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2 8 4 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3of the whole of the preceding philosophical tradition in this respect, by pausingto tell a story that, he hopes, we will not regret hearing. The story involvesan almost undisguised ridicule of Christianity and its foundational claims,according to which, through the advent of Christ, man’s nature has, in principle,been “changed.” For, on one hand, those who put their faith in the graceand power of the incarnate god are said, through that grace and power, to beliberated from the “victory” of death; 10 and, on the other hand, the promiseof leaving behind a corruptible for an incorruptible body is accompanied bythe promise of being made a sharer in the divine nature, of ascending beyondman’s mortal and rational nature to a transhuman and supernatural perfectionof mind. Even a man of the humblest natural capacities and intellectualendowments may, through the sincerity of his faith, be made to participatein the cognition of the first principle of all things. For, as Aquinas argues,man does not “attain [this] blessedness by his own natural powers,” but onlythrough a transformation of those powers wrought by the grace and powerof god. 11 The story of the young man living in the Florence of times past whocould not be cured of his longing to run—“everywhere he would run in thestreets, and in all weather without a care” (I.35–36)—denies that any suchtransformation is possible. In the words of Horace, “You may throw natureout with a pitch-fork. She always returns.” 12This young man’s irrepressible nature was understood by his family, andespecially his father, to be a disease. His father wished to “cure” him of this“illness” and sought the advice of several wise men—to no avail. At last hefound a “certain charlatan” who claimed to possess the power to relieve hisson of this indisposition. In recounting the father’s conversion to the programof the charlatan, Machiavelli employs the terms “belief” (crede) and“faith” (fede) to describe the gullibility of men in regard to such “sects” that10“Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will be changed, in a moment, in thetwinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. …For this perishable body must put on imperishability, andthis mortal body must put on immortality (1 Cor. 15:51–53; see also 10:17, 12:12–14, 15:16–23).11Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness, Question 5, article 5. Athanasius goes so far as to declarethat god “was made man that [man] might be made god” (De incarnatione verbi Dei, 54.3). Similarly,Gregory of Nazianzus encourages the faithful Christian to recognize that he has “become a son ofgod, fellow heir with Christ, if I may be so bold, even very god” (Oration 14:23, in Select Orations,Fathers of the Church, vol. 107, trans. Martha Vinson [Washington, DC: Catholic University Press ofAmerica, 2003], 56). Clement of Alexandria insists that through Christ and his “heavenly doctrine”men have been granted “the Father’s truly great, divine and inalienable portion, making men god”(Exhortation to the Greeks, in Clement of Alexandria, trans. G. W. Butterworth [Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1982], 245). See also Origen, Contra Celsum 6.44, and Augustine, Sermons13 and 81.12Horace, Epistles 1.5.24