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THE SCHOOLMEN and on Plato’s Timaeus in describing the creation, and imagines God as addressing the newly created human being in the following terms: The nature of other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature We have set thee at the world’s centre that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker and moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgement, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.21 Pico sees the human, at birth, as a totipotential being, containing the seeds of many forms of life Depending on which seed you cultivate, you may become a vegetable, a brute, a rational spirit, or a son of God You may even withdraw into yourself and become one with God in solitary darkness Pico’s consistent aim in his writings was to exalt the powers of human nature To this end he defended the use of alchemy and symbolic rituals: these were legitimate magic, to be sharply distinguished from the black magic that invoked the aid of demons But not all the scientiWc claims of the ancients were to be believed Pico wrote twelve books against astrology: the heavenly bodies could aVect men’s bodies but not their minds, and no one could know the stars’ movements and powers well enough to cast a horoscope Astrology was to be opposed because the determinism it proclaimed limited human freedom; white magic was to be pursued because it made man the ‘prince and master’ of creation Pico’s evocation of human dignity was an ancestor of Hamlet’s paean: What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how inWnite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals In spite of his unorthodox views and diYculties with the Church authorities, Pico was much admired by St Thomas More, who as a young man 21 E Cassirer et al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959), 225 110
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