"The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants"
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Renaissance humanism loved to brag about human dignity; Pico reminds you it can be revoked.
In this line, he reaches back past Christianity into the prestige library of Greek philosophy and pulls out a lurid image: the soul demoted down the ladder of being. The Pythagoreans, famous for transmigration, become a rhetorical weapon. “Impious men” aren’t just wrong; they’re metaphysically downwardly mobile, refiled as animals. Then Pico sharpens the humiliation by invoking Empedocles, who reportedly imagined reincarnation slipping even further, into plants. It’s not punishment as torture; it’s punishment as status loss. You don’t merely suffer. You stop counting as fully human.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s a moral warning in a culture obsessed with hierarchy: to live without reverence is to forfeit the rational, godward part of the self. On the other, it’s a savvy piece of intellectual stagecraft. Pico, the young virtuoso of the syncretic Renaissance, signals that he can make pagan authorities speak in a Christian register. He doesn’t need you to literally believe in being reborn as a shrub. He needs you to feel the chill of the metaphor: impiety is self-bestialization, a choice to live beneath your own capacities.
In Pico’s moment, “dignity” isn’t a guaranteed right; it’s a project. This sentence weaponizes ancient cosmology to police that project, translating spiritual failure into a vivid, almost comic degradation that a courtly audience couldn’t easily shrug off.
In this line, he reaches back past Christianity into the prestige library of Greek philosophy and pulls out a lurid image: the soul demoted down the ladder of being. The Pythagoreans, famous for transmigration, become a rhetorical weapon. “Impious men” aren’t just wrong; they’re metaphysically downwardly mobile, refiled as animals. Then Pico sharpens the humiliation by invoking Empedocles, who reportedly imagined reincarnation slipping even further, into plants. It’s not punishment as torture; it’s punishment as status loss. You don’t merely suffer. You stop counting as fully human.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s a moral warning in a culture obsessed with hierarchy: to live without reverence is to forfeit the rational, godward part of the self. On the other, it’s a savvy piece of intellectual stagecraft. Pico, the young virtuoso of the syncretic Renaissance, signals that he can make pagan authorities speak in a Christian register. He doesn’t need you to literally believe in being reborn as a shrub. He needs you to feel the chill of the metaphor: impiety is self-bestialization, a choice to live beneath your own capacities.
In Pico’s moment, “dignity” isn’t a guaranteed right; it’s a project. This sentence weaponizes ancient cosmology to police that project, translating spiritual failure into a vivid, almost comic degradation that a courtly audience couldn’t easily shrug off.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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