Conclusion

We have seen a consistent interest in philosophical angelology throughout Pico's texts. His initially shocking and apparently provocative rhetoric of “Angel comparison” in the Oration, although it has been misinterpreted and exaggerated in “angel magic” interpretations, turns out not to represent a new and radical approach to angelology. Rather the Oration is consistent with the rest of Pico's major texts in presenting a mystical philosophy rooted in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. Although it does present a bold view of man making the choice to become angelic and even godlike, this view is Pico's rhetorical celebration of the Biblical and medieval picture of man's relationship to angels. It is not some heretical or proto-modern view, although it is admittedly unique and highly original. This originality has yet to be fully appreciated in philosophical study of Pico, and it is my hope that this paper makes a contribution to a view of Pico as seriously interested in the angelology he studies, rather than merely speculating about Neoplatonic metaphysics as an excuse to infuse human life with a magical angelic being.

Future study of the meaning of Pico's angelology should pay more attention to his debts to, and departure from, not only the Neoplatonic philosophy he encounters but also the Christian Neoplatonism of Dionysius and Aquinas that forms his theological commitments. His metaphysical speculations, however tentative and obscure, can best be understood as an original contribution to this philosophical tradition, rather than a resort to magic.

I have emphasized the centrality of Dionysius, who has received some attention in recent studies establishing his role as a significant influence on Pico. But the study of the influence of Dionysius in specifically angelological and metaphysical terms still remains to be done. Brian Copenhaver's study of Dionysius as an influence on Pico's mystical “angel regimen” and Crofton Black's study of the role of angels in Pico's Heptaplus, as Michael Allen's analysis of the Platonic exegesis of the Commento, have provided a solid foundation, but we await a full study of the philosophical influence of Dionysius on Pico's unique approach to harmonizing the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions he is working with.

I have also emphasized the influence of the medieval scholastic interpretation of Dionysius on Pico, specically in terms of the influence of Aquinas. Recent scholarship on the topic of Aquinas and Platonism has brought to light a great deal of information about the encounter with Neoplatonism that Aquinas experienced in his efforts to systematize the theological and angelological insights of Dionysius. These insights depend on a complicated interaction with the Neoplatonic response to Aristotle that represents the background to Pico's own project of resolving differences between Aristotelian Platonic schools. Aquinas' understanding of Aristotelian and Platonic approaches was shaped by his reading of Dionysius as well as Proclus, and forms a significant part of the ground of Pico's own encounter with Neoplatonism. Future study of Pico should take into account the role of Aquinas in shaping the Christian Neoplatonic interpretation of Dionysius which Pico inherits. It is this inheritance that is the source of Pico's most important and interesting philosophical problems, rather than magic.

Pico and Aquinas

Pico and Aquinas
Pico's writings on angels do not have many obvious magical implications. Rather they are explicit efforts to explain, criticize, and develop ideas about angels from Dionysius and Aquinas. As we will see below, Pico explores alternative philosophical approaches to Aquinas in the experimental wanderings of the 900 Conclusions, and Dionysius in the exercise in Neoplatonic commentary that is the Commento, but ultimately embraces both philosophers in his more mature works Heptaplus and On Being and Unity. Even when he is questioning them Pico makes his debt to Dionysius and Aquinas clear, and in his late works we see Pico accepting Aquinas' interpretation of Dionysius, which he employs in a polemic against Ficino and the Proclan-style Neoplatonism that places Unity over Being. Pico agrees with Aquinas that God is better seen as Being itself than Beyond Being, and that anything that has being gets its unity from the being. This makes sense to Pico in terms of the same logic of participation that Aquinas adopted from Dionysius but modified in light of his Aristotelian reaction to Platonism, which he had to employ in order to think about Angels and God but had to modify in light of his Aristotelian metaphysics. The end result in Aquinas has been described as Aristotelian, but as scholars of Aquinas and Platonism have soundly demonstrated, since Aquinas accepts many Platonic notions in a modified form the situation is more complicated. This complication should be our guide to understanding the difficulties of Pico's own reaction to Neoplatonism and Aristotelian, both of which he embraces although he feels free to criticize aspects of both approaches as well. Aquinas has a story about divine illumination and the Agent Intellect that was clearly a profound influence on Pico, and tells us more about his correlation of the angel Metatron with the Agent Intellect than any Kabbalistic or magical explanation. In arguing for a compromise with the view that there is an intellectual or angelic part of the human mind, Pico is doing something similar to what Aquinas did making a compromise between the Augustinian illumination model and the Aristotelian interpretation of the role of the agent intellect. Pico's criticisms of Aquinas deal with problems concerning angels and the intellect. Since he sees Aquinas in the light of the scholastics who followed him, as well as having access to more texts from the Aristotelian and Platonic texts that form Aquinas' background, Pico thinks he can solve the philosophical problems that Aquinas left behind.
Pico's work on angels is better understood as a development of the philosophical themes of the Angel Treatise of Aquinas than an application of Neoplatonic metaphysics to magic. He never got very far with his project, and can't be considered to have produced anything like the angel treatise of Aquinas. Pico's explorations of the metaphysical themes from the angelology of Aquinas and their master Dionysius are original, sometimes brilliant, but not developed into anything like the systematic rigor we see in Aquinas. Pico offers some genuinely interesting new starts, but since he did not live to complete his project we will never know what the finished angelology would have looked like. We do not even know how he would have argued the propositions from the 900 Conclusions that claim to reconcile the differences between Aquinas and his scholastic opponents like Scotus on angelology problems.

Aquinas on Angel Substance includes "man has a spiritual soul"

50. THE SUBSTANCE OF THE ANGELS

1. Creatures exist in a series of grades. They participate and represent the goodness of God in various ways. In the world about us, there are three kinds of substances: mineral, vegetal, animal. These are all bodily substances. We find also in this world the human substance which is mineral, vegetal, and animal, and yet is something more; it is not all bodily; man has a spiritual soul. To round out the order of things, there must be some purely spiritual or nonbodily substances. Thus created substances are: the completely bodily substance, the substance that is a compound of body and spirit, and the completely spiritual substance. Completely spiritual substances are called angels.

Aquinas on Illumination and Participation

It is necessary to say that the human soul cognizes all things in the eternal reasons, through participating in which we cognize all things. For the intellectual light that is in us is nothing other than a certain likeness of the uncreated light, obtained through participation, in which the eternal reasons are contained. Thus it is said in Psalm 4, Many say, Who shows us good things? To this question the Psalmist replies, saying The light of your face, Lord, is imprinted upon us. This is as if to say, through that seal of the divine light on us, all things are shown to us (Summa theol. 1a 84.5c).

Pico puts Forms in Angelic Mind / Aquinas in Divine Mind

Pico's philosophical account of Angelic Mind ostensibly explores a Neoplatonist approach, but he is just as clear as Dionysius and Aquinas were in their own respective encounters with Platonism, concerned to block off the door to many gods (Boland). Thinking of the Angelic Mind as a single, simple creature rather than a henadic manifold or plurality of angelic intelligences allows him to make this Christian point clearly, but in a surprising new way. Pico still holds that God does not create the universe in an indirect way through intermediaries—the intermediaries being necessary for another reason than demiurgically taking over for God in the work of creation—but he puts the Forms of all things into the Angelic Mind. This is a different approach from Aquinas, who puts the forms in the divine mind. Understanding what Pico is doing with Forms, Angelic Mind, seemingly in response to theories like that of Aquinas on Divine Mind, is beyond the scope of this small paper but should be pursued in future scholarship.

Doolan on Aquinas' Divine Mind

Thomas notes that a solution must be found that (1) does not introduce a multiplicity into the divine essence, (2) does not add anything accidental to God, or (3) does not posit ideas subsisting outside of the divine mind

Wippel "the plurality of divine ideas joins with the ontological unity of the divine essence to form two essential parts of Thomas' effort to account for the derivation of many (creatures) from the one (their divine source) Divine Ideas 19-20

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.

Commento - does it give Pico's position more clearly than Conclusions?

Commento

While “angel magic” interpretations of Pico tend not to take into account the angelology of his later texts, the Commento is central to Crofton Black's account of progression to felicitas, the theme that he sees unifying Pico's works up to the Heptaplus. In the Commento we see detailed and coherent arguments on Pico's philosophical themes that develop a position in a way that the scattered and sometimes contradictory conclusions do not. However, Pico makes clear that he is exploring a philosophical possibility that does not agree with his favorite theologian Dionysius' approach, so it is questionable how far we should take the Commento as representing a view that Pico is professing.

Pico and Plotinus

Plotinus

Pico draws for his angelology not only from the Late Neoplatonists who theorized about angels and henads, Iamblichus and Proclus, but also from Plotinus who inaugurated the Neoplatonic tradition and theorized about the Intelligible which Pico equates with Angelic Mind.

Pico criticizes Ficino's reading of Plotinus most clearly in the Commento. Here we see the groundwork of his Plotinian take on Angelic Mind. The decisions Pico made in selecting these few conclusions from a philosopher he respected so greatly deserve our attention as an important moment in his philosophical development. The Enneads are a huge text, and while Pico draws a large number of conclusions from Proclus he draws a relatively smaller number from Plotinus. Allen criticizes Pico's understanding of Ficino's Plotinian errors, but allows that rather than misunderstanding or deliberately misrepresenting Plotinus, Pico may be “radically simplifying” him. In his more mature “On Being and Unity” we will see Pico taking a Thomistic-Aristotelian position on Dionysius against Ficino's Proclan position on Dionysius—is this the way Pico understands the “Plotinian theology” of that important phrase “God is not Intellect?” That is to say, is Pico criticizing Ficino for not making the same ontological decisions about Neoplatonism as Aquinas, who found that Dionysius everywhere follows Aristotle? Pico sees the Christian meaning of Plotinus, at any rate, as expressible in a much simpler form than the many ontological principles of Proclus. He uses an idealized Plotinus to build his own Christian Platonist model of Angelic Mind in the thought experiment of Commento and angelic exegesis of Heptaplus. Just as philosophers today might admire Dionysius for his own resonances with the Plotinian rather than the Proclan take on mystical unity, so does Pico have a special admiration for the simplicity of Plotinus.