The Essence of Man
Pico della Mirandola’s fifteenth-century Oration on Man was one of the turning points of Western civilization, the “manifesto” of the Italian Renaissance. In it he attributed the following declaration to God, addressing the first man:
We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very centre of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.1.Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Miller, Wallis and Carmichael (Hackett, 1998).
Homo sapiens, that unique synthesis of “dust of the earth” and breath of God, is unique among created beings in having no fixed essence: in being free to be what he or she chooses. Mirandola’s Oration was a break with the two dominant traditions of the Middle Ages: the Christian doctrine that human beings are irretrievably corrupt, tainted by original sin, and the Platonic idea that humanity is bounded by fixed forms.
It is also a strikingly Jewish account – almost identical with the one given by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man: “The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself. It is this idea that Judaism introduced into the world.”2.Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, translated from the Hebrew by Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 109.
It is therefore with a frisson of recognition that we discover that Mirandola had a Jewish teacher, Rabbi Elijah ben Moses Delmedigo (1460–1497), with whom he studied Tanakh in the original Hebrew, together with Talmud and Kabbala.3.Born in Crete, Delmedigo was a Talmudic prodigy, appointed at a young age to be head of the yeshivah in Padua. At the same time, he studied philosophy, in particular the work of Aristotle, Maimonides and Averroes. At the age of twenty-three he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Padua. It was through this that he came to know Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who became both his student and his patron.
The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that God created man “in His image, after His likeness.” Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that God has no image. Hence the prohibition against making images of God. For God is beyond all representation, all categorization. “I will be what I will be,” He says to Moses when Moses asks Him His name. All images, forms, concepts and categories are attempts to delimit and define. God cannot be delimited or defined; the attempt to do so is a form of idolatry.
“Image,” then, must refer to something quite different than the possession of a specific form. The fundamental point of Genesis 1 is that God transcends nature. Therefore, He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings “in His image,” God gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative. The unprecedented account of God in the Torah’s opening chapter leads to an equally unprecedented view of the human person and the capacity for self-transformation. That is Mirandola’s point. Everything else in creation is what it is, neither good nor evil, bound by nature and nature’s laws. The human person alone has the possibility of self-transcendence. We may be a handful of dust but we have immortal longings.
Mirandola’s late-fifteenth-century humanism was not secular but deeply religious. This period was one of the last times in European culture when religion, science and the arts walked hand in hand, giving rise to such figures as Brunelleschi, Michelangelo and da Vinci. It is fascinating to speculate what might have happened had the Renaissance continued along these lines. However, a series of corrupt rulers and popes, followed by the confrontation between the church and Galileo, led to a gradual break of this synthesis of religion and scientific humanism. The advent of the Reformation signalled the dominance of the quite different views of Luther and Calvin, while humanism swung in the opposite direction, becoming progressively more secular.
As it is, the great truth of Genesis 1 remains as the most powerful statement of a religiously-based humanism, based on the idea of the human person as God’s image, the one creation that is also creative, the sole life-form capable of dialogue with the Author of life Himself. As the rabbis put it: “Why was man created last? In order to say, if he is worthy, all creation was made for you; but if he is unworthy, he is told, even a gnat preceded you.”4.Bereshit Raba 8:1; Sanhedrin 38a.
That is the simplest answer to Rabbi Isaac’s question: Why did the Torah, a book of law, not begin with the first law? For law presupposes freedom. As Maimonides writes in his “Laws of Repentance,” if we had no freedom, if all we did was determined by forces beyond our control, what would be the point of commanding people to do this, not that? Where would be the justice in rewarding obedience and punishing sin? Without freedom, the whole edifice of law and responsibility falls to the ground.5.Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva, chapter 5.
The Torah is a sustained exploration of human freedom, the greatest gift God gave man, as well as the most fateful, for freedom can be used or abused. It can lead to the highest heights or the lowest depths: to love or hate, compassion or cruelty, graciousness or violence. The entire drama of Torah flows from this point of departure. Judaism remains God’s supreme call to humankind to freedom and creativity on the one hand, and on the other, to responsibility and restraint – becoming God’s partner in the work of creation.