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Liber XX · Kabbalah

Liber XX · Kabbalah · Chapter II: Christian & Hermetic Qabalah

Pico della Mirandola: The 900 Theses, the Oration and Kabbalah

Pico della Mirandola's 900 Theses (1486) and Oration: the Kabbalistic and magical theses, the papal condemnation of 1487 and the birth of Christian Cabala.

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In December 1486 the young Italian nobleman Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) published in Rome nine hundred theses, the Conclusiones nongentae, which he offered to defend in a public debate against any scholar in Europe. Among them were the first Christian propositions drawn from Jewish Kabbalah and a claim that magic and Kabbalah were the sciences that most surely proved the divinity of Christ. The debate never took place, Pope Innocent VIII condemned the theses in 1487, and the speech Pico had written to open it, later known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man, became one of the most famous texts of the Renaissance.

Pico's Life and Education§

Giovanni Pico was born on 24 February 1463 at Mirandola, near Modena, a younger son of the family that ruled the small lordship of Mirandola and Concordia. Destined at first for the Church, he studied canon law at Bologna and then moved through the leading schools of Italy: Ferrara, Padua, where he learned Aristotelian philosophy and met the Jewish philosopher Elijah del Medigo, and Pavia, before spending a year at the University of Paris in 1485–1486. In Florence he became a friend of Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato and of the Hermetic writings, of the poet Angelo Poliziano and of Lorenzo de' Medici.

In May 1486, after a scandalous attempt to carry off a married woman at Arezzo, he withdrew to Perugia and nearby Fratta, where he studied Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic and prepared the great project of his youth: a single public disputation that would show the hidden agreement of every school of human wisdom.

The 900 Theses of 1486§

The Conclusiones were printed in Rome by Eucharius Silber on 7 December 1486, and Pico offered to pay the travel costs of scholars who came to dispute with him. The book is a list of short, often cryptic propositions without arguments, divided into two parts. The first, of some 400 theses, reports the opinions of others "according to" each authority: Latin scholastics such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Arabic philosophers such as Averroes and Avicenna, Greek Peripatetics and Platonists, Pythagoras, the "Chaldean" oracles attributed to Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus and the "Hebrew sages, the Cabalists". The second part, of roughly 500 theses, gives Pico's own views, including new proposals in physics, theology and mathematics, interpretations of the Orphic hymns and a set of magical and Kabbalistic conclusions. The text is listed in the library as the 900 Theses.

Behind the list lay the idea of a single truth expressed in many traditions, the prisca theologia or ancient theology that Ficino had traced from Hermes and Zoroaster to Plato; see Prisca Theologia. Pico went further than Ficino in two ways. He claimed that even schools that seemed opposed, such as Plato and Aristotle, or Thomists and Scotists, could be reconciled, and he added Kabbalah, a tradition no Christian philosopher before him had treated as a serious source. S. A. Farmer has argued that this ambition rested on a habit shared with medieval commentators: reading every authority so that it agreed with every other.

Kabbalah, Flavius Mithridates and the Christian Reading§

Pico could not yet read Kabbalistic literature fluently in the original. His guide was Flavius Mithridates (born Samuel ben Nissim Abulfaraj in Sicily, later known also as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada), a Jewish convert to Christianity and a gifted, temperamental linguist who had once preached a Good Friday sermon before the pope. In 1486 Mithridates translated for Pico a large library of Kabbalistic works into Latin, several thousand manuscript pages in all. Chaim Wirszubski's study of these translations showed that they included writings of the ecstatic kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, the Torah commentary of Menahem Recanati, works close to Joseph Gikatilla, the Bahir and other texts, and that Mithridates sometimes added Christian glosses of his own.

The Kabbalistic theses fall into two groups: 47 presented "according to the secret doctrine of the Hebrew Cabalist wise men", which summarise Jewish teachings on the ten sefirot, the divine names and the letters of the Torah, and 72 "according to my own opinion", in which Pico draws Christian conclusions. Here he argues that a Kabbalist reading Hebrew scripture by its methods would find the Trinity, the Incarnation and the name of Jesus encoded in it, and that the letters and numbers of sacred words carry hidden meaning. The best-known proposition, among the magical theses, states in Latin that "no science makes us more certain of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah."

Pico also gave Kabbalah a sacred pedigree. In the Oration he explains that Moses received on Sinai both the written law and a secret oral interpretation, which Ezra later wrote down in seventy books, drawing on an episode in the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras. In those books, he says, he found "not so much the Mosaic as the Christian religion". With this claim, Kabbalah entered European learning as a part of ancient wisdom; the movement it began is surveyed in Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabalah.

Magic in the Theses: Natural Magic versus Demonic Magic§

Twenty-six of Pico's own theses concern magic. He distinguished two kinds sharply. One, which depends on the work and authority of demons, he condemned as false and abominable. The other, natural magic, he presented as the practical summit of natural philosophy: the art of bringing into action the powers that God has hidden in the world, uniting things above and things below as a farmer marries the vine to the elm. Following Ficino, he included the use of words, numbers and music, especially the Orphic hymns, whose recitation he thought could have real effects if sung in the right way.

Pico then linked natural magic to Kabbalah. Natural magic works with the powers of nature; Kabbalah, in his reading, works with the higher powers of divine names and letters, and no magical operation can be effective without some element of it. This was a novel and risky synthesis. It gave later writers a model for joining Hermetic and Kabbalistic sources into a single "occult philosophy", most fully realised in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. The wider debate on natural magic in this period is described in Occult Philosophy: Ficino, Pico, Agrippa and the Magical Cosmos.

The Oration on the Dignity of Man§

Pico wrote a long Latin speech to open the disputation. It was never delivered and was printed only after his death, in the collected works edited by his nephew Gianfrancesco Pico at Bologna in 1496; the title by which it is now known was attached by later editors. Its first part retells the creation of Adam. Having given every other creature a fixed nature, God places the human being at the centre of the world without a fixed seat or form, free to sink to the level of beasts or to rise, through philosophy and contemplation, to the level of angels and to union with God. Pico calls the human being a chameleon and pictures the ascent as a climb up Jacob's ladder through moral philosophy, dialectic, natural philosophy and theology.

The second part justifies the disputation and its sources: the value of studying every school, the hidden harmony of philosophers, the dignity of natural magic and the Christian truth concealed in Kabbalah. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers, starting from the opening pages, made the Oration a manifesto of humanist individualism and human self-making. Brian Copenhaver's Magic and the Dignity of Man (2019) has argued that this reading is largely modern, and that Pico's aim was not human autonomy but an ascetic and mystical ascent, shaped by Kabbalah and Neoplatonism, in which the self is finally lost in God.

Condemnation, Later Works and Legacy§

Innocent VIII suspended the debate early in 1487 and appointed a commission, which found thirteen theses suspect, among them the claim about magic and Kabbalah and propositions on the descent of Christ into hell and on the Eucharist. Pico hastily published an Apologia defending them. The pope responded with a bull, dated 4 August 1487, condemning all nine hundred theses and ordering copies burned. Pico fled to France, was arrested near Lyon in early 1488 and briefly held at Vincennes, and was released through the intervention of Lorenzo de' Medici. He settled near Florence, came under the influence of the preacher Girolamo Savonarola, and was absolved by Pope Alexander VI in 1493.

In his last years he wrote the Heptaplus (1489), a sevenfold interpretation of the creation story in Genesis that ends with a Kabbalistic analysis of the letters of its first word; the short treatise On Being and One (1491), listed in the library as Of Being and Unity; and a long attack on divinatory astrology, published posthumously in 1496. Pico died in Florence on 17 November 1494, at thirty-one, as the French army of Charles VIII entered the city. Poisoning was suspected at the time, and a forensic study of his remains published in 2018 reported high levels of arsenic, though the circumstances remain uncertain.

Pico's Kabbalistic theses opened a new field: Johannes Reuchlin built on them in Germany, and the Christian Cabala that followed shaped Renaissance occult philosophy and much of later Western esotericism.

Frequently asked questions§

What were Pico della Mirandola's 900 Theses?§

They were nine hundred short propositions printed in Rome in December 1486, which Pico offered to defend in a public debate. They summarised the views of many philosophical and religious traditions and added his own conclusions, including the first Christian theses based on Kabbalah.

Why were Pico's theses condemned?§

A papal commission judged thirteen theses suspect on points of doctrine, including the claim that magic and Kabbalah prove Christ's divinity. When Pico defended them in print, Innocent VIII condemned the entire set in 1487.

Did Pico actually deliver the Oration on the Dignity of Man?§

No. The speech was written to open the planned debate, which was cancelled. It was first printed in 1496, two years after his death, and its familiar title was added later.

Was Pico the founder of Christian Kabbalah?§

He is usually regarded as its founder, because his theses were the first systematic attempt to use Kabbalah to support Christian doctrine. Earlier converts had used Jewish esoteric ideas in polemics, but Pico treated Kabbalah as a source of philosophical wisdom.

Sources and further reading§