Pico della Mirandola's Oration: Man, Magic and Kabbalah

The most famous speech of the Renaissance was never delivered. Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola and Concordia, born in 1463, wrote it in 1486 as the opening address of a public disputation to be held in Rome at the beginning of 1487. The disputation was stopped and the text remained among his papers. It was printed only after the author's death, in 1496, edited by his nephew Gianfrancesco, and the title by which we know it, De hominis dignitate, was added later.

The Chameleon and Freedom

The Oration opens with a sentence from the Hermetic Asclepius: “Magnum, o Asclepi, miraculum est homo”, that is, “a great miracle, Asclepius, is man”. Pico then explains why with an account of creation. God, after assigning every creature a precise place, creates Adam with no fixed seat and no face of his own, and allows him to choose what he wishes to be.

Man can thus degenerate towards the lower forms of the brutes or be reborn towards the higher, divine ones. To express this changeability Pico uses the image of the chameleon, taken from ancient authors. This is not a celebration of the modern individual, as has sometimes been claimed, but an invitation to ascend by degrees, through ethics, natural philosophy and theology, towards union with the divine.

Two Kinds of Magic

In the second part of the oration Pico defends his theses and addresses the most delicate subject, magic. He distinguishes two forms. The first rests on the work and authority of demons, and for him it is monstrous and to be rejected. The second is the perfection of natural philosophy: it adds nothing to the world, but brings to light the hidden virtues that God has sown in it.

To describe the magus who practises this second art, Pico uses an agricultural image: just as the farmer weds the elm to the vine, so the magus “marries” earth to heaven, linking lower things to the gifts and powers of higher ones. It is the same idea of correspondence found in Ficino, which Agrippa would develop systematically. The magus, in this view, is not a master of nature but its most attentive interpreter, who admires the works of God and leads others to admire their hidden wisdom.

The Discovery of Kabbalah

Alongside magic, the Oration introduces Jewish Kabbalah to Christian readers. Pico had commissioned Latin translations of many Kabbalistic texts from the convert Flavius Mithridates and had become convinced that they contained a secret tradition going back to Moses. Read with the right tools, this wisdom would, he believed, confirm the mysteries of Christianity. Thus Christian Kabbalah was born, carried forward in the following decades by Reuchlin, Giorgi and Postel.

Pico died in Florence in 1494, aged thirty-one, on the very day Charles VIII entered the city. Poison was suspected even then, and recent analyses of his remains have strengthened the hypothesis of arsenic poisoning. His Oration remains the text in which natural magic and Kabbalah first enter, with full rights, into a philosopher's programme.