It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the
Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself
like one of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new
religion, but still with a tenderness for the earlier life, and
desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"-
-it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made
in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of
paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those
writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or
Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to
reconcile the [45] accounts which pagan philosophy had given of
the origin of the world with the account given in the books of
Moses--the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. 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