Pico della Mirandola's Oration on Human Dignity

1486

The twenty-three-year-old Florentine prodigy published nine hundred theses he offered to defend in Rome against all comers. The opening oration argued that humans, uniquely, could become whatever they willed. The pope banned the debate; the text survived. Renaissance humanism had acquired its manifesto. His assertion that humanity could ascend toward the angelic or descend to the bestial became the defining statement of Renaissance individualism.