Pico della Mirandola

The 23-year-old Florentine count who put Kabbalah on Christian Europe's syllabus: hired converts to translate a library of kabbalistic texts, planted them in his 900 Theses, and made "Cabala" a Renaissance password. His Oration on the Dignity of Man — humanism's manifesto — leans on the kabbalistic picture of the human as the being who can climb or descend the whole chain.