Oration on the Dignity of Man

"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.