Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was a Florentine philosopher who believed that all the great traditions of thought, rightly understood, said the same thing — and who spent his short life trying to prove it. Count of a small northern Italian territory, prodigiously learned, he moved in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic circle and read in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic at an age when most scholars had barely begun one of them.

His ambition took its sharpest form in 1486, when he composed nine hundred theses — drawn from Latin and Greek philosophy, Arabic commentators, the Hermetic writings, and the Jewish Kabbalah — and proposed to defend them in public debate in Rome against all comers, offering to pay the travel of any scholar who would argue. The disputation never happened. A papal commission condemned thirteen of the theses, and Pico’s defense made matters worse; he was briefly arrested while fleeing to France before powerful patrons secured his return to Florence. The introductory speech he had written for the occasion circulated separately and is now read as the Oration on the Dignity of Man. In it he has God tell the newly made human being that it alone has no fixed nature and may shape itself toward the beasts or toward the divine — a passage later generations took as a charter of human freedom, though Pico’s own point was the soul’s capacity to rise.

What set him apart from his contemporaries was the use he made of Hebrew sources. Working with Jewish converts and teachers, Pico became the first Christian to treat Kabbalah as a hidden confirmation of Christianity, arguing that its techniques disclosed Christian truths in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. The project he began — Christian Kabbalah — became one of the durable currents of Western esotericism, carried on by Johann Reuchlin and many after him. Scholarship has worked hard to recover what Pico actually drew on, and how much he understood; the picture is of a brilliant, hurried mind assembling more than any one person could master.

He held that Plato and Aristotle agreed at bottom, that Moses and the Greek poets veiled one wisdom, that Hermes Trismegistus and the Hebrew prophets pointed the same way. This conviction — that the traditions are facets of a single truth, and that the philosopher’s task is to gather them — is the ancestor of what later writers would call the perennial philosophy. He died at thirty-one, in the year Charles VIII marched into Italy; an analysis of his remains in 2007 found arsenic, consistent with the long rumor that he had been poisoned. He had by then turned toward the austere preaching of Savonarola, and was buried in a Dominican habit.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Marsilio Ficino · Nicholas Of Cusa · Pythagoras