Long before Friedrich Nietzsche scandalized Europe with his idea of the “Superman,” long before modern thought began to question the perfectibility of the human being, an ancient school had already made self-transcendence its program of life.
Not in the remote lands of the future, not in the utopias of philosophers, but in southern Italy, on the coasts of Magna Graecia, between Croton and Metaponto.
It was the Pythagorean school, a secret brotherhood that for centuries guarded a revolutionary idea: man is not a point of arrival, not a finished product, but an ever-open construction site. And that, with the right discipline, the right knowledge, the right tension toward the divine, one can become something more than what one is. One can even become intermediaries between the human and the divine.
Indirectly, Plato tells us this. The Athenian philosopher, who had undertaken long journeys in southern Italy and come into direct contact with the Pythagorean legacy, in the only occasion he mentions Pythagoras, defines him as the one who devised a “way of life” entirely peculiar.
Not an abstract doctrine, not a set of theorems, not a closed philosophical system. A way of living. And Aristotle, with his precise yet deeply respectful prose, adds an even more startling detail: he reveals that the Pythagarians jealously guarded the doctrine of the existence of three species of rational beings.
The first is God. The second is the common man, the one who walks the streets without asking too many questions. And the third? It is the “man like Pythagoras,” the Pythagorean man, a sort of living bridge between human fragility and divine perfection. A third genus, neither completely earthly nor completely celestial, but capable of ascending, through discipline and wisdom, toward the highest goal: assimilation to God.
What did this ambition mean, concretely? It was not a vague mystical aspiration, not a dream of poets. It was a program of radical transformation, which today, without fear of anachronism, we would define as “scientific.”
The Pythagoreans were the first to consciously and systematically propose the overcoming of the human species. Not in the sense of violence against nature, not in the sense of domination over others, but in the sense of a refined art—an art that unites religion, morality, politics, philosophy, science, medicine, psychology, pedagogy, art, and literature—aimed at forging a superior human type.
If we want to use a modern term, as suggested by a commentator of the early twentieth century, we should speak of “androplastics”: the technique of molding the human being, of sculpting him like a statue, so that his highest form emerges, that which lies hidden under the crust of habits and fears.
Where did this extraordinary wisdom come from? Pythagoras was not an improviser, not a charlatan.
He had traveled for decades, studied with the priests of Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, and, above all, India. From those millennial civilizations he learned that man is infinitely perfectible, that the causes that favor or hinder this perfectibility are multiple, and that only a part of them is within our power.
To distinguish these causes, to accommodate the useful ones, to eliminate the harmful ones: this is the secret to becoming architects of one’s own destiny. To leave nothing to chance regarding what depends on us. It is a message of extraordinary relevance, echoing the most recent discoveries of psychology and neuroscience: our life is not only the fruit of external circumstances, but also of conscious choices, of habits cultivated with patience, of an environment we can contribute to shaping with intelligence.
The physical environment, the social and family environment, political institutions, religious conceptions, knowledge of the destinies of man and the universal nature, physical, intellectual, and moral education, the regimen of life, art and literature: everything had to be taken into consideration.
Everything had to be reformed for the sake of that transfiguration that was to launch man on the path of increasing assimilation to God. There was no aspect of life that was irrelevant.
Diet, music, geometry, meditation, friendship, politics: every practice, even the most daily, could become a tile of that great mosaic which is the elevation of the human being.
The Pythagoreans never separated theory from practice, contemplation from action, the science of the soul from the science of the polis. For them, everything was connected.
And in this holistic vision, in this ability to hold together what we have subsequently fragmented, lies perhaps their most precious lesson.
Today, twenty-five hundred years later, we live in a civilization that has inherited many of the Pythagorean insights, but often reduced them to scattered fragments.
We have transformed them into manual self-improvement techniques, recipes for personal success, private wellness paths, emptied of any communal and spiritual dimension.
We have perhaps lost the big picture. We have forgotten that the transformation of the individual is inseparable from the transformation of the community, that the ascent toward the divine cannot be separated from civic engagement, that the science of the soul and the science of the polis are two sides of the same coin.
The Pythagoreans, with their school, with their “way of life,” with their tension toward a third genus of rational being, remind us that humanity is never an acquired datum, never a completed nature.
It is a task. It is a responsibility. It is a work of art that every generation is called to sculpt anew, with the tools at its disposal, with the hope that makes it possible.
Perhaps, in an age that celebrates efficiency and profit, a return to a Pythagorean perspective might sound like a distant, naive, out-of-time utopia.
But utopias, when thought out with rigor and lived with coherence, become compasses. And the Pythagorean compass points to a precise direction, which has not lost a gram of its strength: do not settle for man as he is, do not rest in mediocrity, do not resign oneself to one’s limits, but strive toward man as he can become.
Do not renounce the tension toward the divine, but cultivate it through discipline, knowledge, the art of living. Do not delegate our destiny to chance, but learn to recognize what depends on us and act accordingly, with patience and determination.
It is an ancient message, but perhaps never as necessary as today. Because today, more than ever, we need to remember that we are not passive spectators of our existence. We are architects.
And the most important work we can sculpt, with our hands and with our soul, is ourselves.
RVSCB
