Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

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.

Pico's most consequential act was not the nine hundred theses but the claim buried among them: that no science gives greater certainty of the divinity of Christ than magic and kabbalah. To make it he needed texts, and he bought them. The convert Flavius Mithridates translated for him an enormous corpus of kabbalistic works into Latin, thousands of folio pages prepared at speed in the 1480s, and Pico read them as he read everything, as fragments of a single ancient theology whose centre was Christian truth. Out of that reading came the founding move of Christian Kabbalah: the techniques of the Jewish tradition, the sefirot, the permutations of letters, the names of God, redeployed as proofs and instruments within a Christian frame.

Reuchlin took the project further, and for two centuries Christian Hebraists followed the trail Pico opened. The oration he set at the front of the theses, on the dignity of man, with its God telling Adam that he may fashion himself into whatever form he chooses, became the most quoted page of the Renaissance long after the debate it was written to open was banned. His last completed campaign reversed field: the Disputations against divinatory astrology, published after his early death in 1494, attacked the astrologers' claim to read particulars from the heavens, and it did more damage to learned astrology than any work before Kepler. Both projects came from one conviction: that human dignity is incompatible with fated stars.