Pico della Mirandola and the 900 Theses
In the winter of 1486, a young nobleman put up a notice in Rome. He was twenty-three years old, and he offered to defend nine hundred propositions drawn from every school of thought he knew, against any scholar in Europe who cared to challenge him.
He even promised to pay the travel costs of anyone who came from far away. His name was Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola. The great debate never happened, but the notice, the propositions and the speech he wrote to introduce them made him famous for five centuries.
A Prodigy of Mirandola
Pico was born in 1463 into a small noble family in northern Italy. He studied canon law at Bologna, and then philosophy at Ferrara and Padua, where Aristotle was the chief authority. He later spent time in Paris. He learned Latin and Greek, and he taught himself Hebrew and some Arabic, with the help of teachers.
In Florence, he became a friend of Marsilio Ficino, who was translating Plato and the Hermetic writings, and of the poet Angelo Poliziano.
He seems to have been a man of great charm, and also of restless ambition. He was handsome and rich, and he would have preferred to be both a scholar and a free spirit.
The Nine Hundred Theses
The Conclusiones of 1486, known as the 900 Theses, were meant to be a public debate. They gather opinions from an enormous variety of sources: the Greek philosophers, the Latin scholastics, Arabic thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes, Jewish writers, the Hermetic texts and the Chaldean Oracles, a set of Greek verses then thought to be very ancient. Pico's idea was that these schools were not enemies. If read with care, they pointed to the same truths.
This aim of harmony was a hallmark of the Renaissance, and Pico pushed it farther than most. He believed that wisdom had been scattered among many peoples, and that a patient scholar could bring the fragments together. Whether this was possible is another matter. Critics have long noted that his method sometimes made the sources say more than they did.
Magic and Kabbalah
Pico is often called the founder of Christian Kabbalah. He read Hebrew texts with the help of a teacher, Flavius Mithridates, a Jewish convert to Christianity who translated for him. In the Theses, he claimed that no science gave better proof of the divinity of Christ than "magic and Kabbalah."
By "magic," he meant natural magic: the study of hidden powers and sympathies in nature, which he distinguished from the work of demons.
His reading of Kabbalah was Christian and filtered through Neoplatonism, and Jewish scholars would not have recognized all of it. Even so, it opened the door. A generation later, Johannes Reuchlin wrote the first major Christian books on the subject, and the Western occult tradition drew on this stream for centuries.
The Oration
The speech meant to open the debate has come down to us under a later title, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico imagines God speaking to Adam at the creation. All other creatures, God says, have a fixed place and nature.
Adam alone is given none, so that he may shape himself as he chooses: he can sink to the level of brutes or rise to the divine. The human being, Pico says, is a kind of chameleon, who can take many forms.
Readers have admired the speech for its confident spirit, and it is often called a manifesto of Renaissance humanism. It is worth noting that Pico himself was a deeply religious man, and his freedom was a freedom to seek God. The idea of a person who chooses their own path has had a long afterlife.
The Church's Reaction
Pope Innocent VIII appointed a commission to examine the Theses. In 1487, it condemned thirteen of them, and the debate was cancelled. Pico wrote a defense, the Apologia, which only made matters worse. He fled to France, where he was arrested in 1488 at the pope's request. Friends, including Lorenzo de' Medici of Florence, intervened, and he was released and allowed to settle near Florence.
He changed his life after this. He wrote the Heptaplus, a commentary on the creation story in Genesis, and, remarkably, a large work against astrology, which he thought was both false and a threat to human freedom. It was published after his death. Many modern readers are surprised to find that this hero of the occult revival was a firm critic of fortune-telling by the stars.
A Short Life
Pico died in Florence in November 1494, at the age of thirty-one. Rumors of poison followed him, and in 2007 an Italian team that examined the remains of Pico and Poliziano reported traces of arsenic, which suggested that the poet and the philosopher might have been poisoned.
The question is not settled, and the cause may be unknown. He was buried in the church of San Marco, in a Dominican habit, and Savonarola is said to have preached at his funeral.
Closing
Pico left his work unfinished, as young geniuses often do. What he did leave is a spirit: the belief that truth is large enough to hold many voices, and that a person can choose to grow toward the light. We may doubt his sources and smile at his boldness.
Yet a man who invites every scholar in Europe to a debate, and offers to pay their fare, has understood something about the love of learning that does not age.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Pico della Mirandola and the Kabbalistic Theses
- Pico della Mirandola and the Oration on the Dignity of Man: The Alchemy of the Will
- Pico della Mirandola and the Heptaplus
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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