On Being and Unity (1492) – Pico della Mirandola

On Being and Unity (or “On Being and the One,” De Ente et Uno) by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)

Translated by Victor Michael Hamm (1943)
Read by Dan Attrell

Text available here (see especially explanatory notes): http://www.esotericarchives.com/pico/beinguni.htm

This is the only surviving section of Pico’s planned magnum opus “The Harmony” or “Concord of Plato and Aristotle,” a work that stands unfinished on account of its author’s untimely death in 1494. It has been described by Brian Copenhaver as “the least eccentric of Pico’s works of philosophy“. By understanding Being, Unity, The Good, and The True all as one thing – God – Pico attempted to reconcile the kataphatic and apophatic approaches to the divine in four steps, and thereby attempted to bridge the gap between the Aristotelian schoolmen and the mystical Neoplatonists (i.e., Ficino, in line with Plotinus) who differed on the question of whether “Being” and “the One” were really the same thing or somehow different to one another.
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