Pico della Mirandola: New Essays ed. by M. V. Dougherty (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 509 his essay, while compact and insightful, deals with a very focused exegesis of two sections of the Letter to Families on the interconnection of self-gift and the common good, leaving the theology of the body catecheses unmined. Finally, apart from Levering's fruitful comparison of John Paul II and Aquinas on the Eucharist there are no studies on their approach to the sacraments. It might have been especially interesting to contrast their thought on the marriage since, unlike Aquinas, John Paul II agrees with St. Bonaventure in seeing marriage as a sacrament "from the beginning." In spite of the uneven nature of some of the essays and the fact that some potentially fruitful topics of comparison are left untreated, this is a very worthwhile volume. The essays by Dulles, Mansini, Morerod, and Sherwin are genuinely outstanding. Virtually all of the essays are interesting and substantive in their own right. With the exception of the debate over whether Wojtyla was a phenomenologist, a Thomist, or (if possible) both, on his elevation to the papacy, there has not been sufficient attention paid to the Thomistic roots of the twentieth century's most prolific and visible pope. This collection goes some distance in filling that gap in scholarly reflection. I recommend this study for advanced students of Aquinas and of Wojtyla/John Paul II. Both will profit from this fruitful interchange. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. JOHNS. GRABOWSKI Pico delta Mirando/a: New Essays. Edited by M. V. DOUGHERTY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2008. Pp. 240. $80 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-52184736 -0. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola died at 31, none of his writings became part of institutional Christian study, and his was the first printed book to be banned by the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, his writings have been a major focus for discussion about the relations of philosophy, religion, and humanism in the Renaissance. His citation of Hermetic, magical, kabbalistic and Zoroastrian writings, from Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic has frustrated scholarly efforts to identify his opinions within any particular school of thought. He declared an intention of learning from all teachers, instead of following any single master; some scholars have interpreted this to mean that he believed that all teachings contain an element of truth. Such an interpretation does not explain letters to his nephew that expressed earnest Christian piety, his resolute defense against the papal commission of his condemned theses, his affinity to Savonarola, or his exhaustive denunciation of judicial astrology. Now, at a time when earlier 510 BOOK REVIEWS interpretations of Pico's thought have crumbled and new evidence has become available, the articles in this volume ask whether and how it is possible to reconcile the contradictions in his major works. After briefly surveying the current state of Pico studies, Michael V. Dougherty announces that the collection is intended "to assess the philosophical merit" of Pico's writings, to guide English-speaking readers through the wide range of topics in his diverse corpus, to make scholarship about him comprehensible, and to point out directions for future investigation. Each of these articles confronts a clear problem and proceeds, through lucid discussion of the textual evidence, to break important scholarly ground, without the professional jargon that might leave students behind. Jill Kraye ("Pico on the Relationship of Rhetoric and Philosophy") explains Pico's surprising defense of Scholasticism in a letter of 1485 to Ermolao Barbaro. Pico defended the Scholastics against humanist complaints that their Latin was a barbarous distortion of the classical language. Barbaro advocated uniting wisdom with eloquence and studying ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle instead of the Latin Scholastics who did not know Greek. Pico replied, using the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, by impersonating an imagined Scholastic philosopher saying that the Scholastics' awkward, technical Latin was a tactic for concealing deep secrets from unqualified readers. The Scholastics applied their subtlety and intellectual penetration to investigating deep questions, not to adorning their writing to please the crowd. "They have Mercury in their hearts, not on their tongues." In this letter, as in his famous Oration, Kraye asserts, Pico endorsed Scholastic philosophy as a discipline intended to discover the truth, whereas humanist rhetoric could...