Pico's 900 Theses: the Disputation That Never Was and the Papal Ban

In December 1486 the printer Eucharius Silber issued in Rome a booklet of nine hundred propositions entitled Conclusiones nongentae. Their author, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was twenty-three and offered to debate them publicly before the learned of all Europe, even promising to pay the travel costs of those who came from afar. The project was meant to show the deep agreement among all schools of thought. Instead it ended in one of the best-known doctrinal controversies of the fifteenth century.

A Summa of All Philosophies

The theses fall into two large parts. The first reports the opinions of others, arranged by schools and nations: Latin theologians, Arab Peripatetics, Greek Platonists, Pythagoreans, Chaldeans, Egyptians and Jewish Kabbalists. The second gathers the conclusions Pico upholds in his own name, often in an attempt to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, pagan and Christian wisdom. The style is terse and lapidary, without arguments: each proposition was to be defended orally.

Among those stated in his own name are twenty-six magical conclusions and seventy-two Kabbalistic ones. In the former Pico repeats the Oration's distinction between demonic magic, which he rejects, and natural magic, which he defines as the practical part of the science of nature. In the latter he applies Kabbalistic techniques, such as the study of letters and numbers, to the interpretation of Christian mysteries.

Innocent VIII's Commission

The disputation never took place. Pope Innocent VIII appointed a commission of theologians who examined the text and singled out thirteen suspect theses, some judged heretical, others doubtful. Among them was one of the boldest propositions: no science makes us more certain of Christ's divinity than magic and Kabbalah. To the commissioners it seemed unacceptable that such ambiguous arts could support the faith.

Within a few weeks Pico replied with an Apologia defending the incriminated theses, published in 1487. He argued, among other things, that the commissioners had misunderstood the technical sense of many propositions. The gesture, however, was read as an act of disobedience. On 4 August 1487 the pope signed a bull condemning the entire collection of nine hundred conclusions and ordering it destroyed.

Flight, Arrest and Pardon

Fearing worse consequences, Pico left Italy and headed for France. Early in 1488 he was overtaken and held for a short time in the castle of Vincennes, near Paris, at the request of papal nuncios. He was freed through the pressure of French princes and of Lorenzo de' Medici, who welcomed him to Florence. Pico spent his last years there in the circle of Ficino and Poliziano. Only in 1493 did Pope Alexander VI formally absolve him.

The Conclusiones remain a unique document: nine hundred sentences condense the ambition of uniting all the world's wisdom. The ban did not prevent their circulation: the theses were reprinted in the sixteenth century with Pico's other works and read throughout Europe. The magical and Kabbalistic conclusions in particular opened the way to an idea Agrippa would make his own, that of a learned and pious magic, inseparable from philosophy and theology.