Pico della Mirandola
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Pico della Mirandola wrote, at the age of twenty-three, the speech that became the manifesto of the Renaissance. In the Oration on the Dignity of Man he imagined God setting the newly made human at the center of the world and telling him that he alone among all creatures has no fixed nature: he may, by his own free choice, sink to the level of the beasts or rise to the angels and to God, for he is the molder and maker of himself. It is the boldest statement of human freedom and self-creation the Renaissance produced, and it reaches forward across five centuries to the existentialists.
The corpus and how the chat answers. Pico wrote in Latin, and the standard English translations of the Oration all belong to the twentieth century and remain under copyright, so this room carries no primary-text corpus. It answers from training knowledge, says so plainly, and cites the Oration and his other works by title. A few public-domain fragments survive in English, Thomas More's 1510 Life of John Picus and Thomas Stanley's 1651 Platonick Discourse upon Love, and a future pass could add them. Expect citations to the Oration on the Dignity of Man by title.
Life. Pico was born in 1463, Count of Mirandola and Concordia, into a princely family of northern Italy, and grew into one of the great prodigies of the age. By his early twenties he had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic and ranged across the philosophy of all of them; he studied at Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Paris, and joined the circle of Marsilio Ficino and the Platonic Academy that gathered in Florence under Lorenzo de' Medici. In a brief and meteoric career he set himself nothing less than the reconciliation of all human wisdom, and the works he left behind kept their hold on the imagination of Europe long after.
Where to begin. Start with the Oration on the Dignity of Man, then the nine hundred Theses it was written to introduce; turn to the Heptaplus, his sevenfold reading of the opening of Genesis, and On Being and the One for the metaphysics, and to the Disputations against Astrology for the defense of human freedom.
The dignity of man. At the core of the Oration stands a speech Pico places in the mouth of God, found nowhere in scripture. To every other creature, God says, he assigned a fixed nature and a fixed place; but to man alone he gave no fixed seat, no face of his own, no single gift, telling him instead: constrained by no limits, you shall determine your own nature by your own free will; I have set you at the center of the world; you may shape yourself into whatever form you choose, sinking to the brutes below or being reborn into the things of God above. The dignity of the human being lies precisely here, that unlike everything else in creation he has no fixed essence but is free to make himself.
The unfinished creature. This is Pico's most startling and most modern thought. Every other being simply is what it is by nature; the human being alone is undefined, a creature whose essence is not handed to it but chosen, who becomes whatever it makes of itself. Five centuries later Jean-Paul Sartre would compress the same idea into a slogan, that for the human being existence comes before essence, that there is no fixed human nature, and that we are condemned to be free and to create ourselves. Pico arrives at that vision of the self-fashioning human from the opposite, God-given direction, and the kinship between the Renaissance count and the modern atheist is unmistakable.
The concordance of all wisdom. Pico drew up nine hundred theses, gathered from Latin and Greek philosophy, from Arabic and Jewish thinkers, from the Hermetic writings and the Chaldean oracles, and offered to defend every one of them in public disputation in Rome, with theOration as his preface. Behind the audacity lay a conviction: that all the great traditions, Plato and Aristotle, Moses and the Kabbalah, Hermes Trismegistus and the Christian faith, are fragments of a single universal truth, and that the philosopher's task is to gather and reconcile them. He labored to harmonize Plato with Aristotle and pagan, Jewish, and Christian wisdom with one another, in the name of the unity of truth.
Christian Kabbalah, and the war on astrology. Two further firsts belong to him. Pico was the first major Christian thinker to take up the Jewish Kabbalah, finding in its secret traditions, as he believed, hidden confirmations of Christian doctrine, and so founding the Christian Kabbalah that would fascinate the Renaissance. And in his late Disputations against Divinatory Astrology he turned against the astrology his own teachers half-believed, arguing that the stars cannot determine human action without destroying the very freedom that is humanity's dignity. The defense of free will runs through everything he wrote, and his assault on astrology helped clear the ground for the new astronomy.
Reception, and adjacent reading. Some of the nine hundred theses were condemned by the Church and the Roman disputation forbidden, yet Pico never gave up his deepest conviction, and he became a lasting emblem of the free and questing intellect against the censor. Read now, he is the philosopher of human freedom and self-creation, the voice that told the Renaissance, and tells us still, that we are the unfinished animal who must make himself. He was the pupil and companion of Ficino in the Platonic Academy of Florence; the great miracle of man that opens his Oration he took from the Hermetic writings; his vision of a self-fashioning humanity with no fixed essence anticipates the existentialism of Sartre; his dream of reconciling all the wisdom traditions is kin to the concordance of opposites in Nicholas of Cusa; and his exaltation of human dignity stands beside the Christian humanism of Erasmus. The unfinished, self-making human he described remains the Renaissance's great gift, and challenge, to the modern world.