Promethean, when Pico has God say to Adam that his free will enables him to
be the free and proud shaper of his own being and nature. Later, however,
Hamlet complicates this formulation, framing man as a paragon of animals
that eventually becomes a quintessence of dust. Shakespeare focuses on the
increased consciousness and prerogative of self-realization that Pico cele-
brates, but adds to them the demands of conscience and a dread of mortality
that neither Pico nor anyone else can avoid, especially not that Renaissance
revenger that circumstances called Hamlet to be.
All this said, however, we misread Pico if we see him as a forebear of, let’s
say, someone like Christopher Hitchens. Thomas Moore, in his brief life of
Pico, presents a conversion narrative not unlike Augustine’s in hisConfessions
showing us Pico as an arrogant, precocious young scholar who in time burned
his wanted books and‘gave himself, day and night, most fervently to the
studies of Scripture’.^8
So, this ubiquitous syncretism is thefirst key word here among Renaissance
scholars and poets, who had this ability to maintain pagan and Christian
outlooks, or, even better, to fortify expressions of Christian faith with pagan
sources, as strange as that sounds.Scholars remain divided on the success of
harnessing syncretism for Christianity, mostly because contestants on each
side of the question rarely appreciate sufficiently how deep and integrated this
syncretism could be. Moreover, the strains and tensions we moderns perceive
in often rather surprising partnerships of Christian and pagan outlooks would
have appeared wholly different within the specific literary and cultural context
of our Renaissance poets.
IMITATIONBesides syncretism, imitation is another essential concept and central compo-
nent of Renaissance poetic composition. Truth be told, imitation is a practice
that remains important for contemporary poets for all of their dispraising of
imitation. This was not a practicefirst created in the Renaissance, for the
Roman poet Horace, to cite a far earlier example, proudly brought prior Greek
poetic achievements into Latin verse. Hefigured himself as an industrious bee
gathering wisdom from various times and places. Erasmus borrowed and
developed the bee metaphor, explaining inCiceronianusthat earlier literature
must not only be gathered but then also digested:
So that your mind crammed with every kind of food may give birth to a style
which smells not of anyflower, shrub or grass but of your own native talent and(^8) SeeThe Life of Pico della Mirandola by his Nephew Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, trans.
Thomas More, ed. with introduction and notes by J. M. Rigg, http://www.exclassics.com/Pico/
pico.pdf, 37, accessed 17 February 2016.
176 Brett Foster