The Renaissance: Political Renewal and Intellectual Change 245Rome to Venice and the other Italian states. By the
mid-fifteenth century, it was attracting followers be-
yond the Alps.
Humanism: Its Methods and Its Goals
Associating the early humanists with any fixed ideolog-
ical or philosophical system is difficult. Most of them
were either teachers of rhetoric or the editors of classi-
cal texts whose chief purpose was to study the classics
and to apply ancient ideas and values to life in their
own time. As such they might be found on almost any
side of a given issue. But for all their variety, they
shared certain presuppositions that defined them as a
movement. Humanists by definition believed in the su-
periority of ancient culture. Errors, they said, were
modern. Where medieval writers had seen their world
as a historical extension of antiquity, the humanists saw
a radical disjuncture between ancient and modern
times, and they regarded the interval between the fall
of Rome and their revival of antique ideals as a “middle
age” of barbarity, ignorance, and above all, bad style.
Immersed in the elegance of classical Latin, they were
deeply concerned with form, sometimes, according to
their critics, at the expense of substance.
Because they revered the classical past, they shared
a preference for argument based on the authority of an-
cient sources and a suspicion of formal reason that bor-
dered on contempt. The scholastics in particular were
thought to be sterile and misguided, in part because of
their bad Latin, but also because the nominalist rejec-
tion of reason as a support for faith had led the philoso-
phers into pursuits that humanists regarded as trivial.
Scholastics sometimes counterattacked by accusing
them of irreligion. Though humanists were to be found
among the critics of the church, few if any rejected
conventional religious belief. The Renaissance moved
Western society strongly toward secularism by reviving
the ancient preoccupation with human beings and their
social relationships. Writers such as Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola asserted “the dignity of man” against preach-
ers who saw humanity as wholly depraved (see docu-
ment 13.3), but even Pico believed that human dignity
derived largely from man’s central place in a divinely es-
tablished universe. Unbelief was not at issue. The hu-
manists believed in perfecting their minds and bodies
on Earth while preparing their souls for the hereafter.
Such a goal was fundamentally educational, and the
humanists were predictably concerned with educational
theory. Their purpose was to create il uomo universale,the
DOCUMENT 13.3
Pico: The Dignity of Man
Giovanni Pico, count of Mirandola (1463–94) was some-
thing of a prodigy who, before his death at thirty-one, wrote
extensively on many subjects. Like many humanists he was
deeply interested in magic, the occult, and Neoplatonic philos-
ophy. In his Oration on the Dignity of Manhe pro-
duced what some regard as the classic Renaissance statement
of human dignity and freedom. The argument is based largely
on humanity’s place in the Great Chain of Being, the hierar-
chical structure of the universe described by such Neoplatonic
writers as Dionysius the Areopagite, but Pico’s Oration
provides a vision of human potential rarely emphasized in
medieval writing.[God] took man as a creature of indeterminate na-
ture and, assigning him a place in the middle of
the world, addressed him thus: “Neither a fixed
abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any func-
tion peculiar to thyself have We given thee, Adam,
to the end that according to thy longing and ac-
cording to thy judgment thou mayest have and
possess what abode, what form, and what func-
tions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all
other beings is limited and constrained within the
bounds of laws proscribed by Us. Thou, con-
strained by no limits, in accordance with thy own
free will, in whose hand We have placed thee,
shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We
have set thee at the world’s center that thou
mayest from thence more easily observe whatever
is in the world. We have made thee neither of
heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal,
so that with freedom of choice and honor... thou
mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou
shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degen-
erate into the lower forms of life, which are
brutish. Thou shalt have the power out of thy
soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher
forms, which are divine.
Pico, Giovanni. “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” In E. Cassirer,
P.O. Kristeller, and J.H. Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance
Philosophy of Man.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.