Dialogue of the dignity of man: greatness and human misery
The brevity of the text contrasts with its wealth, since in a few pages, it brings together the pagan and Christian theories of man, reflecting the main anthropological issues addressed from ancient times to the Renaissance. Free in its translation, the work is accompanied by a series of notes that facilitate its full understanding and a brilliant introduction that provides accurate information about Pérez de Oliva, performs a detailed analysis of dialogue (text history, sources, argument and structure ), greatly presents the topics of the Renaissance tradition and, finally, highlights the news of the work. The book also contains a fairly complete bibliography of the modern editions of dialogue and the critical studies of which it has been subject.
Greatness and human misery. It is not certainly the pagan materialistic thesis of epicureanism opposed to a creative and provident God, but a purified position in which man is microcosm for participating in the perfections of the sensitive world and the spiritual perfections that allow him to open himself to the transcendence. In this sense, the letters are the channel to guard and transmit humanism, with which man reaches his true being. In the last part of the introduction, García Cuadrado discovers some anthropological keys of the dialogue they set in modernity.
According to García Cuadrado, the dialogue, whose interlocutors are Aurelio, Antonio and Dinarco, is not an original work; Its value lies rather in the synthesis of previous doctrines. The anthropological theme revolves fundamentally around the notion of man as imago dei. It inserts the issues of dignity and misery of man; The first comes from creation and recreation; the second, has its origin in sin that moves man from God.
The support of this binomial is in freedom, since man, with the free work of him, can participate in the divine life or be engaged by lowering himself to animal life. This data is no stranger to the new conception of the man generated by Renaissance humanism, according to which the dignity of his is no longer determined by the man is, but for his ability to be done because of freedom. However, Pérez de Oliva does not rule out the
notion of human nature as a specifier of what is convenient for man according to his way of being. The same and good for the human being is according to rational nature. Consequently, there is no antinomy between the natural and the free in the dialogue.
In the reflection on the image of God, the idea of man as microcosm is also inserted. It is not certainly the pagan materialistic thesis of epicureanism opposed to a creative and provident God, but a purified position in which man is microcosm for participating in the perfections of the sensitive world and the spiritual perfections that allow him to open himself to the transcendence.
But, not being completely finished, man must forge with his free will. That is why freedom is the ability to humanize and humanize the world, and education is the task by which man humanizes himself. In this sense, the letters are the channel to guard and transmit the humanist, with which man reaches his true being. They are the manifestation of reason and allow to deploy the virtualities contained in the image and likeness of God. Through education, man can master the earth, build society and obtain all knowledge.
The conscience of his greatness and his misery is present in the man of all time as an unplazable call to his responsibility. In the dialogue on the dignity of the man of Fernán Pérez de Oliva, the main arguments about this topic to the Renaissance are exposed synthetically and threatens, anticipating some anthropological conceptions of modernity. That is why its reading continues to show a full current.
In the last part of the introduction, García Cuadrado discovers some anthropological keys of the dialogue they set in modernity. Among the ideas that allow highlighting the news of the work are: personal dignity and its objective foundation in the way of human being, which derives in the Kantian approach of a man who gives himself his own dignity as achievement or conquest ; The helplessness of man from the biological and instinctive point of view, which claims the decisive role of learning and the exercise of freedom, then deformed by a deterministic vision of his behavior due to genetic inheritance or cultural influence; the survival of man thanks to the fruits of the earth and the art of his hands later faced
with the development of an ecological sensitivity that holds the human being for the devastation of nature; the idea of a creative and provident God, just remunerating, replaced by that of an anonymous and perverse nature of the needs of men; the separation between truth and happiness (based on the disability of the intellect) and the conception of skepticism as a relief of human evils, which somehow announce the weak thought of postmodernity and its essential relativism.
Freedom as man to become as he wants and further existentialism that ends up denying nature and God in favor of an work without references with which man determines his own essence; The reduction of human reason to its technical dimension and the modern position according to which reason imposes its laws on nature trying to dominate it perversely, while man is reduced to his production capacity and is assimilated to a historical moment of evolution Of the mattery; The natural origin of human sociability, with its tendency to material and moral goods, and the negative version of this condition that an enemy sees in man for its fellow man.
With all the above, there are no doubt that we are facing an exciting work that encourages the contemporary thinker to a deep reflection.
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