Early modern Europe · 1463–1494
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Italian humanist who proclaimed humanity’s freedom to shape itself
In his Oration, God gives Adam no fixed place in creation: humans alone can make themselves into beasts or into angels. He hoped to show that all philosophies and religions share a single hidden truth.
Life and thought
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, from the family of the lords of Mirandola in northern Italy, studied canon law at Bologna and philosophy at Padua and Paris, and learned Hebrew and Aramaic to read the Kabbalah. In 1486, aged twenty-three, he published 900 theses and invited scholars to debate them in Rome. Pope Innocent VIII suspended the debate and a commission condemned thirteen theses; Pico fled to France, was briefly arrested, and settled in Florence near Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic circle. He died there in 1494, aged thirty-one.
The speech he wrote to open the debate, later called the Oration on the Dignity of Man, retells creation: every creature received a fixed place, but Adam was given none, so that he could sink to the level of the beasts or rise towards the divine by his own choice. Human dignity lies in this freedom to shape oneself. Pico also hoped to show that Plato, Aristotle, the Kabbalah and Christianity share one hidden truth. Printed after his death, the Oration became a manifesto of Renaissance humanism.