Life & Wisdom Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

A question like this is a Renaissance magic trick: it flatters piety while quietly rerouting attention back to the human. Pico’s “why should we not” sounds deferential, almost childlike, but it’s a rhetorical crowbar. By pretending to simply endorse admiration for angels, he sets up a comparison that forces the reader to ask what, exactly, is worth admiring - fixed perfection or earned ascent.

The subtext lands in the space Pico helped define: humanism that still speaks fluent Christianity. Angels and “blessed choirs” represent a hierarchy where each being has an assigned nature, locked into its rung. Pico’s larger project (most famously in the Oration on the Dignity of Man) argues that humans are the odd exception: not pinned to a single essence, but capable of self-fashioning, rising toward the angelic through intellect and virtue or sinking through appetite. So praising angels isn’t the endpoint; it’s the measuring stick. If angels are admirable because they are pure and ordered, humans become fascinating because they can choose order.

Context matters: late 15th-century Italy is a pressure cooker of classical revival, church authority, and esoteric synthesis. Pico is trying to harmonize Plato, Aristotle, Christian theology, even Kabbalah, without sounding like a heretic. The heavenly “choirs” (a nod to the medieval angelic hierarchy) gives him orthodox cover. Under that cover, the provocation slips through: if heaven is admirable, what’s truly radical is a creature on earth that can, by will and learning, make itself more like heaven.