Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/56

34 in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses seems in his writings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a theologian, that is because it was an institution with the ancient philosophers either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak of them dissemblingly; hence their doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a 'master of silence,' and wrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart, and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of figure and analogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish ritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greek mythologists. Everywhere there is an unbroken system of analogies. Every object in the material world is an analogue, a symbol or counterpart of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and this again of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars. There is the element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fire of heaven; and there is in the super-celestial world the fire of the seraphic intelligence. 'But behold how they differ! The elementary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celestial fire loves.' In this way every natural object, every combination