Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/725

 delighted in thought, a seeker whose passion it was to find the truth, and who would gladly have sold all he possessed to buy it. Born in 1463, he studied Canon Law at Bologna; then, first at Padua, and later at Paris, he cultivated philosophy. When only twenty-one he returned to Italy and read Plato in Florence under Ficino; three years later he travelled to Rome, where he drew up nine hundred theses, philosophical and theological, which he offered to discuss with the scholars of all lands, promising, if they came, to bear the cost of their journey. But heresy was discovered in some of the theses, and the disputation was prohibited. Later he devoted himself to a contemplative life, renounced the world, divided his goods between his nephew and the poor, saying that, once he had finished the studies which he had undertaken, he should wander barefoot round the world in order that he might preach Christ. He was a mystic; nature was to him a parable, history was an allegory, and every sensuous thing an emblem of the Divine. He magnified man, though he distrusted self; and as he believed that truth came only by revelation he felt bound to seek it from those who had thus received it from God. Hence he searched for truth, successively in Aristotle, in Plato, in Plotinus, and in the pseudo-Dionysius, who seemed to many, even after Valla had written, the source of the highest and purest truth. But as Pico said, philosophy seeks truth, theology finds it, but religion possesses it; and the truth which religion possesses is God's. Man can best discover it in the place where God has been pleased to set it.

Now, in his quest for truth and its purest sources, Pico heard of the Cabbala, and conceived it to be the depository of the most ancient wisdom, the tradition of the aboriginal revelation granted to man. And just then John Reuchlin, German mystic and scholar, found Pico. He was older in years but younger in mind. He had studied philology in Paris, law in Orleans, and he had lectured on Greek in Tübingen; he was then on his second visit to Italy, with all the mystic in him alive and unsatisfied. The God whom he wanted, the logic of the Schools could not give him; by their help he might transcend created existence, though even then what they led him to was only the boundless sea of negation. In Aristotle the impossible, in Plato the incredible, was emphasised; but in the region of spirit things were necessary which thought found impossible or reason pronounced incredible. The Neo-Pythagorean School saved Reuchlin from the tyranny of the syllogism and restored his faith. In this mood he came to Pico, and to his mood the Cabbala appealed; its philosophy was a symbolical theology which invested words and numbers, letters and names, things and persons, with a divine sense. But Reuchlin was more than a mystic with a passion for fantastic mysteries; he was also a scholar; and the idea that there were truths locked up in Hebrew, the tongue which God Himself had spoken at the Creation and which He had then given to man, compelled him to learn the language that he might read the thought in the words of