The Shape of Theological Humanism
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forth and reveal himself distinctly in many things, is divine and Jupiter-like.”Indebted to Pico della Mirandola and Cicero, Vives locates human dignity in the power that free action has to define human existence. Humans have complete power to fashion their lives unencumbered by natural or super-^21
natural limits. Moreover, what it means to be a human being is revealed precisely in those things and realities shaped by human power. Culture and society are the artifacts that reveal the Jupiter-like power that is human nDelivered in 1486 in Rome when he was 24, Pico’s Oration on the Dignity ature.
of Manand also a basic text of classical humanism. He begins the oration with the image of the stage:Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that , as it is now known, is a powerful expression of the Renaissance mind
The struggle of human life, accordingly, is to rise and not fall, to move Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on his stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man.^22
towards the divine rather than fall to the level of the brutes. Pico has God say that “We have made you (man) a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may ... fashion yourself in the form you prefer.” (^23) Pico denies that human beings have a “nature.” We are
chameleons, infinitely changeable and plastic; like Vives, the idea is that the human appears in different masks. By God-given free will, human beings can define their own nature. In other words, human beings are “things in between,” whose existence is not defined by the nature of mortality or
immortality or the laws of heaven or the laws of earth. Russell Kirk notes the link between humanism and religion in the Yet all this dignity of human nature was the gift of God: the spiritual and rational powers neglected – and through free will Man is all too able to neglect Oration:
Human beings are created good, but them – Man sinks to the level of the brutes. The humanist does not seek to dethrone God: instead through the moral disciplines of struggle upward toward the Godhead.^24 changeable. Human beings can freely humanitas, he aspires to
seek the highest good, seek God, but they can also fall below their dignity and become brutes. This basic instability, lack of constancy, and changeability characterizes the moral and spiritual struggle of life.One can see a forerunner of radical existentialism in this account of
human freedom. Existence precedes essence, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote much