 The most conspicuous pages of the Oration, celebrated by Garin and many others as the humanist charter of human freedom and dignity, are just the first few. Assured by them that we can be what we want to be, we are then told—contrary to the usual interpretation of the Oration—that what we must be is not human at all. We must become angels—bodiless, sexless and ultimately, that most unromantic of all conditions, selfless in the strictest sense. Cherubim, the next-to-highest angels, are the first higher stage that we must reach, and to achieve that lofty state we must shed not only the body that imprisons us but also the identity and personality that distinguish us from all other individuals and from God. Mystical union with God is Pico’s final goal, and extinguishing the self is a necessary consequence of achieving it. “Let a holy ambition possess our spirit,” Pico writes.