The Heptaplus is
dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tells
us, in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses seems in his
writings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a
theologian, that is because it was an institution with the ancient
philosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak
of them dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries.
Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a "master of silence," and
wrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart, and
speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In explaining the harmony
between Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of figure and
analogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish
ritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greek
mythologists. Everywhere there is an unbroken system of correspondences.
Every object in the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or
counterpart, of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and this
again of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars.
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