In 1486, aged twenty-three, Pico published nine hundred theses drawn from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Chaldean sources and offered to defend all of them in public debate in Rome against any comer, paying the travel costs himself. The debate never happened. A papal commission examined the theses, found thirteen suspect, and when Pico defended them in an Apologia rather than withdrawing, Innocent VIII condemned the whole set in 1487. He fled, was arrested in France, and was released through Medici influence and rehabilitated by Alexander VI in 1493. He died the next year, aged thirty-one; an exhumation in 2007 found arsenic at levels consistent with poisoning.
The introductory speech he wrote for the debate was not published in his lifetime and did not carry the title it now bears. The Oration on the Dignity of Man was named by later editors. It has been read since the nineteenth century as the manifesto of Renaissance humanism, on the strength of the passage in which God tells Adam that he has been given no fixed place or form and may make himself into whatever he chooses, neither heavenly nor earthly, free to descend to the brutes or be reborn into the divine. That passage is genuinely remarkable. It is also the preface to a magical and Kabbalistic programme, and reading it as secular humanism removes it from its argument.
Two of the condemned theses are the ones that matter here: that no science gives more certainty of Christ's divinity than magic and Kabbalah, and that natural magic is lawful. Pico is the origin of Christian Kabbalah, the claim that the Jewish mystical tradition, correctly understood, demonstrates Christian doctrine. Everything from Reuchlin through Agrippa and Khunrath to the Hebrew scaffolding of the Golden Dawn descends from that move.
Chaim Wirszubski's study established what Pico was actually reading, and the finding complicates him. He worked from Latin translations made for him by the convert Flavius Mithridates, who in places altered the texts as he translated, inserting Christological readings into the Hebrew he was rendering. Some of Pico's proof that Kabbalah confirms Christianity rests on passages his translator had already Christianised.