Elia del Medigo: an archetype of the halachic man? (An examination of early 15th-century Jewish and Christian philosophy and religion in the 'Behinat al-Dat')

“And the person who urged me to this point is the noble master, Pico della Mirandola, who is given to speculation of the highest sciences, is a very intelligent man, a worthy philosopher, a lover of truth, of whose like I have not seen in these times.” Thus wrote Elia del Medigo in the introduction to his commentary on Averroes' De substantia orbis written at the behest of the famous count of Mirandola as a result of their discussions in 1485. In late 1486, Pico, then in Rome, presented his Conclusiones in which he was able to couple the philosophy of Averroes with statements such as: “Averroes and Avicenna cannot disagree fundamentally on whether the physicist receives composite bodies from the metaphysician, even if they differ in their words,” or: “If there is any nature immediate to us that is either simply rational, or at least exists for the most part rationally, it has magic in its summit, and through its participation in men can be more perfect.” Conclusions like these could only have deeply frustrated someone like Elia del Medigo, who had devoted much time and effort to persuading the count of the superiority of peripatetic philosophy as interpreted by Averroes and may have caused him to revise somewhat his favorable statements about Pico. His last known contact with Pico was in December of the same year, in the form of a letter with two accompanying treatises, a last-ditch effort to make Pico aware of the superiority of Aristotelian-Averroistic cosmology.