Della Mirandola Quotes

....man's place in the universe is somewhere between the beasts and the angels, but, because of the divine image planted in him, there are no limits to what man can accomplish....

Let some holy ambition invade our souls, so that, dissatisfied with mediocrity, we shall eagerly desire the highest things and shall toil with all our strength to obtain them, since we may if we wish.

To [man] it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...

You can lower yourselves to the level of the beast, but you can also be reborn as a divine creature by the free will of your spirit. Man can become what he likes - subhuman or superhuman, as he wishes.

A sacred pride should grip us of not being satisfied with the mediocre but to strive (for we can do it, if we want to) with the exertion of all our strength to attain the highest. Let us scorn what is of this earth, let us ignore what is of heaven, let us leave absolutely everything worldly behind us in order to hasten to the abode out of this world, in the proximity of the sublime deity. We do not need to think of stepping back. Of being satisfied with second rank, let us strive for dignity and glory. To attain the highest.

You [Mankind] have been given no particular function. You may give your life whatever form you choose, do whatever you wish … you have no limitations, and can act in accord with your own free will. You alone can choose the limits of your nature.

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [...]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, Neither mortal or immortal, So that with freedom of choice and with honor, As thought the maker and molder of thyself, Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once ... The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells. He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there? Seems not.

We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, Neither mortal nor immortal, So that with freedom of choice and with honor, As though the maker and molder of thyself, Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul’s judgment, To be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.” —GOD’S SPEECH TO ADAM FROM PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA’S ORATION ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN

ITALIANO – Adoro la luce della candela. Mi aiuta ad ingannare gli occhi e a giudicare le cose guardandole con il cuore. ENGLISH – I love the candle light. It helps me to fool the eyes judging things by heart. SPAGNOLO – Adoro la luz de las velas.Me ayuda a engañar los ojos y a juzgar las cosas mirandolas con el corazón.

...There, as the sacred mysteries tell us, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones occupy the first places; but, unable to yield to them, and impatient of any second place, let us emulate their dignity and glory. And, if we will it, we shall be inferior to them in nothing.

Pico della Mirandola escribe hacia esta época su Discurso sobre la dignidad humana, en el que otorga al ser humano tanto la capacidad como la obligación de ser lo suficientemente noble para responder a la alta misión de llegar a comprender la unidad del cosmos en su divinidad.

Considering that we are born with this condition, that is, that we can become whatever we choose to become, we need to understand that we must take earnest care about this, so that it will never be said to our disadvantage that we were born to a privileged position but failed to realize it and became animals and senseless beasts.... Above all, we should not make that freedom of choice God gave us into something harmful, for it was intended to be to our advantage. Let a holy ambition enter into our souls; let us not be content with mediocrity, but rather strive after the highest and expend all our strength in achieving it. Let us disdain earthly things, and despise the things of heaven, and, judging little of what is in the world, fly to the court beyond the world and next to God. In that court, as the mystic writings tell us, are the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones in the foremost places; let us not even yield place to them, the highest of the angelic orders, and not be content with a lower place, imitate them in all their glory and dignity. If we choose to, we will not be second to them in anything.

The most important idea he gleaned from the swift, learned talk was that religion and knowledge could exist side by side, enriching each other. Greece and Rome, before the dawn of Christianity, had built gloriously in the arts, humanities, sciences, philosophy. Then for a thousand years all such wisdom and beauty had been crushed, declared anathema, buried in darkness. Now this little group of men, the sensual Poliziano, the lined Landino, the tiny Ficino, the golden-haired Pico della Mirandola, these few fragile men, led and aided by Lorenzo de' Medici, were attempting to create a new intellect under the banner of a word Michelangelo had never heard before: Humanism. What did it mean?

Magia est pars practica scientiae naturalis (Magic is the practical part of natural science)

Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the center of his own unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all.

The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli’s Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evidently both the ancestor and the descendant of the Virgins of Fra Filippo Lippi: the ancestor in her pre-Christian meaning, the descendant in absorbing all that had been achieved through the artistic representation of the Virgin Mary as the symbol of untainted flesh. The post-Renaissance rehabilitation of sexual desire laid the foundations for a genuinely erotic art, an art that would display the human being as both subject and object of desire, but also as a free individual whose desire is a favour consciously bestowed. But this rehabilitation of sex leads us to raise what has become one of the most important questions confronting art and the criticism of art in our time: that of the difference, if there is one, between erotic art and pornography. Art can be erotic and also beautiful, like a Titian Venus. But it cannot be beautiful and also pornographic—so we believe, at least. And it is important to see why. In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible. (See the discussion in Chapter 2.) Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.

That the flood was world-wide is proved, not indeed by the philological evidence of Martin Schoock, for it is far too slight, nor by the astrological evidence of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, followed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. For this latter evidence is too uncertain, indeed quite false, relying as it does on the Alphonsine Tables, which were refuted by the Jews and are now refuted by the Christians, who, having rejected the calculations of Eusebius and Bede, now follow those of Philo the Jew [54]. But our demonstration will be drawn from physical histories discerned in the fables [192–195, 380].

Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have we created thee, so that thou mightest be free according to thy own will and honor, to be thy own creator and builder. To thee alone we gave growth and development depending on they own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal life.

The theme of tonight’s dinner is apotheosis. What does it mean to become God? If Father Francis has no problem with lesser mortals like ourselves bursting into kaleidoscopic rainbows after decades of intense meditation, then why not simply drink the sacred potion and cut to the chase? At the end of the day, aren’t we both talking about that cryptic promise from Eleusis: overcoming the limitations of the physical body and cheating death? That “moment of intense rapture” sought by the maenads of Dionysus, until they “became identified with the god himself.” And aren’t he and Ruck both committing the same arch-heresy by suggesting that the original, obscured truth of Christianity has nothing to do with worshipping Jesus, and everything to do with becoming Jesus? Aren’t we all just gods and goddesses in the making? Maybe the concept of apotheosis doesn’t sound particularly heretical today. But a few hundred years ago, it got the likes of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola into a load of trouble. In 1484 the upstart Italian was only twenty-one years old when he met Lorenzo de’ Medici, who promptly invited him into the Florentine Academy that was about to punch the Renaissance into high gear. Already a student of Greek, as well as Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, the newest Florentine got to work writing Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man): the so-called Manifesto of the Renaissance. He wanted to publicly debut the Oratio, together with his 900 Theses, in Rome on the Epiphany of 1487, the God’s Gift Day. But Pope Innocent VIII was not impressed. He put a halt to the spectacle and condemned every one of Pico della Mirandola’s theses for “renovating the errors of pagan philosophers.

To be free is to escape restraint. Style becomes manner, introspection breeds narcissism, asserting the self leads to exhibition. Fame decays into celebrity, public presence into publicity, public judgement is a noise in the street. The individual as subject becomes an ego. Yet this egotism, liberated by its illegitimacy from the discipline of family and community, makes a display of what unrestrained talent can attain - inviting others, whatever their birth or position, to do the same. If individualism is a demonic power, it is also a force for democracy.

There have been many attempts during the past century to describe man's peculiar nature, but I am not sure that a better characterization has yet been made than that of the Renascence humanist, Pico della Mirandola, though couched in the now unfamiliar language of theology. "God," observed Pico, "took man as a creature of indeterminate nature, and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: 'Neither a fixed body nor a form that is peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam; to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thought shalt desire. The nature of all things is limited and constrained within the bounds and laws prescribed by us. Thou, constrained by no limits...shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature....As the maker and molder of thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer, thou shalt have the power to degenerate into lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.'" That choice occurs at every stage in man's development.

Se, joka pakotetaan antautumaan, saa voittajaltaan palveluksia: tappion kärsinyt palaa kotiin rikastuneena, siis oppineempana, ja hän on paremmin varustautunut tulevia koitoksia varten.

By the start of the twentieth century, attitudes about war and what it could accomplish were bound up with a singular, overarching idea. Let’s call it “The Myth of Progress.” Perhaps the most widely held view in the years leading up to the Great War was that Western civilization was marching inexorably forward, that humanity itself was maturing, evolving, advancing—that new vistas of political, cultural, and spiritual achievement were within reach. The Renaissance message of Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), in which the Creator extols mankind’s fearsome possibilities, fairly captures the mood: “We have made you a creature neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

Una de las figuras principales del Renacimiento se llamó Ficino. Él exclamó: «¡Conócete a ti misma, oh estirpe divina vestida de humano!». Y otro, Pico della Mirandola, escribió un Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre, algo que hubiera sido completamente impensable en la Edad Media, durante la cual únicamente se utilizaba a Dios como punto de partida. Los humanistas del Renacimiento pusieron al propio ser humano como punto de partida.

George Russell had responded to yet another request for a reference, sending, by return air-letter, an encomium which would have sat extravagantly on the shoulders of Pico della Mirandola.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As intellectually gifted as he was aristocratic (he was actually Prince della Mirandola), Pico read not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew and Arabic. Although only in his twenties, he had studied science and mathematics as well as literature and philosophy. He was as much at home with the medieval scholastics as with the wisdom of the ancients. Historians have labeled several scholars in the Renaissance as being “the last man to know everything,” including Erasmus and Francis Bacon. Giovanni Pico is the true owner of the title. His staggering range of interests and his inexhaustible scholarly energy were aimed at a single mission. This was to prove that all religions and philosophies, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, actually formed a single body of knowledge. On the surface, Plato and Aristotle, Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian theologies, seemed hard to reconcile. But underneath them all, Pico argued, was a shared set of universal truths handed down over the centuries to certain great wise men, who then passed them along to their successors.

We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own, the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou will fix the limits of nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the centre of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable, art the molder and maker of thyself.

Long before Freud made his contribution to modern thought, Pico della Mirandola, in a treatise called De Imaginatione—Concerning the Imagination—was discriminating between two kinds of revery: the one retrograde, backward-turning, keeping the man from his man’s work, prolonging irresponsibility and mental childhood; the other, the true imagination, was found in the successful man.

Countless philosophers, prophets, early scientists, not to mention alchemists and occultists, had tried to present the same idea in the past, Plotinus, Lao-tse, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Kepler, Leibniz. Every phenomenon, and every person, is a microcosm of the whole pattern of the universe, according to this idea.

To lead the soul through ascetic praxis to erotic ecstasy was the aim of Platonic spirituality, described immortally by Plotinus: 'Exulting like Bacchus ... straining upwards, ... and longing to break away from the body ... are emotions of souls under the spel of love .... The ancients teach that ... every virtue ... is purification .... In the soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like God.... Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every soul ... until, passing on the upward way all that is other than God, each in the solitude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure .... And one that shall know this vision - with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight?' Despite the sensual language, love's proper object is immaterial, and eros must escape the world in order to meld with the One.

Even sublimated ecstasy is unruly, however. Synesus, a Christian Neoplatonist studied by Ficino and known to Pico, therefore argued for a modified rapture that could sustain community, culture, and politics. To jump past human frailty straight to contemplation would be impulsive and ineffective. A rush to ecstasy would be barbarian, a 'Bacchic frenzy, a manic, enthusiastic leap to win the race without running it.' Synesius conceded that the mysteries aim 'not to learn anything but to have an experience and be put in a certain state.' Yet the Greek way of taking small steps, like going up a ladder, seemed better to him than a direct assault on the deity. Since humans are not pure contemplators, their best path to the visionary state would start with educated experience. To rise above all experience, both Greeks and barbarians cultivated cathartic virtues, but only Greeks like himself, according to Synesius, practiced them in a measured and effective way.

The other is Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino’s friend and fellow Plato enthusiast: a tall, green-eyed intellectual virtuoso who can read, among other languages, Aramaic and Chaldean, and who can recite the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy both forward and backward. The awestruck Ficino regards him as a member of “a superhuman race.”5 “They wanted to see everything in our library,” Brother Gregorio later notes of his distinguished visitors.

Post fata resurgo.