Things began to change during the second post-war decade with women advancing in their careers, obtaining degrees and university positions.
Younger ones completed high school within the same clandestine system.
Older ones saw their education put on hold during the war or attended underground university classes but did not obtain their degrees. It was an unusual group composed of various ages and levels of knowledge. While all chairs of classics after the war were entrusted to already well-established pre-war professors, female scholars, junior often only by rank, took care of the mind-boggling logistics of setting up the defunct departments and preparing them for the first cohort of students. Unfree due to their existence (Dasein), enslaved by the Angst of “mere nothing.” Even more, modern humans are fatally unfree either in the secular “radicalization” of faith or in the atheistic secularization of the world. Therefore, freedom and faith are perfectly compatible. Violence and killing are eo ipso prohibited, especially in the name of faith.
However, this is only the case if God (being transcendent or immanent to the world) does not command anything, if God does not demand anything – except love. This paper argues the opposite: that the human free will is even nowadays, not less than in the Renaissance period, compatible with the belief in God. From the point of view of the mainstream modern dualism, this is a paradox, even a contradiction. At the same time, Pico believes that Man was created as the image of God, in the sense that no man is determined in advance: human free will reflects God’s free will in creation. Even higher than this eminent human role in the world is the freedom of man to choose his role and task himself. Neither is it present in the role of the human soul as the “tie of the world” (copula mundi), as Marsilio Ficino has taught. The Oration on the Dignity of Man makes a claim, characteristic for the Renaissance, that the dignity of man, the real “excellency of human nature,” is not present in any specific human quality or ability.
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