Complete Works

THE HEPTAPLUS OF GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA ON THE SEVENFOLD EXPOSITION OF THE SIX DAYS OF GENESIS, TO LORENZO DE' MEDICI. PREFACE.

An emulation of your studies, Lorenzo de' Medici, moved me to review the secret volumes of Moses, since last winter I observed that in what leisure was granted to you from the Republic, you applied yourself nowhere more greatly or more willingly than to that reading. Then, a private reason also invited me, since for my other work—begun long ago under your auspices, but also growing in your name—in which I attempted not only to defend the Davidic hymns translated by the Seventy and constantly resounding in the Church from all suspicion of calumny, but also to illuminate them from the very depths of interpretation, absolutely no treatment is found more useful, none more fruitful than that of these books, and none again more consistent or (to speak more truly) more necessary.

Moreover, it happened during these days that I was constant in the study of the creation of the world in those celebrated works of the six days. Great reasons present themselves for us to believe that the secrets of all nature are contained in them. For, to pass over the fact that our prophet, full of God and with the heavenly spirit—the master of all truth—dictating, received all these things, have not the testimonies of our own people, of his own, and finally of the gentiles, previously declared him to us as the teacher of human wisdom and the most learned in all doctrines and letters?

In the Genesis of Moses are the mysteries of all nature.
Moses most learned, yet he appeared popular.

There exists among the Hebrews a book by that Solomon, surnamed the wisest, titled Wisdom—not the one now in hands, which is the work of Philo, but another composed in the more secret language which they call Jerusalemite, in which the man, as a presumed interpreter of the nature of things, confesses that he received all discipline of that kind from the inner sanctuaries of the Mosaic law. Likewise, as far as our own authors are concerned, both Luke and Philo are most serious authorities that he was most learned in the universal doctrine of the Egyptians. Moreover, all the Greeks who were held to be more divine—Pythagoras, Plato, Empedocles, and Democritus—used the Egyptians as teachers. Well known is that saying of the philosopher Numenius: that Plato is nothing other than an Attic Moses.

Mysteries. Gymnosophists.
Egyptians.
Pythagoras.
Philolaus.
Pythagoras.
Lysis.
Hipparchus.
Ammonius.
Origen.
Plotinus.
Herennius.
Porphyry.

But even Hermippus the Pythagorean attests that Pythagoras transferred very many things from the Mosaic law into his own philosophy. But if, in the meantime, Moses appears in his books to be unpolished and popular rather than either a philosopher or a theologian or a master of some great wisdom, let us recall to mind that it was a celebrated practice of the ancient sages either not to write of divine things at all, or to write of them in a concealed manner. Hence they were called mysteries, and they are not mysteries if they are not hidden; this was observed by the Indians, by the Ethiopians (to whom their name comes from their nakedness), and by the Egyptians. This was also what those Sphinxes before the temples suggested. Taught by them, Pythagoras became the master of silence, nor did he himself commit anything to writing except a few small things which he, when dying, commended to his daughter Damo. For the "Golden Verses" which are circulated are not Pythagoras', as is commonly believed even by the learned, but Philolaus'.

Next, the Pythagoreans most religiously guarded that law. Lysis complained that it was violated by Hipparchus. Porphyry is the authority that the disciples of Ammonius—Origen, Plotinus, and Herennius—were sworn to it. Our Plato so concealed his dogmas in the winged veil of enigmatic fables, in mathematical images, and in the somewhat obscure signs of receding meanings, that he himself said in his letters that no one would openly understand his opinion on divine matters from what he had written, and he proved it to those who were less believing. Wherefore, if for this reason we think the reading of Moses is as if unrefined, because it contains nothing in its first...