Fatherhood Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Pico’s God is not the Renaissance handyman who sometimes runs out of nails. The sentence is a rhetorical firewall: creation, in its “final” act, cannot be read as a botched job, a fatigued deity, or a divine committee meeting that lost the plot. By piling up negations (“not the part… to fail,” “not the part… to waver”), Pico narrows the imaginable universe until only one option remains: omnipotence that does not deplete, wisdom that does not hesitate. The rhythm has the feel of scholastic disputation, but it’s also a polemic disguised as piety.

The intent is theological, yet the subtext is cultural. Pico is writing in a late-15th-century world intoxicated by recovery: Greek texts, Plato, Hermetic lore, Kabbalah, the sense that ancient knowledge can be remixed into a grand synthesis. That intellectual daring invited suspicion. If you’re going to argue for human freedom, dignity, and the mind’s capacity to climb toward God, you first secure the ceiling. God’s power doesn’t “fail as though exhausted,” so the openness of the human condition isn’t a sign of divine limitation; it’s a deliberate design. God’s wisdom doesn’t “waver… through poverty of counsel,” so the apparent messiness of history and choice isn’t evidence of confusion at the top.

It works because it anticipates the skeptic’s smirk: maybe the world’s unfinishedness means the maker was tired or unsure. Pico shuts that down, then quietly flips the implication. If the Father isn’t weak or indecisive, the unfinished parts of creation - especially the human - are there on purpose, as an invitation and a burden.