That human knowledge which is called rational is, in turn, imperfect knowledge because it is vague, uncertain, shifting, and laborious. Add the intellectual knowledge of divine minds, which the theologians call angels. Even that is imperfect knowledge, at least because it seeks outside itself what it does not possess fully within itself, i.e., the light of truth which it lacks, and by which is is perfected.
...
the life of the angels is not perfect. Unless the vivifying ray of divine light constantly warmed it, it would all fall into nothingness. The same is true of other things. Therefore, when you say that God is knowing and living, notice first that the life and cognition which are ascribed to him are understood as free from all these imperfections, but this is not enough. There remains another imperfection.
-Chapter Five
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Commento: Pico on differences between Platonists... God is Not Intellect
77 Of these three kinds of being, the highest and most perfect causal being. Accordingly the Platonists believe that all of the powers which are commonly attributed to God exist in Him only in the causal mode of being. Thus they say that God is not Himself being but the cause of all being, and similarly that God is not Himself intellect. Statements such as these can give a modern Platonist a good deal of trouble if he does not understand the principle behind them. I remember that a great Platonist once told me that he was amazed by a passage in which Plotinus says that God understands nothing and knows nothing. It is perhaps even more amazing that my Platonist did not understand in what sense Plotinus means that God does not understand: Plotinus simply means that the attribute of understanding exists in God in its causal being rather than in its formal being. Plotinus is not denying that God understands; he is only attributing to him understanding of a higher and more perfect kind. That this is the case can be clearly understood from the following. Dionysius the Areopagite, the prince of the Christian theologians, says in one place that God knows not only Himself but also every smallest particular thing; but elsewhere Dionysius uses the same manner of speaking that Plotinus uses, saying that God is not an intellectual or intelligent creature, but is ineffably exalted above all intellect and cognition.
79-80 [Third Chapter] About the second hypostasis, that is, the angelic or intellectual, there is disagreement among the Platonists. Some Platonists, such as Proclus, Hermias, Syrianus, and many others, say that between God and the World Soul (which is the first rational soul) there is a large number of creatures which they call partly “intelligible” and partly “intellectual.” Sometimes even Plato confuses these two terms, as in the passage in the Phaedo where he talks about the soul. Plotinus, Porphyry, and in general the better Platonists say that between God and the World Soul there is only one creature, which they call the “son” of God because it is created directly by God. The first opinion is closer to that of Dionysius the Areopagite and the Christian theologians, who believe in a more or less infinite number of angels. The second opinion is more philosophical; it is closer to the views of Aristotle and Plato, and is followed by all of the better Aristotelians and by the better Platonists. For our purposes, since we have undertaken to say what we think is the common ground between Plato and Aristotle, we shall ignore the first opinion (even though in itself it may be true), and follow this second path.
79-80 [Third Chapter] About the second hypostasis, that is, the angelic or intellectual, there is disagreement among the Platonists. Some Platonists, such as Proclus, Hermias, Syrianus, and many others, say that between God and the World Soul (which is the first rational soul) there is a large number of creatures which they call partly “intelligible” and partly “intellectual.” Sometimes even Plato confuses these two terms, as in the passage in the Phaedo where he talks about the soul. Plotinus, Porphyry, and in general the better Platonists say that between God and the World Soul there is only one creature, which they call the “son” of God because it is created directly by God. The first opinion is closer to that of Dionysius the Areopagite and the Christian theologians, who believe in a more or less infinite number of angels. The second opinion is more philosophical; it is closer to the views of Aristotle and Plato, and is followed by all of the better Aristotelians and by the better Platonists. For our purposes, since we have undertaken to say what we think is the common ground between Plato and Aristotle, we shall ignore the first opinion (even though in itself it may be true), and follow this second path.
Heptaplus: With Angelic Mind God Created One Creature...All Creatures
82 Now the Platonists say that although God created only one creature, the First Mind, nevertheless in effect He created all creatures, for in that First Mind, He created the Ideas or Forms of all things. For in that Mind is the Idea of the sun, the Idea of the moon, of men, of all the animals, of the plants, of the stones, of the elements, and of everything in the world. And since the Idea of the sun is a truer sun than the visible sun is, and so on with all of the other things in world, it follows not only that God created all things, but also that he created them in the truest and most perfect kind of being they can have, that is, in true, ideal, and intelligible being. For this reason the Platonists call the First Mind the intelligible world.
Angelic Mind as place for people who "become like angels" in Pico's Heptaplus
108 the ancients called the Angelic Mind, adorned with the Ideas, paradise… they referred to people as being “in Paradise” if they lived a completely non-physical intellectual life, and, having already risen above human nature and become like angels, lived in contemplation alone.
Pico on the influence of Angelic Forces in Disputations Against Astrology
Those forces interceding between God and man should be superior to man, just as they are inferior to God. And it is not proper that what is accomplished by reason and counsel, as our affairs should, be arranged by the first author through the agency of non-rational beings. But just as he rules and regulates the elementary mass, inasmuch as it is inferior, through the agency of the sky, which is superior, so it is proper that human affairs be governed by the mystery not of bodies but of angels, who by nature and dignite mediate between us and God. So when you descend from God to the earth, you descend by means of the sky; when you descend from God to man, you descend by means of angels.
Pico on Metatron
Oration
Indeed, even the most secret Hebrew theology at one time transforms holy Enoch into an angel of divinity, whom they call Metatron, and at other times it reshapes other human beings into other spirits.
Conclusions
19.2. I believe that the active intellect that is illuminating only in Themistius
is the same as Metatron in the Cabala.
11>10. That which among the Cabalists is called Metatron
is without doubt that which is called Pallas by Orpheus, the paternal mind
by Zoroaster, the son of God by Mercury, wisdom by Pythagoras, the
intelligible sphere by Parmenides.
A note on Enoch/Metatron in Oration
13 Enoch : Book of E., 40:8. Both Garin and Tognon refer to the Ethiopian Book of Enoch (1 st- or 2 nd- century C.E., Tertullian considered it part of the Holy Scriptures) a source of apocalyptic literature (to be distinguished from a Book of the Secrets of Enoch, of which there exist Medieval manuscripts in slavic languages, ca. 1200). Second- and Third-Century "Church Fathers" like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen and Clement of Alexandria also make use of the Book of Enoch. The reference could also be to the so-called Third Book of Enoch, presumably compiled in Babylon around the 6 th-century C.E. (Dictionary of the Bible, I, 704, sgg.). This is a late apocalyptic text harking back to the mysticism of the Merkava and circulating in Medieval mss. (Pico’s library was rich in Kabbalistic texts in Hebrew, sine titulo, see Kibre). In the Jewish tradition, many legends collect around the figure of Enoch (son of Jared, father of Methuselah, the 7 th in the Adamitic genealogy, along the line of Seth) who "walked with God for three hundred years," was taken to heaven without abandoning the human form and transfigured. In this tradition, Enoch is also represented as the inventor of letters, arithmetic and geometry and called “first author.” In the Third Book of Enoch (or Book of Enoch of the Merkava mystics, on which see G. Scholem, " Merkava mysticism and Jewish Gnosis", in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism), the elevation of Enoch has two versions, in the second of which E. is "taken with the Shekhinà" and "transfigured" as Metatron (according to the prevailing etimology: "Methathronius= he who is next to the throne of God – see Scholem). A reference to Metatron can be found in Pico’s Commentary on the Love Song of Hieronymo Benivieni (written in the same year of the Oratio and the Conclusiones, 1486) almost in the exact terms of the Oratio, as a synonym of transfiguration: “...thus one must understand the saying of the Kabbalists, when they say that Enoch is transformed into Matatron [sic], angel of divinity, or universally any other man [is transformed] into an angel” (see Garin, 1942, 554). After a devout life on earth, E. was elevated to the rank of the first of angels and Sar ha-panìm (literally: prince of the divine visage, or divine presence). This intricate constellation of possible references, not precisely identifiable with a direct quotation of the Ethiopian (Third?) Book of E., hints at the complexity of Pico’s angelology, as articulated in the Oratio and elsewhere.
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/text/riva/eframe.html
Indeed, even the most secret Hebrew theology at one time transforms holy Enoch into an angel of divinity, whom they call Metatron, and at other times it reshapes other human beings into other spirits.
Conclusions
19.2. I believe that the active intellect that is illuminating only in Themistius
is the same as Metatron in the Cabala.
11>10. That which among the Cabalists is called Metatron
is without doubt that which is called Pallas by Orpheus, the paternal mind
by Zoroaster, the son of God by Mercury, wisdom by Pythagoras, the
intelligible sphere by Parmenides.
A note on Enoch/Metatron in Oration
13 Enoch : Book of E., 40:8. Both Garin and Tognon refer to the Ethiopian Book of Enoch (1 st- or 2 nd- century C.E., Tertullian considered it part of the Holy Scriptures) a source of apocalyptic literature (to be distinguished from a Book of the Secrets of Enoch, of which there exist Medieval manuscripts in slavic languages, ca. 1200). Second- and Third-Century "Church Fathers" like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen and Clement of Alexandria also make use of the Book of Enoch. The reference could also be to the so-called Third Book of Enoch, presumably compiled in Babylon around the 6 th-century C.E. (Dictionary of the Bible, I, 704, sgg.). This is a late apocalyptic text harking back to the mysticism of the Merkava and circulating in Medieval mss. (Pico’s library was rich in Kabbalistic texts in Hebrew, sine titulo, see Kibre). In the Jewish tradition, many legends collect around the figure of Enoch (son of Jared, father of Methuselah, the 7 th in the Adamitic genealogy, along the line of Seth) who "walked with God for three hundred years," was taken to heaven without abandoning the human form and transfigured. In this tradition, Enoch is also represented as the inventor of letters, arithmetic and geometry and called “first author.” In the Third Book of Enoch (or Book of Enoch of the Merkava mystics, on which see G. Scholem, " Merkava mysticism and Jewish Gnosis", in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism), the elevation of Enoch has two versions, in the second of which E. is "taken with the Shekhinà" and "transfigured" as Metatron (according to the prevailing etimology: "Methathronius= he who is next to the throne of God – see Scholem). A reference to Metatron can be found in Pico’s Commentary on the Love Song of Hieronymo Benivieni (written in the same year of the Oratio and the Conclusiones, 1486) almost in the exact terms of the Oratio, as a synonym of transfiguration: “...thus one must understand the saying of the Kabbalists, when they say that Enoch is transformed into Matatron [sic], angel of divinity, or universally any other man [is transformed] into an angel” (see Garin, 1942, 554). After a devout life on earth, E. was elevated to the rank of the first of angels and Sar ha-panìm (literally: prince of the divine visage, or divine presence). This intricate constellation of possible references, not precisely identifiable with a direct quotation of the Ethiopian (Third?) Book of E., hints at the complexity of Pico’s angelology, as articulated in the Oratio and elsewhere.
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/text/riva/eframe.html
More Angelology in Pico's 900 Conclusions
25.2. In participated numbers some are images of numbers, others the unions
of images.
20.7. Man's greatest happiness exists when our particular intellect is fully
conjoined to the first and total intellect.
5>21. When Plato says that Love was born from the union of Poverty and
Plenty in the garden of Jove, on the birthday of Venus while the gods feasted,
he means only this, that then the first love, that is, the desire of beauty, was
bom in the angelic mind when in it the splendor of ideas, though imperfectly,
began to shine.
6.7. A superior angel illuminates an inferior not because it presents to it a
luminous object, or because it particularizes and divides for the other what is
united in itself, but because it strengthens and fortifies the intellect of the
inferior.
26.5. The intelligible order does not subsist within the intellectual order, as
Ahmose the Egyptian said, but over the whole intellectual hierarchy, unparti-
cipatively hidden in the abyss of the first unity, and under the cloud of the
first darkness.
10>9. Guardians in Orpheus and powers in Dionysius are the same.
10>13. Typhon in Orpheus and Samael in the Cabala are the same.
2.18. Aeviturnity exists subjectively in more beatified angels.
2.21. No multiplicity of angels exists in the same species.
of images.
20.7. Man's greatest happiness exists when our particular intellect is fully
conjoined to the first and total intellect.
5>21. When Plato says that Love was born from the union of Poverty and
Plenty in the garden of Jove, on the birthday of Venus while the gods feasted,
he means only this, that then the first love, that is, the desire of beauty, was
bom in the angelic mind when in it the splendor of ideas, though imperfectly,
began to shine.
6.7. A superior angel illuminates an inferior not because it presents to it a
luminous object, or because it particularizes and divides for the other what is
united in itself, but because it strengthens and fortifies the intellect of the
inferior.
26.5. The intelligible order does not subsist within the intellectual order, as
Ahmose the Egyptian said, but over the whole intellectual hierarchy, unparti-
cipatively hidden in the abyss of the first unity, and under the cloud of the
first darkness.
10>9. Guardians in Orpheus and powers in Dionysius are the same.
10>13. Typhon in Orpheus and Samael in the Cabala are the same.
2.18. Aeviturnity exists subjectively in more beatified angels.
2.21. No multiplicity of angels exists in the same species.
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