Oration on the Dignity of Man by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

First published:Oratio de hominis dignitate, 1496 (English translation, 1940)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work:

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is a remarkable document, but not for the reason that is sometimes thought. Even though it is an important statement by an influential early Renaissance humanist, the Oration on the Dignity of Man is neither a proclamation of the worth and glory of worldly life and achievement nor an attack on the medieval worldview as such. Pico was a man of his time, and he was willing to defend the medieval theologians and philosophers from the attacks of his humanist friends. However, in his statement he does go beyond what was then the traditional view of human nature.

Pico was a scholar whose erudition included a familiarity not only with Italian, Latin, and Greek but also with Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic. He had read widely in several non-Christian traditions of philosophy, and he had concluded that all philosophy, whether written by Christians, Jews, or pagans, was in basic agreement.

In Rome, in December, 1486, Pico published nine hundred theses and invited all interested scholars to dispute them with him the following month. The Oration on the Dignity of Man was to have been the introduction to his defense. Pope Innocent VIII forbade the disputation, however, and appointed a papal commission to investigate the theses; the commission found some of them heretical. Pico tried to defend himself in a published Apologia, but this made matters worse, and for several years he remained in conflict with the Catholic Church. Pico had not expected this state of affairs and, being no conscious rebel, he was very much disturbed by it. As a result he became increasingly religious and finally joined the Dominican order. The Oration on the Dignity of Man was never published in Pico’s lifetime, though part of it was used in his Apologia to the papal commission.

In form, the Oration on the Dignity of Man follows the then-standard academic, humanistic, rhetorical pattern. The piece is divided into two parts. The first part presents and deals with the philosophical basis of the speaker; the second part announces and justifies the topics to be disputed. The philosophical first part of the Oration on the Dignity of Man begins by praising human beings; this, as Pico points out, is a common topic. However, he immediately rejects the traditional bases for praise, that is, the medieval view that the distinction of human beings is a function of their unique place at the center of creation, in other words, that each individual is a microcosm.

Pico accepted the premise that human beings are the most wonderful of all creations, but he inquired into the reasons why this should be so. Some, he said, believed that human beings are wonderful because they can reason and are close to God, yet the same qualities, he pointed out, may be found among the angels. Pico’s view was that God was ready to create human beings only after he had created the world and everything in it, which are the objects of human contemplation in the divine scheme of things. Everything, including the angels, had been given a fixed and immutable form, but human beings, created with no definite abode or form, were given both free will and the use of all of God’s creatures. Pico claimed that human beings were neither heaven nor earth, mortal nor immortal, but free to choose between sinking to the level of animals or rising to the divine.

God’s great gift to humankind was free choice. Individuals can be what they will to be. If they choose to be vegetables, then they will act like plants; if they choose to be sensual, they will act like animals; if they choose to be rational, they will be saintlike; if they choose to be intellectual, they will appear like angels; and if they reject the lot of all created things, they will draw into the center of their own beings and thus unite their spirits with the divine. Human beings have this capability of becoming either an animal or more than an angel, and their inconstant nature is their greatest blessing. It is, therefore, their duty to seek out the highest level they can obtain, striving to rise above the angels who, fixed in form, cannot surpass themselves and reach the godhead.

Pico’s is an exalted idea of human nature. Though it is otherworldly in focus and thus resembles what is considered as the worldly view of the Renaissance, it is also Renaissance in embracing the position that human beings are limitless by their very nature. Pico sees as a great human strength that inconstancy of being that had so long been the despair of Christian dogmatists.

In the second part of his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico points out that human beings are assisted in their attempt to achieve the highest form of existence by philosophy. This view explains Pico’s own interest in philosophy and also the plan of the disputation that was to follow the Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico says that he must undertake to defend so great a number of theses because he is not an adherent of any one philosopher or school of philosophy. He feels the need to argue for positions drawn from a great variety of sources. He broadly surveys his nine hundred theses, commenting on the various writers from whom they are drawn. In so doing he displays the full extent of his learning in both Christian and non-Christian writings. As he concludes this longer and more involved part of his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he challenges his readers to plunge joyfully into argument with him as if joining in battle to the sound of a war trumpet.

In this second part of the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico rejects the idea that any one philosopher may have a monopoly on final truth. He proclaims instead the idea of the unity of truth. He adopts this position in an attempt to solve the ancient problem of reconciling the great multiplicity and many contradictions of varying philosophical schools. Ancient thinkers as well as later ones have tended to adopt a relativistic position and to use the idea of philosophical multiplicity to prove there can be no truth or absolute. Pico, writing in the tradition of the ancient eclectics and neo-Platonists, assumes that opposing philosophical doctrines share in both error and insight into universal truth. For him, truth is a collection of true statements drawn from various sources. He recognizes some error but also some truth in all the different philosophers.

In his work, Pico hoped to winnow out error, to extract various aspects of truth, and to combine them eclectically into a unified statement of truth that would help human beings take advantage of their freedom to seek the highest form of existence. Although this is not an original position, it is humanistic and thus a justification for the typically Renaissance humanistic desire to study all ancient writings rather than just those thought to support the medieval Christian tradition of philosophy and theology.

Bibliography

Cassirer, Ernst. “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942): 123-144. The second part of this article analyzes Pico’s philosophy as it is outlined specifically in the Oration on the Dignity of Man. Remains an important source on the work that is frequently cited in other studies.

Copenhaver, Brian P. “The Secret of Pico’s Oration: Cabala and Renaissance Philosophy.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2002): 56-81. Discusses why Pico wrote Oration on the Dignity of Man. Argues that the work is not about human dignity and freedom in the sense that a modern reader understands these topics; maintains instead that most of the oration deals with magic and the Kabbala.

Dougherty, M. V., ed. Pico della Mirandola: New Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Includes a detailed analysis of the genre and contents of the oration, focusing on Pico’s defense of humans as unique beings in the order of creation.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “Introduction to Oration on the Dignity of Man.” In Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. An excellent survey of the treatise, written by a preeminent scholar of Renaissance philosophy who places it within its historical and intellectual context.

Trinkaus, Charles Edward. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. 2 vols. London: Constable, 1970. Chapter 10 of this important study focuses on Pico and the Oration on the Dignity of Man, relating them to other Renaissance humanists’ conceptions of the essence of human existence.

Vasoli, Cesare. “The Renaissance Concept of Philosophy.” In The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Places the Oration on the Dignity of Man in its philosophical context. Other articles in this volume provide information on the intellectual heritage upon which the Oration on the Dignity of Man drew.