Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) in his youth visited the chief Italian and French universities. In 1486 he issued a challenge to all comers to debate on any of nine hundred theses at Rome, but the debate was forbidden by the pope on the score of the heretical tendency of some of these theses, and Pico suffered persecution until Alexander VI in 1493 absolved him from heresy. He was the last of the Schoolmen and his works are a bewildering compound of mysticism and recondite knowledge. A humanist as well as a theologian, he wrote various Latin epistles and elegies and a series of sonnets. His philosophical writings include Heptaplus and De Hominis Dignitate, from which the following selection is taken.
* * *
I have read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdala the Saracen, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world, as it were, could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: "There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man." In agreement with this opinion is the saying of Hermes Trismegistus: "A great miracle, Asclepius, is man." But when I weighed the reason for these maxims, the many grounds for the excellence of human nature reported by many men failed to satisfy me -- that man is the intermediary between creatures, the intimate of the gods, the king of the lower beings, by the acuteness of his senses, by the discernment of his reason, and by the light of his intelligence the interpreter of nature, the interval between fixed eternity and fleeting time, and (as the Persians say), the bond, nay, rather, the marriage song of the world, on David's testimony but little lower than the angels. Admittedly great though these reasons be, they are not the principal grounds, that is, those which may rightfully claim for themselves the privilege of the highest admiration. For why should we not admire more the angels themselves and the blessed choirs of heaven? At last it seems to me I have come to understand...