![]() His larger project was the synthesis of all human knowledge into a single whole while humanists sought to reconcile classical philosophy with Christianity, Pico sought out nothing less than the reconciliation of every human philosophy and every human religion with Christianity. Pico brought to this project an immense mind, insatiable curiosity, infallible memory, and a confidence in his intellectual capabilities that few if any have ever matched before or since. This was more than scholarship the "classical" humanists were engaged in the syncretistic project of mixing their present society and world view with that of the works and thoughts of the ancient world. As a result of this scholarly interest in the classics, the early humanists recovered the study of Greek and Hebrew, and also began to rethink their world views and their social organization by drawing on principles extracted from the writers of antiquity. "Classical" humanism, as we call it, begins in the middle of the fourteenth century, when the great Florentine poet, Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, begins to do systematic scholarship on the ancient writers, especially Cicero. These "human studies" included music, grammar, poetry, rhetoric, etc., and were based on reading texts from classical antiquity. Defined this way, "humanism" begins in the twelfth century in the institution of studia humanitatis, or "the studies of human things" in the newly formed universities. In the simplest possible terms, all the term "humanist" refers to is the revival of classical learning in the high middle ages and Renaissance. ![]() The later humanists, of course, sought to couch their project in the philosophical terms described above hence, our tendency to read humanism as a philosophical movement above everything else. Such is humanism in its philosophical definition this was not, however, what humanism really was in essence. The importance of Plato for Renaissance humanism cannot be understressed among other things, it gives rise to a particular species of Renaissance magic which will, in turn, form the basis of what we call "science" as it is invented in the early Enlightenment (late seventeenth century). Humanists were, as Pico demonstrates, syncretists part of the philosophy of humanism was that religious truth was in part revealed to all, both Christian and non-Christian, so that part of their project was to conform non-Christian thinking, especially the thought of Plato and his followers, to Christian thinking, and to point out, through exhaustive textual scholarship, the similarities between non-Christian philosophies and religions and Christian philosophies and religion. Their concern was to define the human place in God's plan and the relation of the human to the divine therefore, they centered all their thought on the "human" relation to the divine, and hence called themselves "humanists." At no point do they ignore their religion humanism is first and foremost a religious and educational movement, not a secular one (what we call "secular humanism" in modern political discourse is a world view that arises in part from "humanism" but is, nevertheless, initially conceived in opposition to "humanism"). The Humanists, rather than focussing on what they considered futile questions of logic, semantics and proposition analysis, focussed on the relation of the human to the divine, seeing in human beings the summit and purpose of God's creation. Late medieval and Renaissance humanism was a response to the standard educational program that focussed on logic and linguistics and that animated the other great late medieval Christian philosophy, Scholasticism. "Humanism" is not anti-Christian as it has come to mean in some quarters of modern discourse in fact, late medieval and early modern humanism is just the opposite. Pico was a both a Neoplatonist and a humanist in fact, Pico is one of the most read of the Renaissance philosophers because his work synthesizes all the strains of Renaissance and late medieval thinking: Neoplatonism, humanism, Aristoteleanism, Averroism (a form of Aristoteleanism), and mysticism. Pico himself had a massive intellect and literally studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance the "Oration" in part is meant to be a preface to a massive compendium of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a compendium that never appeared because of Pico's early death. ![]() If there is such a thing as a "manifesto" of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's " Oration on the Dignity of Man" is it no other work more forcefully, eloquently, or thoroughly remaps the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and the human perspective. ![]()
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