Becoming Greater

“Behold, the man is become as one of us [meaning like the gods]”

Genesis 3:22. The Father of Heaven himself proclaims the unlimited potential of humankind and our destiny to become gods. Man, because of their fall, has received the divine gift of “knowing good and evil”. The possibilities are limitless.

Now what does this have to do with the Renaissance?

After nearly nine centuries of silence, this truth concerning man’s glorious potential rang forth again. In 14th century Italy, a “rebirth” of interest in classical civilization began. The scholar Petrarch, now known as the father of humanism, propelled this movement when he discovered long-lost writings of the great orator and statesman Cicero. Petrarch’s thirst for truer language and self-improvement reflected (and inspired) a yearning for a greater humanity. After the harrowing bubonic plague-- as Gideon Burton eloquently stated, “an equal-opportunity destroyer”-- feudal society’s structured class system and the sedimented economic locks were worn away. Thus, ancient Greek and Roman ideals brought forth by scholars were absorbed by a decimated Europe. Now, however, they were fused with Medieval faith. The hybridization of these worlds-- pagan and Christian, democratic and feudal-- created a unique era known as the Renaissance.

Nowhere is this fusion better embodied than in society’s new attitude towards mankind. The medieval society tended to view man as a lost, fallen creature totally dependent upon God’s mercy and Grace. While movers and shakers of the Renaissance did not deny this dependence upon God, they began to realize man’s potential to become like Him. To do so, they argued, would require a rigorous and well-rounded education, a flair for rhetoric, civil involvement, and a certain dignitas. As Pico Della Melandola stated, ““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.”

Montaigne's Difference Between Novelty and Nature

            Michel de Montaigne was a French essayist of the Renaissance. One of his essays is titled “Of a Monstrous Child” focuses on the concept prevalent in the Renaissance that men have a greater worth and dignity that was previously not believed in the Middle Ages, when men were considered “cogs in the universe” instead of a central part of the universe such as was believed in the Renaissance.

            The essay “Of a Monstrous Child” recounts the experience of Montaigne observing the relationship of a deformed child (the deformity was the abscess of an underdeveloped conjoined twin) and his uncle, who was leading him around the town in which they lived seeking donations for the “freak show” of nature that he has marketed as. Montaigne’s moral of this essay is that though there is something that is not understood because of its oddness, anything alive is still created from God: “Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein; and it is to be believed that this figure which astonishes us has relation to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man.”

            On the concept of infinite worth of men, this essay further proves that the Renaissance mindset shifted from only the holiest religious man was worth something in God’s eyes to anything created by nature (and therefore God), no matter its strangeness, has dignity and is worth respect.

            Montaigne ends his essay with a citation from Cicero whose philosophical writings also inspired the humanism movement: “What he often sees he does not admire, though he be ignorant how it comes to pass. When a thing happens he never saw before, he thinks that it is a portent.”