Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man

Considered the “Manifesto of the Renaissance,” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) is a defining text in Renaissance humanism and the blending of cultures that characterized it. Serving as both a freestanding treatise and the introduction to Pico’s 900 Theses on religion, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and magic, the Oration proposed that human beings, by virtue of their formation in the image of God, possessed the unique capacity, distinguished from those of both earthly creatures and heavenly angels, to freely change and develop themselves. Human beings are capable of lowering themselves to the level of beasts or raising themselves to the status of angels. Historically perceiving that governments and worldviews continually exist in flux, Pico (1463– 1494) regarded the human power of self- transformation as the only unchangeable earthly reality. Further, the Oration’s assertion that all human creative endeavors symbolize divine realities and participate in those realities revolutionized the fine arts, as it lifted authors, painters, sculptors, and musicians out of their previous status as craftspeople and up to the status of geniuses. Since greater exaltation was attached to sacred endeavors, the Oration also rendered philosophically informed theologians the most dignified of humans. Pico presents this as a universal rather than a specifically Christian knowledge, drawing from the Bible and the church fathers but also from ancient pagan philosophers such as Plato as well as Jewish and Islamic sources.