ORATIO DE HOMINIS DIGNITATE

Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was a great lover of the Antiquity, bisexual, like most of the Antiquity, a dedicated humanist, and the unlikely friend of the severely anti-humanist Savonarola. Need I also mention that he was poisoned by arsenic (as established by a modern-time exhumation) at the tender age of 31? This precocious genius of the Renaissance was aspiring to become a veritable Renaissance man by using his exceptional memory and no less exceptional desire for learning, attending several universities, and learning from the best European scholars, which effort culminated in his famous, and ambitious, Nine Hundred Theses which, he was convinced, provided a complete and sufficient basis for the discovery of all knowledge, and hence, a model for mankind’s ascent of the “chain of being.” These 900 Theses combined Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and even Kabbalah! Characteristically, they also included seventy-two theses describing what he believed to be a complete system of physics.

Serving as an Introduction to the 900 Theses, was the document which has become known as the very first Humanist Manifesto, which Pico himself called Oratio de Hominis Dignitate. In case some of my erstwhile Evangelical Christian friends should suspiciously wonder, it had nothing to do with the infamous Humanist Manifesto, issued by the American (Secular) Humanist Association in 1933, and then reissued in 1973 and again in 2003. The original work is profoundly religious, as is all genuine humanism, untainted by the AHA perversion, mistaken by American Evangelicals in their dark-age ignorance for the real thing. Here is a key excerpt from Pico’s definitive composition, written in 1486, when he was just twenty-three years old:

“…But when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. Therefore, when everything was done, He finally took thought about the creation of man. He took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thusly: “Neither a fixed abode nor a form which is thine alone, nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, that according to thy longing and thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of law; but thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish, or thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be born into the higher forms, which are divine.”

Every scholarly analysis of the Renaissance humanism recognizes its undeniably Christian underpinnings. The essence of Humanism is the special role of Man, in God’s creation. The following is a useful summary of Pico’s writing, quoted by several reference sources, which I offer here for the reader’s convenience. It is a deliberate effort on my part not to use my own words, but to appeal to the authority of official sources in demonstrating that humanism is not a devil’s creation, but a genuinely Christian point of view.---

“Having created all creatures, God conceives of the desire for another, sentient being who may appreciate all His works, but there is no longer any room in the chain of being: all the possible slots from angels to worms had been filled. So God creates man such that he has no specific slot in the chain, but, instead, he is capable of learning from and imitating any existing creature. When man philosophizes, he ascends the chain of being towards the angels, and the communion with God. When he fails to exercise his intellect, he vegetates. Pico does not fail to notice that his system makes philosophers, like himself, among the most dignified human creatures. The idea that men could ascend the chain of being through the exercise of their intellectual capacities is a great endorsement of the dignity of human existence in this earthly life. The root of this dignity is in his assertion that only human beings can change themselves through their own free will, whereas all other changes in nature are the result of an outside force, acting on whatever undergoes change. He observes from history that philosophies and institutions are always in change, making man’s capacity for self-transformation the only constant. Coupled with his belief that all of creation constitutes a symbolic reflection of the divinity of God, Pico’s philosophy had a profound influence on the arts, helping elevate writers and painters from their medieval role as mere artisans to the Renaissance ideal of the artist as genius.”

Having hopefully read through this entry with some attention, I trust that my reader no longer should have any question in his (or her mind) as to Why Pico? It’s not so much his individual philosophical propensity or specific academic achievement, as his general philosophical outlook, his sense of direction, and his role in the historical development of Western civilization, which make him a seminal figure in history and an essential human link in the “chain of being,” otherwise known as God’s Creation.