APPENDIX Z44: Man: Mortal or Divine ***
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APPENDIX Z44:
Man: Mortal or Divine
***
“When I behold Your Heavens, the work of Your
ngers,
ngers,
The moon and stars that You
set in place,
set in place,
What is man that You are
mindful of him,
mindful of him,
Mortal man that You take
note of him?
note of him?
Yet You have made him little less than the angels
And adorned him with glory and majesty.”
Psalm 8:3-5
(c. 1000 BCE)
“Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) was one of the
moving
moving
spirits of the Italian Renaissance. Born into an
aristocratic
aristocratic
family, he was a child
prodigy, mastering Latin and Greek
prodigy, mastering Latin and Greek
at an early age and winning the title of papal
protonotary
protonotary
when we was only ten. Initially intending a career
in the
in the
Church, he went to the University of Bologna to
study
study
law, but widened his
interests to include philosophy,
interests to include philosophy,
which he pursued at the universities of Ferrara
and
and
Padua.
In 1486 he completed his monumental 900 Theses,
Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et
theologicae,
theologicae,
on the entire range of human knowledge. To accompany
them he wrote his Oration on the Dignity of Man, widely
regarded as a manifesto of
the Renaissance. In it he
the Renaissance. In it he
argued that the human person was the centerpiece
of
of
creation, the one being other than God himself who
had
had
no xed nature. Endowed with freedom, he could rise
higher than the angels or fall lower than the
animals. This
animals. This
is how he imagines God addressing the rst human:
Adam, we give you no xed place to live, no form
that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is
yours
yours
alone… All other things have a limited and xed
nature
nature
prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no
limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the
limits
limits
and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the
world’s center so that you
may survey everything else
may survey everything else
in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly
nor of Earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal,
so that
so that
with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself
into whatever form you choose. To you is granted
the power of degrading yourself into the lower
forms
forms
of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power,
contained in your intellect and judgment, to be
reborn
reborn
into the higher forms, the divine.”*
*
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), the text available at: http://
public.wsu.edu/~brians/world_civ/worldcivreader/world_civ_
reader_1/pico.html#2. See Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller
and John Herman Randall, Jr, The Rennaissane Philosophy
of Man, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948; M.V.
Dougherty (ed.), Pico della Mirandola: New Essays,
Cambridge
Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
*** Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership, New York: Random House, Inc. 2011, pp.111-112
