Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the brilliant young prince of the Florentine Renaissance, a friend of Ficino and a prodigy of learning who mastered Hebrew and Arabic alongside Greek and Latin. He set out to defend nine hundred theses drawn from every tradition — Plato and Aristotle, the Hermetica, the Kabbalah, the Arabs — convinced that all true wisdom is ultimately one, the ancient theology.

His Oration on the Dignity of Man, often called the manifesto of the Renaissance, exalts the human being as the one creature without a fixed nature, free to ascend by its own choice toward the divine or sink toward the beasts. As the pioneer of the Christian Cabala, Pico did more than anyone to draw Jewish mysticism into the stream of Western esotericism.