Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is the young Florentine philosopher whose Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486) — written as a preface to nine hundred theses he proposed to defend before the papal court — has come down as the foundational statement of Renaissance humanism and, for the Seba lineage, as the first synthesis of Platonic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic material into a single account of what it is to be human.

Pico’s thesis — that the human being, alone among creatures, has no fixed nature and is called to become whatever it will through the exercise of its own choice — is the philosophical kernel that ran from Renaissance Platonism into Romantic and post-Romantic accounts of self-making, and which Jung inherited through his reading of the Hermetic and alchemical corpus. Pico introduced the serious study of the Kabbalah into Christian Europe, arguing in De arte cabalistica that the Jewish esoteric tradition confirmed Christian doctrine — a claim that established one of the major channels by which Hebrew mystical material reached Jung through the Hermetic-alchemical transmission. See marsilio-ficino for his intellectual partner.

Relationships

• marsilio-ficino
• plato
• corpus-hermeticum