From Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists (1550) to Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), the Italian Renaissance has been considered because the age of the lone genius. Alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the eccentric goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, the philosophical prodigy Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had confirmed a pre-eminent instance of the sort.
Born into the Aristocracy in 1463, Pico displayed a precocious expertise for studying. As a baby he might reportedly recite Dante’s Commedia each forwards and backwards. He loved a meteoric rise to fame in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence, the place he caught the eye of luminaries together with Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano. Aged 24, he arrived in Rome with a listing of 900 theses, which he provided to defend towards all challengers. A few of Pico’s theses proved an excessive amount of for the papal authorities, and he fled to Paris. Returning to Florence, he settled all the way down to a lifetime of research, however couldn’t assist however get caught up within the political upheavals that adopted Lorenzo’s dying in 1492. Pico helped carry the controversial Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola to Florence, earlier than dying from a sudden and mysterious sickness, aged 31.
In Edward Wilson-Lee’s telling of this rambunctious life story, Pico stays an impulsive maverick. However a poster boy for individualism he’s not. Fairly the other: Pico’s philosophical enquiries had been underpinned by a deep uncertainty about particular person id and the problem of proving the separateness of 1 human from the higher entire of humanity. Pico was a synthesiser, looking for to carry collectively all philosophical data into one common entire. Drawing on a big selection of sources – together with Plato, Averroes, and the Jewish kabbalist custom – Pico reopened the unconventional query of whether or not people actually had been specific, impartial beings, or whether or not (in Wilson-Lee’s useful recurring picture) we’re just like the crest of a wave, which although showing particular person in actual fact type small elements of a higher oceanic entire. Pico presents proof that the Renaissance might be about transcending individuality, quite than the triumph of the person.
Trying past Florence, Wilson-Lee stresses the affect of Paris, the nice centre of scholastic theology. Pico’s debt to medieval scholasticism challenges outdated assumptions concerning the Renaissance, during which humanists rejected and displaced scholastics. Nonetheless too typically written off as pedantic quibbling about what number of angels might dance on the pinnacle of a pin, Pico’s writings as a substitute reveal a scholasticism that was intellectually adventurous, radical and – at instances – even harmful.
Removed from irrelevant abstractions, angels had been a vital thought experiment which lay on the core of scholastic (and Pico’s) thought. In keeping with Aristotle, what makes people distinctive is the truth that they should reside alongside others: as he put it initially of his Politics, ‘man is a political animal’. Herein lay the essential distinction from instinct-driven animals (people might cooperate by speech and purpose) and the right purpose of gods (who had no want of others). For the scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas, working to make Aristotle according to Christianity, gods (within the pagan plural) had been changed by angels. A step up from people within the divine hierarchy, angels had been unencumbered by fallible, sinful our bodies and represented a purer type of purpose.
This was a framework which steered a tantalising chance: might people – by a better philosophical understanding – turn into angels? Might they share in an ideal, common mind? All through this vigorous and classy mental biography, Wilson-Lee traces Pico’s investigation of this query. The expertise is immersive: like Pico, the reader is thrown into multifarious philosophical contexts and traditions. Taking inspiration from anthropology as a lot as historical past, Wilson-Lee attracts comparisons between very totally different instances and locations. As an illustration, we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of culturally diversified curiosity within the language of birds, from the Mixtecs to Icelandic epics, to the Brahmins of India. This units Pico’s curiosity within the language of angels – ‘chicken males’ – in broader context. Pico was entranced by types of language that transcend that means and purpose, which pointed in direction of a common expertise, shared throughout all instances and locations.
Pico’s obsession with the facility of language explains his fascination with the enigmatic Savonarola, who urged his Florentine listeners to surrender vanities and reside purer religious lives. The friar’s accusatory but beguiling preaching type had a mesmeric impact: it’s mentioned that the artist Botticelli was satisfied to burn his personal work. Right here was the facility of language writ giant. Pico died on the Dominican monastery of San Marco in 1494 and subsequently didn’t reside to see Savonarola’s fall, burnt as a fraud in 1498. By then, Florence’s second of mass spiritual hysteria had handed, and so too had Pico’s quest for common understanding.
For Wilson-Lee, Pico’s embrace of human oneness supplies a precious counterpoint to a contemporary Western world during which individualism has turn into an unthinking norm. As Wilson-Lee factors out, over the span of historical past it has been way more frequent for people to place collective identities first. The joys of dropping oneself in a communal entire has a darkish historical past, mendacity on the coronary heart of Twentieth-century fascism. However the historic narrative outlined in The Grammar of Angels challenges us to ask if now we have now gone too far within the different route. Will we lack philosophical instruments for tackling genuinely communal challenges such because the Covid pandemic or local weather change? Maybe, Wilson-Lee suggests, by turning into extra attuned to this very human intuition ‘to dissolve the people in bigger teams and constructions’, we’d study to be extra discerning concerning the communities we select to type. We aren’t angels, however we are able to form our collective future.
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The Grammar of Angels: A Seek for the Magical Powers of Language
Edward Wilson-Lee
William Collins, 288pp, £35
Eloise Davies is Assistant Professor of Humanities on the College of Florida.
