greatness of man and urges the subordination of our baser instincts to reason
so that we may live to up to our divine image, he has not departed far
from Augustine’s similar educational programme. Like Augustine, Pico cele-
brates humanity’s God-given dignity, not human autonomy. Other passages
show clearly Pico’s basic adherence to the Christian narrative of redemption,
according to which Christ restores our full humanity:
But just as all of us in thefirst Adam, who obeyed Satan more than God and
whose sons we are according to theflesh, deformed [sic] from men [and]
degenerated into brutes, so in the newest Adam Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the
will of the Father and defeated the spiritual iniquities with his blood, whose sons
we are all according to the spirit, reformed by grace, we are regenerated [by man]
into adoption as sons of God.^59Pico is not, as is often assumed, the Promethean Renaissance villain (in the
standard Christian narrative) or prophet (in the standard secularist story),
who proclaimed the secularist sovereign self. The patristic scholar Henri de
Lubac hits nearer the mark when he claims that Pico’s Renaissance manifesto,
Discourse on the Dignity of Man, is theologically not opposed to traditional
Christianity.^60 Like the church fathers and the medieval humanists, Renais-
sance thinkers regarded the ability and drive of man to cultivate and shape his
world as‘an emulation of divinity, since it was in this respect that man was
created in the image and likeness of God’.^61
Renaissance humanists thus return us once more to the importance of the
incarnation for Christian educational ideals. They knew well that the incar-
nation, death, and resurrection of Jesus set Christianity apart from previous
philosophies and religions. As Petrarch put it, only Christianity truly joins
heaven and earth. For however close Platonic thought may have come to
Christian truth, that the divine Word‘becameflesh, [and] how, joined to the
earth, it dwelt in us, this the learned Plato did not know’.^62 The educational
programme of Renaissance humanistsflowed from the fact that God joined
himself to humanity so that humanity could regain its true divine likeness.
That education was a main concern of Renaissance humanists is common
knowledge.^63 What is less well known is that humanistic education did not
(^59) Commentary on Genesis; quoted in Charles Trinkhaus,In Our Image and Likeness:
Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, vol. 2 (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1995), 517.
(^60) Henri de Lubac,Theology in History(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1996), 43. See also the
similar conclusion of Pierre-Marie Cordier, that Pico believed‘the essential truth is contained in the
Catholic faith’and that his interest in other religions was principally apologetic. SeeJean Pic de la
Mirandole, ou La plus purefigure de l’humanisme chrétien(Paris: Editions Debresse, 1958), 101.
(^61) Trinkaus,In Our Image, vol. 1, xx–xxi.
(^62) Petrarch,De otio religioso, quoted in Trinkaus,In Our Image, vol. 2, 658.
(^63) Paul Oskar Kristeller,‘Humanism’, in Kristeller (ed.),Renaissance Thought, vol. 2:Papers
on Humanism and the Arts,13–14.
Christian Humanism and Contemporary Culture 151