In the supposedly vastly superior, enlightened, benevolent occult world, in comparison to which the true Catholic Church before the Renaissance is contrasted to ill effect, there is no such equality before the law. There is no right to access all the truth which the Son of God related while on earth. As noted, Pico expressed this elitism in his Oratio De Hominis Dignitate, more commonly known as The Oration on the Dignity of Man. But to what man is Pico referring, concerning this dignity? It is not Humanity. It is not the People. Rather, it is the “perfect” ones:
“…to disclose to the people the more secret mysteries, things hidden under the bark of the law and the rough covering of words, the secrets of the highest divinity, what was that other than to give what is holy to dogs and to cast pearls among swine? Consequently, it was not human prudence but divine command to keep these things secret from the people, and to communicate them to the perfect…” 3
Here in a few lines is the encapsulation of the ideology which had thrust itself up from what had been only cracks in the cement of the medieval ecclesiastical edifice, to become the full-blown arcana of the Renaissance Church of Rome, empowering its systematic child molestation, lying (“mental reservation”), usury banking and “white” magic which has enveloped the hierarchy of the Church of Rome from then until now, no matter which “saintly” pontiff was at the helm. It is actuated by keeping the reality of these mortal sins and crimes, which flourish sub rosa, hidden from the people, i.e. the parish priests and the laity.
Pico cites Christ’s words in Matthew 7:6 concerning dogs and swine, so as to maintain the legitimacy of the secretskeeping occult ideology in a Christian milieu. Our Lord, however, is most certainly not referring exclusively to the peasants and the poor or, for that matter, the wealthy and the officials, when he warned us not to give that which is sacred and holy to dogs and swine. As St. Peter declared, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34). This is a truth that the Neoplatonic-Hermetic cabal cannot countenance, since that movement is based on division, while laying claim to the pluralist title of unifier and reconciler. The human being who behaves like a dog or a swine according to Jesus, who turns and rends the man or woman who conveys great truths, is any person, from PhD. to peasant, who lacks the vision to perceive that a profound truth has been freely and openly related, and lacks the gratitude to appreciate the magnitude of the gift. Contrary to Pico, Matthew 7:6 is not a mandate to exclude the common people, the am ha’aretz, from realities which the “perfect” may savor at will. To accuse the people of being pigs and dogs in toto, holds them up to contempt and constitutes an abominable derogation of their dignity as human beings. If we comprehend the depravity of the mind chained to occult idolatry, then we should not be surprised at the doublestandard and chutzpah of Pico in undermining the supposed objective of his own homily.
“Ficino’s pupil, Pico della Mirandola…used Qabalistic and Neoplatonic ideas in an attempt to find common ground between Christianity, Judaism and Islam (which) brought accusations of heresy against him…Pope Alexander VI absolved him of heresy in 1493. Another advocate of Qabalism was the Franciscan (friar) Francesco di Giorgio…whose De Harmonia Mundi combined Qabalism with a preoccupation with the ideas of universal harmony…” 4
Pico was not Father Ficino’s student alone. He studied canon law at the University of Bologna (1477-78), and theology at the University of Ferrara (1479), Padua (1480-1482), Pavia (1483-1484) and Paris (1485-1486). He studied with Ficino from 1484-1485. Pico taught that there was a great secret underlying the world’s significant religions, an occulta concatenatio (“hidden connection”) between them indicating their common root and heritage.
“Much of what Giovanni Pico della Mirandola has to say about the Tetragrammaton is found in the 900 Conclusiones, or Theses, which he planned to debate in Rome in 1486. This extraordinarily daring and innovative program blended Classical, Late Antique and medieval philosophy; Christian Kabbalah; the Hermetic tradition; and Pythagorean mathematics into a syncretic system designed to expose the unity and power of Ancient Truth and its ability to work both reformation and miracles…The antecedents of this bold project may lie in the highly syncretistic Neoplatonic systems developed in Late Antiquity after Plotinus—as in Proclus’s Platonic Theology, for example…
“The openness of Medici Florence to the generous integration of these diverse traditions no doubt provided a sympathetic context for the development of Christian Kabbalah…the extraordinary effervescence in European culture in Florence was also stimulated by the first major synthesis of Renaissance thought and Kabbalah…Pico without ambiguity declares that Kabbalah ‘is the key to understanding the marvelous power of Christ’s name…’ Pico’s use of Gematria, manipulation of numerical values of Hebrew words, is enthusiastic and prepares us for the later work of Reuchlin. Pico himself compares his Scientiam alphabetariae revolutionis with the Ars combinadi of Ramon Lull (c. 1235-1316)….” 5
Pico described his agenda in these terms, “The following nine hundred dialectical, moral, physical, mathematical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and kabbalistic opinions, including his own and those of the wise Chaldaeans, Arabs, Hebrews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Latins, will be argued publicly by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Count of Concord… The doctrines to be debated are proposed separately but in respect to the parts of philosophy they are intermingled as in a medley, everything mixed together.”
His Nine Hundred Theses (also known as Nine Hundred Conclusions), was published in Rome on December 7, 1486 by Eucharius Silber. Copies were dispatched to Catholic universities and posted throughout the “Eternal City.” Pico was not seriously expecting to actually be debated by the hierarchy of the Church. His announcement was a public relations device to garner attention for his Theses which would win admirers throughout the West, thanks in part to the notoriety of the “proposed debate” concerning their merits and validity.
The see-no-evil academic Establishment takes at face value Pope Innocent VIII’s pro forma condemnation of thirteen of the 900 Theses. This narrative sets up the caricatured, set-piece psychodrama of Liberated Lover of Learning vs. Benighted, “Burn ‘em at the Stake!” conservative Catholic authority figures. The pope could not publicly do otherwise than what he did when a large number of Pico’s Theses centered on the rehabilitation of rabbinic theology, specifically the demonic Kabbalah. In 1487, no pontiff, no matter how much he might have been in secret sympathy with Pico, could have accepted with even neutrality the conclusion that a Judaic manual of black magic (Kabbalah) “testified of Christ” and was in fact a Christian text, as Pico had boldly proclaimed.
It was the outré aspect of the alleged proposed debate that electrified the Catholic intelligentsia and burnished Pico’s reputation in what would soon become, in the sixteenth century, an above ground movement. Apologists may point to Innocent VIII’s rhetoric against Pico’s Theses all the like. It does not alter the fact that Pico, and most of his followers after his death, were virtually invulnerable to papal repression or inquisition. Eventually his followers were promoted to the highest levels of the Church, including popes who took Pico’s counsels to heart.
Those who approach the subject of the papacy in the Renaissance who trust in surface appearances are going to be duped. To consider Innocent VIII an anti-occult pontiff is a sad jest. He did what was required of him in the particular timeperiod when the advancement of the occult virus depended upon gestures that appeared to retard it. Consequently, in the superficial legend, Innocent VIII is the anti-occult pope who interdicted Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Actually, Innocent made the necessary gestures for appearance sake of impeding Pico, and with those gestures he mollified conservatives. The record shows that the pope’s token and brief obstruction of Pico actually served to shield the Kabbalistic-heretic from demands from conservatives for stronger measures against him. By slapping Pico’s wrist, Pico’s enemies were pacified. To take this papal ruse at face value is wishful thinking on the part of those seeking grounds
for their own confirmation-bias concerning the “staunchly conservative” Innocent VIII. False beliefs like this are founded upon ignorance. It was Cardinal Lorenzo Cibo, the “staunchly conservative” future Pope Innocent VIII, who was the earliest patron of Flavius Mithridates, the Kabbalistic Judaic who, thanks to future Pope Innocent, became preacher to the papal household of Sixtus IV, Pico’s handler, initiator and a homosexual suitor for Pico’s affections, as well as a Professor at a papally-chartered college. By bringing Mithridates to Rome and sponsoring his rise inside the Church, Innocent VIII while a cardinal made possible the Kabbalism of Pico.
Pico’s books survived to proceed to shape the intellectual life of the Catholic world long after Pico and Innocent VIII were in their graves.6 In remarkably short order a reprint of the first edition appeared the next year (1487) in Ingolstadt, home to the University of Ingolstadt where Reuchlin, and much later Adam Weishaupt, would be members of the faculty. Its remarkable immediate re-publication in what would become, in the late eighteenth century, the capital of the Bavarian Illuminati (a city which, in 1487 was entirely in the orbit of the Church of Rome), is seldom mentioned. Behind the curtain of received opinion and consensus reality, Pico’s magnum opus was circulating without hindrance, issued by a German Catholic printing press. It was in high demand in record time. It was reprinted without interdiction in Catholic France (Paris) in 1532, in Catholic Italy (Venice) in 1557, and again in Paris in 1601. The genie was out of the bottle.
Whole sections of the Nine Hundred Theses contain propositions undermining or contradicting St. Thomas Aquinas. Yet modern Catholic writers frequently misrepresent Pico as a Thomist. Only because the details of what constitutes the Kabbalah are largely unknown or obscured can Pico, for whom the doctrines of the Kabbalah are at the heart of his philosophia nova, be presented by “Catholic scholars” as supposedly in agreement with St. Thomas Aquinas. The depth of deception and misdirection is instructive.
“Pico’s historians have been especially insistent on an impossible agreement between himself and the writer he planned to attack most violently at Rome, St. Thomas Aquinas. In part, at least, systematic reasons lay behind this conflict, since Thomas’s system regularly violated the cosmic symmetries critical to Pico’s ‘new philosophy’…
“Pico’s supposed agreement with Thomas has been especially emphasized by Catholic historians including (Avery) Dulles (1941) and DiNapoli (1965); also cf. the French theologians De Lubac (1974) and Roulier (1989). Renaissance antecedents for this reading were provided by Gianfrancesco Pico (his nephew), who in his (posthumous) spiritualized biography of his uncle (Opera, fol. 5v), claimed that whatever differences Pico had with Thomas early in life…Pico…disagreed with the Dominican theologian on only ‘three or four out of ten thousand propositions…’
“The extreme violence of Pico’s early polemics with the Dominicans is suggested in Pico’s defense of his first examined thesis in (his) Apology, 7in Opera, 125-150…Gianfrancesco also quotes Pico’s passing praise for Thomas in the Heptaplus, which was written while Pico was actively attempting to repair his differences with the Dominicans…” 8
Later in the Theses, Pico favorably quotes “the Arab…Moses the Egyptian.” This is reference to Rabbi Moses Maimonides who was no Arab though he was influential among the family of the Kurdish Islamic King (and conqueror of Jerusalem), Saladin. In his Avodah Zarah laws, in Avodat Kochavim chapter 10, Maimonides, a legal authority of great repute in Ashkenazi Judaism, issued binding admonitions for killing Christians. Of Jesus Christ he wrote, “May the name of the wicked rot.” 9
In spite of this hate-speech, Maimonides is included in Pico’s synthesis and here it is apropos to observe the shapeshifting quality of syncretists like Pico and the extent to which theological and spiritual identities are manipulated and fused. For example, we can point to the very real, fundamental differences between Plato and Aristotle but by the time of the emergence of the first wave of Neoplatonists in Rome, Athens, Alexandria and Apamea in the 3rd to the 5th centuries after Christ, the differences between Platonists and Aristotelians were being blurred and for a time a symbiosis was crafted. There is not a strict respect for objective truth in syncretic systems, as for example in the massive syncretic tome by Proclus, Platonic Theology, which is featured in Pico’s Theses. The Church of Rome from the Renaissance onward is a shapeshifting enterprise deeply committed to relativism and situation ethics concealed beneath a stern dogmatic veneer. The Catholic Pico, and before him Proclus, are personifications of this “modernist heresy” which is anything but modern. “Proclus’s goal was to demonstrate that every line of Platonic Scriptures was in total harmony with every other—with the supreme syncretic principle that ‘all things exist in all things in their own mode,’ ensuring that in times of special exegetical need, any god, mythopoeic image, or abstract concept could stand in for any other…Pico planned to correlate this material further with the ten Kabbalistic sefirot, with Pseudo-Dionysius’s hierarchies of angels, and related syncretic constructs…that Pico found in the ‘Chaldean Theologians,’ Pythagoras, Mercury (Hermes) Trisemegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus etc.” 10
The final destination of this syncretic peregrination is the lie that God and Satan are one. Pico in his Nine Hundred Theses insinuates this as follows: “Eaedem sunt litterae nominis cacodemonis qui est princeps mundi huius et nominis dei Triagrammaton, et qui sciuerit ordinare transpositionem deducet unum ex alio” (“The letters of the name of the evil spirit who is the prince of this world and of the three-letter name of God are the same, and whoever knows how to order the transposition can deduce one from another”).
In his Conclusiones Magicae of his Theses, Pico distinguishes between black magic and good magic. The former he terms potestatum harum tenebrarum (“powers of darkness”), and the latter he designates as “natural magic,” and asserts that the Church permits it and does not prohibit it: “Magia naturalis licita est et non prohibita.” From there he proceeds to state the most grievous heresy of his Theses, which eventually infiltrated elements of the hierarchy of the Church of Rome, never to be completely eradicated: “Nulla est scientia quae nos magis certificet de diuinitate Christi quam magia et cabala” (“There is no science that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and kabbalah”).
He further alludes to the word magic and gematria incumbent on his version of supposed “angelic” sorcery: “Ex secretioris philosophiae principiis necesse est confiteri plus posse caracteres et figuras in opere Magico, quam possit quaecunque qualitas materialis” (“Out of the principles of the more secret philosophy it is necessary to acknowledge that characters and figures are more powerful in a magical work than any material quality”). Thomas Aquinas explicitly condemned as demonic the use of words and numbers in magical rites.
In his section of the Theses on “Conclusions Cabalisticae,” Pico proceeds to put forth delirium for occult suckers and the self-deceived, i.e. that every follower of the Kabbalah is a believer in Jesus: “Every Hebrew Kabbalist, following the principles and sayings of the science of Kabbalah, is inevitably forced to concede, without addition, omission or variation, precisely what the Catholic faith of Christians maintains concerning the Trinity and the divine Person, Father, Son and Holy Ghost…No Hebrew Kabbalist can deny that the name of Jesus, if we interpret it following the method and principles of the Kabbalah, signifies precisely all this and nothing else, that is: God the Son and the Wisdom of the Father, united to human nature in the unity of assumption through the third Person of God, who is the most ardent fire of love.”
There is no denying that Pico, with Italian Medici backing, forged the symbiosis of Judaism and Catholicism by founding the tradition of “Christian Kabbalah,” an oxymoron if ever there was one. He did so under the direction of his handler, the aforementioned Guglielmo Raimondo de Moncada, the enigmatic Judaic “convert to Catholicism” who was known by his alias, “Flavius Mithridates.” With papal patronage Moncada/Mithridates was appointed Professor of Orienta
l Languages at the Studium Urbis in Rome in 1482. He was an early teacher of Pico.11
“…there are reasons to suspect a sinister role for Flavius Mithradites, whose reputation in the Renaissance as something of a con man was apparently well-deserved. Pico’s involvement with this colorful figure—who liked to style himself as Pico’s scorned lover—constitutes one of the strangest personal stories of the period…” 12
There can be no question of Pico’s esteem for Judaism’s Oral traditions which formed the Talmud, and its black magic textbooks classified under the heading, Kabbalah (“cabala”). Referring to the Oral Law traditions in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico wrote:
“Esdras, then governor of the church, after he corrected the book of Moses, clearly knew that the custom instituted by the forefathers of passing the doctrine on by hand could not be preserved through the exiles, slaughters, flights, and captivity of the people of Israel, and that the secrets of heavenly doctrine, granted to him by God, would henceforth perish, as they could not remain long in memory without the mediation of writings.”
Pico moves from the Oral Law tradition in general to an elucidation of the origin of the Kabbalah specifically: “Consequently, he decreed that all the wise men who were then left should be called together, and each of them should bring together what he remembered about the mysteries of the law. After scribes were summoned, it should then be written down in seventy volumes, for there were about that many wise men in the Sanhedrin. Do not take my word only for this, fathers, but listen to Esdras himself speaking:
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 22
