Love Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

A subtle act of theological self-defense hides inside this long, courteous sentence. Pico frames his predicament as an interpretive injustice: it would be a strange cruelty of "His kindly love" if a man appointed to celebrate God's generosity toward others were forced, in his own case, to denounce that same generosity. The syntax does the real work. By the time you reach the end, condemnation has been made to look not merely unpleasant but logically incoherent and spiritually indecorous.

Context matters. Pico is writing in the late 15th-century pressure cooker where humanist ambition, scholastic gatekeeping, and church authority collide. His project (most famously, the attempt to reconcile disparate traditions and elevate human capacity) flirted with the boundaries of orthodoxy. Accusations of error or arrogance hang in the background. This line reads like a defensive maneuver against charges that his intellectual boldness is impious. He recasts the issue as one of consistency: if God's gifts are real, broad, and praiseworthy, why should the very act of praising them become evidence against the praiser?

The subtext is strategic humility with teeth. Pico speaks as if he is only protecting God's reputation for kindness, but he's also protecting the legitimacy of his own calling: scholarship, synthesis, and the audacity to speak about divine matters. The phrase "in regard to others...in regard to himself" turns doctrine into a moral mirror. Condemning Pico would imply a God who dangles grace as spectacle while denying it in practice. In a culture where orthodoxy is enforced through public correction, Pico makes correction feel like blasphemy.