Theological Origins of Modernity

86 chapter three
of the fact that as the imago dei man is above all creatures, the creature
who most fully participates in divine being. Th is account of the origin of
man in the Oration was the introduction to Pico’s defense of nine hundred
theses drawn from almost all of the world’s religions. Pico’s goal was
to make human beings recognize their special dignity and the power of
their free will, which, following Ficino, he believed was akin to that of God
himself. 59 Whether this titanic project could ever have been completed is
an open question, for even in its initial formulation it went so far beyond
the bounds of what the church was willing to accept that Pico and his work
were condemned. However, he did not abandon his eff orts to formulate a
comprehensive account of all knowledge.
Pico was convinced that truth was universal and that all philosophies
and religions had a part in it. 60 In his later work Heptaplus, he argued that
in addition to the hierarchy of angelic, celestial, elementary worlds, there
is a fourth world constituted by man himself. 61 In this work too, he tried to
show that the creation story in Genesis was in accord with the Greek view
of nature. In his last work, Of Being and Unity, he even argued that Plato
and Aristotle—thought by most of his contemporaries to be diametrically
opposed—were in essential agreement. His eff orts demonstrate both the
perceived necessity and the real diffi culties of the Neoplatonic eff ort to
reconcile the wisdom of the pagans with Christianity. However, at its core
this was still a Christian and not a pagan project. Pico’s own example provides
us with evidence of this. He was convinced that philosophy could
only go so far in penetrating to the truth of the divine, which in his view
remained dark. Th us, while philosophy could take man a long way, it was
always necessary at some point to rely on religion. In his own case, when
it proved impossible to achieve the reconciliation of pagan sources with
Christianity, he chose to follow a more fundamentalist notion of Christianity,
under the infl uence of Savonarola. At its most extreme, on the verge
of a Promethean rejection of God, humanism thus stepped back from the
brink.
While the humanist project thus developed in a direction that over time
placed ever more weight on human will and ever less on divine will in its
attempt to make sense of the mysterious relationship of God and man, it
was never willing to solve the problem by denying the effi cacy or authority
of God. Th e humanists were clearly aware of this Epicurean solution to
their problem, but they chose not to employ it. Many have argued that the
humanists were not actually religious but only feigned belief in order to
avoid being burned at the stake as heretics. However, a careful consideration
of the lives of most humanists makes it clear that very few could even