Oration on the Dignity of Man

Pico della Mirandola  -  Oration on the Dignity of Man  - 1486

Excerpt:

Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!  The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them... all that they will ever possess.  The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities.  But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life.  Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him.  If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God... 

Pico’s Oration attempted to center all attention on human capacity and human perspective.  He taught the amazing capacity of human achievement.  Pico justified the importance of the human quest for knowledge within a Neoplatonic framework.  He writes that after God had created all creatures, He conceived of the desire for another sentient being who would appreciate all His works, but there was no longer any room in the chain of being; all the possible slots from angels to worms had been filled.  So, God created man such that he had no specific slot in the chain.  When man philosophizes, he ascends the chain of being towards the angels, and communion with God.  When he fails to exercise his intellect, he vegetates.

The idea that men could ascend the chain of being through the exercise of their intellectual capacities was a profound endorsement of the dignity of human existence in this earthly life.  The root of this dignity lay in his assertion that only human beings could change themselves through their own free will.

Coupled with his belief that all of creation constitutes a symbolic reflection of the divinity of God, Pico's philosophies had a profound influence on the arts, helping to elevate writers and painters from their medieval role as mere artisans to the Renaissance ideal of the artist as genius.