Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 41
his friends Poliziano and Barbaro, Pico’s interest in the Greek commentators did
not prevent him from paying equal attention to scholastic thinkers such as
Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus—whom, characteristically, he wanted to
reconcile—nor from studying the works of Averroes and commissioning
translations of those extant only in Hebrew. 140 With help from Jewish scholars,
he also acquired enough knowledge of Cabbala, a mystical theology purporting
to derive from Moses, to apply its hermeneutic techniques to the first verses of
Genesis. 141
Pico believed that each of these traditions—Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew
—despite apparent discrepancies, was an incomplete manifestation of a single
truth, whose fullest revelation was to be found in Christianity. 142 The real
objective of his syncretism was the confirmation of Christian dogma, 143 although
he scrupulously denied that profound mysteries such as the Trinity had any true
parallels outside the Church. 144 For Ficino it was Platonism, supplemented by the
ancient theology, which provided the philosophical justification of religious
beliefs. 145 Pico had a much grander design: to prove that every genuine form of
wisdom was a witness to some aspect of the ultimate truth embodied in
Christianity. 146 Since there was no room in this scheme for a double truth,
doctrines which conflicted with the demands of faith (the attribution of miracles
to the power of the stars, the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul)
were excluded as the products of false philosophy and pseudo-science. 147
Pico’s Christian syncretism exerted a formative influence on Francesco Giorgi
(1460–1540), a Franciscan theologian, whose De harmonia mundi (1525) used
the metaphor of musical harmony to express the universal concord of ideas. 148
Giorgi found prefigurations of Christianity wherever he looked and was far less
discriminating than Pico in registering the differences between Christian and non-
Christian doctrines. He also departed from Pico in his hostility to Aristotelianism,
especially the Averroist variety, favouring a more Ficinian synthesis in which
Neoplatonic philosophers were combined with Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster
and other putative ancient theologians. 149 To this mixture he added an interest in
the Christian application of Cabbala, which was more enthusiastic—though less
informed—than Pico’s. 150
Pico’s concordism was also the inspiration behind De perenni philosophia
(1540), in which Agostino Steuco (1497/8–1548) presented a learned account of
the ‘perennial philosophy’, a divinely revealed wisdom known to mankind since
earliest times. Steuco was an Augustinian biblical scholar, bishop and prefect of
the Vatican Library, 151 with a solid knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic along
with Greek and Latin. Using the Old Testament—but not Cabbala, which he
scorned—and the (spurious) works of ancient theologians, he showed that Jews,
Chaldeans, Egyptians and other early peoples had transmitted to the Greeks a
body of doctrines which, beneath a diversity of forms, contained the same truths.
These included the existence of a triune God, the creation of the world and the
immortality of the human soul. 152 Christianity’s advent had not brought new
truths, as Pico believed, but had simply renewed the knowledge of old ones,