Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory by Brian P. Copenhaver

Abstract

Reviewed by: Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory by Brian P. Copenhaver Denis J.-J. Robichaud Brian P. Copenhaver. Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 682. Cloth, $55.00. “Man is a great miracle” (459). Nowadays, a student who happens to have studied nothing more than a smattering of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–94) philosophical writings might only remember this one line from the introduction of Pico’s most famous Oration (often entitled Oration on the Dignity of Man), which Pico originally conceived as an introductory oration to a public disputation over his 900 Conclusions—that is, the 900 Conclusions primarily about philosophy, theology, and magic that he brazenly wished to debate in Rome in 1486, which earned him an excommunication. If pressed by an instructor during an exam to explain what Pico means by this great miracle, a student might quote from a passage shortly thereafter where Pico’s personification of a Demiurgic God proclaims to man, “For others, a definite nature is confined within laws that we have prescribed. With no strictures confining you, you will determine that nature by your own choice, which is the authority under which I have put you” (460–61). This student might then conclude that the miracle of man is that only humans stand outside of the laws of nature, since only [End Page 160] humans are capable of fashioning themselves according to their own rational choice. In other words, man’s miracle is his particular status or dignity in (or rather outside of) the laws of nature. And if this student happened to have studied a little more philosophy, he might interpolate that Pico is either an apologist for Catholic notions of human dignity, or a harbinger of Kantian notions of human freedom, or a Burckhardtian emblem of the Renaissance man (i.e. a self-reflective complex modern secular individual), or finally a herald of existentialism bearing the Sartrian standard, “l’existence précède l’essence” (Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme [Paris: Nagel, 1946, 29]). If this student happened to be in Brian Copenhaver’s classroom, one imagines that such answers would not earn him the highest marks. Copenhaver’s Magic and the Dignity of Man seeks to dispel any such misinterpretations of Pico’s Oration. The first misinterpretation is the Oration’s title. Copenhaver reminds us that it only first came to be known as the Oratio de hominis dignitate long after Pico’s death. Simply put, according to Copenhaver, the Oration is not about human dignity. Instead, he tells his readers early on that “Pico wants humans to become angels and then to be annihilated in God: the rest of the Oration tells them how” (28). Why, then, were generations of scholars so wrong about Pico’s Oration? Copenhaver devotes ten of the book’s thirteen chapters (chapters 1–10) to critiquing the history of misunderstandings. The misinterpretations began early when Giovanni Pico’s nephew Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola manipulated Pico’s memory by writing his uncle’s biography, a work that none other than Thomas More translated. One might call Copenhaver’s book a masterclass in the historiography of philosophy, but he describes it as “a philosophical history of philosophy as cultural history” (3). Copenhaver analyzes the philosophical categories through which Pico has been historically understood, for example, by examining Pico’s treatment at the hands of the likes of Johann Jakob Burcker and Voltaire. But at times Copenhaver also shapeshifts into a cultural historian, for instance when he discusses how snippets of Pico’s Oration were excerpted in what he labels as “Pico Boxes” in American textbooks on Western civilization after the Second World War, or how the Disney cartoon character known to English-speaking audiences as Professor Ludwig von Drake came to be known as Pico de Paperis in Italian. No proverbial stone is left unturned in this long book—or rather nearly no stone, since a few important Pico interpreters like Henri de Lubac, for example, are not discussed. Still, no one before Copenhaver...