Mirandola's Renaissance Manifesto

A possible depiction of Pico della Mirandola in Raphael’s School of Athens (1511)

Florentine philosopher, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called the ‘Manifesto of the Renaissance’ – and for good reason. To its fifteenth-century readers, it would have seemed titillatingly, even dangerously humanistic.

That any thinker should take it upon himself to discuss man’s place in the cosmos at all would, in itself, have been enough to raise contemporary brows; that, having chosen this as his point of focus, he should go on also to glorify his subject matter, suggesting that, in man, there was an element of the divine – this, to the medieval mind reared on centuries of human-denigrating theology, would have been subversive beyond our comprehension.

The origin of the Oration is a curious one, in that its existence is contingent on one of Mirandola’s other, larger works: the 900 Theses, for which he wrote the Oration as a sort of preamble. The Theses, published in Rome at the end of 1486, are an erudite and controversial compendium of arguments in favour of ‘natural philosophy’. He composed the Oration as a speech which he intended to deliver a public seminar held in Rome to defend the Theses, but the event never took place. Pope Innocent VIII halted proceedings and eventually condemned as unorthodox a portion of Mirandola’s work. The Oration wouldn’t be published for another 10 years.

The Oration is remarkable above all for its radical up-ending of the medieval mindset. For the Christian of the Middle Ages, man had been a figure of secondary metaphysical importance. Though he had ostensibly been made ‘in god’s image’, he partook in none of god’s divine energy. Faced with the great mysteries of the universe, he was helpless and entirely dependent on the logos (god in the form of the Son, Jesus Christ) to ‘illuminate’ his mind, to show him ‘the way’. For medieval theologians like Augustine and Aquinas, man’s faculties of reason were flawed and imperfect, requiring, for their ‘completion,’ god’s own hand – both in the form of divine illumination and of revealed truth.

In Mirandola’s Oration, we see this conception indirectly but forcibly challenged. Man ceases to be a supporting cast member in the cosmic playhouse, and takes on a central role. Far from helpless and flawed, he’s now a “great miracle”, a “thing surpassing belief, and wondrous too” (Part II: 7). In Mirandola’s hands, man receives his long-awaited and much-needed cosmic promotion. He is finally conceded a divine inner energy of his own. And, though Mirandola’s justifications are theologically derived, his conclusions are humanistic through and through. So much so, in fact, that to the modern mind his celestial discursions might even come across as diplomatic trade-offs; disingenuous sophisms put in place primarily to placate his orthodox detractors.

But Mirandola’s queer mixture of humanistic zeal and pious theism is typical of the ‘in-betweenness’ of the age. In arguments like the following, we see Mirandola, the transitional Renaissance figure par excellence:

But when the work was finished, the Craftsman still longed for there to be someone to ponder the meaning of such a magnificent achievement, to love its beauty and to marvel at its vastness. So, when everything was done…He finally thought to bring forth man. (Part II: 10) 

Man is given his place in the metaphysical order of things, and it is indeed a prominent one, but one which is still contingent on god’s magnanimity. If man is great, it is because god has conceded it.

Be that as it may, Mirandola’s humanistic fanfare is loud and triumphant: man is now a vital piece in the cosmic superstructure; that creature without whom all that was created would be in vain. Since he is endowed with the faculties to observe it, man is able to identify meaning in god’s universe and, therefore, bestow it where it might otherwise not exist. On account of his consciousness, his sentience, man is no longer a pitiful cosmic afterthought, but an active agent in God’s divine plan.

In an attempt to give a cosmogenic account for man’s special place among living things, Mirandola then improvises a rather bizarre creation myth that has a more-than-vague air of unorthodoxy about it. When god’s work was done, his cosmos was to all intents and purposes complete. “Every place was by then filled; all things had already been assigned to the highest, the middle, and the lowest orders” (15). God needed an observer, but couldn’t figure out where to put him. What’s more, having no pre-existing ‘mould’ at his disposal for the sculpting of such an unprecedented and majestic being, he had to get creative:

He therefore took man..and said to him: “We have given you, Adam, no fixed seat or form of your own, no talent peculiar to you alone. This we have done so that whatever seat, whatever form, whatever talent you may judge desirable, these same may you have and possess according to your desire and judgment.” (18)

Though it may at first seem that Mirandola is casting man as a ‘hodgepodge’, a cosmic ‘neither-here-nor-there’, he is in fact doing the opposite. If God could allocate his darling creature no specific abode in his ‘creatorium’, he would offer him a rather grand and magnanimous alternative: free transit. Man would be allowed to roam god’s cosmic hierarchy, to jump from one slot to another as he pleased. Rather than possessing no identity at all, man, the ultimate spiritual chameleon, possesses all of them:

We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you may, as the free and extraordinary shaper of yourself, fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer…  (20)

 Man uses his cosmic ‘in-betweenness’ to mould his own identity, swivelling with ease from one world to the next, from lower to higher forms of being and back again. But how is he able to exercise this special gift and what does it entail? How exactly is he able to fashion himself into whichever shape he prefers?

Here, Mirandola’s genius for wielding theological means to humanistic ends reaches new levels. Man determines his own nature depending on what type of god-given ‘seeds’ he cultivates. And he must choose his seeds wisely, for they can mean the difference between “degenerating into lower forms of life” and being “reborn into the higher orders” (26):

 The Father infused in man…every sort of seed...If he cultivates his vegetative seeds, he will become a plant. If he cultivates his sensitive seeds, he will become a brute animal. If he cultivates his rational seeds, he will become a heavenly being. If he cultivates his intellectual seeds, he will be an angel and a son of God. (26–29)

And this is, perhaps, the crux of Mirandola’s entire philosophy: if man shuts down his higher faculties (his reason, his intellect, his ingenuity), and acts as if he doesn’t possess them, he vegetates and is no better than the plant. But if, on the other hand, he exercises them carefully, if he philosophises and accumulates knowledge, he joins the ranks of angels.

Mirandola doesn’t stop there. Not satisfied seating man alongside angels, he now raises him even farther up in the heavenly firmament and places him in its highest circle:

And if [man]…gathers himself into the centre of his own unity, thus becoming a single spirit with God in the solitary darkness of the Father, he, who had been placed above all things, will become superior to all things. (30)

It’s an astonishing passage, one that’s about as far removed from the self-flagellating mindset of the Middle Ages as one could imagine. And, although it’s far from clear what Mirandola intended by “solitary darkness of the Father” (we can assume that the unity-with-god of which he speaks was inspired by his close readings of the mystical Jewish sect, Kabbalah), the gist is clear: humans contained within them a divine spark, or the very real potential for divinity, and their pathway to cosmic greatness was, not through pious self-abnegation, but through intellect and reason.

And once again, Mirandola the devout Christian meets Mirandola the forward-thinking humanist. His cosmic goal may be god-oriented, but his means for getting there – the ‘cultivation of his intellectual seeds’ – would have been met with giddy approval by Enlightenment thinkers over a century later. 

It is especially enticing to contemplate what a rationalist like Descartes would have made of Mirandola’s exhortation to ‘purge the soul’ by ‘washing away the squalor of ignorance’: 

 …[by] curbing the drive of the emotions through moral science, dispersing the darkness of reason through dialectics (as if washing away the squalor of ignorance and vice), may we purge our souls, lest our emotions run amok or our reason imprudently run off course at any time. (71)

 Allusions here are clearly made to a quasi-Cartesian method for getting to ‘the crux of things’; for finding truth by weeding the garden bed of one’s reason, pruning it of all that is impertinent, illogical and fallacious.

The ‘dialectics’ to which Mirandola refers are of course Plato’s, which would serve as a truth-searching model for Descartes in his groundbreaking Discourse of 1637. Proceeding deductively from axiomatic first principles and deriving, therefrom, rationally foolproof conclusions would become a cornerstone of Enlightenment epistemology. And, although Mirandola never comes close to setting out as systematic a dialectical methodology as Descartes, he openly announces the same sympathy with its underlying impetus. Our minds are unruly things, says he, but if they can be tamed, if they can be channeled properly, we can wring miracles, we can become “guests at the table of the gods” and receive “the gift of immortality.” (108)

PETRARCH’S ORATION

Laura crowns Petrarch with the Laurel, 15th century

Not by coincidence, this very same ‘gift of immortality’ had been a central preoccupation of an earlier humanist, Petrarch, whose work – because of its obvious parallels with Mirandola’s – it seems logical to briefly cover here.

Well over a century before Mirandola’s paen to human dignity, Petrarch had written a human-exultating oration of his own, but under very different circumstances. For the acclaim generated by his epic poem Africa, he’d been appointed poet-laureate in Rome, the greatest honour a wordsmith at the time could receive. And, seized with pent-up zeal for man’s wonders, he penned his Coronation Oration, which he delivered at the crowing ceremony in 1341 in front of a delegation of Roman dignitaries.

The work is just as brash as Mirandola’s – more so, perhaps, considering its earlier conception – and, in a way, even more ‘humanistic’. Absent from all but a few passages are Mirandola’s theological justifications, which are replaced by sweeping, erudite references to the great minds of Roman antiquity.

Petrarch speaks of the poet as being animated by Virgil’s ‘sweet longing’ (dulcis raptat amor) to climb Mt Parnassus[1], and Cicero’s ‘divine in-breathing’[2]. Deities are evoked, but they are old gods rather than new. For Petrarch, to achieve poetic nirvana is not to ascend to Dante’s empyrean but to climb the mount of the Greek muses. The in-breath that ignites the imagination and lets flow the creative juices is divine, yes, but it’s Cicero’s rather than Augustine’s, pagan rather than Christian.

Let it be clear: Petrarch was far from an apostate, but his ‘return’ to the Ancients is neither a casual nor an empty literary trick. In drawing on Roman wisdom, he is calling for nothing short of the recovery of a pre-Christian form of lauding the poet and, therefore, humanity. What is wrong with wanting to achieve, with striving to scale the heights of human excellence, and – yes – producing a legacy that will be remembered for centuries to come? According to Petrarch, nothing:

The desire for glory is natural, not merely in the generality of men, but also and in greatest measure in those of some wisdom and excellence.[3]

 If the desire for glory is natural, then to deny it is unnatural. Though Petrarch never gets overt about it, his disavowal is clear: the lamentable medieval impulse to collective self-flagellation has to be done away with. Replacing it should be a bright, new, human-loving ethos, one that glorifies glory and exults excellence, one that can serve as a springboard to greater civilization heights; a reprisal of the enlightened past for an even more enlightened future – in short, a Renaissance.

Petrarch’s ‘desire for glory’ and Mirandola’s ‘dignity of man’ are two peas in a metaphysical pod. Where Petrarch seeks immortality through glory, Mirandola, instead, finds it in the sowing of ‘intellectual seeds’. The point is, finally, the same: despite what the Medievals would say, man is divine, or at least has the potential to be so.

[1] Virgil, Georgics: III. 291-292

[2] Cicero, Aulus Licinias Archias

[3]  Petrarch, Coronation Oration, Journal of the Modern Languages Association, Vol. 68, No. 5 (Dec 1953), p. 1245