Chapter 21 - Pythagoras in the Early Renaissance

Summary

Introduction

The Renaissance story of Pythagoras and Pythagorean wisdom, its religious and its scientific aspects alike, is a complicated one. This is partly because leading philosophers and historians of the age read a host of later developments and assumptions back into their source materials, and thereby recreated a Pythagoras in their own image, one invested with their own enthusiasms and preoccupations. In the process they created a thinker of enormous stature, who was the founder of a number of disciplines, and a moralist and sage of such lofty grandeur that he anticipated the virtues of Christianity's greatest saints, if not of Christ himself. Ralph Cudworth as late as the mid seventeenth century was not untypical when he called Pythagoras “the most eminent of all the ancient philosophers” implying that his school had surpassed even the Academy and the Lyceum. This is a positive way of saying that Renaissance thinkers falsified the record in their syncretistic desire to find either a magisterial pre-Platonic thinker or a Greco-Jewish mystagogue whom they could set beside Moses and to whom they could attribute a like plenipotential wisdom and authority, especially since St. Ambrose had intimated that Pythagoras was a Jew.

Underlying this impulse was the assumption that Pythagoras was part of a storied succession of ancient theologians (prisci theologi) that climaxed in Plato but stretched back prior to Pythagoras through Aglaophamus, Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus to Zoroaster, and constituted a line of sages who had adored God by combining “marvelous wisdom and incomparable sanctity” (14.10.2) as distinct from the simple piety of unlearned men. The line ran loosely parallel to that of the Hebrew prophets and bore witness to the same principal theological truths: the existence of one almighty God, who had created a harmonious world, who rewarded virtue and punished sin, who had endowed humankind with immortal souls, and who had established a beginning and an end to time, however vast the intervening duration. This ancient wisdom had been shared by Gentiles and Jews alike, however separate the traditions. For Platonizing Christians it had been perfected in Christ, who was accordingly both the Hebrew Messiah and the new Zoroaster, the culmination of what the Platonists saw as the Chaldaean-Pythagorean-Platonic wisdom.