Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Heninger, S K

Titel

Some Renaissance Versions of the Pythagorean Tetrad1

Ist Teil von

• Studies in the Renaissance, 1961-01, Vol.8, p.7-35

Ort / Verlag

New York: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1961

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In 1538 when Sir Thomas Elyot printed his Dictionary, he included the following entry for Pythagoras: ‘An excellente Phylosopher, whose Phylosophye was in mystycalle sentences, and alsoo in the Scyence of noumbers.’ The ‘mystycalle sentences’ were the Carolina aurea and Symbola, collections of spurious precepts with hidden meanings which had received extensive explication; and ‘the Scyence of noumbers’ recalled Pythagoras’ fundamental postulate that all things have innate numerical relationships. Elyot's entry indicates concisely what facets of the Pythagorean doctrine appealed to the Renaissance and how Pythagoras could appear as the fountainhead of both mysticism and physical science. Reuchlin cited Pythagoras as source of the mystical wisdom contained in De arte cabalistica, while Copernicus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium claimed support from the ancient Pythagoreans for his belief that the earth moved.