“O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest
and most wonderful felicity of man! To him it was granted to have what he
chooses, to be what he wills….When man came into life, the Father endowed him
with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds
each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in him. If these seeds are
vegetative, he will be like a plant; if they are sensitive, he will become like
the beasts; if they are rational he will become like a heavenly creature; if
intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God. And if, content with the
lot of no created being, his spirit, made one with God in the solitary darkness
of the Father, which is above all things, will surpass all things.
“Who then will not wonder at this chameleon of ours,
or who could not wonder more greatly at anything else?”— Italian Renaissance
philosopher and scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), “The Dignity
of Man,” 1486, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by James Bruce Ross and
Mary M. McLaughlin (1953)
Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar”
address of 1837 kicked off American intellectual thought, so “The Dignity of
Man” (or, as I heard it more formally referred to in college, the “Oration on
the Dignity of Man”) has generally been considered the manifesto of the
Renaissance.
In Dorothy Dunnett’s seventh novel in her “House of
Niccolo” historical fiction series, Caprice
and Rondo, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is a correspondent of Callimachus, an Italian humanist poet
exiled to Poland. But Pico could easily be a major character in his own right.
He was gifted beyond the dreams of ordinary men, not
just with the riches one might expect of the heir to the principality of Mirandola
but also (as suggested by the accompanying portrait in from the Uffizi Gallery,
in Florence) with good looks, a phenomenal memory, effortless command of Greek,
Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, and a charisma that drew women and men. Altogether,
he was a dazzler in the Platonic Academy
of Florence founded by Cosimo de' Medici. Aspiring to soar with the angels,
he could only be brought down by his own impetuosity and the jealousy of others.
By his early 20s, Pico had decided not just to issue
his equivalent of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa
theologica, boiled down to 900 theses, but to defend it against all comers.
Like Aquinas’ systematic body of knowledge, it was never finished. And like the
Summa, it attracted early on the
baleful eye of censors who regarded some of its propositions as heretical.
Though he argued for human freedom, dignity and
autonomy, Pico’s thought had none of the secular overtones associated with
today’s brand of humanism. Reason and the intellect, because they are
God-given, he believed, not only separate us from the beasts but, when fully
and properly used, lift men to the level of angels.
By seeking to reconcile traditional church teachings
with newly available texts on the Kabbala and ancient Greeks such as Plato and
Aristotle, Pico provoked clerical enemies in the Inquisition (as well as
personal enemies outside it, when he tried to run away with the wife of a cousin
of his protector, Lorenzo de’Medici). The last half-dozen years of his life
were marked by papal censure (Innocent VIII), Pico’s flight from Rome,
imprisonment in France, release, and a late reconciliation with new pontiff Alexander
VI.
Pico’s death at age 31 left far more open questions
than just the manner of his passing. (The rumor that he and friend Angelo Poliziano were poisoned at the instigation of
Lorenzo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, was confirmed only a decade ago by scientists
using biomolecular technology, scanning equipment, and DNA analysis.)
Nobody
knows how much more he would have contributed to world thought if he had had
the chance. Even though he wrote comparatively little in his truncated life,
that residue remains enduring and powerful, as noted by conservative political
and cultural theorist Russell Kirk:
“If Things are to be thrust out of the saddle once
more, and Man mounted (in Pico’s phrase) ‘to join battle as to the sound of a
trumpet of war’ on behalf of man’s higher nature, then some of us must go
barefoot through the world, like Pico, preaching the vegetative and sensual
errors of our time.”
(This blog
post was inspired by two teachers highly different in temperament but similar
in their commitment to reason: Prof. Eugene Rice, who, over several decades in
his Modern European History survey course at my college, recounted to me and thousands of
other students the personality and importance of Pico; and
Sister Margaret Bradley, a Knick-loving Sister of Charity in my high school who
told me not only that there was such a thing as a “Christian humanist,” but
also that it was a title to be worn with pride.)
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