There is another poem in which the feelings of a lover towards his love are made to show what the Christian’s feelings ought to be to Christ; and lastly, there is a solemn and beautiful ‘Prayer of Picus Mirandola to God,’ glowing with the same adoration of
... ‘that mighty love
Which able was thy dreadful majesty
To draw down into earth from heaven above
And crucify God, that we poor wretches, we
Should from our filthy sin yclensèd be!’
and the same earnest longing
‘That when the journey of this deadly life
My silly ghost hath finished, and thence
Departen must,’ ...
‘He may Thee find ...
In thy lordship, not as a lord, but rather
As a very tender, loving father!’
Pico’s enlightened piety.
I have made these quotations, and thus endeavoured to put the reader in possession of the contents of this little volume, which More in his seclusion was translating, because I think they throw some light upon the current in which his thoughts were moving, and because, whilst the name of Pico is known to fame as that of a great linguist and most precocious genius, his enlightened piety and the extent of the influence of his heroic example have scarcely been appreciated.
This little book, indeed, has a special significance in relation to the history of the Oxford Reformers. Whatever doubt may rest upon the direct connection between their views and those of Savonarola, there is here in More’s translation of these writings of a disciple of Savonarola, another indirect connection between them and that little knot of earnest Christian men in Italy of which Savonarola was the most conspicuous.
Position of the Neo-Platonic philosophers of Florence.
The extracts made and translated by More from Pico’s writings may also help us to recognise in the Neo-Platonic philosophers of Florence, by whose writings Colet had been so profoundly influenced, a vein of earnest Christian feeling of which it may be that we know too little. Like their predecessors of a thousand years before, they stood between the old world and the new. They were the men who, when the learning of the old Pagan world was restored to light, and backed against the dogmatic creed of priest-ridden degraded Christendom, built a bridge, as it were, between Christian and Pagan thought. That their bridge was frail and insecure it may be, but, to a great extent, it served its end. A passage was effected by it from the Pagan to the Christian shore. Ficino, the representative Neo-Platonist, who, as has been seen, had aided in its building, had himself passed over it. Savonarola too had crossed it. Pico had crossed it. It is true that these men may, to some extent, have Platonised Christianity in becoming Christian; but it will be recognised at once that the earnest Christian feeling found by More in Pico, so to speak, rose far above his Platonism.
More calls Savonarola a ‘man of God.’