900 Conclusions

A groundbreaking edition of controversial theses proposed by the most famous philosopher of the Italian Renaissance.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), the most famous philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, had ambitions in line with his talents, especially in philosophical theology. His boldest venture urged Christians to save their souls with Jewish mysticism—Kabbalah—while also offering to debate anyone in Italy about his project. In 1486, he announced plans for a disputation in Rome on 900 theses, but Pope Innocent VIII quashed the event with an indictment for crimes against Christian orthodoxy.

Pico’s theses cited well-known scholastic authorities: Muslims like Ibn Rushd, Jews like Maimonides, and Christians like John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. But as Brian Copenhaver demonstrates in Nine Hundred Conclusions, many of Pico’s scholastic sources were filtered through a less renowned Thomist theologian named Jean Cabrol (Capreolus). Pico also sought to enrich Christian theology with newly available authorities from the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions as well as theosophical texts associated with ancient Orphism and Hermetism. Supreme among his authorities were theses taken from medieval Jewish Kabbalah, which Pico regarded as an angelic revelation and tried to appropriate for Christianity. The present volume is a ground-breaking contribution, containing a new critical edition of the Latin text along with a new translation into contemporary English, a detailed introduction, and a commentary discussing each of the 900 theses individually.