Review: The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee

A subtle and compelling exploration of the life and thought of a Renaissance mystic

It was an age of wonders. In the autumn of 1487 Lorenzo de’ Medici took receipt of a camelopard – what we would call a giraffe – as a gift from Qaitbay, the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. The Florentines marvelled at how it seemed to walk out of descriptions of itself from late antiquity a millennia before. In 1479, an elephant arrived in Ferrara for the carnival and was made to dance before the duchess during the masquerade. It performed its role “in a most humane and pleasing way”, an on-looker said.

Another marvel of the age arrived in Ferrara in 1479. His name was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and he was sixteen years old. Just before he was born, it was said, a circle of fire had briefly flamed into life over the bed where his mother laboured. From an early age Pico recited poetry; he only had to hear a poem once to recall it for ever, repeating it perfectly both forwards and backwards as if language had a level of sense that transcended meaning.

Pico’s father died when he was four and his mother took control, directing him into the church. She had him named an apostolic protonotary at the age of ten, a stepping stone towards the College of Cardinals. Then she sent him to the university in Padua to study canon law; by the time he was fifteen he had mastered every papal decree.

But then she died, and Pico took control of his own destiny – and what a destiny it was that he sketched for himself. Certainly, canon law had no place in it. Instead he brought his formidable memory to bear on philosophy. He determined, he said, “to swear allegiance to no creed, to plumb the depths of every philosopher, to scrutinize every scrap of paper, and to master every kind of thought”. His aim: to synthesise Aristotelian logic and Platonic idealism – all previous systems of thought, really – into one great unified theory of knowledge. Why toy with the language of the church when there was God’s language at creation to decipher?

Over the next few years, as Edward Wilson-Lee reveals in The Grammar of Angels, Pico’s intellectual itinerary took him around some of humanist Europe’s hottest spots: Ferrara, Florence, Paris and more. He added Hebrew and Arabic - rare languages in western Christendom at that point – to his childhood Latin and Greek. He also learned what he thought was Chaldean, the language of Zoroaster. (On this, at least, he was misled: it was in fact Ge’ez, the liturgical language of Ethiopia.)

He became famous in the philosophical prize-fights of the debating theatres. These were far from ethereal intellectual spaces: the year Pico arrived in Ferrara one such bout, over the election of a rector to the university, ended in an armed brawl. “So great would his skills as a public speaker become,” Wilson-Lee writes, “that after his death many made it their proudest boast to have seen him once perform.” Rabelais burlesqued him in the character of Panurge in Gargantua and Pantagruel. In a fresco by Cosimo Rosselli in the Cappella del Miracolo at Sant’Ambrogio it is the figure of Pico among the bystanders to which the eye is drawn, even though a miracle is occurring elsewhere. Ghirlandaio and Raphael may have painted him into crowd scenes too, each ensuring he was singled out in different ways.

This tension between the singular and the collective, the part and the whole, is everywhere in both Pico’s life and work. The mystical language of chant and incantation, he thought, was the key to unlock ecstatic states of being and burst the bubble of the self. We could escape “the wilderness of the body’s solitude”, he wrote, and transcend the angels until “full of divinity we shall be ourselves no longer, but rather we will be Him, the One who made us”.

Such heretical grand ideas were at the heart of the 900 Theses which Pico brought to Rome in late 1486 to defend against all-comers in public debate. They also attracted the attention of the papacy, which forbade any debate and summoned Pico to account for himself. Pico had little experience of either humility or emollience, and he didn’t trouble to acquire any now. The hearing did not go well. A Papal Bull was issued ordering that every copy of the Theses be burned. It thus has the unfortunate distinction of being the first printed text to suffer such a punishment. Pico himself was lucky to escape the attention of Torquemada and the Inquisition.

He was lucky too in the friendship of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had once said he would happily bankrupt himself to build a library fit for Pico’s use. Lorenzo made good his promise, dispatching an agent to the Eastern Mediterranean in search of rare and ancient manuscripts. As for Pico, he was reading himself into yet stranger places. “Anyone who spends all their time reading,” Wilson-Lee writes, “is bound to find hidden worlds opening up inside the sentences of the books.” Pico was now swimming so deeply in language that nine-hundred theses were no longer necessary to explain the universe to him: the roots of all necessary knowledge could be found in the Hebrew word beresit – ‘In the beginning’ – the very first word of Genesis.

Around this time he adopted a motto from the Roman poet Propertius: “in great things it is enough to have tried”. Perhaps it was a tacit acceptance of failure, of how far the angelic reach exceeded the human grasp. Perhaps not. But it’s not clear how much further he could have taken his line of thinking; and, as it happened, he didn’t have too long to find out.

The last weeks of his life are hard to piece together. He retreated to San Marco in Florence – the friary of his friend Savonarola, whose oratorical command over the city’s people seems to embody some of the darker aspects of Pico’s angelic speech. There Pico was reportedly writing so fast and with such confusion that his thoughts were afterwards indecipherable, a “thicket and a farrago”, according to his nephew. None of these writings survive. Wilson-Lee thinks it apt that his final work became “a sort of sublime gibberish, the illegible and incomprehensible in hot pursuit of the unthinkable”, and he may be right. In any event, Pico died in San Marco in November 1494 at the age of 31. One man confessed, under torture, to have poisoned him, for reasons that are unclear, on behalf of the Medici family. Whatever the details, the truth remains indecipherable. That too is apt.

Later generations would not be kind to Pico’s thinking. Enlightenment rationalism swept away with some contempt the old idea that true knowledge and wisdom were things to be recovered by the application of deep thought to ancient texts; that was merely “the conceit of scholars”, one historian sneered. Instead, the pursuit of knowledge would become an ever-expanding, future-facing imperium of newly minted paradigms and freshly mined points of data: information over understanding, innovation at any price – at what cost to wisdom, and indeed the planet, we are still finding out.

The Grammar of Angels, on the other hand, offers an account of Pico’s often difficult thought that in places slips into a kind of gentle advocacy. Wilson-Lee notes, for instance, what Pico couldn’t: that “In the centuries [to come] Europeans were to encounter in a great many places evidence of beliefs in the sublime nature of language”, to the extent that one might think such beliefs intrinsic to the human condition. The way he quotes Pico, meanwhile, which he does copiously using italicised text woven tightly among his own thoughts and phrases, serves to breakdown the discrete categories of author and subject, objective analysis and subjective argument. It’s a brilliant performance; Pico would be proud.

Ultimately Pico’s work fascinates in part because it belongs somewhere close to the high tide of the written word, the last moment at which a manuscript library might hold any kind of answer to the mysteries of life, its books, in Wilson-Lee’s evocative phrase, “pieces in a limitless puzzle”. On his death bed two years earlier in April 1492, Lorenzo had joked with Pico that he would have preferred not to die “till that day when I had fully completed your library”. It’s a poignant idea, not least in the distance between its hope and the possibility of its achievement. The same feels true of Pico’s ambition and the daring of his thought, as if it were a high-wire act between the proud towers of a city no-one visits anymore. Still, in his willingness to break the limits of language and seek what lay beyond the thinkable, Pico was exploring facets of collective human experience for which modernity has yet to find accommodation, never mind an explanation. Was it enough to have tried, then? Unequivocally, yes.

This review first appeared on Engelsberg Ideas.