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The history of dignity is usually recounted by using, one after the other, select texts taken from the Western literary canon, which employ the word with special intention and frequency. Such a history cannot preclude a certain number of essential names – Cicero, Mirandola, Kant – but the arid juxtaposition of quotations, in itself lacking eloquence, becomes more intelligible when inserted into a wider context, namely the debate between misery and dignity that permeated European cultural tradition up to the Renaissance.

In this debate, there are three principal viewpoints. First, there are those who believe that, in this world, the reign of misery is absolute and that there is no kind of dignity. Second, there are those who admit that there is misery but also acknowledge that there is dignity. Finally, there are those who only see the excellence and gravitas of humankind and take no interest in the rest.

The first group created a new literary genre to express their pessimism: the consolations. A consolation is a treatise, cultivated first by philosophers and later by rhetoricians, which is directed at someone who has suffered a calamity, a typical case being a man or woman who has lost a child. Authors in this genre strive to accumulate arguments that bring solace and relief to the sufferer. The consolations by Seneca and Plutarch that have survived coincide in the strategy of their argument – which is anything but comforting – by attempting to convince the sufferer that no death is an evil because the only evil worthy of pity is to be alive. The best thing, they say, is not to be born, and, if we have been born, the next best thing is to die soon.

Cicero is the initiator of the second group. The Consolatio, which he wrote after the death of his daughter, has not survived, but we do have his thoughts on the misery of death in a number of his writings, notably the Tusculanae. The subject of Book I of this treatise is his own death, a source of unhappiness for those who, he says, are not wise; and the subject of Book III is sadness (in Latin, aegritudo) upon the death of a loved one. In this sense, the work can be classed in the genre of the consolation, though the vitality of his own personality shines through its pages.

According to Cicero, philosophical meditation teaches us that death is only an apparent evil, whether we believe that the soul is immortal, as Plato did, or that it disappears along with the body. And this supposition does not lead, as it does with Seneca and Plutarch, to a disdain toward life but, on the contrary, makes room for dignity. The source of dignity is two-fold. If we strive to live well instead of simply to live for a long time, life will never have been brief. Our conscience is consoled, before death, by the memory of a worthy life: “But death truly is then met with the greatest tranquillity when the dying man can comfort himself with his own praise. No one dies too soon who has finished the course of perfect virtue” (Tusculanae Disputationes, 1.45). The second source, which is added to this satisfaction, is the solicitude that the virtuous have for posterity and that encourages them to carry out exemplary acts that will bring them posthumous glory and lasting memory, and thus endow human dignity with an influence that outlives the short-lived period of an individual life.

In Cicero, the recognition of a person’s dignity in this world is supplemented by a daring extension of its subjective basis. We must remember that dignitas in ancient Rome implied status, rank, and a higher position in comparison with others in the same hierarchy. It is not an inborn quality but inherent in an office, which can be won or lost, and there is not one single dignity but a multiplicity of them. At the end of the Roman Empire, the lists of official positions continued to receive the name Notitia dignitatum.

Cicero introduces an important novelty into this state of affairs. In Book I of On Duties, he states that the general virtue of a person (honorability) is made up of four special virtues – prudence, justice, magnanimity, and decorum – which entail different types of duties. He defines decorum as “that which corresponds to the excellence of the person, where his nature differs from other living beings,” and the duty that is peculiar to this virtue consists of disciplining the impulse to pleasure and subjugating it to reason (Kapust 2011). The ability of reason to impose obedience on impulse gives humans – all humans without exception – a distinctive dignity. For the first time, Cicero universalizes dignity in all men and women, placing them at the same level because they are endowed with reason, in contrast to the lower animals, which, being devoid of reason, are, as a result, devoid of dignity.

The dignity that, in Cicero, redeems the misery of this world is also worldly, since it is rooted in human nature, whereas in Innocence III, who in about 1195 issued his treatise De miseria humanae conditio, that dignity, which he does not reject, is supernatural: it is the hope of being saved by Christ and, after death, of attaining citizenship of Heaven. Centuries later, the humanist Bartolomeo Fazio, with the express intention of completing the diptych that Innocence III had left unfinished, wrote De excellentia et praestantia hominis in 1447. In this work, he signaled, as Petrarch did also, the puzzling lack of books on the subject. For Fazio, a human being’s excellence stems exclusively from his immortal soul, which cannot be enhanced by anything originating in this corrupt world.

Petrarch also belongs to this second group, and in the work I referred to before, “On Sadness and Misery,” he shares the conviction expressed by Innocence III that the greatest excellence of a human person resides in his supernatural destiny. At the same time, he adds a new tone: as a Christian humanist, he is able to perceive and enjoy the beauty of nature, the perfection of the human body, and the wonders of the arts and sciences that dignify our human condition and the contemplation of which banishes the general sadness (aegritudo) that oppresses us and which is all the more dangerous, he maintains, if it has no specific cause.

Finally, the third group includes those writers who praise the dignity of humankind and pay no attention whatsoever to his misery, as if it did not exist. An important author in this group is Giannozzo Manetti, who in 1452 wrote De dignitate et excellentia hominis. The first three volumes are a hymn of praise of the perfection of the human body and soul and postulate an ideal of happiness and plenitude immanent in this world, not as a substitute of the next, and incompatible with the defense of that misery, which had been tirelessly repeated in innumerable previous writings. For this reason, Book IV does not complete the unfinished treatise of Innocence III but, on the contrary, explicitly refutes it.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola opens his well-known Oratio, written in 1485 (with a second version in 1488), and later called “On the Dignity of Mankind,” by stating that he is dissatisfied with the reasons usually proposed to justify the great dignity of humankind and that he believes he has finally understood why, among all living beings, the human being is most worthy of admiration. God created the world by conforming to eternal archetypes and then realized that none of them could be used to form humankind; so He created humankind “without a precise image.” Then He spoke to Adam and explained to him the eccentric nature of his dignity, saying that it derived not from possessing a specific place or gift within Creation but from having the freedom, similar to divine freedom, to create himself as he wished and to choose, according to his own will, the determination of his nature. So, if in Cicero, it was reason that distinguished humankind from beasts, here it was an absolute and limitless freedom.

This history would be incomplete if we were not to mention the Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre (Dialogue on the Dignity of Man), which was published posthumously by the Spanish writer Fernán Pérez de Oliva (1494–1531), and which is a dialogue between Aurelio, who takes the side of human misery, and Antonio, who defends human dignity. The most interesting feature of this Renaissance essay, in comparison with previous writings, is that it sets out the two opposing versions, one after the other, without deciding between them, and leaving that decision to the good sense of the reader. Furthermore, this dialogue acts as a gateway to later Spanish literature, since, for the first time, it is not written in Latin, which, until then, had enjoyed a monopoly on writings on such an elevated subject. Written in the vernacular, it is also innovative in that it is not written in the discursive style of the treatise or sermon, which had been prevalent in classical tradition.