Angelology in Pico's 900 Theses

3>49 It is more improperly said that God is intellect or that which has intellect, than that the rational soul is an angel.

3>43. The act by which the angelic and rational nature is bestowed with
the greatest happiness is an act neither of the intellect nor of the will, but
is the union of the unity that exists in the otherness of the soul with the
unity that exists without otherness.

3>63. Although in the soul there exists in act an intellectual nature, through
which it convenes with the angel, just as a rational nature exists in it, through
which it is distinguished from that, there is nothing intrinsic in it through
which it is able, without the appropriate image, to understand something dis-
tinct from itself.

5>13. If we follow the theology of Syrianus, it is rational [to claim] that priests
in the ecclesiastical hierarchy correspond to the analogous powers in the celes-
tial hierarchy.

5>21. When Plato says that Love was bom from the union of Poverty and
Plenty in the garden of Jove, on the birthday of Venus while the gods feasted,
he means only this, that then the first love, that is, the desire of beauty, was
bom in the angelic mind when in it the splendor of ideas, though imperfecdy,
began to shine.

5>17. If we follow the doctrine of Syrianus, it is appropriate after the unity of
total intellection, which is also divided triply into substantial, potential, and
operative intellection, to posit another triad of intellection, namely, partial,
participated, and imagerial.

20.7. Man's greatest happiness exists when our particular intellect is fully
conjoined to the first and total intellect.


19.2. I believe that the active intellect that is illuminating only in Themistius
is the same as Metatron in the Cabala.


11>10. That which among the Cabalists is called Metatron
is without doubt that which is called Pallas by Orpheus, the paternal mind
by Zoroaster, the son of God by Mercury, wisdom by Pythagoras, the
intelligible sphere by Parmenides.

6.7. A superior angel illuminates an inferior not because it presents to it a
luminous object, or because it particularizes and divides for the other what is
united in itself, but because it strengthens and fortifies the intellect of the
inferior.

25.2. In participated numbers some are images of numbers, others the unions
of images.

26.5. The intelligible order does not subsist within the intellectual order, as
Ahmose the Egyptian said, but over the whole intellectual hierarchy, unparti-
cipatively hidden in the abyss of the first unity, and under the cloud of the
first darkness.

10>9. Guardians in Orpheus and powers in Dionysius are the same.

10>13. Typhon in Orpheus and Samael in the Cabala are the same.

2.18. Aeviturnity exists subjectively in more beatified angels.

2.21. No multiplicity of angels exists in the same species.