Oration on the Dignity of Man

...to the initiates, the true interpretation of the law handed by God to Moses, it received the name Kabbalah, which in Hebrew means reception original: "receptio"; this implies that he left this teaching behind not in written monuments, but in a sequential series of revelations, transmitted as if by right of inheritance from one person to another.

After the Jews were saved by Cyrus Cyrus the Great, the Persian King who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem in 538 BCE. from the Babylonian captivity and the temple was restored under Zerubbabel, they turned to the restoration of the law. Ezra, who was then the head of the Church, revised the books of Moses. He clearly understood that—due to the exiles, murders, flights, and the captivity of the Israelite people—the custom established by the ancestors of transmitting the teaching orally could no longer be maintained. Lest the secrets of the highest teaching revealed to Moses by God be lost in the future (as it was impossible to keep the commentaries in memory any longer), he decreed at a gathering of the most outstanding scholars of that time that each should contribute whatever they had preserved in their memory concerning the mysteries of the law. These invited scholars were to record everything in seventy books (according to the number of scholars then in the Sanhedrin The supreme judicial and ecclesiastical council of ancient Jerusalem.).

And so that you, Fathers, might believe more than just my word in this matter, hear the words of Ezra himself, who spoke thus:

“After forty days had passed, the Most High spoke. The things you have written first, make public, so that the worthy and the unworthy may read them; but the seventy latter books you shall keep, to deliver them to the most learned men of your people. For in them is the vein of the intellect, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge. And so I did.”⁷² This quote is from the apocryphal book 2 Esdras 14:44–46.

These are the words of Ezra. These are the books of the science of Kabbalah; in them, Ezra clearly and with good reason identified what is the vein of the intellect original: "vena intellectus", that is, the inexpressible theology of the supersubstantial divinity; the fountain of wisdom original: "sapientiae fons", that is, the authentic metaphysics of intelligible and angelic forms; and the river of science original: "scientiae flumen", that is, the most reliable philosophy of nature.

Pope Sixtus IV⁷³ Pope from 1471–1484, known for commissioning the Sistine Chapel and his interest in humanist scholarship., the predecessor of the current Pope Innocent VIII⁷⁴ Pope from 1484–1492, under whose reign Pico was writing., under whom we now prosper, carefully and diligently ensured that these books were published in the Latin language for the common benefit of our religion. When he died, three of them had been translated into Latin. Among the Jews, these books are held in such reverence today that no one under the age of forty is permitted to touch them. I acquired them for myself at no small price and have reread them tirelessly with great care. I saw in them—God is my witness—not so much the religion of Moses as the Christian religion. There I read the same things we read daily in Paul⁷⁵, Dionysius⁷⁶ Dionysius the Areopagite, a Christian theologian and philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century whose works were highly influential in the Middle Ages., Jerome⁷⁷, and Augustine: the mystery of the Trinity, the incarnation of the Word, the divinity of the Messiah, original sin, its atonement by Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem, the fall of the demons, the angelic choirs, purgatory, and the punishments of hell. In matters relating to philosophy, you truly hear Pythagoras and Plato, whose first principles are so connected to the Christian faith that our Augustine gave immense thanks to God that the books of the Platonists had fallen into his hands.

In general, there is almost no point of dispute between us and the Jews on which...