The Complete Works of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

THE LIFE OF GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

...he hid his own teachings behind the evidence of the receding senses, just as he himself said in his letters that no one among those who read what he wrote would properly understand his opinion on divine matters—and he proved this to those who were less believing. Therefore, if we think the reading of Moses is commonplace original: "exculcata", meaning well-trodden or ordinary. because it seems to have nothing on the surface that is not ordinary or crude, we would, by that same logic, condemn all the ancient philosophers—whom we venerate as masters of all wisdom—for crudeness and ignorance.

Jesus Christ

Indeed, we see the same practice observed in the Church. Jesus Christ, the image of God’s substance, did not write a Gospel, but preached it. Moreover, he preached to the crowds in parables, but separately to a few disciples, to whom it was granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven openly and without figures of speech. Nor did he tell all things even to those few, for they were not capable of all things, and there were many things they could not bear until the coming Spirit taught them all truth. If the Lord's disciples, so few chosen out of so many thousands, could not bear many things, how could the whole Israeli crowd—laborers, cooks, butchers, shepherds, male and female slaves, to all of whom the law was handed down to be read—have borne the weight of the entire Mosaic, or rather divine, wisdom?

He [Moses], on the heights of the mountain (certainly that mountain on which the Lord often spoke to his disciples), was illuminated by the light of the divine sun, and his whole face shone in a wondrous way.

Why Moses spoke with a veiled face.

But because the people, with their blinking, nocturnal eyes, could not bear the light, he spoke to them with a veiled face. Let us return to our own writers. Matthew was the first to write a Gospel;

The Gospel was first written by Matthew.

and as the prophet says, "hiding the words of God in his heart so that he might not sin," A reference to Psalm 119:11. he pursued only the history of those things which pertained to Christ's humanity, lest the memory of the deeds performed be lost to oblivion. This is why we understand him to be represented by the figure of the Man in Ezekiel's mystical vision The Four Living Creatures: In Christian tradition, the four authors of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are associated with the four creatures described in Ezekiel 1:10—the Man, the Lion, the Ox, and the Eagle.. John, who more than all others revealed the secrets of divinity, was compelled to speak the things he had long kept silent—many years having passed since the Lord's crucifixion—in order to abolish the heresy of the Ebionites,

Ebionites

which asserted that Christ was a man and not also God. He spoke of the eternal birth of the Son, but to few, and he spoke obscurely. Thus he began: "In the beginning was the Word."

Paul

Paul denies solid food to the Corinthians because they still live by the laws of the flesh and not by the Spirit; he speaks wisdom only among the "perfect."

Dionysius

Dionysius the Areopagite A 5th-century Christian theologian and philosopher who was historically (but incorrectly) identified with Paul's convert in Athens., a disciple of Paul, writes that it was a holy and established custom for the churches not to communicate the more secret doctrines through letters, but only by word of mouth to those who had been properly initiated.

I have pursued these matters at length because there are many who, judging by the crude outer bark of the words, despise and reject the book of Moses as something common and trivial. Nothing seems less credible to them than that it holds something more divine in its inner depths than what it promises on its surface. But if this has been sufficiently refuted, then it is easy to believe that if he treated of nature and the craftsmanship of the whole world anywhere—that is, if in any part of his work, as if in some field, the treasures of all true philosophy were buried by him—it was done primarily in this part. Here, he philosophizes most profoundly, even explicitly, on the emanation of all things from God, and on the degree, the number, and the order of the parts of the world.

Jerome

For this reason, it was a decree of the ancient Hebrews (which Jerome St. Jerome, the 4th-century translator of the Vulgate Bible. also mentions) that no one should touch upon this account of the creation of the world unless they were already of a mature age. Perhaps, therefore, I will seem to have done something worthwhile if, lingering longer with more exact care and more laborious study (as far as my weakness allowed), I have searched out the understanding of the Mosaic reading.

What the commentators have explained.

When I saw that many Latin and Greek authors had worked on its explanation—and furthermore, countless old and new Chaldean and Hebrew interpreters—I did not even dare to think of writing or commenting anything new on this matter after so many others. However, I remembered that the Mosaic law cautioned that no one should harvest their field completely and entirely, but should leave an untouched portion for the poor and the needy, who might seek out sheaves and handfuls from it to take for themselves to endure their hunger. This...