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    Oration on the Dignity of Man
    Oration on the Dignity of Man
    Oration on the Dignity of Man
    Ebook56 pages56 minutes

    Oration on the Dignity of Man

    By Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, A. Robert Caponigri and Russell Kirk

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    An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level.

    This translation of Pico della Mirandola's famed "Oration," hitherto hidden away in anthologies, was prepared especially for Gateway Editions, making it available for the first time in a stand-alone volume. The youngest son of the Prince of Mirandola, Pico lived during the Renaissance, an era of change and philosophical ferment. The tenacity with which he clung to fundamental Christian teachings while crying out against his brilliant though half-pagan contemporaries made him exceptional in a time of exceptional men. While Pico, as Russell Kirk observes in his introduction, was an ardent spokesman for the "dignity of man," his devout nature elevated humanism to a truly Christian level, which makes his writing as pertinent today as it was in the fifteenth century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGateway Editions
    Release dateMar 27, 2012
    ISBN9781596983014
    Oration on the Dignity of Man
    Author

    Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

    Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was an Italian Renaissance philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the “Hermetic Reformation."

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      Book preview

      Oration on the Dignity of Man - Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

      001001

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      Introduction

      ORATION ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN

      NOTES

      Gateway Editions

      Copyright Page

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      This most elegant oration (oratio elegantissima) as it was called in the first edition of the collected works and as it has been named ever since, of Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola (1463-1494) was composed as a prelusion to the disputation which Mirandola proposed to hold shortly after Epiphany, 1487. In this disputation, as he recounts in the course of the Oration, Pico proposed to defend nine hundred propositions. The disputation did not take place because it was suspended by Pope Innocentius VIII, who also appointed a commission to examine the theses. Some of them were condemned as counter to the accepted teachings. In reply Pico composed an Apology, in the course of which he reproduced the second portion of the Oratio practically verbatim. This is, consequently, the first appearance of the Oratio, or any part of it in public print. The whole of the Oratio was first published in the collection of Pico’s works edited and published by his relative, Gian Francesco Pico, in 1496. The qualifying phrase on the dignity of man is a later addition, but has become practically identical with the oration, even though some writers have protested that it has reference only to the first portion. Subsequent editions of the Opera Omnia in which the Oratio is included appeared at Venice in 1498; at Strasburg in 1504; at Reggio in 1506; at Paris 1505; again at Venice in 1519 and 1557; and at Basel in 1530, 1537, 1557 and 1572. Numerous editions of the Oratio alone have appeared since that time. The present translation is based conjointly on one of the most recent and best of these individual editions, that of Bruno Cicognani (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Dignita dell’uomo (De hominis dignitate ), Testo, Traduzione e Note, Firenze, Le Monnier 3a ed., 1941), and the text of Opera Omnia of 1504. A German translation appeared in a selection of Pico’s writings edited and translated by Arthur Liebert (Arthur Liebert: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Ausgewaehlte Schriften, Jena und Leipzig, 1905); in Italian a translation by Semprini (Giovanni Semprini: La filosofia di Pico della Mirandola, Milano, 1936 appendice), as well as that by Cicognani already referred to. In English, a translation by Charles G. Wallis was published in the magazine View (fall, 1944 and December, 1944). Several passages were translated and published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1942. This translation is by Elizabeth L. Forbes, who subsequently published an excellent complete translation in the volume The Renaissance Philosophy of Man edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oscar Kristeller and John Herman Randell, Chicago, the University of Chicago Press, 1948. While the present translator has consulted all of these, the translation here offered is a fresh one, based directly on a reading of the Latin text as indicated above. Whatever merits or shortcomings it may have are consequently to be judged on this basis. His aim has been first, of course, adherence to the ideas; but he has also tried to reproduce something of the stylistic flavor of Pico.

      INTRODUCTION

      The enduring value of Pico’s work is due, not to his Quixotic quest of an accord between Pagan, Hebrew, and Christian traditions, John Addington Symonds writes, but to the noble spirit of confidence and humane sympathy with all great movements of the mind, which penetrates it. Out of the bulk of the works of Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who challenged the doctors of the schools to dispute with him on nine hundred grave questions, the only production widely read nowadays is this brief discourse, The Dignity of Man, delivered by him in 1486, at Rome, when he was only twenty-four years old. The oration, which was his glove dashed down before authority, lives as the most succinct expression of the mind of the Renaissance.

      Pico, a son of the princely house of Mirandola, one of the most brilliant of the great Renaissance families, studied at Bologna, and wandered through the Italian and French universities for seven years, becoming immensely erudite, proficient in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic. Mystic, magician, and grand scholar, he combined in his character the Gothic complexity of the

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