Pico della Mirandola and the Heptaplus
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." It is the most famous opening in the Bible, and few sentences have been read so many times. What did Moses mean? Did he describe a few days of divine work, or the order of a whole cosmos?
In 1489, a young nobleman living near Florence decided that the first chapter of Genesis could be read in seven ways at once, and he wrote a book to show how. It was called the Heptaplus, "the sevenfold account," and its author was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
After the Storm
Pico was twenty-six, and he had lately been through a difficult time. His 900 Theses had been condemned by a papal commission in 1487, and he had been arrested in France in 1488. With the help of Lorenzo de' Medici, he came to live near Florence, in the hills of Fiesole. The Heptaplus is a product of that quiet period. It is dedicated to Lorenzo.
It was a carefully safe work. Unlike the Theses, which had startled authorities by their daring, the Heptaplus is a commentary on a Bible text, written by a loyal Christian. At the same time, it carried much of the same ambition: to show that the wisdom of the Greeks, the Hebrews and the Christians agreed.
Seven Ways of Reading
The book consists of seven expositions of the story of creation in Genesis 1, each approaching it from a different angle. Medieval readers had long held that Scripture has several levels of meaning, and Pico, drawing on a view found in the early Christian teacher Origen, followed this tradition.
According to a modern outline of the book, the first expositions read the text in terms of the elemental world, the celestial world and the angelic world. The next explains the nature of man. Later ones consider the worlds together and their kinship, and the final parts turn to the soul's happiness and to the opening phrase, "In the beginning."
The reader meets a long series of ideas that were commonplace in the fifteenth century. The cosmos was thought to consist of nested spheres, with the earth and its four elements at the center, then the heavens of the Moon, the Sun and the planets, and above them the realm of pure spirits.
Three Worlds and a Fourth
Pico's central notion is that reality is made up of three worlds: the lower or elemental world of earth, air, fire and water, the celestial world of the stars, and the supercelestial world of the angels. A fourth "world" is the human being.
Man, he says, is a small image of the whole, containing in himself something of all three. He shares the body with animals and the elements, the life of the heavens and the mind of angels.
This was the doctrine of the microcosm, the little world, and it was old. Pico gave it his own accent in the Heptaplus, calling man the bond that ties the worlds together. The same thought, that the human being has no fixed rank but may rise or fall, stands at the heart of his famous speech on the dignity of man.
The three worlds also mirror each other. In Pico's reading, each day of creation in Genesis can be taken as a stage in the making of the elemental world, as a stage of the heavens, or as a stage in the life of the soul. The seven readings thus show one pattern repeating on different scales.
Hebrew and the Beginning
The final section of the book applies the methods of Kabbalah to the first word of the Bible, Bereshit, "in the beginning." By taking the Hebrew word apart and rearranging its letters, Pico found hidden meanings in it. This kind of letter play was typical of the Kabbalists, and Pico was among the first Christians to try it.
A modern reader may find the method forced, since it can produce a meaning for nearly any word. It was prized by scholars of the time as a sign of the depth of Scripture.
His approach also shows his high view of Moses. Pico believed that Moses had hidden profound natural and spiritual truths beneath the plain language of Genesis, and that the best of the ancient philosophers had taught the same truths in other forms.
Doubts
A few cautions are due. The Heptaplus describes a universe that science has long since replaced. The nested spheres, the four elements and the ranks of angels belong to the history of ideas. The book's claims about hidden meanings in the Hebrew letters cannot be tested.
It is also worth remembering that Pico changed his mind about some matters. Shortly before his death, he wrote a long attack on astrology, which he thought undermined human freedom. This shows that he did not simply accept every old idea, and that his thinking continued to develop.
Closing
The Heptaplus is rarely read today, and yet it speaks to an old human longing: to find in the first page of the world's story a map of the whole. Pico's answer was that there is not one reading but seven, and that all of them are true in their place.
A man who could look at the same short chapter and see the earth, the stars, the angels and the soul all at once was a reader with a rare gift for wonder.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Pico della Mirandola and the Oration on the Dignity of Man: The Alchemy of the Will
- Pico della Mirandola and the 900 Theses
- Pico della Mirandola and the Kabbalistic Theses
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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