More translates the life and works of Pico.
Pico’s warm piety and zeal.
A layman to the end.
The ‘Life of Pico,’ with divers Epistles and other ‘Works’ of his, had come into More’s hands. Very probably Lilly may have brought them home with him amongst his Italian spoils. More had taken the pains to translate them into English. He had doubtless heard all about Pico’s outward life from those of his friends who had known him personally when in Italy. But here was the record of Pico’s inner history, for the most part in his own words; and reading this in More’s translation, it is not hard to see how strong an influence it may have exercised upon him. It told how, suddenly checked, as More himself had been, in a career of worldly honour and ambition, the proud vaunter of universal knowledge had been transformed into the humble student of the Bible; how he had learned to abhor scholastic disputations, of which he had been so great a master, and to search for truth instead of fame. It told how, ‘giving no great force to outward observances,’ ‘he cleaved to God in very fervent love,’ so that, ‘on a time as he walked with his nephew in an orchard at Ferrara, in talking of the love of Christ, he told him of his secret purpose to give away his goods to the poor, and fencing himself with the crucifix, barefoot, walking about the world, in every town and castle to preach of Christ.’ It told how he, too, ‘scourged his own flesh in remembrance of the passion and death that Christ suffered for our sake;’ and urged others also ever to bear in mind two things, ‘that the Son of God died for thee, and that thou thyself shall die shortly;’ and how, finally, in spite of the urgent warnings of the great Savonarola, he remained a layman to the end, and in the midst of indefatigable study of the Oriental languages, and, above all, the Scriptures, through their means, died at the early age of thirty-five, leaving the world to wonder at his genius, and Savonarola to preach a sermon on his death.[269]
The Works of Pico.
And turning from the ‘Life of Pico’ to his ‘Works,’ and reading these in More’s translation, they present to the mind a type of Christianity, so opposite to the ceremonial and external religion of the monks, that one may well cease to wonder that More, having caught the spirit of Pico’s religion, could no longer entertain any notion of becoming a Carthusian brother.
It will be worth while to examine carefully what these works of Pico’s were.
Pico’s letter to his nephew.
The first is a letter from Pico to his nephew—a letter of advice to a young man somewhat in More’s position, longing to live to some ‘virtuous purpose,’ but finding it hard to stem the tide of evil around him. To encourage his nephew, he speaks of the ‘great peace and felicity it is to the mind when a man hath nothing that grudgeth his conscience, nor is appalled with the secret touch of any privy crime.’... ‘Doubtest thou, my son, whether the minds of wicked men be vexed or not with continual thought and torment?... The wicked man’s heart is like the stormy sea, that may not rest. There is to him nothing sure, nothing peaceable, but all things fearful, all things sorrowful, all things deadly. Shall we, then, envy these men? Shall we follow them, forgetting our own country—heaven, and our own heavenly Father—where we were free-born? Shall we wilfully make ourselves bondmen, and with them, wretched living, more wretchedly die, and at the last most wretchedly in everlasting fire be punished?’
Pico’s faith in Christianity.
Having warned his nephew against wicked companions, Pico proceeds to make evident allusion to the sceptical tendencies of Italian society. ‘It is verily a great madness’ (he says) ‘not to believe the Gospel, whose truth the blood of martyrs crieth, the voice of Apostles soundeth, miracles prove, reason confirmeth, the world testifieth, the elements speak, devils confess!’[270] ‘But,’ he continues, ‘a far greater madness is it, if thou doubt not but that the Gospel is true, to live then as though thou doubtest not but that it were false.’
Its reasonableness and harmony with the laws of nature.
Pico on prayer.
Pico on the Scriptures.