Pico della mirandola (1463-1494)

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Pico della mirandola (1463-1494)

• Thematic Focus on
• (Being) Human

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Pico
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Oration on the Dignity of Man
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Background

• The Humanism of The Renaissance Man
• Anthropocentric
• Copernican (Ambiguity/Centrality)
• Ancient Greek back to Socratic tradition
• The Place of Man in The Great Chain of Being
• The Messenger/ The Mid-point
• God either self-caused (causa sui) or uncaused
• Differences between beings are in the degree of
  perfection.
• Evil deprivation/lack of good
• Images of the Chain and its Neo-Platonism its
  hierarchical ambiguity

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The Renaissance Man Old and New

• The Old Bible and New Reason
• Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophical Tradition and
• New Biblical Vision
• Syncretism and Expansionism Freedom and/of
  Divinity
• Focus on the man himself
• a divinity clothed with human flesh (p.3)

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Three Questions

• 1. Pico and the Renaissance
• Picos oration embodies the Renaissance spirit
  (p.1).
• What is the Renaissance spirit?
• And how exactly do Picos ideas on human
  exemplify or represent it?
• 2. Pico and Human Dignity
• What is the Great Chain of Being? Why chain?
• And where does it place human beings? And why so?
  
• How similar, and different, to Plato is Pico?
• (re hierarchical relationship between beings, or
  between beings and Being)
• 3. Pico and Divinity
• When humanitys quest ends, we shall not be
  ourselves
• but He himself who made us (p.2).
• Is Pico talking about us or about God
  Himself?
• What is puzzling about Picos (spatial) relation
  to God, his Copernican turn?
• And what does this turn tell us about the
  Renaissance God as mans image?

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Key Quotes

• Man is the messenger between creatures. (p.2)
  Man is an animal of diverse, multiform an
  destructible nature. (p.3)
• Man is capable of arousing envy not only in
  the brutes but also in the stars and even in the
  minds beyond the world. (p.2) He more superbly
  is a divinity clothed with human flesh. (p.3)
  Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind, so
  that we may not be content with mean things but
  may aspire to the highest things and strive with
  all our forces to attain them for if we will to,
  we can. (p.4) We, raised up into the loftiest
  watchtower of theology, from which, measuring
  with indivisible eternity the things that are,
  will be, and shall have been and looking at their
  primeval beauty (p.4)
• Therefore He took up man, a work of
  indeterminate form. Neither heavenly nor
  earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made
  thee. At mans birth the Father placed in
  him every sort of see and sprouts of every kind
  of life.(p.3)
• Who does not wish to have breathed into him the
  Socratic frenzies sung by Plato and be
  possessed by these Socratic frenzies, which will
  so place us outside of our minds that they will
  place our mind and ourselves in God. (p.4)