Pico had access to the hermetic sources translated by the academy
that under the name of CORPUS HERMETICUM gathered treaties like the Poemandres
and the Asclepion. Besides, he decided the translation of the Dialogues
of Plato. He also had access to the Cabala, being initiated in it through
the teaching in hebrew that Pico received from conversed jews like Flavius
Mithridates, Pablo de Heredia and Elia de Mendigo, carriers of this tradition
as it was developed in 13th century in hispanic lands.
Mithridates, erudite in hebrew, greek and latin languages, as well as Pablo
and Elia transferred to Pico the fundamental hebrew texts and their hermeneutic
procedure according to the law of correspondences, that allows combinations
and permutations among numbers and consonant letters. Based on this, Pico
found in the ancient wisdom an open path to the christian hermeneutic of
the Cabala, in which the christian faith in divinity of Christ is confirmed,
according to the line of the patristic and medieval tradition that was
already drew by Saint Jerome and Nicholas of Cusa.
In the confluence of the great Cabalistic, Christian and Hermetic current,
that with its fundamental symbols gives identity to the live tradition
of occident, Pico develops his Nine Hundred Conclusions, offering to whom
could be interested, the proof and reciprocal confirmation among ones and
others, through the principles that sustain their respective cosmogonies,
aspect of only one and unique principle that gives them their fundament.
Pico Della Mirandola had also access to the revealer space of CORPUS HERMETICUM,
of which translation took care the scriptorium of Marsilio Ficino. One
year after the elaboration of his Nine hundred thesis, Pico redacts the
Oration or Discourse about the Dignity of the Man, as introduction and
apology of them, given the disapproval they suffered by the prejudges of
the religiosity of that time. Discourse in which is manifested the renascence
Idea of the man and his possession of the world, who as center and reflection
of the entire cosmos, was given of all that was in the creation itself,
having the man the capability to degenerate to inferior beings that are
the beasts, as well as to re-generate in the superior realities that are
divine, and all that thanks to the intellect, “the intellectual soul
unique for all men”, reflection of the “mens divina”,
which is link of the celestial and terrestrial worlds through the magic
established around the sciences of the Astrology and the Alchemy. |