Abstract
The historical making of human dignity is usually understood either as a result of a progressive history of the recognition of the human being’s worthiness or as an upward equalization of ranks. The present article offers a novel and different analysis. It takes the Renaissance idea of dignitas hominis as an object of study and reframes it through Michel Foucault’s insights on ‘archaeology’, power and subjectivity. In doing so, the article demonstrates how dignitas hominis was produced within the so-called Renaissance episteme and as a result of what Foucault defines as the ‘pastorate counter-conducts’. Therefore, the article argues the dignitas hominis narrative aimed to debunk the authority of the ecclesiastical authorities and moulded other ways of ‘being conducted’ and of ‘conducting oneself’ in spiritual life. More radically, this narrative fashioned a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’ that removed confession as the main technique producing the Christian subject.
Keywords
Introduction
Human dignity, that is, the inherent and absolute worthiness of all human beings, is usually reframed either as the historical recognition of the value of the individual 1 or as an upward equalization of high social ranks for everyone. 2 Beyond this hypo-deductive framework, the novelty of the present article consists in debunking the tendency to conceive of human dignity as a result of a progressive or disruptive history of the moral/social recognition of the human being. It addresses the issue of dignitas hominis without seeking in it the traces of the contemporary meaning of human dignity. The present article argues the dignitas hominis narrative was less about the worthiness or rank of the human being than an attempt to produce other forms of spiritual and Christian subjectivity. Dignitas hominis was as such a leading effect of political resistances that took place during the Renaissance.
Nowadays, human dignity is considered as the cornerstone of human rights, a core value of the rule of law and a relevant principle in ethics and bioethics. 3 Debates interested in this issue usually insist either on the relevance of this idea or on the conceptual ambiguities and uses of the latter. 4 To understand where the present article intervenes in the recent debates on human dignity, I will single out two recent (but non-exclusive) approaches on the topic. A first one intends to reveal the complexities underlying the historical making of human dignity. A second one is interested in understanding the value of the contemporary notion of human dignity. In relation to the first trend, it is argued that a radical split would exist between the ‘contemporary paradigm of human dignity’ (justifying rights) and the ‘traditional paradigms of dignity’ (justifying duties), so that the former could not stem from the latter. 5 Besides, some suggest the Western history of dignity refers to an idea that neither referred simply to a status nor was purely metaphysical. Dignity was targeting first and foremost the human body so that the ‘bestial’ could be neutralized from the body appearance. 6 Even Kant’s definition of dignity has been qualified, since archaic and traditional elements (i.e. honour, self-esteem) would be entangled with modern dimensions (i.e. dignity understood as an axiological principle). 7 Still in relation to this first trend, the role of human dignity in our contemporary era has also been studied critically. Indeed, some authors have qualified its function usually associated with the justification of individual rights. In the field of adjudication of instance, it has been demonstrated that human dignity is often used not to construct rights but to impose obligations towards oneself. 8 Similarly, human dignity has been connected with a ‘biopolitical governance’ of ‘spiritual politics’ and with a ‘project of biopolitical rule’ tied to ‘processes of disciplining subjects’. 9 Furthermore, it has also been suggested the contemporary idea of human dignity would not have arisen from the international human rights regime but from a conservative agenda of the so-called ‘religious constitutionalism’ that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s in Western Europe. 10 Along with this first approach, a second trend has been interested in defining the value of human dignity. This idea would have such an importance that it would be beyond morality, or at least, the latter would not be helpful to grasp the full aspects of the former. Since human dignity would not be simply a ‘moral value’, it has been defined as an ‘existential value’ attached to the uniqueness and incommensurability of each individual. 11 It has also been understood as an ‘embodied value’ entailing lovability, self-respect, and as such, raising against certain forms of human sufferings (i.e. torture, rape). 12 Finally, it has been suggested that the value of human dignity would be shaped exclusively by the contemporary human rights practices. 13 The two approaches on human dignity I have just mentioned greatly depart one another (in their objectives and consequences), but they do share a common premise: both consider, implicitly or explicitly, that power affects negatively the idea of human dignity. On the one hand, dignity is understood as a quality grafted to individuals so that power can perform its authority. It shapes individuals (or some of them) accordingly with moral, social and even ‘biopolitical’ purposes. On the other, human dignity refers to the intrinsic worthiness of all individuals that must be protected from power and its excesses. In one case, human dignity has turned to be a tool used by power to deploy its exercise as close to human subjects as possible, and on the other, human dignity refers to a value that protects individuals from power. It is precisely at this level where the present article intercedes. It argues that the very making of dignitas hominis can be understood exactly through the entanglement of power and subjectivity. It holds that the dignitas hominis narrative was entwined with the production of alternate spiritual practices and it did so by intending to refashion certain forms of power relations in the Renaissance period. Consequently, and with this article, the issue of power is (re)introduced within the historical production of dignity, a perspective that often goes unnoticed in the recent debates on this issue.
Besides, the present article also conveys two other basic novelties, one related to its object of study, the other referring to its methodological approach. On the one hand, the idea of dignitas hominis has not been sufficiently studied in contemporary scholarship, since this concept is generally studied only in the light of the contemporary idea of human dignity, so that dignitas hominis is judged only in relation to the latter. 14 The present article intends to fill this vacuum in contemporary scholarship, showing unnoticed dimensions of the dignitas hominis narrative. On the other, it reframes dignitas hominis according to a Foucauldian approach, albeit one seemingly at odds with Foucault’s critique of humanism. 15 However, thanks to this Foucauldian approach, I will raise brand new aspects underlying the historical emergence of dignitas hominis.
Neither the recognition of the intrinsic worthiness of the human being nor the rank or status of the individual represented the stakes that underpinned the Renaissance idea of dignitas hominis. The present article argues that what sustained the notion of dignitas hominis was the making of what I call a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’. To achieve this objective, I draw on Foucault’s notion of ‘episteme’ as a basic framework. In The Order of the Things, 16 Foucault adopts an ‘archaeological’ perspective and develops the idea of ‘episteme’ in order to describe the nexus of relations that unite, during a certain historical period, discursive practices that have given rise to specific epistemological approaches, forms of knowledge and sciences. Foucault focuses on three major historical periods: the Renaissance (the 15th and 16th centuries), the Classical age (the 17th and 18th centuries) and the Modern period (the 19th century), each of which is associated with a particular episteme. As I am interested in the notion of dignitas hominis, I will examine the Renaissance episteme, and since the latter was fashioned, as I explain further, around the realms of resemblances and similitudes, I show how dignitas hominis was also defined within this very mould. Against the miseria hominis narrative that justified the harshness of human life and the total obedience of the human being to ecclesiastical authorities, I contend that dignitas hominis produced, through the features of the Renaissance episteme, a counter-narrative defining, in particular, the actuality of one’s salvation.
From this point, I complement this ‘archaeological’ analysis with another Foucauldian approach, that of power relations and the making of subjectivity. I believe that dignitas hominis can be understood as an effect of the overlapping of the Renaissance episteme and the struggles for other spiritual subjectivities. To defend this argument, I take into account Foucault’s insights on ‘Christian pastorate’ and ‘pastoral counter-conducts’. Foucault defines the Christian pastorate as a form of power, that is to say, ‘an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand and manipulating men (…) an art with the function of taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence.’ 17 Within the Christian pastorate, Foucault particularly insists on how the formation of the Christian subject was produced through confession, in other words, the obligation to examine and to expose a truth about oneself. Against this form of pastorate, he also notices the emergence of what he calls ‘pastoral counter-conducts’. With this expression, he refers to struggles which occurred during the Renaissance and which were aimed, ‘within the field of the pastorate’, at ‘escaping direction by others and to define the way for each to conduct himself’. 18 I contend dignitas hominis was a result of those ‘counter-conducts’ and I conclude this article showing how a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’ underpinned this idea. Indeed, the dignitas hominis narrative intended to shape, within God’s pastorate, a spiritual subject beyond confession and the obedience due to ecclesiastical authorities.
In the first part of this article, I define the Renaissance episteme and the pastorate form of power, highlighting their reciprocal entanglements. In the second part, dignitas hominis is understood within this framework and as an attempt to define other economies of truth and salvation different from the traditional Christian pastorate. Finally, the third part deals with the ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’ produced by the dignitas hominis narrative and how it fashioned a ‘non-confessing’ subject within God’s economy of obedience.
I The Renaissance: Episteme and forms of power
The prose of the world
During the Renaissance, Western culture was built through several forms of ‘repetition’, such as, for example, ‘the theatre of life’ and the ‘mirror of nature’. Those forms were the results of a specific condition of possibilities of knowledge: resemblance. Resemblances and similitudes organized the game of symbols and made possible the cognition of all things and beings. Foucault identifies four epistemological figures through which resemblances evolved. I will define each of them successively.
With the figure of convenientia, things were coming sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition. This ‘convenience’ brought similar things together and made adjacent things alike. Consequently, the world was linked together like a chain: as with respect to its vegetation the plant stands convenient to the brute beast, so through feeling does the brutish animal to man, who is conformable to the rest of the stars by his intelligence; these links proceed so strictly that they appear as a rope stretched from the first cause as far as the lowest of things, by a reciprocal and continuous connection.
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The second figure consisted of aemulatio. It entailed a process of resemblance that – unlike convenientia – did not require any contacts between things. There was ‘something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror’: things scattered through the universe could answer one another. Foucault refers in particular to Paracelsus’ idea of Man according to which the latter ‘(…) comes to resemble the order of the world’. 21 With ‘emulation’, the world duplicated itself through various reflecting points overcoming the places allotted to each thing.
The third form of resemblance, analogy, applied to the subtler relations of resemblances and as such its power was ‘immense’, since it could extend an ‘endless number of relationships’ from a single given point. 22 Through it, all the figures of the universe could be drawn together. Foucault contends that Man was a ‘particularly privileged point’ since he was ‘saturated with analogies’, and the ‘fulcrum upon which’ all the relations of the universe used to turn. 23
The fourth form of resemblance referred to the game of sympathies which stirred the things of the world in movement and drew the most distant of them together. Since sympathy gave rise to a ‘hidden interior movement’, it had a ‘dangerous power of assimilating’, of rendering things and beings identical to one another. 24 That is why sympathy was also entangled with antipathy inasmuch as the latter was protecting the singular identity of all things and prevented them from being totally assimilated. Thanks to the general interplay between sympathy and antipathy, things resembled one another and were held apart: ‘resemblances continue to be what they are (…) and the same remains the same’. 25
As a consequence, convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy show how in the Renaissance Western culture, the world ‘must fold in upon itself, duplicate itself, reflect itself and form a chain with itself so that things can resemble one another’. 26 They also reveal an anthropocentric universe since Man was the centre, the ‘fulcrum’ upon which those epistemological categories were concentrated with the greatest intensity. Furthermore, Foucault notices that the interplays of similitudes between things and beings were also hidden and secret. To make them known, the Renaissance episteme evolved around ‘signs’ and ‘marks’ that allowed access to these secret resemblances. Knowledge was thus founded upon the deciphering of ‘signatures’ that were ‘indicated on the surface of things’. 27 Consequently, in the Renaissance episteme, the world was defined as a ‘vast open book’: it was covered ‘with blazons, with characters, with ciphers, with obscure words’ and with magical signs that one had to decode in order to understand the universe’s hidden truths. 28
Within the Renaissance episteme, Foucault insists on some specific consequences, in particular, the relations established between macrocosm and microcosm. These notions represented, on the one hand, a ‘category of thought’ that applied the interplay of ‘duplicated resemblances’ to all the realms of nature and ensured that everything would ‘find its mirror’. On the other, and as a ‘general configuration of nature’, they defined the limits of all created things, arresting the ‘indefinite oscillation between resemblance and sign’. 29 Thus, these relations between macrocosm and microcosm were a ‘mere surface effect’, in order to adjust and guarantee ‘knowledge and the limit of its expansion’. 30
Taking into account the forms and the limits through which similitudes were produced, Foucault draws attention to the kind of knowledge that made the ‘signs’ of resemblances intelligible. Hence, since ‘to know must therefore be to interpret’, the ‘marks’ 31 of Divinatio (magic) and Eruditio (erudition) structured the knowledge of Renaissance culture. They both enabled the signs of resemblances that covered the world to be decoded. Divination and ‘natural magic’ enabled the ‘visible marks’ that God had stamped in nature to be accessed ‘so that we may know its inner secrets’. 32 In relation to erudition, it focused and valued language as the very ‘sign of things’. 33 Language was revealed in particular in the words of the Holy Scriptures and in the ‘Sages of Antiquity’ that one had to interpret through exegesis and hermeneutics. ‘Printing, the arrival in Europe of Oriental manuscripts, and the appearance of literature’ gave Writing a ‘fundamental place’ in the 15th and 16th centuries. 34 From now, the ‘order of the universe’ could be discovered by the way words were ‘linked together and arranged in space’. 35 It was even thought that ‘there are already existed a form of writing composed of the marks of nature itself, with the results that its characters would have had the power to act upon things directly’. Accordingly, ‘esoteric knowledge’ with, in particular, the cabala was intending to preserve the ‘scattered memory’ and the ‘powers’ of written and secret languages. 36 Following Foucault, the Renaissance episteme gave rise to a ‘prose of the world’, where knowledge consisted of interpreting: ‘Scriptural commentary, commentaries on Ancient authors, commentaries on the accounts of travellers, commentaries on legends and fables’ also composed Renaissance knowledge. 37
To recapitulate, the Renaissance episteme was defined by the interplays of resemblances. Insofar as things depended on and reflected one another, knowledge consisted of interpreting signs that would reveal those similitudes. These signs and secrets were accessible through marks (or ‘signatures’) distinguishable in the universe since the latter resulted from God’s will. They also manifested themselves in language since (written) words were considered as expressing the basic similitudes between things and beings.
The Pastorate Mode of Government
If we now turn to the description of power during this period, the Renaissance episteme found its correlate in ‘sovereignty’, as there was a sort of ‘theological-cosmological continuum in the name of which the sovereign [was] authorized to govern’. Indeed: ‘the sovereign does nothing other than reproduce a model [that] is quite simply that of God’s government on Earth’. 38 Insofar as the exercise of sovereignty was an expression of a great continuum, the exercise of power: ‘(…) amounted to the question: Am I governing in proper conformity with moral, natural, or divine laws?’. 39 Put in other words, just like its episteme, the Renaissance form of sovereignty was also based on similitudes between the earthly and the spiritual, the sovereign mirroring God’s will and power: ‘The king’s art will be excellent insofar as it imitates nature, that is to say, insofar as it operates like God’. 40 Hence, there was a relationship of convenientia between God and the sovereign, since this ‘continuum’ suggested these notions of ‘chain’ and of ‘rope’ implying a ‘continuous connection’ between beings. There was also a bond of aemulatio between them, since God reflected himself in the sovereign, while the latter intended to ‘recreate’ God’s government on earth.
According to Foucault, God’s government implied more particularly a pastoral mode of government and reckoned on three dimensions: an economy of salvation, an economy of obedience and an economy of truth. 41 I will now underscore the basic traits of God’s pastorate government since, as I will argue in the next part of this article, this form of power had a great influence on the shaping of dignitas hominis. I will also insist on the economy of obedience, insofar as it was around this specific dimension that the dignitas hominis narrative emerged.
As an economy of salvation, God’s pastorate power created a world made for Man so that he could pass into a greater one and was, as such, a world of ‘final causes’. This pastorate economy of salvation was entrenched in the anthropocentric universe of the Renaissance episteme, since the world was also designed for Man, and the latter was the centre of all similitudes. Finally, the pastorate economy of salvation penetrated the royal function. Indeed, the monarch’s main goal consisted of procuring the common good of the multitude. Since Man’s highest goal was striving for eternal bliss and the enjoyment of God, the sovereign had to act in such a way that the individual’s eternal salvation was possible. 42
As an economy of obedience, this dimension reveals the individualizing power of God’s pastorate. God addressed individually each of his fellows and ‘forced beings to show his will through signs, prodigies, marvels, and monstrosities’. 43 On the one hand, this aspect can be reframed within the general ‘marks’ and ‘signs’ of the Renaissance episteme inasmuch as they allowed God’s will in the world to be accessed (and obeyed). On the other, I would like to draw attention to this specific aspect of the Christian mode of obedience since, as I will explain further, it was at the core of the formation of dignitas hominis. As noted above, obedience was practiced within the Christian pastorate, thanks to modes of individualization that were deployed, according to Foucault, around three specific points. First, individuals were constantly ‘dissected’ in relation to their faults and merits. Second, this economy of obedience carried out a ‘network of servitude’ and the ‘exclusion of the self (…) as the nuclear form of the individual’, that is to say, it referred to a mode of individualization by subjection (assujetissement). Third, this individualization was also produced ‘through the production of an internal, secret, and hidden truth’ about oneself (subjectivation). 44 In summary, the Christian pastorate replicated and intensified the individualizing power of God’s pastorate, producing a human being understood as an ‘individual’ through procedures of subjection and subjectivation.
Finally, as an economy of truth, God’s pastoral government implied, on the one hand, that some truths were ‘taught’ (i.e. the Scriptures), while, on the other, that other truths were ‘hidden’ and ‘extracted’. God’s universe was then conceived as an ‘open book’ where truths were taught and revealed themselves through ‘reciprocal cross-references’. It was also a world of ‘hidden truths’ that had to be deciphered. It is possible to suggest that this economy of truth of God’s pastorate produced and reproduced the same twofold conception of truth underpinning the Renaissance episteme: truth could be taught and revealed (Eruditio) but also hidden and decrypted (Divinatio), while knowledge consisted mainly in interpreting all these ‘signs’ of God’s will.
In the first part of this article, I have addressed the main characteristics of the Renaissance episteme and how they intersected God’s pastorate and the political form of sovereignty, identifying some points of conflation between them. By no means have I envisioned demonstrating that the Renaissance episteme was the primary cause of the two other dimensions. My goal consists in highlighting the complex and specific interplays between these three aspects. In the next part, I will introduce the notion of dignitas hominis within this Renaissance framework, so that I can show this concept can be understood better in relation to God’s pastoral power. Accordingly, through its antagonisms with the so-called miseria hominis, I argue that the dignitas hominis narrative intended to produce other economies of truth and salvation.
II Dignitas hominis: Other economies of truth and salvation
The celebration of dignitas hominis was not something produced by the Renaissance culture since many thinkers referred to this idea throughout the Middle Ages and acclaimed the ‘excellence and greatness’ (excellentia ac praestantia) of the human being as a critic of miseria hominis. 45 Between the 15th and 16th centuries, other authors continued the narrative of dignitas hominis in their attempt to qualify miseria hominis. This latter notion had been previously formulated in the writings of the High Middle Ages, the so-called Contemptus Mundi (Contempts of the World) by Christian authors, such as, for instance, Bernard of Cluny, Bernard of Clairvaux and Lotario di Segni (the future pope Innocent III). In his famous book, On the Misery of Human Condition (1195), di Segni described the wretchedness that accompanied humans as they passed through this world. Man was presented as a dangerous and sinful creature, whose salvation could be achieved only through humility and penance: ‘omnis qui se exaltat humiliabitur et qui se humiliat exaltabitur’ and God was depicted as a distant father and a judge who sent sinners to eternal punishment. 46 The miseria hominis narrative intensified the Christian economy of obedience with its underpinning individualizing power and its procedures of subjection. Indeed, with the celebration of absolute penance, the individual was imbued in constant obedience to ecclesiastical authorities, amplifying the ‘network of servitude’. Dismissing human intelligence and desire as misleading, dangerous and selfish, miseria hominis accentuated the ‘exclusion of the self’. However, it is worth insisting that miseria hominis was only one of the possibilities of the human existence, and following the own words of di Segni, it was also possible to consider the human being through his ‘dignity and greatness’. 47 Therefore, miseria hominis and dignitas hominis represented the two possible and opposite fates of each individual life. Just like the ‘constant balancing of sympathy and antipathy’, 48 miseria hominis and dignitas hominis worked as mirror-inverted configurations: miseria hominis implying dignitas hominis and vice versa. Since human nature was defined within those two possibilities, each individual life was also balanced between those two destinies.
I will now underscore some basic traits of dignitas hominis and explain them within the Renaissance episteme and God’s mode of government. In doing so, I intend to show how dignitas hominis justified the excellence of the human being against miseria hominis, not so much from the recognition of the intrinsic worthiness of the human being but from the characteristics of the Renaissance episteme which, albeit anthropocentric, did not include the recognition of the intrinsic value of Man. To do so, I will study in particular the expressions of ‘scala naturae’, ‘microcosm’ and ‘magnum miraculum est homo’ as constitutive traits of dignitas hominis and as reflections of the Renaissance episteme.
According to the treaties supporting dignitas hominis, human nature was defined within a scala naturae available to the individual so that he could evolve through all the ontological levels. In the Dialogue on the Dignity of Man (1585) of Fernán Pérez de Oliva, the human being ‘lives like a plant, feels like a brute animal and understands like an angel (…). He has in his nature all these things and thus the freedom to be what he wishes’. 49 In the De Sapiente (1510) of Charles de Bovelles, Man could freely explore all the ontological levels: the esse, the vivere, the sentire and the inelligere. 50 This scala naturae quoted in Pérez de Oliva and in de Bovelles can be reframed within one of the Renaissance semantic webs of resemblance: convenientia. As noted above, through ‘convenience’, all beings adjusted to one another because of their adjacencies in an ‘immense chain’ while Man enjoyed a peculiar situation, resembling ‘everything around him’. 51 Besides, since convenientia was, as Foucault notes, ‘resemblance connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity’, it pertained less to the things themselves than to the world in which they existed. 52 Accordingly, Pérez de Oliva, de Bovelles and other authors 53 used this great chain of being 54 not so much as an inherent feature of human nature but as condition endorsing a peculiar ability of the human being: since Man could embrace all beings, he was gifted with an absolute freedom. Unlike miseria hominis which confined human existence within an economy of salvation with limited options (Man was already condemned as a sinful creature), dignitas hominis enlarged the ontological possibilities of human life and as such, enabled the subject to choose what he wanted to resemble. From this first trait of the Renaissance episteme (convenientia) sustaining dignitas hominis, a second characteristic came along.
In Manetti’s De Dignitate et Excellentia Hominis (1486), Man was defined as a ‘microcosmum, quasi parvum mundum’ (‘a microcosm, like a small world’) as he embodied the ultimate reference of the Creation. 55 Juan Luis Vives envisaged Man as a ‘little world’ that encompassed ‘the features and nature of everything’. 56 In the Heptaplus (1489), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola conceived of Man as a ‘copula mundi’, that is, a living union between the earthly and the celestial. 57 This idea of the human being as a microcosm also drew on the anthropocentric dimension of the Renaissance episteme. On the one hand, it prolonged the epistemological form of analogy, since Man – ‘saturated with analogies’ – retransmitted all the resemblances into the world from which he received them. He was the ‘centre’, the ‘fulcrum’ upon which the relations of similitudes were concentrated and from which they were reflected. 58 On the other, the interplay between microcosm/macrocosm was the main epistemological category of the Renaissance episteme, since it was both a ‘category of thought’ and a ‘configuration of nature’. When Pico, Vives and Manetti referred to Man as a ‘microcosm’ they were not only using this notion as an epistemological category but also transforming it into a feature justifying the excellence of the human being. Or better, since this idea of microcosm was already circulating as a ‘surface effect’ of the Renaissance episteme, it had been seized on and used to justify dignitas hominis. Unlike the miseria hominis economy of truth that defined Man as an ‘inverted tree’ which only produced urine and stench, dignitas hominis regarded the human being – through this idea of microcosm – as a node between the material and spiritual worlds (nodus et vinculum mundi), unifying ‘in the very integrity of his being all the natures of the world’. 59
Alongside this concept of microcosm, it is worth noting that dignitas hominis went hand in hand with another expression, ‘magnum miraculum est homo’: ‘Man is a great miracle’. In the Brief Discourse on the Excellence and the Dignity of Man (1559), Pierre Boaistuau referred to Man as a ‘great miracle of nature’ 60 and the same expression appears for instance in Pérez de Oliva 61 and in Giordano Bruno. 62 The expression ‘Man is a great miracle’ was drawn from the Corpus Hermeticum which was a set of treaties allegedly attributed to the God Hermes (Hermes Trismegistus). 63 When Boaistuau, Bruno, and Pérez de Oliva referred to the Corpus Hermeticum, (i.e. Marsilio Ficino translated this text from Greek into Latin in 1463), they were actually ‘interpreting’ and ‘commenting’ on a manuscript, bringing out the hidden and eternal truth of Man as a ‘great miracle’. 64 Consequently, this reference to hermeticism that structured all the dignitas hominis narrative, encapsulated a fundamental knowledge of the Renaissance episteme: Eruditio. Knowledge consisted in interpreting and in ‘commentaries on Ancient authors’, since words could reveal secret truths. Therefore, dignitas hominis was understood within the general Renaissance framework of exegesis and the interpretation of texts. For instance, while miseria hominis reduced Man to a sinful creature, the dignitas hominis narrative developed a Christology, thanks to which all the human beings were already redeemed from the original sin. According to Ficino, for example, the Incarnation of the Word enabled Man to progress and to become better. 65 Unlike a miseria hominis that was creating an antipathy between God and Man, insisting on the harshness of human life in reference to Genesis (3:19), 66 dignitas hominis reestablished the sympathy, the resemblances and the ‘image and likeness’ between them. Manetti returned to the Bible and considered that thanks to his intelligence and behaviour, the human being ‘resembles God’ in reference to Psalm (82.6). 67 Against a miseria hominis mocking Man’s cognitive faculties, Pico della Mirandola referred to Aristotle and Seneca in order to defend the autonomy of thought and the consideration of Man as the ‘wisest of animals’. 68 The reference to hermeticism must be understood within this broader framework of Eduritio.
Also, and along with Eruditio, this Renaissance interest in the Corpus Hermeticum reveals the place of Divinatio in the shaping of dignitas hominis. Hermeticism, astrology and cabala were esoteric sources shaping Renaissance knowledge in general and the very moulding of dignitas hominis in particular. Hermecitism became part of specific Renaissance projects aiming to create new spiritual beliefs (i.e. prisca theologia), 69 fashioning in particular, and as I will argue in the next part, other forms of spiritual subjectivity.
To recapitulate, the miseria hominis narrative intended to justify the harshness and meaningless of human life. Its main purpose consisted in demonstrating that Man’s single fate was hoping for God’s mercy through the humble practice of obedience and penance. Against this perspective, dignitas hominis framed another ‘economy of truth’ returning to the Bible, to ancient philosophy, and to esoteric sources in order to build a different ‘economy of salvation’. Man was no longer a sinful and condemned creature but a ‘great miracle’ who, as such, was already saved.
Following this idea, I will argue in the next part that dignitas hominis was entangled with struggles concerning ‘pastoral counter-conducts’. As such, it did not intend to question God’s pastorate but designed other ways of being conducted spiritually within God’s economy of obedience.
III The making of a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’
According to Foucault, during the 15th and 16th centuries, a counter-history was constructed on alternative historical narratives in order to question the prevailing relations of power. 70 Various struggles took place in order to fulfill ‘the need to take a direct part in spiritual life’ beyond and against the ecclesiastical authorities. 71 The dignitas hominis narrative was part of this counter-history that questioned the role of traditional ecclesiastic authorities. In this part, I argue that dignitas hominis epitomized a point of conflation between, on the one hand, the calling into question of traditional religious authorities, and, on the other, this needs to ‘take a direct part in spiritual life’. To be more precise, I contend dignitas hominis intended to reach this double objective by defining a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’.
In the first section, I show how dignitas hominis intended to remove the ecclesiastical authorities from the personal experience of spiritual life, opening, in particular, the possibility for the human being to take a direct participation in the latter. I argue that dignitas hominis aimed at achieving this objective encapsulating the demands for another ‘spiritual life’ through an intensification of God’s pastorate. In the second section, I consider why the ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’ produced by the dignitas hominis narrative was a radical novelty: it intended to produce a Christian subjectivity without needing the procedure of confession.
Better conducts and a better Pastorate
In his Oratio, Pico started with a counter-narrative of the Genesis. After having created everything, God was missing a being able to admire his work, in other words, a ‘pure contemplator’.
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However, insofar as all things and qualities had been already dispensed in all the orders and among all the beings, Man was created with an ‘indeterminate image’.
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In a famous excerpt, the Supreme Maker turned to Man and ruled the following: We have given you, oh Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, the same you may have and possess, through your own judgment and decision (…); may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature (…). We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal or immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.
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It is true that the words of Pico, based particularly on cabala, 79 inciting Man to mould his nature in the form he may have preferred, seem to convey the ideas of self-determination and self-construction. The current conception of human dignity is often based on the preservation of individual autonomy, 80 while in Foucault the absence of substance in the subject is a strategy to invent new ways of freedom’s practices. 81 However, throughout his Oratio, Pico constantly urged the individual to properly use his freedom in order to go beyond simple earthly existence. 82 In other words, ‘free will’ must be used in order to strive for the highest and spiritual ontological levels. Other authors, such as Manetti and de Bovelles adopted the same approach when they also urged the individual to make a correct use of his inherent ontological freedom. 83 In this context, if human freedom was initially conceived as unlimited but restricted within a strict economy of obedience, it is hardly possible to deduce from it, premises of pure self-practices and self-determination. Instead of interpreting dignitas hominis through the perspective of human dignity and contemporary conceptions of the self, it is more prudent to restore what was actually at stake in this idea. Alongside the redefinition of the economies of truth and salvation that used to structure the Christian pastorate, dignitas hominis addressed its economy of obedience. Indeed, it echoed the removal of the traditional religious authorities, so that one could fulfil ‘the need to take a direct part in spiritual life’.
Foucault notes that during the Renaissance the issue of ‘conducting/conducting oneself’ took a form ‘that was not especially religious or ecclesiastical’. 84 I believe that dignitas hominis reflected precisely this new ideal of ‘conducting oneself’ since, as demonstrated above, the individual could access divine reckoning solely through his own faculties. The emphasis of the dignitas hominis narrative on free will called into question the ‘network of servitude’ and the ‘exclusion of the self’ grounding the individualizing power of the Christian pastorate. Stressing the inherent freedom of the human being was aimed at debunking the procedures of subjection undertaken by the pastorate power of the Church. As a consequence, dignitas hominis registered a balancing movement: on the one hand, it ruled out the Church pastorate, highlighting the possibility to ‘conduct oneself’ freely in matters of spirituality and, on the other, it simultaneously called for the intensification of God’s pastorate, introducing Man’s ontological freedom within God’s economy of obedience. As Foucault notices, the new ways of ‘conducting oneself’ did not ‘get rid of the pastorate in general (…), but rather: how to benefit from a better pastorate (…), maintain obedience better, and approach truth better’. 85 Consequently, dignitas hominis registered a twofold process: (i) the economy of obedience was removed from the pastorate power of the ecclesiastical authorities and (ii) was reintroduced better within God’s pastoral government of the world. I will explain this second aspect in the following lines.
Through the entanglement between dignitas hominis and God’s pastorate, the economy of obedience required human beings to strive for divine and spiritual life, making good use of their ontological freedom. Pico insisted for instance: ‘we may not, through abuse of the generosity of a most indulgent Father, pervert the free option which He has given us’. 86 Along with this proper use of one’s freedom, there was a second element that conveyed a subtler and deeper entanglement between dignitas hominis and the economy of obedience of God’s pastorate. As noted in the first part of this article, God ‘forced beings to show his will through signs, prodigies, marvels and monstrosities that were so many threats of chastisement, promises of salvation, or marks of election’. The economy of obedience of God was ‘nature peopled by prodigies, marvels, and signs’. 87 In Pico’s Oratio, the human being was gifted with an uncommon freedom which made him like a ‘chameleon’. The same occurred, for instance, in De Homine (1517) of Vives. In this fable, Jupiter created a ‘teatrum mundi’ where Man performed and portrayed all the characters of the universe, from the plants to the divine, revealing a unique Proteus-like ability and sparking the admiration of all the gods. 88 In numerous treatises about dignitas hominis, the capacity of ‘shaping one’s being’ was the fundamental feature of the human being making him a ‘great miracle’ worthy of wonder. 89 This capacity can be reintroduced within the economy of obedience of God’s pastorate, since it was a ‘prodigy’ underpinning as such God’s will. Moreover, this Proteus-like ability ratified this economy of obedience since it expressed the ‘sign’ of a permanent possibility of salvation in each individual. Since this Proteus-like ability was inherent in Man, it did not only mean that it depended on us to become godlike (through a good use of freedom) but also and foremost, that it was always possible to strive for this goal. Consequently, this idea of freedom – understood as this capacity of ‘shaping oneself’ and underpinning dignitas hominis – conveyed a radical consequence: salvation was actual, because its actuality was the very malleable material of the human being.
As discussed at the beginning of this article, pastorate power evolved, in particular, around a process of individualization by subjection (assujetissement) from which emerged a ‘network of servitude’ and the ‘exclusion of the self’. In this section and in the first part of the article, dignitas hominis came to be understood as a struggle against those servitudes and this exclusion of the self. Indeed, through alternate regimes of truth, salvation, and obedience, the self could now enjoy direct access to spiritual life. Moreover, the pastorate power of ecclesiastical authorities was removed in favour of an intensification of God’s pastorate government of the world. At the beginning of the article, I also noted that the Christian pastorate was an individualizing power since, along with its procedures of subjection, it entailed techniques of subjectivation, requiring the individual to produce secret truths about himself. In the second section, I will show how it was precisely around this issue that the dignitas hominis narrative shaped a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’.
A non-confessing animal
In his project of ‘the genealogy of the modern subject’,
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Foucault underscores – along with the ‘techniques of the self’ of Antiquity – the role of Christianity in the making of the Western subject. From a general point of view, he considers that truth has played a fundamental role in the constitution of oneself as a subject, and in the case of early Christianity, he notes that the ‘truth obligation’ was built around a twofold set of obligations. The first one dealt with the faith, the Bible, dogma and the acceptance of religious authorities. The other one referred to obligations related to oneself: each person has the duty to know who he is (…) to acknowledge faults (…), to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and hence to bear public or private witness against oneself.
Overall, Christian spirituality evolved around two principles: obedience and contemplation. 95 Given that Christian obedience entailed a control of the subject’s will and behaviour (i.e. confession and penance), the subject was formed, following Foucault, through a ‘sacrifice of the self’. The ‘disclosure of the self’ implied a ‘renunciation of one’s own self’, 96 and this mode of truth obligation has shaped the Christian pastoral power since modernity. 97 In the case of miseria hominis, it exalted penance and obedience as the only ways to gain salvation. Within the miseria hominis framework, and interpreting Foucault’s words, the subject is moulded when he ‘kills’ himself, 98 that is to say, when he renounces and sacrifices his will and when he is bound to a hidden and ‘evil’ truth he had to confess to someone else. It was precisely against this background, as I will argue subsequently, that the dignitas hominis narrative shaped a counter-form of spirituality.
First, dignitas hominis rejected the confessional obligation of truth, thanks to its conception of the ontological nature of the human being and its understanding of the status of the human body. In relation to the first aspect, since Man could become whatever he wished throughout the scala naturae, this assumption entailed the radical premise he had no fixed and predetermined substance. This lack of substance implied a lack of stable ontological support required by confession in order to occur. Indeed, no hidden truth could be deciphered from the continuous malleability of the subject. The removal of confession also came from the status of the body. Indeed, in the dignitas hominis writings, the body and its ‘passions’ did not represent a material upon which the subject had to narrate itself. First, the human body was described as a tool enabling human beings to govern the world and master nature. 99 Second, sexuality did not represent ‘concupiscence’ or a sin but a continuation of spirituality. Following Manetti, the subject could enjoy the bodily pleasures since they came from God’s will. Lorenzo Valla stood for the pursuit of moderated spiritual and sensual pleasures not only in this world but also in the other one. 100 Consequently, while the ‘hermeneutics of the self’ defined the Western and Christian making of the subject, turning Western Man into a ‘confessing animal’, 101 it was totally removed from the narrative of dignitas hominis. The subject of dignitas hominis was understood in its sole immanence, gifted with a body and a soul completing one another.
Second, confession was erased from the dignitas hominis narrative, but at the same time, a counter production of truth was suggested in this narrative, since truth, following Foucault has always been part of the constitution of oneself as a subject. As noted above, ‘orthodox Christianity’ implied a certain autonomy between the two sets of ‘truth obligation’: one concerned with the ‘access to the light of God’ and the other with ‘the truth inside oneself’. 102 Miseria hominis intensified this separation since there was no access at all to the light of God, while the purification of the soul was uncertain and brought about through penance and complete obedience. Miseria hominis amplified the premises of Christianity that promised ‘the imperfect possibility of salvation’ and insisted on the ‘permanent imperfection’ of those who think they are saved. 103 To the contrary, I hold dignitas hominis offered a counter-form of spirituality inasmuch as it merged these two sets of ‘truth obligation’: faith implied an immediate purification of the soul, and conversely, the truth about oneself conveyed a direct access to God. In fact, and drawing on different techniques, other forms of spirituality, such as Gnosticism and mysticism, used to be part of the ‘pastoral counter-conducts’ since they merged the revelation of God with the recognition of oneself as a subject. 104 This strategy was a powerful trait of ‘pastoral counter-conducts’ as it neutralized the economy of obedience of the traditional ecclesiastical authorities. The dignitas hominis narrative followed this strategy and merged this twofold set of ‘truth obligations’ in order to produce a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’. I will explain this process below.
Starting with the light of faith, it was expressed in the economy of obedience of the dignitas hominis narrative that was enhancing God’s pastorate in order, precisely and as noted above, to ‘approach truth better’. The light of God required a good use of one’s free will and was made knowledgeable since it was everywhere. The scala naturae through which the individual had to strive for the highest spiritual grades was also and foremost the framework expressing God’s will to the most ‘unawaken corners’. 105 Furthermore, when the individual progressed on his spiritual path, he became aware that, unlike miseria hominis, God was both accessible and a loving Father aiming for the well-being of all his Children. 106 Simultaneously, this knowledge of divine light aroused a truth about oneself. As a magnum mircaculum and a microcosm, the subject of dignitas hominis was gifted with abilities, allowing him to overcome terrestrial existence and to become part of the divine. Manetti would even invert the imago Dei and wrote that ‘God is the image of Man’. 107 Therefore, while the human being progressed under the light of God, purifying his soul, he also accessed a truth about himself: through his distinctive qualities, both spiritual and terrestrial, he was actually godlike.
Regarding the obligation concerned with ‘the truth within oneself’, the dignitas hominis writings reactivated the Delphic ‘know thyself’. Pico wrote, for instance, that ‘know thyself arouses us and urges us towards knowledge of all nature, of which man’s nature is the medium’. 108 According to Nicholas of Cusa, the human being is a ‘second God’ so long as he is able to access the truth when he learns how to ‘know himself’. 109 De Bovelles defined the Delphic principle as a ‘mirror’ enabling human beings to access universal truth and overcome the misfortunes of life. 110 Other authors, such as Pierre de Boiastuau and Buonaccorso da Montemagno relied on the Delphic principle and insisted on the inner strengths of human beings so that they could face the strokes of fate and other adversities. 111 Two complementary perspectives can be drawn from this obligation of truth about oneself underpinning the dignitas hominis narrative. On the one hand, the latter used the Delphic principle following the Platonic interpretation according to which, ‘to know oneself one must look at oneself in the element that is the same as the self’, that is to say, ‘the divine element’. 112 Consequently, the soul of the subject shaped by dignitas hominis could see itself and escaped Christian examination. The emphasis on the sense of sight was subtly epitomized in the description of Man by Pico della Mirandola, standing next to God, and becoming a ‘pure contemplator’. Confession and self-examination were removed here not only by the sense of sight but also and foremost by the silence that implicitly surrounded the activity of contemplation. Through silence, the subject got an ‘immediate inspiration’ of himself and God’s presence. 113 On the other hand, dignitas hominis also produced a subject through a stoic perspective. The hardships of existence do not reveal miseria hominis, but the idea that life is a test (probatio) and as such an education wished by God. Indeed, given that ‘the paternal love of God’ implies a ‘loving fortiter (strongly and vigorously)’, God submits good men to tests in order to harden and prepare them. 114 Therefore, the ‘self-knowledge’ underpinning dignitas hominis was entwined with the knowledge of God either through His reflections within one’s soul and/or through His love throughout one’s existence. In any case, self-knowledge implied an immediate access to the light of God.
Following the present approach, it is possible to encapsulate the dignitas hominis obligation concerned with this ‘truth within oneself’, suggesting that it refracted the ancient ‘techniques of the self’. As Foucault notes, in relation to the different strategies of the ‘pastoral counter-conducts’, the Renaissance witnessed the reappearance of philosophy ‘as the answer to the fundamental question of how to conduct oneself’. 115 The dignitas hominis narrative drew on ancient philosophy and in particular on the Delphic precept in order to shape a spiritual subject whose inner truth was not produced by confession but through direct access to God. More particularly, and in my understanding, the subject of dignitas hominis stood in a middle point between the subject produced by antique philosophy with its related ‘techniques of the self’ and the Christian subject shaped through examination, confession and obedience. On the one hand, the Greco-Roman ‘techniques of the self’ used to produce a self constituted by the ‘force of a truth’ prescribing different rules of conduct and enabling the subject to become the master of himself. 116 Even if dignitas hominis did not explain the procedures underpinning the ancient ‘techniques of the self’, it kept from ancient philosophy the ideal of an autonomous subject and the conception of a truth that enabled one to conduct oneself better. On the other, the Christian subject was essentially produced by techniques of self-examination and confession that fashioned subjectivity through different regimes of obedience. Dignitas hominis might have removed confession as the technique producing its underpinning subjectivity, but it still drew on a Christian framework, since it enhanced, as argued above, God’s pastorate of the world. Consequently, the spiritual subjectivity of the dignitas hominis merged uniquely – without exhausting them – those two opposite forms of Western subjectivity. As such, it represented a spiritual counter-subjectivity since it expanded the Christian possibilities of subjectivity. The latter was no longer confined to a confessional obligation of truth but was constituted through a simultaneous process: the actuality of one’s spiritual perfection implied the possibility of one’s salvation and vice versa.
Conclusion
Reckoning on a Foucauldian perspective, I have tried to demonstrate in this article how the subjectivity of the dignitas hominis narrative was shaped at some points of conflation between the Renaissance episteme and the Christian pastorate. It removed confession from the obligation of truth about oneself and it produced, as such, a ‘spiritual counter-subjectivity’ within Christianity. What was really at stake with the Renaissance idea of dignitas hominis was neither the intrinsic worthiness of the human being nor his rank in relation to the rest of the universe but the actuality of his spiritual salvation through an intensification of God’s pastorate of the world. To put in a nutshell, the dignitas hominis narrative was addressing the issue of ‘government’ that is, from a Foucauldian perspective, the issues of ‘being governed’ and of ‘governing oneself’ better and differently. It might be precisely here how the Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment notions of dignity could be reframed. For example, when Kant’s famously claimed to ‘use the humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’, 117 he was suggesting different ways of governing oneself and others under the moral law. When human dignity is now used as the cornerstone of human rights and as a relevant principle of the rule of law and bioethics, it also entails ideal and ‘counter’ modes of governing individuals accordingly with their alleged intrinsic worthiness. If we go back to the classical idea of dignitas, it used to refer to both a political function and a way of behaving in accordance with this function, that is, both a form of ‘governing others’ and of ‘governing oneself’. This hypothesis according to which the different historical notions of dignity were entwined with different (and ‘counter’) modes of ‘being governed’, of ‘governing oneself’ and of ‘governing others’, is particularly sounding in the light of the worldwide redeployment of the state of exception and the development of ‘counter-insurgencies practices’ that reckon (but not only) on the extended uses of torture and on mass surveillance. 118 Indeed, human dignity should not be seen ‘simply’ as the intrinsic worthiness of the human being but also as a ‘critical’ and ‘counter’ entry on how individuals and populations are now governed in their minds and bodies. This latest hypothesis requires of course further and deeper analysis that should also intend to reframe human dignity within the remaining two epistemes (as defined by Foucault), that is, taking into account their correlative forms of power and their underpinning production of subjectivity. Hopefully, it is a task I would be able to meet before not too long.
