Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the most precocious and universally ambitious thinker of the Renaissance — a young nobleman who proposed to defend nine hundred theses drawn from every philosophical and theological tradition known to him before the scholars of Europe. His Oration on the Dignity of Man, written as the introduction to this event, became the manifesto of Renaissance humanism.

The Oration argued that God had given humanity no fixed nature but the freedom to shape itself — to descend to brutishness or ascend to divinity through one's own choices. Pico drew on Plato, Aristotle, the Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and Arabic philosophy in a synthesis without precedent. His attempt to reconcile all philosophical traditions into a prisca theologia — an ancient universal wisdom underlying all religion — defined the ecumenical spirit of Renaissance Neoplatonism. The Church condemned many of his theses; he died in mysterious circumstances at thirty-one.