Did Pico Really Write an "Oration on the Dignity of Man"?

If a textbook on the Renaissance quotes one passage of philosophy, it is likely to be this one. God has finished making the world, every rank of being has its fixed place, and he turns to the last creature and says: "Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone." And then: "We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose."¹

The lines come from a speech by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man, and they are regularly presented as the moment the Middle Ages ended and the self-made individual stepped forward. The introduction printed with one widely used classroom translation puts the standard view well: "No other work more forcefully, eloquently, or thoroughly remaps the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and the human perspective."¹

So: did Pico write an oration on the dignity of man? He wrote the oration. The rest needs qualifying, in three ways. He never gave the speech. He never gave it that title. And there is a serious argument that human dignity, in the sense we usually mean, is not what it is about.

A Speech for An Event That Never Happened

Pico was twenty-three when he composed it, and it had a job to do. According to Brian Copenhaver's entry on Pico in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the speech was written to introduce Pico's 900 Conclusions, a vast set of theses drawn from Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew sources, which he proposed to defend against all comers in a public disputation in Rome in early 1487.² Pope Innocent VIII condemned the Conclusions, and the disputation was never held. The speech went undelivered and unpublished. It was first printed in 1496, two years after Pico's death, by his nephew Gianfrancesco.²

Nor was it called what we call it. "Pico never gave it a title," Copenhaver writes. The 1496 edition called it simply "A Very Elegant Oration"; the phrase de dignitate hominis was attached in an edition of 1504, and the full familiar title appears in a Basel collection of 1557.² Copenhaver's opening sentence is accordingly barbed: "A few paragraphs from a speech that Giovanni Pico (1463–1494) did not write about human dignity have drawn more comment than any other statement by a philosopher of his day."²

A title added by later editors would be a curiosity and nothing more, if it fitted. The question is whether it does.

Read Past the Famous Paragraph

The opening certainly sounds like praise of humanity. Pico begins by citing authorities for the wonder of man, among them the Hermetic saying "A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!"¹ After God's speech to Adam he exclaims: "Who could not help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how could one admire anything else?"¹ (Other translations keep the animal Pico names here, the chameleon.)

But look at what the freedom consists of. It is freedom to move along a scale that already exists. God tells Adam: "To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power" to be "reborn into the higher forms, the divine."¹ Pico then spells out the rungs: "If these seeds are vegetative, he will be like a plant. If these seeds are sensitive, he will be like an animal. If these seeds are intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God."¹

Notice what is missing from the list of things worth becoming. There is no rung labelled "fully human." A person who lives by appetite is a plant or a beast; the good outcomes are all above the human. The passage goes on: "If you see a philosopher judging things through his reason, admire and follow him: he is from heaven, not the earth. If you see a person living in deep contemplation, unaware of his body and dwelling in the inmost reaches of his mind, he is neither from heaven nor earth, he is divinity clothed in flesh."¹

And then comes the practical advice, which is the part anthologies often trim. We should aim at the highest ranks of angels: "In that court, as the mystic writings tell us, are the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones in the foremost places; let us not even yield place to them."¹ The rest of the speech, which the excerpt quoted here does not include, sets out how this is to be done. On Copenhaver's account it is a programme of purification through moral philosophy, dialectic, and natural philosophy, culminating in theology and drawing on Jewish Kabbalah, with the goal of union with God.²

What Kind of Dignity?

Here Copenhaver draws his conclusion, and it is a strong one. The reading that finds in Pico a charter of human autonomy comes, he argues, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpreters, shaped by the Enlightenment and by Kant, who read the first pages and found their own ideals there.² Against this he sets the speech's actual destination: "Personal extinction by mystical union with God was Pico's goal: for people to be divinized, selves had to be discarded."² The task Pico sets is to become like the angels, and so to leave the human condition behind, not to celebrate it.

It is fair to mark the limits of this. Copenhaver's is one scholar's interpretation, forcefully stated, and it is a corrective to a tradition of reading that includes distinguished names; a reader is not obliged to think the older view has nothing in it. The opening paragraphs do say that the human being has no fixed nature and chooses what to become, and that was a striking thing to say. The point is about what the choice is for. In the text, freedom is the starting condition, not the prize. The prize is to stop being merely human.

One can test this against the passage quoted above without taking anyone's word for it. "Unaware of his body" is praise, in Pico. The highest figure he describes is not the man of action or the artist but the contemplative who has withdrawn into "the inmost reaches of his mind."¹ That is an ascetic and mystical ideal with deep roots in Platonism and in medieval Christianity. It is a long way from the self-made man.

The Answer

Pico wrote a speech, for a debate that was banned, and left it untitled and unpublished. Editors after his death supplied "on the dignity of man," and later centuries supplied the reading that goes with it. What he actually says is that human beings alone have no assigned place, and that they should use that freedom to climb out of their humanity towards God. Whether one finds that inspiring or alarming, it is more interesting than the slogan, and it explains something the slogan cannot: why a supposed manifesto of human self-sufficiency is so intent on angels.