Comparison and contrast of key concepts and approaches

¶ … Man?

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola asks the question as to what is man's highest calling. He finds it in the deepest of religious beliefs and offers rational spirituality as the way to perfection. He believed that man was the greatest of God's creations, the highest form of life, even rivaling the angels. His reason was based on his firm belief in God and man's relationship with God as the creator and father of all men. He pointed out that man was the intermediary between God and the lower animals. He based this on the fact that Man has reason and intelligence. He is the one to interpret nature, and use nature. Giovanni writes from the premise that man is created by God, and that there is a Divine order to the Universe. His belief is agreement with other religious leaders including the writings of Teresa of Avila, and Saint Augustine. Man has an immortal soul imbued with life by God. After God created the world he then created man and gave him something none of the other creatures had, that is free will.

This free will can be used by man to raise him to the highest spiritual level and commune with God, or to sink to brutish forms of life. Unlike other theologians who believed man's hands were dictated by fate, and also countering some pagan beliefs that everything was preordained, he said man had greater possibilities. He had the ability to chance and cultivate himself to walk tall among God's creatures. Of course, the free will also allows people to go against the Creator. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola believed that the person who goes against the will of the Father is like a lowly animal, while those who seek to walk in the light are close to the divine. He admitted there should be a balance between the high spiritual intellect, and the highest good of the body he felt that those who devote themselves to the highest spiritual thought have reached a higher plane of existence.

Petrarch finds his highest plane of existence in his love for a woman. Yet this love is transient at best. He asks if a woman's love can make a man feel divine. His discovery in sadness is that no matter how much a person loves another it can never compare with the spirituality that St. Augustine or Pico Della Mirandola find. His poetry is filled with self loathing over frustrated desire. He writes of the baser love and lust that contemplated without resolution leaves a man is desperate despair and hopelessness. It isn't whether this form of love is right or wrong because all love can be said to be of God who is the author of love. It is the question of obsessive love that Petrarch writes about in his poem that consumes his entire thought and existence. Saint Augustine has tried this avenue of existence and in the end turned away from it. Mirandola warned against this earthly passion as a trap to a man's spirituality.

Saint Augustine in his Confessions asks if being in the world a man can obtain a higher plane of spiritual existence. He uses his own life as an example of his journey to God. Certainly Saint Augustine would agree with the writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Augustine lived a baser life for a long time until he came to his own version of spiritual truth. He explored various philosophical thought including skepticism before he embraced the faith of his mother Monica. He didn't come into Catholicism easily but only after the deep internal thought and meditation that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola offers as the way to the higher spiritual plane. He was immersed in the material world of pleasure until he discovered that it had its own disorder, confusion and grief. The lessons he learns as an individual include a long process of returning to God. This salvation he seeks and finds, is also the path that he knows all men can take to be reunited with the creator.

Teresa of Avila also asks how man can touch the Divine. Her writing expresses her belief in the possibility of the full flowering of a soul towards spiritual perfection. This is the path taught by Augustine, and by Mirandola. These three seek the ascetic life and the pursuit of self-knowledge, humility, detachment from earthly pleasures, and even suffering. King Lear certainly suffered, but he was not as interested in spiritual attainment as in earthly power.