Harmony of the World and the Celestial Rhetoric in Sixteenth Century Venice

Abstract

In this article, I deal with one of the episodes of the intersection between the history of science and the history of the conceptions of language. I argue in this article that Francesco Patrizi's philosophy of nature was closely linked to the process of transformation of the Rhetoric that took place in the context of the hermetic Platonism of sixteenth-century Venice. Francesco Giorgio's "world harmonies" were deeply rooted in a Kabbalistic conception according to which all things derive from the first Divine Word and therefore the nature of the world is essentially textual. Giulio Camillo took a decisive step towards the conjunction of this tradition of Christian kabbalism with the tradition of Rhetoric. Francesco Patrizi, on his part, echoed the inspirations of Giorgio and Camillo, while going further, proposing a radical revision of the Rhetoric that would make it abandon its humanist pigeonhole of imitation of the classical authors and turn it into a universal science of language that would lead to authentic knowledge of the world. Patrizi thus came to maintain that the genuine philosophy of nature must be celestial rhetoric that follows a scientific method and a mathematical model.