Oldal 202 [202]
OCR
MONIKA FRAZER-IMREGH of the Soul: Polemic Against Materialism. The latter title is important too, showing Ficino’s polemic with the Paduan Averroists, who suggested that the human soul is material and perishes with the body’s death. Ficino also advances several arguments from Aquinas’s Summa Theologia, but as Allen points out, he was very careful to ensure that his wording is not scholastic.’ I cite one example of how Ficino argues by refering to a row among “ancient theologians”: [...] man’s soul is something divine, that is, something indivisibile, wholly present to every part of the body and produced by an incorporeal creator such that it depends only on the power of that agent [...]. The ancient theologians teach us this: Zoroaster, Mercury, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, and Plato, whose footsteps Aristotle, the natural philosopher, for the most part follows." Pico learned Ficino’s ideas about the so-called prisca theologia and docta religio within the framework of Platonic and Hermetic evangelizing. On the first pages of his work On the Dignity of Man, he quotes the authorities mentioned above and their writings about the undetermined nature of human beings, and he presents God’s speech giving Adam free will as the most precious gift in the universe. Among the roles they can choose for their lives, the philosopher and the contemplator are on the highest levels: “If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.”’* The main purpose of human life, thus, is to free ourselves from material wishes and worries and fly in our thoughts to a divine point of view: “Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind so that we [...] may aspire to the highest things and strive with all our forces to attain them: 10 M. J. B. Allen, Introduction, in Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, I-VI, English translation by M. J. B. Allen with John Warden; Latin text edited by J. Hankins with W. Bowen; Cambridge, Mass., London, Harvard University Press, 2001—2006, vol. I, ix. 1 Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, vol. I, book VI. chapt. 1. pp. 125-127. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Translation by A. Robert Caponigri, introd. by Russel Kirk, Chicago, H. Regnery Co.,1956. See also : Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man. Translations by Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller and Douglas Carmichael. Introduction by Paul J.W. Miller. Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, 6. In Latin: “Si [videris] recta philosophum ratione omnia discernentem, hunc venereris; caeleste est animal, non terrenum. Si purum contemplatorem corporis nescium, in penetralia mentis relegatum, hic non terrenum, non caeleste animal; hic augustius est numen humana carne circumvestitum.” Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno e scritti vari, a cura di Eugenio Garin, Firenze, Vallecchi Editore, 1942, 108. + 200 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 200 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:20
