Complete Works

...might announce divine things and raise the minds of men from the earth to heaven. He was of a remarkable and noble appearance, of a tall and lofty stature, of delicate frame, and a face generally beautiful; his complexion was pale, yet interspersed with a comely redness; he had blue-gray and lively eyes, golden and natural hair, and teeth that were white and even. Under his mother's authority, he was sent to masters and various disciplines; he cultivated the studies of the humanities with such an ardent mind that, in a short time, he was—not unjustly—to be ranked among the Swift intellect chief poets and orators of that age. He was indeed most swift in learning, being endowed by God with such a ready intellect that he could recite poems heard only once from a reader, both in forward and reverse order, to the wonderful admiration of all; and he retained them with a most tenacious memory, which usually happens to others in the opposite way. For it often happens by nature that those who are of a quick wit do not possess a strong memory, while those who learn with labor turn out to be more tenacious of what they have grasped.

While he was in his fourteenth year, by the command of his mother—The boy was skilled in Canon Law who vehemently desired him to be initiated into the sacred orders—he moved to Bologna for the sake of learning Canon Law. When he had tasted this for two years, and perceived that it rested upon mere traditions, he turned elsewhere, though not without producing good fruit; for even as a boy, and a very young one at that, he completed a certain epitome or breviary of the letters of the Supreme Pontiffs, which they call Decretals, which concluded the meanings of all those sanctions as concisely as possible—a work of no small weight even for seasoned professors. But as an eager explorer of the secrets of nature, leaving these well-worn paths, he devoted himself entirely to the speculation of the intellect and to philosophy, both human and divine. For the sake of mastering this, he traveled through the literary gymnasia not only of Italy but also of the Gauls, most scrupulously examining the celebrated doctors of that time, after the manner of Plato and Apollonius. He spent such indefatigable labor on those studies that he was and was held to be at once a consummate theologian and philosopher, while still beardless.

He had already been engaged among those studies for seven years when, desiring human praise and glory (for he was not yet warmed by divine love, as will become openly clear), he moved to Rome. There, wishing to demonstrate how great an envy awaited him from his inferiors in the future, he proposed nine hundred questions concerning dialectical, mathematical, natural, and divine matters, Nine hundred conclusions proposed for dispute at Rome drawn not only from the stores of the Latins and excerpted from the cabinets of the Greeks, but also unearthed from the mysteries of the Hebrews, and tracked down from the secrets of the Chaldeans and Arabs. He also interwoven into those questions many things from the ancient and obscure philosophy of Pythagoras, Trismegistus, and Orpheus, and much concerning the Kabbalah—that is, the secret reception of Hebrew dogmas, with which Origen, Hilary Origen and Hilary among our own authors are chiefly associated. He also taught many things concerning natural magic, which he showed to be separated by no small gap from the impious and wicked kind, and he proved this most elegantly by the testimony of many. Nor were there lacking seventy-two new physical and metaphysical dogmas, his own inventions and meditations, adapted to elucidate any questions of philosophy whatsoever. To these he annexed a new method of philosophizing through numbers, and he posted all of them together in public places, so that they might be more widely known, promising that he would pay the expenses of those who had come to Rome from remote lands for the sake of debating.

But due to the animosity of detractors (which, like fire, always seeks high places), he could never bring it about that a day for the dispute be appointed. For this reason he remained in Rome for a year, during which time those carping critics did not dare to attack him openly and in free examination, but rather endeavored to prick him with tricks and tunnels, and to undermine him with secret weapons, out of the pestiferous envy of a corrupt mind (for so very many have judged). It was thought that he had stirred up this malice against himself chiefly for this reason: that many who, perhaps out of ambition or avarice, had long brooded over the literary business, suspected that it would be a mark of shame upon them...