The dignity of man: Pico, Manetti and the chameleon

“A great miracle, Asclepius, is man.” With this sentence, taken from the Hermetic dialogue Asclepius, opens one of the most celebrated texts of the Renaissance, the speech that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola prepared in 1486 as an introduction to the public disputation on his nine hundred theses. The disputation never took place and the speech was published only after the author's death in 1494. The title by which it is known, Oratio de hominis dignitate, was given to it by later editorial tradition.

A humanist theme

Reflection on human dignity did not begin with Pico. As early as 1452 the Florentine Giannozzo Manetti had composed De dignitate et excellentia hominis, in response to the medieval treatise by Pope Innocent III on the misery of the human condition. Manetti celebrated the beauty of the body, intelligence, and the works of the arts and of cities as signs of man's likeness to God. Bartolomeo Facio too had written on the same subject, and Marsilio Ficino had extolled the human soul as the centre and bond of the world.

Pico took up this legacy but gave it an original twist. For him the greatness of man lies not in a fixed position in the hierarchy of creation, however exalted, but precisely in the lack of a fixed position. Man is not the highest rung of the ladder of beings, but the only creature that can travel along it in both directions.

Adam without a fixed abode

In the most famous passage of the Oratio, God addresses Adam after having distributed their qualities to all creatures. To him alone he has given neither a fixed seat nor a face of his own nor a particular function: he will be able to choose for himself what he wishes to be. He may degenerate into the lower forms of the brutes or be reborn into the higher ones, which are divine. Man is, in this vision, the moulder and sculptor of himself.

Pico compares man to a chameleon and to Proteus, the sea god able to take on any form. His freedom, however, is not endless caprice: the speech invites him to ascend, through moral philosophy, dialectic, natural philosophy and theology, to union with the divine. In the second part Pico also defends natural magic and kabbalah as instruments of this ascent.

Man as magus in Agrippa

Cornelius Agrippa inherits from Pico and Ficino the image of man as a being intermediate between the material and the spiritual world. In De occulta philosophia this position becomes the very condition of magic: precisely because he shares in all levels of reality, man can act upon them. The magus, for Agrippa, is the one who has come to know himself and who, having purified his mind, becomes a channel between above and below.

Renaissance optimism was not without its shadows, however. Agrippa himself, in De vanitate scientiarum of 1530, cast doubt on the human capacity to reach certain knowledge. Meanwhile, in 1511, the Frenchman Charles de Bovelles, in the Liber de sapiente, had described the wise man as a mirror of the universe who becomes a complete human being through knowledge.

Pico's speech has been read over the centuries as a manifesto of modern individualism, an interpretation that historians today scale back, recalling its religious, mystical and kabbalistic context. It nonetheless remains the text in which the Renaissance formulated most boldly the idea of an open human nature, not yet defined, still to be accomplished through knowledge and choice.