History of Italian Philosophy
VIBS Volume 191 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon Daniel B. Gallagher William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry
Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Alan Milchman Alan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters John R. Welch Thomas Woods
a volume in Values in Italian Philosophy VIP Daniel B. Gallagher, Editor
History of Italian Philosophy Eugenio Garin
Volume I Introduction by Leon Pompa
Translated from Italian and Edited by Giorgio Pinton
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - Italy
[email protected] - www.seps.it
Cover Design: Studio Pollmann Cover photo: © Clara Natoli Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2321-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS VOLUME I
Translator’s Preface
xix
Introduction by Leon Pompa
xxi
Prologue: Is a National Philosophy Possible? By Eugenio Garin 1. The Evaluation of the Italian Philosophical Tradition of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Renaissance Considered as the Beginning of a National Philosophy 2. Vincenzo Gioberti 3. Bertrando Spaventa 4. Roberto Ardigò and the Positivists 5. Giovanni Gentile and the Idealist Historiography 6. Conclusive Considerations Notice of Eugenio Garin (1966)
xxxix
xxxix xlii xliv xlvii xlix liii lix
HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY PART ONE THE MEDIEVAL HERITAGE ONE From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century 1. Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great 2. The Italian Cultural Centers 3. Lanfranc of Pavia 4. Peter Damian 5. Anselm of Aosta 6. Peter Lombard 7. Arnold of Brescia 8. Heretical Unrest and Movements 9. Joachim of Fiore 10. Francis of Assisi 11. The Eternal Gospel. Ubertino of Casale TWO Translations from the Greek and the Arabic 1. Italy and the Byzantine Culture The Swabians. Michael Scot 2. Astrologists, Epicureans, and Averroists The “Sicilian Questions”
3 3 5 8 11 13 19 21 23 24 26 29 33 33 37
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THREE St. Bonaventure and Franciscan Thought 1. Characteristics of St. Bonaventure’s Thought Illumination 2. God and Things. Being 3. Exemplarism 4. Creation 5. Angels. Human Beings. Plurality of Forms 6. Mathew of Acquasparta FOUR St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomism 1. Life of St. Thomas 2. Thomistic Formulation 3. Need for Concreteness and Communication Nature and Grace. Faith and Reason 4. Knowledge 5. God: Essence and Existence 6. Analogy, Voluntarism, and Intellectualism Eternity of the World. Creation 7. The Order of Being and the Angels 8. The Human Being and the Problem of Individuation 9. Plurality of Forms 10. The Sensible 11. Beatitude 12. Characteristics of the Thomistic Philosophy 13. Italian Thomists FIVE Aristotelianism and Averroism 1. The Presumed “Averroism” of Pietro d’Abano Guido Bonatti 2. Cecco d’Ascoli 3. John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua SIX The Thought of Dante 1. The Problem of Dante’s Philosophy 2. What Philosophy is for Dante 3. “La Donna Gentile.” Philosophy and Theology Morality. Martha and Mary 4. The Sciences. Guido Vernani The Averroism of Dante The De Monarchia
41 41 45 48 50 52 55 57 57 59 60 64 66 68 70 73 76 79 80 82 84 89 89 91 93 95 95 97 102 108
Contents 5. Language
vii 114
SEVEN The Decline of Scholasticism 1. Giles of Rome The Polemic with Henry of Ghent Giles of Rome and Thomas Aquinas 2. Giles of Viterbo and Agostino of Ancona 3. Gerard of Bologna and Iacopo of Ascoli Hugolin of Orvieto
117 117 121 122
PART TWO THE AGE OF HUMANISM EIGHT The Origins of Humanism 1. Middle Ages and Humanism Consciousness of Renovation 2. The Interpretation of Burdach Renovatio and Rebirth 3. Cola di Rienzo 4. The Religion of the Humanists 5. The Crisis of Scholasticism Scotism. Ockhamism 6. New Lines of Orientation NINE From Petrarch to Salutati 1. Albertino Mussato The Love of Petrarch for the Ancients Studia Humanitatis and Pietas Solitude and Death 2. Cicero and Augustine. Petrarch and Luigi Marsili 3. Science and Philosophy. Plato and Petrarch Barlaam and Leonzio Pilato 4. Petrarch and Aristotle. Against Science 5. Coluccio Salutati and Petrarch. Francesco Landini The Thought of Salutati 6. The De saeculo et religione 7. The De fato Eulogy of Socrates. Grace and Freedom 8. Martha and Mary 9. Law and Medicine 10. Giovanni of Imola. Niccoletto Vernia and Galateo
129 129 130 132 133 134 137 139
139 142 144 147 151 153 155 159 162 165
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TEN The World of Humanity 1. Luigi Marsili The Meetings of Santo Spirito Niccolò Niccoli. Leonardo Bruni Manuel Chrysoloras. The Translations of Plato 2. The Aristotelianism of Bruni The Ancients and the Moderns 3. St. Bernardino of Siena 4. Poggio Bracciolini. Carlo Marsuppini 5. Epicureanism. Cosma Raimondi 6. Filelfo. Alipía Conciliation between Plato and Aristotle 7. Lorenzo Valla 8. About Pleasure 9. Epicureanism of the Academy Callimaco Esperiente. Platina 10. Bartolomeo Fazio and Giannozzo Manetti 11. Matteo Palmieri 12. Alamanno Rinuccini 13. Leon Battista Alberti ELEVEN The Greeks in Italy 1. The Greek Influence. Byzantine Culture Gennadius 2. Gemistos Pletho Comparison between Plato and Aristotle 3. George of Trebizond. Bessarion Johannes Argyropoulos TWELVE The School of Marsilio Ficino 1. Pandolfo Collenuccio. The Life of Ficino Niccolò Tignosi. St. Antonino Epicureanism 2. Plato noster 3. Translations. Platonic Philosophy Aristotle. Plotinus 4. Theology Avicennian and Franciscan Influences 5. The Soul. God 6. The Dignity of the Human Being 7. Immortality
167
167 171 176 182 185 187 189 193 199 202 206 214 216 219 219 221 224 229 229 235 241 244 249 254 259
Contents 8. Light and Love 9. Astrology and Magic. Lorenzo Bonincontri 10. The Academy. G. Nesi and B. Colucci Giles of Viterbo 11. Ludovico Lazzarelli 12. Cristoforo Landino and Lorenzo de’ Medici THIRTEEN The Aristotelians 1. The Averroists. Urbano of Bologna Zaccaria of Parma 2. Paolo Veneto, Ugo Benzi, and Niccolò Fava 3. Biagio Pelacani and Gaetano of Thiene 4. Scotists and Thomists Giorgio Valla and Niccoletto Vernia The Southern Culture: Pontano and Galateo FOURTEEN Giovanni Pico della Mirandola 1. Life of Pico. G. Donato and Elia del Medigo Conflict with Barbaro The Defense of Philosophy 2. The Roman Disputation. The Works of 1486 3. Condemnation of the Church In Florence: Politian and Girolamo Benivieni Jochanan Alemanno and Savonarola 4. Sources of Pico’s Thought. The Cabala Siger of Brabant 5. Pichian Thought: God, the Divine Circle Being and the One The Polemic with Antonio of Faenza 6. Revelation. Magic. Universal Life. Miracles Astrology. True Causes. Angels and Human Beings
ix 263 266 270 274 275 281 281 285 287 289 295 295 302 306 311 312 316
PART THREE THE RENAISSANCE FIFTEEN Aristotelianism from Pomponazzi to Cremonini 1. The Inheritance of the Fifteenth Century 2. Alessandro Achillini and Pietro Trapolino 3. The Influence of Siger of Brabant Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Commentary Pomponazzi. Philosophy and Religion 4. Disputations Concerning the Soul
329 329 331 334 336
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 5. Immortality and Morality 6. The Polemic with Contarini and Nifo 7. The Two Treatises: De incantationibus and De fato 8. Agostino Nifo and His Averroism 9. The Conflict with Pomponazzi 10. M. A. Zimara. The Simplicians. Simone Porzio and G. B. Gelli. T. Bacilieri and A. Bernardi della Mirandola. J. A. Marta The Castellanis. F. Pendasio 11. Other Minor Aristotelians 12. Jacopo Zabarella 13. Cesare Cremonini
SIXTEEN Platonic-Aristotelian Syncretism and Philosophy of Love 1. Francesco Cattani of Diacceto 2. The School of Cattani of Diacceto The “Verini” Crisostomo Javelli of Casale 3. Gian Francesco Pico’s Skepticism Adriano of Corneto 4. Francesco Giorgio Veneto. Leone Ebreo. Minor Writers of Treatises on Love 5. Pietro Bembo and the “Asolani.” Castiglione Mario Equicola and Betussi Tullia d’Aragona. Flaminio Nobili 6. Agostino Steuco of Gubbio and Perennial Philosophy Iacopo Mazzoni Minor Platonists SEVENTEEN Between Science and Philosophy 1. Luca Pacioli. Leonardo da Vinci 2. Girolamo Cardano 3. Girolamo Fracastoro 4. Giambattista Della Porta 5. Andrea Cesalpino
340 347 351 356 358
360 366 371 374 379 379 382 385 390 395 398 405 405 408 414 416 420
Contents EIGHTEEN The New Thought from Telesio to Bruno 1. Bernardino Telesio. His Works Relationship with Vincenzo Maggi The De rerum natura Objections of Francesco Patrizi 2. Francesco Piccolomini. His Polemic with Zabarella Pietro Duodo and Stefano Tiepolo 3. Francesco Patrizi of Cherso 4. Marcello Palingenio Stellato. Aonio Paleario Scipione Capece. Other Philosopher-Poets 5. Giordano Bruno A. Life and Works B. Trials and Condemnation 6. Giordano Bruno: His Thought A. The Art of Memory. Lullism B. The Metaphysics C. The Moral Problem D. Two Antithetical Positions in the Italian Works E. Bruno’s Thought in the Latin Works F. Giulio Cesare Vanini and Gerolamo Cardano
xi 427
427 437 441 444 449 454 461 465 475 478 483 487
NINETEEN Political and Religious Motives 1. Niccolò Machiavelli A. His Life and Works B. His Thought C. Human Perfidy D. Fortune, Chance E. Power, Virtue F. Necessity G. Ambiguity 2. Francesco Guicciardini Politicians and Utopians 3. Religious and Political Reformers
501 507
TWENTY Problems of Aesthetics and Morality 1. Mario Nizolio 2. Problems of Aesthetics 3. Problems of Morality
513 513 516 519
489 489 490 492 494 496 498 500
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY PART FOUR THE COUNTER REFORMATION AND THE BAROQUE AGE: FROM CAMPANELLA TO VICO
TWENTY-ONE The Counter Reformation 1. Ancients and Moderns Alessandro Tassoni. Daniello Bartoli Sforza Pallavicino 2. Paolo Sarpi 3. The Moralists Torquato Accetto, Virgilio Malvezzi, and Agostino Mascardi 4. La Ragion di Stato. Tacitism Troiano Boccalini. Giovanni Botero Ludovico Zuccolo 5. Aesthetics. Emanuele Tesauro TWENTY-TWO Tommaso Campanella 1. Campanella’s Personality. His Life Themes from Telesio and Plato. Astrology Needs of Reformation. First Writings and Trials 2. The City of the Sun. Relation with Galileo French Interlude. His Thought and Method The Book of God. Science and Religion 3. The Influence of Telesio The Sensation of Things 4. Knowledge and Sensation. The Soul Value of Human Beings Metaphysical Crisis of Campanella 5. To Know. To Know Is to Die. The cogito Knowledge and Existence 6. Primalities. Infinity. Goodness Magic and Astrology. Sympathy and Things Miracles. Moral Conclusions TWENTY-THREE Galileo and His School 1. Galileo and Philosophy Anti-Aristotelian Polemic. Religion Bellarmino’s Position. Nature and Scripture Human and Divine Cognition Mathematics and Experience. Method 2. Evangelista Torricelli
531 531 539 544 550 556 561 561 571 581 585 592 596 605
605 614
Contents 3. Orazio Ricasoli Rucellai. Vincenzo Viviani C. R. Dati. Carlo Rinaldini. Antonio Nardi Giuseppe Zambeccari. Lorenzo Magalotti 4. Defense of Atomism. Lucretius and Gassendi Berigard of Pisa. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli Alessandro Marchetti and Gassendism TWENTY-FOUR The New Culture and Its Diffusion 1. Reasons for the Diffusion of Cartesianism in Italy Francesco D’Andrea. Camillo Colonna 2. Tommaso Cornelio. Niccolò A. Stigliola Leonardo Di Capua. Carlo Buragna 3. Giovanni A. Borelli. Giuseppe Valletta The Debates on Jansenism. Costantino Grimaldi 4. The School of Caloprese Francesco M. Spinelli. Tommaso Campailla Michelangelo Fardella. Matteo Giorgi 5. Father Giovenale. Bernardo Trevisano. Paolo M. Doria The Controversy with Francesco M. Spinelli 6. Tommaso Russo. The First Critique of Locke 7. Antonio Conti. Gian Vincenzo Gravina Ludovico A. Muratori 8. Pietro Giannone TWENTY-FIVE Giambattista Vico 1. Life. Vatolla. The Neapolitan Culture. The Platonists The University of Naples. Testimony of a Disciple The Institutiones Oratoriae. The Inaugural Orations De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia Hugo Grotius. Diritto Universale. La Scienza Nuova 2. Formation of Vichian Thought. Descartes and Plato Analysis of the Inaugural Orations De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione Institutiones Oratoriae 3. Metaphysics. Mathematics. Philology 4. Diritto Universale. The True and the Certain First New Science. Philosophy and Philology Poetic Theology. Fantasy. Poetry. Religion. Language 5. “Corsi” and “Ricorsi.” Revelation
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617 622 629 629 631 636 641 651 662 666 674 679
679
687 692 697 707
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY VOLUME I I PART FIVE FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO RISORGIMENTO
TWENTY-SIX The Enlightenment 1. Jansenist Motives. Diffusion of Locke’s Doctrine 2. Francesco M. Zanotti. The Polemics on Maupertuis Isidoro Bianchi. Carlo A. Pilati. Francesco Algarotti Ruggero G. Boscovich 3. Antonio Genovesi 4. The School of Genovesi. Ferdinando Galiani Gaetano Filangieri. Nicola Spedalieri F. M. Pagano. Melchiorre Delfico. Francesco Salfi 5. The Verris and Cesare Beccaria 6. Vittorio Alfieri. Ugo Foscolo. Vincenzo Monti Giacomo Leopardi TWENTY-SEVEN The Traditional Currents of Thought 1. Odoardo Corsini and Iacopo Facciolati The Historians of Philosophy 2. Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil Eulogy of Plato. Anton Filippo Adami 3. Ermenegildo Pini 4. Vincenzo Miceli 5. Thinkers of Piedmont TWENTY-EIGHT Vico’s Inheritance and Ethical Inquiries 1. Damiano Romano. Emmanuele Duni Polemic with Gian Francesco Finetti 2. Mario Pagano 3. Jacopo Stellini. The Call for Aristotle Against Stoicism 4. The Morality of Pietro Tamburini 5. Cataldo Jannelli and Vincenzo Cuoco TWENTY-NINE The Ideologists 1. Francesco Soave and His Life Criticism of G. Compagnoni, I. Kant, and J. Locke 2. Melchiorre Gioia 3. Gian Domenico Romagnosi 4. The Thought of Romagnosi 5. Minor Ideologists
715 715 719 724 732 736 741 749 749 752 757 758 761 763 763 768 769 775 778 783 783 787 792 799 804
Contents
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PART SIX ITALIAN THOUGHT DURING THE RISORGIMENTO THIRTY Southern Italian Thought and Pasquale Galluppi 1. The Crisis of Ideology Pasquale Borrelli and Paolo Costa Kantian and Eclectic Influences 2. Life of Pasquale Galluppi. Religious Motives 3. Genesis of Galluppi’s Philosophy Supposed Kantism of Galluppi 4. Analysis and Synthesis 5. Galluppi’s Cartesianism. The Cognitive Synthesis 6. Galluppi’s a priori. Sensation 7. Practical Philosophy 8. Ottavio Colecchi. The Influence of Victor Cousin 9. Vincenzo De Grazia THIRTY-ONE Antonio Rosmini and the Rosminian Controversies 1. Life and First Writings. Nuovo Saggio Rinnovamento. Polemic with Mamiani Writings on Morality. Metaphysics Polemic with Gioberti. Teosofia 2. Unity of Rosminian Thought The Critique of Subjectivism The System of Truth 3. Ideology. The Platonism of Rosmini The Criticism of Kant 4. Illumination. Being. Being and Existence 5. Sentiment. Criticism of Mamiani Objections of Gioberti 6. The Teosofia. The Synthesism of Being 7. Psychology 8. Theodicy. Morality. Church and State 9. Niccolò Tommaseo, Alessandro Manzoni, and Alfonso Testa 10. Gino Capponi, Raffaello Lambruschini, and Silvestro Centofanti THIRTY-TWO Vincenzo Gioberti 1. Vincenzo Gioberti’s Life and Studies Giuseppe Mazzini and Gioberti 2. The Genesis of Gioberti’s Thought. Religious Doubts
811 811 818 823 825 827 830 834 836 840 845
845 853 856 859 866 871 874 876 880 883 891 891 896
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 3. Teorica del sovrannaturale. The Super-Intelligence 4. Introduzione. Vico and Gioberti The Ideal Formula. The Word. The Creation 5. Developments. Mimesis and Methexis Protology. Palingenesis 6. On Goodness and Beauty 7. Giuseppe Mazzini
THIRTY-THREE Humanism and Skepticism 1. Giuseppe Ferrari 2. Carlo Cattaneo 3. Ausonio Franchi 4. Bonaventura Mazzarella THIRTY-FOUR Spiritualists, Ontologists, Kantians, Mystics, and Thomists 1. Terenzio Mamiani. The Academy of Italic Philosophy The Philosophy of the Italian Schools 2. Luigi Ferri 3. Giovanni Maria Bertini, Luigi Ornato, and the Philosophy of Life 4. Francesco Bonatelli 5. Giuseppe Allievo and Francesco Acri 6. Augusto Conti and Baldassare Labanca 7. Return to Kant: Carlo Cantoni, Francesco Fiorentino, Felice Tocco, and Giacomo Barzellotti 8. Neo-Thomism. Gioacchino Ventura THIRTY-FIVE The Hegelians 1. The Hegelians of Tuscany. Augusto Vera 2. Bertrando Spaventa 3. The Circulation of Thought 4. Minor Hegelians. The Crisis of Hegelianism: Antonio Labriola and Francesco De Sanctis
900 904 911 918 920 923 923 928 933 935 937 937 939 940 947 951 953 953 957 961 961 964 969 974
THIRTY-SIX Positivism 1. Salvatore Tommasi and Pasquale Villari 2. Aristide Gabelli, Nicola Marselli, Andrea Angiulli, Pietro Siciliani, and Nicola Fornelli 3. Roberto Ardigò
977 977 979 981
Contents 4. Simone Corleo
xvii 988
PART SEVEN ITALIAN THOUGHT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THIRTY-SEVEN Epilogue: Rebirth and Decline of Idealism 1. Orientations of the Italian Philosophy 2. The Heritage from Positivism 3. Positivism and Socialism 4. The Crisis of Positivism 5. Positivism and Irrationalism 6. The Crisis of Marxism 7. The Crisis of Science 8. Benedetto Croce and His Formation 9. Characteristics of Croce’s Philosophy 10. Croce and Gentile 11. Rebirth of Idealism 12. Pragmatism and Its Different Forms 13. Philosophy in the Universities 14. Philosophical Debates Religious Restlessness 15. Croce and the “Philosophy of Spirit” 16. Origin of Actualism. La Voce First Divisions among the Idealists 17. Contrasts and Diffusion of Idealism 18. The Thought of Gentile and the Critics 19. The Crisis of Idealism Philosophy between Wars 20. Toward a New Problematic THIRTY-EIGHT (by Paolo Fabiani and Giorgio Pinton) With Garin, On Italian Thought from 1943 to 2004 1. From 1943 to 1960 Storia della Filosofia Italiana and Cronache di Filosofia Italiana 2. From 1960 to 1970 Antonio Gramsci’s Inheritance 3. From 1960 to 1980 Question on the Marginality of Italian Philosophy 4. From 1980 to 2004 Philosophical Schools and Movements A. Turin: The School of Abbagnano B. Florence: The School of Garin?
995 995 997 1001 1004 1006 1009 1012 1014 1019 1022 1028 1033 1037 1038 1039 1044 1052 1055 1061 1065
1067 1068 1081 1087 1093 1094 1096
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C. Milan: The Neo-Illuminism D. Analytic and Post-Neoposivist Philosophy E. The Post-Modern Philosophers F. Marxism G. Irrationalism 5. The New Problematic A. Massimo Cacciari B. Gianni Vattimo C. Sergio Givone D. Irrationalistic Thought E. Emanuele Severino F. Opposition and Analytical Philosophy 6. The “Società Filosofica Italiana” A. The Recourse of Vichian Studies B. Historians of Philosophy and Analytical Philosophers 7. What Will Italian Philosophy Tell?
1098 1098 1100 1100 1102 1103 1103 1104 1106 1108 1108 1110 1111 1111 1112 1114
Notice of Eugenio Garin (1978)
1117
List of Abbreviations
1119
Bibliographical Notes
1121
About the Author
1299
About the Translator and Editor
1301
Index
1303
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE The original work of Eugenio Garin titled Storia della Filosofia Italiana enjoyed three editions. It was first published in 1947 without much recognition, and was reprinted in 1966 with the addition of a long “epilogue” on the character of Italian philosophy during the first few decades of the twentieth century. For the third edition of 1978 Garin increased by two hundred pages the bibliographical notes. In these notes, Garin commented on his own positions about the topics covered in the text, added new information, and offered supporting quotations from new texts. The present work represents the full spectrum of Garin’s reflection on Italian philosophy and it alone allows us to follow on Garin’s footsteps and comprehend how all his other researches came to be developed and connected to form an integrated whole. His published researches, between 1943 and 1978, dealt with some well-defined topic, a single age, or some typical individuals in one or more periods of the cultural history of Italy. Among his works are Il Rinascimento italiano (1941), Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento (1942), La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento (1947), Contributi alla storia del Concilio di Trento e della Controriforma (1948), L’umanesimo italiano: filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (1952), Medioevo e Rinascimento (1954), Il pensiero pedagogico dell’umanesimo (1958), La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (1961), Ritratti di Umanisti (1967), Scienza e vita civile nel Rinascimento italiano (1975), Lo zodiaco della vita: la polemica sull’astrologia dal Trecento al Cinquecento (1976). Four works have an English published version: Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance; Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life; Portraits from the Quattrocento, and Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civil Life in the Renaissance. Garin stated that the narration of an Italian philosophy should take its beginnings from the Italian Renaissance. Fortunately, he soon recognized that for the reader an understanding of the Renaissance would have been difficult without an introduction to the Italian Renaissance. For this reason, he decided to begin with a narration of the thought manifesting itself in Italy during the thirteenth century, giving us a history of Italian thought throughout eight hundred years, from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. For the composition of the history of Italian philosophy, Garin extended his thoughts about the sunset of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Modern Age, which he partially had treated in separate works: Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo (1970), La cultura italiana tra Ottocento e Novecento (1976), Filosofia e Scienze nel Novecento (1978), and Cronache di filosofia italiana, 1900–1943 (1966). None of these works have an English translation and their most essential and informative parts have been incorporated within the life of Italian thought narrated in this history. Garin’s meditation on individual ages and growth of the cultural and philosophical thought of Italy was re-considered not only in 1966 (when he
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added the Epilogue) but also for the final edition of 1978 (when he added many pages of notes, leaving the text of the story untouched). We believe that this narration of a philosophy typically and properly Italian throughout eight centuries reveals the validity and importance of Garin’s reflections and efforts. His work is providing an answer to the possibility of isolating the development of the philosophy of a single nation within the Hegelian spirit of the world. Some editorial changes have affected the six parts of the original work: each part was subdivided into a number of chapters always restarting from one. We have kept the six parts, numbered the chapters in continuity, and changed Garin’s Epilogue into Chapter Thirty-Seven, which completes the original Italian text. It was in the Publisher’s wishes that this book should offer an outline of the development of Italian philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. The idea was presented to and approved by Prof. Garin and Einaudi (the original publisher of the book) when in 2003 we asked for the permission of translation. This explains the presence of Chapter Thirty-Eight, whose content remains my sole responsibility. Professor Garin did not see it; he died on 29 December 2004. We have changed Garin’s placement of the notes from the end of each chapter to that of the book, with reference of the appropriate pages and sections of the text. Garin wrote that the Bibliographical Notes are an integral part of his text and we should consult them as he wished. Prof. Leon Pompa, who studied with Garin in Florence, commented several times on our work and provided the Introduction, which, with the Prologue of Garin, is a salient guide through this History of Italian Philosophy. Prof. Bernard C. Den Ouden offered his expert support and wisely contributed when his own writings, his students, his responsibility toward the University of Hartford, the Children of the Unicef, and the World Refugees Agency allowed him. Dr. Paolo Fabiani, philosopher and librarian in Florence, helped in the composition of Chapter Thirty-Eight and guided during those times I risked shipwrecking between the Scylla and Charybdis of text interpretation and translation, of disappointment and impatience in computer literacy. We acknowledge that the Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche (SEPS) has supported the translation of this important document on the cultural and philosophical life of Italy. Giorgio Pinton
INTRODUCTION Outside Italy, the late, great Eugenio Garin is honored most for his work on various aspects of Renaissance thought. This is almost certainly because, together with Paul Oscar Kristeller, he more or less brought the whole academic world to appreciate the importance of this unique cultural phenomenon. Within Italy he is recognized also as being the greatest recent historian of Italian philosophy. It is appropriate that the present volume, which represents his most comprehensive attempt to relate and explain that history should now be made available to the very large number of Anglophone historians and philosophers to whom, it would seem, Italian philosophy has remained virtually unknown. Since Garin starts his History of Italian Philosophy, with a discussion of some of the methodological problems involved, it is to these that I shall devote the first part of this discussion. 1. Garin was fortunate in that, largely as a result of the work of such thinkers as Bertrando Spaventa, Giovanni Gentile, and Benedetto Croce, Italian philosophers had already shown a keen awareness of the importance of the history of their subject. It is typical of his approach as an historian that he should proceed to locate his own work in the context of such historians by a review of the strengths and weaknesses of some of the issues that their writings raise. Since the time that he wrote there has been much discussion of historical methodology and in what follows I shall try also to identify how his work stands in relation to some problems more recently raised. The genre “history of philosophy” raises certain issues more acutely than other forms of history. It is accepted, for example, by all historians that their accounts must conform to the general requirement that their subject matter be worthy of study. Some obvious problems exist concerning the criteria for evaluating something as being worthy of study.1 The classic controversy between the philosopher John Dewey and the historian A. O. Lovejoy will serve to illustrate one of them.2 As a pragmatist, Dewey took the view that only those theories of past philosophers which can throw light on present problems should be held worthy of the attention of present philosophers. It follows from this that the criterion of selection as to what should be included in a history of philosophy will depend upon the state of present philosophical problems. But the adoption of this criterion has implications both for the subjects about whom historians of philosophy should write and how they should write about them. I shall discuss each of these points separately. With regard to the thinkers who should figure in a history of philosophy, it has severely limiting implications. To see that this criterion is commonly
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accepted today, particularly by philosophers, one need only consider the number of histories of philosophy which treat of the subject on a European scale, in which one finds a more or less identical series of canonical figures, starting with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, possibly mentioning St. Thomas and Hobbes, then proceeding to the rationalists, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, to whom are counterpoised the empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, before arriving at Kant, Hegel and then, for there is little consensus about the nineteenth century, either following a line of philosophers who are of interest to modern analytic philosophers, for example Mill, Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein, or those of interest to modern existentialists and phenomenologists, for example Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger. But if one were to seek the rationale for these series of canonical figures, it is difficult to find one, other than that their philosophies are thought to be important in the light of a survey of current philosophical interests. Thus, perhaps at a slightly removed level, they exemplify the outcome of applying the pragmatic criterion to the selection of what or whom to include in a history of philosophy. It may well be that this is a result of the increasing professionalization and specialization of philosophy, but whether or not that is so, the histories of philosophy that are produced are as much works of history as a series of disconnected studies of the foreign policies of the most powerful rulers in Europe would be. At best they can be thought of as studies of a series of philosophers who are, by some sort of common consent, thought to be of greater value in themselves than others who might figure in such lists. In addition to placing severe limitations upon the content of histories of philosophy, the pragmatic criterion has serious consequences for how we should write about the thinkers included in them. Perhaps the most serious of these is that it neglects the simple historical fact that the categories under which these thinkers would themselves have classified their work have changed over time. For, as is well known, the concept of philosophy itself is now much more restricted in range than it was, for example, in the Renaissance, or in Descartes’s or Kant’s time, as psychology, politics, social theory and the various natural sciences have come to be distinguished as distinct disciplines, each with its own methodology, but not, as they once were, as parts of philosophy.3 Given this, to treat of past philosophers solely in the light of the present meaning of “philosophy,” or meanings, for there is now more than one, and to consider only those parts of their thought that would be recognized as philosophy according to some current conception of the subject, must inevitably involve omitting large aspects of their output and, hence, of the ways in which they responded to the requirements of the cultural context in which their thought developed and to the understanding of which it is relevant. Even such a distinguished historian as Geoffrey Barraclough succumbed, it would seem, to this view. Thinking that the only alternative to something like the pragmatic criterion would be to immerse himself so intimately in the past as to write according to the standards of the past, he de-
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clined to do so, claiming that such a procedure could result only in a dreary and irrelevant set of museum pieces, involving the description of values that are no longer accepted and, possibly, barely intelligible to the modern mind.4 That there are some periods of the past that, at least at a certain level of particularity, produced works of a dreary nature can hardly be doubted but the suggestion that this is an inescapable outcome of an attempt to capture the flavor of past thought cannot possibly be correct. For in the general cultural background of such particular pieces can lie views of the world from the study of which we have much to learn and, in many cases, as Garin would undoubtedly have added, which have contributed to the way in which later views of the world came into existence. The fault here lies not with the works under study, even if some may turn out to be dreary, but with the way in which the historian chooses to approach them and the use to which he intends to put them. But, unsatisfactory though it may be, Dewey’s view does at least offer a justification for the study of past philosophy, whereas many historians, understandably proud of their discipline, have tended to justify it simply on the grounds that the past is worthy of study for its own sake. But this, as it stands, is an insufficient defense and could be used to justify almost any form of activity. Here it is worth mentioning A. O. Lovejoy’s eloquent reply to Dewey: “To study history is always to seek in some degree to get beyond the limitations and preoccupations of the present; it demands for success an effort of self-transcendence. It is neither impossible nor unprofitable for a rational animal—and it is imperative for the historian—to realize that his ancestors had ends of their own which were not solely instrumental to his [the historian’s] ends, that the content and meaning of their existence are not exhaustively resolvable into those of the existence of their posterity. In these aspects of history lie not the least of its values; for it is they, especially, which make of it a mind-enlarging, liberalizing, sympathy-widening discipline, an enrichment of present experience.”5 Important though it is, this is by no means the only defense that can be made for the study of the history of philosophy. One such alternative that has been suggested, which may be thought of as a more sympathetic application of the pragmatic criterion than Dewey’s is that it offers the possibility of examining different ways in which major changes in philosophy could have developed.6 But, as will transpire, this would not be an option on Garin’s view. As one reads Garin’s history, it seems clear, given the lengths to which he goes to interpret and make intelligible forms of thought and intellectual and cultural contexts very far from our own, that he would whole-heartedly have endorsed the underlying sentiments expressed in Lovejoy’s justification for the study of history. But, as we shall see, he would not have accepted these as providing a justification for such a study. The fact that such issues were to the fore of Garin’s mind when he wrote his History can be seen from his analysis of the work of his distinguished Ital-
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ian predecessors. Garin’s primary aim in his Prologue was to defend the view that there can be such a thing as a national philosophy and, therefore, a history of Italian philosophy. His defense hinges upon a central claim: that Italian philosophy arose as a series of rational conceptualizations of problems concerning morality, politics, theology and the nature of human being and the natural world as they existed in different periods of Italian culture and society. But since cultures and societies are inescapably historical, that is, arise in specific historical contexts, Italian philosophy was inextricably bound up with the particular contingent circumstances in which these cultures found themselves. As an example of this, it is sufficient to draw attention to the purely contingent fact, which, throughout the main text, Garin emphasizes, of the presence in Italy of the papacy as a political and cultural institution and the effect that this had both on theological thought itself and on forms of thought—such as those of Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Cola di Rienzi, Vico, Rosmini and Gioberti—that had either theological or political implications. This one contingency, albeit of immense consequence, means that Italian philosophy could never have had the same character as that of other national philosophies. It is a consequence of this view that, although philosophy may purport to deal with eternal questions and conceptions, as, for example, Ficino thought and taught in his Academy, in which he was followed by Pico della Mirandola and many others, there are no such questions. This does not mean that there are no enduring questions for, as Garin shows, Italian philosophy has almost always been dominated by the question of how the human being, as a free individual, could relate to the world as a total interactive entity. But the different ways in which this dominant interest was conceived depended on modes of thought and resources available to particular historical societies. Thus the enduring questions are, as it were, determinable, but the ways in which they could be, and were, conceived at different periods, determinate; the idea of the wholeness of the world is determinable, but the different ways in which this wholeness has been construed constitutes a series of different determinate conceptions. Hence the idea that an identical set of determinate questions and assumptions could arise in different societies in different historical circumstances, without the way in which they did so being affected by the nature of the cultures in question, can only lead to faulty and misleading interpretations of the thought of those societies. This, indeed, is what happened when Ficino tried to develop his theological Platonism. Garin’s view is, therefore, a mitigated historicism. Historically, its background is to be found in the way that the Italian Kantians and Hegelians stimulated historical research among Italian philosophers; but it is not itself Hegelian, for Garin was opposed to anything that he thought of as being too teleological or even dominated by the a priori assumption that all developments arise as parts of some progressive sequence (History, p. 410). To illustrate this point, we may turn to what he says about Spaventa, the nineteenth
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century Hegelian who, as is evident in the section devoted to him, Garin greatly admired as a philosopher. When it comes to Spaventa as an historian of philosophy, although Garin praises him for his editions of Renaissance texts, he criticizes him for reading them from a Hegelian point of view. The most fundamental criticism that he makes in this respect is that, in so doing, Spaventa treated the insights of many Italian philosophers merely as “heralds” of the thought of the series of European philosophers, who, on Hegel’s view, had contributed to the triumph of Hegelianism in Western thought. Bruno and Campanella, for example were presented as heralds of Cartesianism, Bruno also of Spinozism, and Vico of Kantianism. But this meant that Spaventa imposed his own Hegelian viewpoint on the thought of these philosophers, seeing them only from the perspective of their insights into the germs of a philosophy that, despite Hegel’s own pan-European perspective, was more properly Germanic, and certainly became possible only in the nineteenth century after Kant had failed to reconcile our knowledge of the phenomenal world with that of the objective world. Moreover, it led to his neglecting the larger part of Italian philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Garin’s objection to Spaventa’s form of historical anticipation brings to mind Bishop Butler’s dictum: “everything is what it is and not another thing.” But this should not be understood atomistically because, on Garin’s view, as we have seen, what makes something what it is, is the way in which it is a response, successful or otherwise to needs, be they of a mundane, practical or spiritual nature, as they arise within particular historical societies. In the case of Spaventa’s historical studies, Garin points out, what we hear is Spaventa’s powerful philosophical voice but not that of the subjects of his investigations (p. xliv). But if the principle of the selection and interpretation of the contents of a history of philosophy is not to be determined by such ahistorical criteria as those of Dewey and Spaventa, how should it be determined? This is not a question that Garin addresses directly but his view can be inferred from the long discussion in his Prologue of the question when a history of Italian philosophy—but not, as the foregoing points entail, that of the history of philosophy of any other nation—should begin. This is equivalent to the question when Italian philosophy acquired its own distinctive character. His answer to this is unequivocal: it first did so it in the Renaissance. In his discussion of this question, it is crucial to attend to the fact that, despite the important and on-going influence of such major figures as St. Thomas, St. Bonaventura and Dante, of whose thought he gives long and sympathetic accounts, he does not include them in his account of a history of a distinctively Italian philosophy. He characterizes them and other preRenaissance thinkers, together with other factors—the survival of the thought of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroès and of the Cabalistic tradition, as well as the fact that the primary sources of manuscripts were the monastic libraries—as aspects of a mediaeval legacy, but not as parts of the history of Italian philosophy proper. In so doing his intention was not to deny the importance of
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the influence of these and many other factors belonging to this mediaeval legacy upon the Renaissance. This is shown by his detailed account of, for example, the continuing influence of Aristotle, Averroès, and St. Thomas, on the one hand, and St. Augustine and St. Bonaventura on the other, in Italian thought up to the very point at which he terminated his History. His reason for excluding them from the start of the history of Italian philosophy proper is that their thought developed originally in different contexts and in response to different demands from those that arose in the Renaissance: in the case of St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura, for example, in purely theological contexts, to meet particular religious needs, whereas their continuing influence in Italian thought lay in the ways in which later thinkers adapted and interpreted them in response to different needs particular to the Italian city states. This is a subtle but important distinction. As Garin states it (Prologue, p. lv), the first developments in the Renaissance, grew within the orbit of this mediaeval heritage but were at times in conflict with it. Here he argues strongly, as he did in other works, against the view that there ever was a period of quite such intellectual desolation as the so-called “dark ages.” As he illustrates in detail, after the collapse of Rome much classical knowledge endured, particularly in the monasteries, which held versions of many Aristotelian and some Platonic texts and in which an Aristotelian conception of the natural world and of logic was favored. But this did not mean that the scholasticism and intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages could provide a philosophy capable of satisfying the needs and ambitions of the Italian city-states as they emerged in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The explicit reason that Garin gives for identifying the beginning of the specifically Italian character of the philosophical developments that he traces with the Renaissance is that it was only then that a national culture consciously emerged. Perhaps this was most strikingly illustrated by Petrarch’s belief, expressed in his three patriotic odes to Colonna, Cola di Rienzo and the Italian princes, in a shared spirituality which underlay the many discordant features of the fourteenth century city-states. But despite his great fame and the enormous impetus that he gave to research into classical learning, Petrarch’s preference for the contemplative life was not as widely shared as a belief in the active life, perhaps best shown in the humanism of his pupil, the statesman and scholar Coluccio Salutati, who adapted the newly acquired knowledge of aspects of Roman social and legal practice to help meet the individual and political needs of the citizens of the city-state of Florence. A further important question that Garin does not address directly is how the thought of the past should be interpreted. As argued above, if it is interpreted as early attempts to answer the very same philosophical problems that exist today, the result would inevitably be to falsify it; the alternative, rejected by Barraclough but adopted by Garin, is to present it in the same terms as those of its authors. This is not merely a methodological option but, for historians of thought, a necessary methodological requirement. The reason why it
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is necessary has been well formulated by one of today’s leading historians7 of political thought: “No agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.” But observing this requirement means not only setting the thinkers in question in the particular cultural contexts they inhabited but finding a way of interpreting their thought in terms which, while not falsifying it, are intelligible in the present age. This was precisely Garin’s approach and here we must pay tribute to the enormous historical and philosophical skills that he brought to the task. For not only does he narrate the contents of the works of the greatest Italian philosophers, by means of summaries, extensive quotation and analysis, but he relates this to accounts of the ways in which their careers developed, both educationally and politically, their literary and philosophical exchanges and personal relationships with other contemporary thinkers and, of course, with the principal cultural and political institutions of their day. In short, he treats philosophy as a cultural product and presents it as such. Thus, his history of Italian philosophy is more akin to the genre now labeled “intellectual history” than what often passes for the history of philosophy. This does not mean that he denies that philosophy is a rational exercise for; on the contrary, he insists that it is. His point is that it is a rational response to intellectual, moral and political problems that arise in a set of wholly contingent circumstances, including, apart from such factors as were mentioned above, an understanding, accurate or otherwise, of its own prior history. Thus we hear of Pico’s problem of reconciling the wisdom of past thinkers with Catholic doctrine through his projected, but prohibited, program for the great debate of the learned in Rome; or, again, of the clash between philosophy, with its increasingly naturalistic view of the universe, and the ethical value of the humane studies, emphasized earlier by Petrarch, Salutati and many others, through Pico’s polemical debate with the great rhetorician, Ermolao Barbaro. What philosophy most emphatically is not, is a wholly rational series of developments of an identical set of problems or of the answers to some such set, unaffected by the contingent circumstances of the times; and, as Garin noted, despite the fact that the exchange between Pico and Barbaro came to no victory on either side, it continued to be of historical importance. Garin did not take into account—nor could he, given the time at which he was writing—contemporary post-modern suggestions to the effect that aspects of past thought may have been so situated within closed systems as to make it impossible for us ever to comprehend them as they were. But it is improbable that he would have taken such doubts seriously. For, along with Croce, Gentile and other later Italian historians of philosophy, he had accepted the Vichian view that language, Vico’s “philology,” and hence thought, always bears within itself a residue from its past and that through this it is always possible to recover retrospectively the language and meanings of the past. As
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Garin puts it, ideas do not arise by parthenogenesis. But the skeptical thesis derives whatever strength it has from a failure to recognize this feature of language and thought. We are never completely isolated from the thought of our predecessors. His historicist approach did not prevent Garin from identifying certain “great” figures of Italian philosophy. The criterion that he adopted here did not depend upon subjective evaluations of the merits of their thought, made either in the past or the present, but on an assessment of the extended influence certain thinkers had upon their successors. His roll-call includes Ficino, Coluccio Salutati, Pico Della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Pomponazzi, Telesio, Galileo, Vico, Rosmini, Gioberti and, perhaps, Croce. The inclusion of Vico may come as a surprise because, unlike the others on this list, as he says, Vico founded no immediate school of important followers. His extended influence, even in Italy, did not come until much later, when he influenced the thought of such important legal thinkers as Filangieri, Romagnosi, and then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, major thinkers such as Rosmini, Gioberti, Gentile and Croce. In evaluating these thinkers in this way Garin was making use of hindsight, as all historians must. But it is important to note that this was a quite different use of hindsight from that employed, for example, by Spaventa. For to call attention to the influences which certain thinkers had upon later generations of thinkers is very far from interpreting their philosophy through the prism of that influence. The distinction is that between first-level description and interpretation and second-level description and explanation. At the first level Garin locates each thinker in his own cultural milieu, which must, of course, involve describing their own communal evaluations. But he is not ipso facto committed to these evaluations and he often disputes them, as in the case of Galluppi, who was highly regarded in his time but whom Garin criticizes on the grounds of superficiality and a failure to understand as well as some of his contemporaries the Kantian philosophy that he espoused. At the second level, he is concerned to explain how the thought of a thinker or an era influenced or failed to influence that of a later period. Despite the differences between the levels, it should not be thought that the first level is logically prior to the second: each requires the other in a mutually supportive relation. For before a thinker’s thought can be properly interpreted it is necessary to explain how the context in which it was produced came to have the character it had, and this involves identifying important earlier and on-going influences. It is the account of these influences that shapes the structure of Garin’s narrative. An interesting example of the subtlety with which Garin observes the distinction between the two levels is to be found in his remarks about Croce’s approach to the history of philosophy (Prologue, p. l), which was characterized by a desire to extract certain eternal truths from the thought of philosophers whom he admired from parts which he took to be of little other than
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local historical value. But, as Garin points out, while it is perfectly legitimate to distinguish within an author’s work those parts that were influential in later epochs from those that were not, it is still necessary to show how the links between the two arose and were connected as answers to the complex needs of the historical society which activated the thinker in question. In putting the matter in this way, Garin was, perhaps being somewhat kind to Croce, for on Garin’s view there are no eternal truths, only some that have had a relatively far-reaching influence. But his point would hold good even had Croce been distinguishing between parts which turned out to be of purely local interest and those of far-reaching influence. At the level of first-order interpretation and analysis this should not be an operative distinction. Claims about local and longer-term influence belong to the second level. If we return to the question of his justification for studying the history of Italian philosophy, it is clear from the detailed way in which he traces the many intricate conceptual and historical relationships between different thinkers, in periods very different from our own, that he would have had considerable sympathy with Lovejoy’s emphasis on self-transcendence through the effort to appreciate other forms of life and thought. But, rather than offering this as a justification for the study of history, he would have treated it as a heuristic requirement for the writing of history. His justification would have lain in the need to understand how Italian philosophy, at any point in its career and not simply at the point that it had reached when he wrote his History, came to have the character that it had. It is in this sense that he could have agreed that the understanding that it brings about is “an enrichment of present experience.” For understanding how the past as it was affected the present as it is, is a necessary part of understanding where and what we now are. 2. Since Garin’s History follows the course of Italian philosophy in immense detail, it would not be possible in this brief introduction to give a general overview of the whole of it. Garin himself makes the point that, particularly in the heady days of the high Renaissance, it is difficult to keep track of the many different ways in which so many thinkers with different interests influenced one another. Each reader of it will therefore take from it something different. It would be impossible to terminate these remarks in this short Introduction without some illustration of the sophistication with which he presents and analyses some extremely complex philosophical situations, starting with his account of a few of the overlapping strands in Renaissance thought. This is particularly important since one of his main concerns was to avoid a unilateral approach, i.e. one which focuses too much on single issues and fails to acknowledge the way in which many different factors—including events, such as the murder of Pico, Copernicus’s discoveries and the execution of Bruno—impinged on one another.
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Although different Renaissance thinkers assimilated the discovery of classical thought in very different ways, beneath their differences there lay the excited and optimistic belief that through the rediscovery, translation and retranslation of the classical and neo-Platonic texts whole new worlds of thought were available. The extent of this excitement, which Garin captures in an almost palpable way, was such as to lead to the invitation of the Greek scholars, Crysoloras and Argyropoulos, to come to Florence to teach the Florentines Greek so that they could read Greek documents in the original, rather than through Latin translations. This was one of the few eras in cultural history when anything seemed possible. But when anything is possible, nothing is certain, and this gave scope to some of the most extraordinary creative feats of the philosophical imagination but also led to the lack of an accepted set of critical criteria for the assessment of these feats. This is one of the things that make an understanding of many aspects of Renaissance thought so difficult. But it is as a result of his own beautiful writing, his knowledge of the historical and cultural context and the judiciousness of his selection of the literary, polemical, and epistolary exchanges between the Renaissance thinkers, that Garin makes it possible for us to understand the sequence of these momentous philosophical visions. What he offers is rather like an intellectual adventure story to which one is avidly eager to discover how it ended. One of the most notable effects of the great literary discoveries was the way in which they fired both the literary and philosophical imaginations of many scholars, to the extent that rhetoric and poetry came to be important ways of expressing philosophical thought. Garin cites many examples of philosophical thought expressed through poetry but perhaps the most striking case is that of Bruno, who made brilliant use of rhetoric and the dialogue form of argument and whose last three philosophical works were in the form of Latin poems. One of the characteristics that this combination of philosophy and poetry gave the Renaissance philosophers was the freedom to avoid the constraints imposed by adhering to the rigid sets of categories which had become so stultifying in the case of the mediaeval scholastics. This poetic strain of activity, which Garin identifies as one of the principal characteristics of Italian thought continued well up to and beyond the time of Vico’s Naples, although by then it had changed in character. In Vico’s philosophy, the poetic impulse was seen as a fundamental source of human creativity and rhetoric as a powerful means of human communication within, and necessary to, the life of the city. In this sense, at least, he was at one with the original humanist ideals. After Vico, the fundamental importance of literature and poetry continued to be recognized, later to receive one of its most important articulations in Croce’s Philosophy of Spirit. But there was a different way in which some scholars, most notably Petrarch, were affected by the literary and poetic discoveries. This was not as a method of philosophizing but as an alternative to it, one which evaded what Petrarch saw as the sterility of philosophy and science. For Petrarch the newly
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discovered literature allowed one to converse with past minds and led to the possibility of meditation, through which individual purification and salvation could be achieved. Literary study was thus not a retreat from the world but from the falseness of the world, which philosophy could not provide. The other, and more characteristic, response to the discoveries came in the form of the humanism of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Lorenzo Valla. In contrast to Petrarch’s concern with interiority, their emphasis was on the civic conditions for living the one true life for the human being. Hence they were concerned with the nature of the polis which could provide these conditions. Here Salutati was strongly influenced by Cicero’s writings on natural law, even though these did not present law as man-made. But he was at one with Petrarch in his opposition to science which, he believed, could neither reach the truth nor lead to the salvation of the soul. He was a profoundly admired figure in his time but has subsequently been somewhat undervalued by historians. Garin seeks to redress this evaluation because he sees in the difference between Salutati’s attitude to the humane studies and to science, one of the most important influences that led to the later divorce between naturalism, as favored by Pico, Bruno, Telesio and others, and the emphasis on the study of rhetoric, as promoted by whole schools of scholars, and, much later, by Vico. Their emphasis on the polis led this group of humanists to oppose any form of asceticism and hence rendered them hostile to monasticism, though not to religion itself, but in this hostility they were not joined by Petrarch, for whom the monastic life simply paralleled the problems of the individual in a communal setting. Their animus against monasticism was further strengthened by the discovery of Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius and by Lorenzo Valla’s support of the Epicurean principle that pleasure is the highest good. Another very different line of thought that arose from the classical discoveries, particularly the re-discovery and translation of Plato and the neoPlatonists, was Ficino’s conception of a pia philosophia, in which he tried to show that a line of great thinkers, including the neo-Platonists but going back to Pythagoras, had had access, through revelation, to a set of eternal truths that were compatible with the Augustinian emphasis on a theology of love. This was a view to which the prodigiously learned Pico, albeit with some divergences of interpretation, also gave credence. The theological Platonism to which it gave rise, long remained a powerful influence and was restored in a different form and in answer to a different need as late as 1540 by Steuco, in his de perenni philosophia, when he used it as a means of defending Catholic doctrine against the Reformation, by trying to show that Catholic doctrine was compatible with recognition of the rational achievements of the past. In the nineteenth century, Antonio Rosmini, the greatest of the Catholic thinkers, was to adopt a similar line of argument. Ficino’s concept of a pia philosophia, faulty though it may have been, stimulated great interest in Plato, and led many scholars, including Pico, to try
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to reconcile the thought of Plato with that of Aristotle, which, reinforced by the continuing influence of St. Thomas but also actively pursued by the naturalist school at Pisa, was a fundamental feature throughout the period. But, as Garin points out, in the course of this, Plato and Aristotle changed. Despite his translations of Plato, Ficino was not a scholarly philologist in the same way as Lorenzo Valla, whose criteria of accuracy set standards not only for philological investigation but also for the investigation of the natural world. Ficino failed to appreciate the difference between the neo-Platonists and Plato, his Plato representing the ascent of the soul to God. Despite the philological problems they raised, access to the works of these great philosophers, however they were interpreted, stimulated an interest in metaphysics, leading to the great metaphysical theories of Pico, Bruno and Campanella. This complex situation was further complicated by the continuing influence of another aspect of the mediaeval legacy: Cabbalistic theory. In a context in which thinkers such as Pico, who wanted to reconcile Christian theology with an Aristotelian conception of the natural world and a humanist emphasis on individual freedom, were attempting to establish the relation between God as the ultimate creator, the natural world and the human being as a free subject, it is not difficult to see why the Cabbalistic idea of grades of entity should seem so attractive and how it could accord with Pico’s famous account of human freedom. A further aspect of Cabbalistic thought that was equally influential was the idea of encodement. This influenced Pico who, despite his rejection of astrology, was only one of many who were very interested in Cabbalistic techniques of interpretation, and in his Heptaplus he used such techniques to seek to uncover the secrets of the Christian mysteries from the book of Genesis. But Galileo provides perhaps the most interesting example of the way in which this influence continued to operate. In his attempt to reconcile his experimental method with Christian thought he argued that God, the perfectly rational being, was the geometer of the universe and that He had issued the plan of the universe through the logos on the basis of mathematics. Thus, through the connection between the world, thought of as an encoded text, written in the language of mathematics, the symbols of which were the geometrical figures, and God as pure rationality, the objectivity of the findings of experimental science was assured. Galileo was not single-handedly responsible for the idea that nature is a book to be read via mathematics. The commitment to an underlying mathematical basis of nature was part of the Pythagorean conception which was always a strong aspect of Florentine neo-Platonism. Galileo stood at the end of the developing idea of nature as a free-standing or autonomous entity, to be investigated free from religious constraints, as found in the work of Pomponazzi, Zabarella and Telesio. But in so far as their approach to the natural world had a strong mathematical basis, none of these thinkers was unaffected by currents of thought that derived from Florentine neo-Platonism. Telesio,
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for example, who wanted to approach nature entirely experimentally, still found it necessary to appeal to God, the rational creator, in order to justify his assumption of the uniformity of nature. For the certainty of knowledge was one of the major desiderata of the Renaissance period. But it was the metaphysicians rather than the scientists who suffered most from difficulties that arose from Catholic doctrine, based upon the miraculous nature of the events and significance of Christ’s life. Pico, for example, had to withdraw most of the nine hundred propositions in which, in his version of the pia philosophia, he argued that Christianity was the point of convergence of all previous human wisdom. Bruno’s early problems with the church similarly arose from his attempts to reconcile Catholic doctrine with neo-Platonism, while his later rejection of theological speculation in favor of free enquiry into the natural world was the source of the distinctly pantheistic nature of his final works, which, together with his refusal to admit the possibility of divine revelation, led to his tragic end. Campanella, one of the most compelling, if perplexing, figures of this period, shared, as Garin shows, much with Bruno. He, too, favored a naturalistic view of the world and, indeed, professed an admiration for Galileo’s work, which went unrequited. But his thought underwent so many vacillations in his twenty-six years of imprisonment as to give rise to worries among his admirers about his sanity. He struggled to find a place for the individual between God as transcendent and the immanence of the natural world. His adoption of the discarded thesis that the world was a living being seemed to allow him to synthesize spirituality and mechanism and to explain astrology and magic as arising from the inner consensus of the totality. Unfortunately, it was also incompatible with the concept of the miraculous as such. Garin sees Bruno and Campanella as exemplifying the crisis engendered by the contradiction between naturalism and spirituality, both of which were strongly supported but which were never satisfactorily reconciled in the thought of the great Renaissance thinkers. Campanella, for example, never managed to show how personal individuality was compatible with the idea, common both to the church and the naturalists, that the world was a unified entity. Without, in any way, wishing to detract from the greatness of these thinkers, it is clear that many aspects of their achievements, and many of the difficulties which they faced, arose from the many influences to which they were exposed and to which they felt that, in a proper philosophy, they ought to be sensitive. The great philosophies of the Renaissance came to an end when it became clear that not all the theoretical consequences of these influences, however they were construed, could be reconciled. Garin shows that with the consequent waning of the Renaissance, critical thought did not come to an end, though the character of Italian philosophy began to change. Throughout the whole period, from Ficino to Campanella, there had been much interest in the nature of art. This had concentrated on the contribution of the content of poetry, rhetoric and the figurative arts to the active life. But with thinkers such as Pallavicino and Tesauro the interest had
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moved from the content of art to the spiritual faculty responsible for its production and appreciation, one that would give art its own autonomy. Thus they were searching for a creative impulse beyond any logical construction. This was to become central to the thought of Vico and Croce. This constitutes another link with the Renaissance emphasis on human freedom, which had been so difficult to accommodate in the great metaphysical systems, for now it could seem that poetic creativity was more fundamental than conceptual thought. A new and very important influence on Italian philosophy was the reception of Descartes’s thought in Italy and, especially, in Naples. As Garin shows, the naturalism which had been such a strong component in Renaissance thought rendered many thinkers sympathetic to Descartes’s mechanical view of the universe. But, at the same time, through its appeal to “the natural light,” his philosophy encouraged others in a return to a quite different way of thought: the Augustinian conception of illumination which had been a very strong feature in Ficino’s philosophy. But the theme of human freedom, never ceased to be far from the surface and in Vico, after his rejection of Descartes, and through the development of his concept of the imagination, it became a major component in his view of the origins of culture. For various reasons, some internal to it and others arising from its potentially heretical nature, Vico’s thought has always been difficult to understand and this has contributed to the comparative lack of interest in it outside Italy. But Garin, who develops a long and valuable account of it, insists upon its importance, both for its eventual rejection of such important features of Renaissance thought as the pia philosophia and the concept of an inscrutable transcendent of which the phenomenal world was a mere shadow; and, in its own right, as a formative influence on the shape of later Italian philosophy. Vico’s conception of a science of humanity, in which the history of human culture, founded in an original imaginative capacity but manifesting itself historically in the development of an inherent rationality, promised to reconcile freedom and rationality, though Garin is doubtful where it successfully did so. But the conception of a science of humanity as such laid the foundations for those of a series of other thinkers with similar ambitions and, later, to the thought of such important thinkers as Filangieri on economics and Romagnosi on legislation and penal theory, to be followed, in a more metaphysical vein, by Rosmini and Gioberti. Other powerful influences, which can only be mentioned here, were Locke, the French Enlightenment thinkers and Kant and Hegel. These gave rise to the Italian Kantian and Hegelian schools. But while Locke’s derivation of all knowledge from the senses contributed to a re-enforcement of the emphasis on experience and the practical world, which was one of the main orientations both of the early humanists and of Vico, it also led to serious skeptical doubts, which were not alleviated by the Kantian influence. The problem here lay in the fact that both Locke’s separation of sensible experience from
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the real world, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, seemed to open the way to subjectivism and, hence, to skepticism. The Italian reaction to these worries came from two thinkers who have been seriously neglected outside Italy. The first of these was Rosmini, the most gifted Italian metaphysician of the first half of the nineteenth century.8 In an extended series of works, beginning with epistemology, he developed an original theory of judgment, arguing that judgment required an innate idea of being, which was omitted both in Locke’s and Kant’s philosophies. However, because actual being is not reproducible, whereas the constituents of judgment must be, Rosmini located this idea of being in an a priori intuition of possible being, as a Platonic ideal of being. In addition to developing a metaphysical system compatible with this theory, Rosmini believed that philosophical speculation could no longer afford to disregard the early stirrings of political unrest, and was convinced that it should provide cultural and political guidance. Although he was unable to extract this directly from his philosophy of ideal being, he did so in a series of writings on morality, emphasizing the importance of conscience, which was to be aided rationally with a wisdom that had developed historically in theology. Throughout all this, he adapted St. Bonaventura’s conception of illumination as a “light of reason,” which constituted the source of our knowledge both of our intellectual powers and ourselves. Rosmini’s attempt to defeat what he saw as Kantian subjectivism was attacked by a number of thinkers, including Gioberti, who claimed that he had failed to make the connection between ideal being and real being. In his own philosophy, Gioberti rejected Rosmini’s reliance on a static structure of Platonic forms in favor of a theory of constant divine creation, in which everything was constantly recreated but in which, in a Vichian manner, the human being participated by means of the creation of new cultural forms. This led him to a providential theory of history, slightly, but only slightly, akin to Vico’s own providential theory, in which he traced what Garin describes as a tendentious history of Italian thought, originating in a mythical Pelasgian or Caucasian culture, but emphasizing the beneficent role played by the papacy and Catholic thought in the development of Italian culture. As Garin points out at length in his Prologue, this faulty history of Italian thought, derived as it was from a non-historical theoretical framework, obliged Gioberti to omit most of Italian philosophy, with the exception of Vico, between Renaissance humanism and the Risorgimento (Prologue, p. xli). Other continuing influences on Italian philosophy in the nineteenth century were Hegelianism, Positivism, Marxism and irrationalism. The first three of these led to a number of important thinkers, including the Hegelian Spaventa, the positivist Roberto Ardigò, who tried to tie philosophy to science and divorce it from theology, and the Marxist Labriola, with his determinist version of historical materialism. After the end of the First World War, and possibly occasioned by it, an irrationalist element entered Italian culture, leading philosophy into a quite terrible state, perhaps its lowest ever, when, un-
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characteristically, it lost almost all sense of serious endeavor. This was a moment of bad faith in which crude spiritualism and skepticism held sway, very superficially linked to thinkers and schools of thought taken to be destructive of reason, from Kierkegaard to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, but including also Buddhism and theosophy. Nevertheless Italy had already produced two major philosophers, Croce and Gentile, who stood apart from this folly. Garin’s attitude to Croce is extremely interesting. The development of the sciences had reproduced a new version of the problem that had been of such concern in the Renaissance and particularly to Campanella: if there is only one reality, is it a natural or a spiritual process and, according to the answer, what is the meaning of the human being and wherein lies the possibility of action? Croce rejected Marxism because it made no sense of revolutionary praxis. He was resistant also to providential views of history which, he believed, evaded the problem of human responsibility in history. His main attempt to avoid the dichotomy between nature and spirit lay in his Philosophy of Spirit. But although Garin admired Croce’s contribution to almost every facet of Italian cultural life up to the end of the Second World War, particularly his work on the methodology of history, and on poetry and aesthetics, he was critical of the less than comprehensive nature of Croce’s principal theoretical achievement. Garin explained this as arising from the fact that, having come initially from a literary background, in his Philosophy of Spirit Croce accepted too easily the framework within in which aesthetics, poetry and history had been categorized more or less since Vico. This meant that he failed to include natural science and economics in his classification of the sciences of spirit and produced a classification of forms of knowledge, of a neo-Kantian kind, in which mathematics and formal logic were omitted. The unfortunate consequence of this was that, because of Croce’s enormous stature within Italy, these omissions colored most of what subsequently transpired in Italian philosophy up to the end of his life. Gentile was a man of profound religious sensibility and great historical learning. Influenced by Spaventa, Rosmini, Marx, Labriola and Croce, he developed a renewed form of idealism, in which positive religion was regarded as a phase in the life of spirit, to be resolved in a clearer philosophical vision in which all religious needs would be fulfilled. This led to his general theory of spirit as “pure act,” in which the world as act continuously translated itself into “the made.” But because of the mystical nature of “the act,” which derived from Gentile’s religious convictions, he emptied philosophy of its content, and proceeded to concern himself with “the made,” that is, with the history of philosophy, to which he made many distinguished contributions. But although some of his most important followers, including Ugo Spirito and Guido Calogero, were critical of the distinctions that underlay this retreat from philosophy to history, the Fascist atrocities prompted such philosophers as Nicola Abbagnano and Enzo Paci to move towards an existen-
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tialist position with an emphasis, understandable in the circumstances, upon the need for authenticity as against dehumanization and alienation. At the time at which he wrote this History Garin expressed the hope, writing not as an historian but as a thinker, that Italian philosophy would best resolve the problems of Italian society along lines advocated by Gramsci. But it remains to be noted that, while never becoming inactive in writing on social and political issues, both at an academic and popular level, he lost this hope after the excesses of the student uprisings, to which he was initially favorable, of 1968. Thereafter he produced many monographs on the thought of different thinkers and on the character of thought and culture in different historical periods, but the present wonderful volume represents what is still the most valuable, comprehensive account of the development of Italian philosophy. One can only express regret that Garin did not survive to enjoy its translation into English. Notes 1. In a recent issue of the journal History and Theory, vol. 43, num. 4 [2004], on the subject of historians and ethics, about the one point that all contributors, philosophers and historians alike, were agreed upon was that historians have a duty to their readers to write about is important. But there was no similar consensus about the criteria for what is important. 2. As expressed in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938), pp. 230–239. 3. Alasdair Macintyre has brought this point out particularly well in his essay, “The relationship of philosophy to its past,” in Philosophy in History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984), pp. 30–48. As he notes, “Augustine and Anselm both wrote philosophy as prayer, Aquinas and Scotus as intellectual debate, Dante and Pope as poetry, Spinoza in what he took to be the form of geometry….” in ibid. p. 32. 4. In History in a Changing World (University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), pp. 21– 22, Barraclough points out that if we followed the judgments of those who wrote in thirteenth century England, we should produce “a dreary recital of miracles, tempests, comets, pestilences, calamities and other ‘wonderful things’,” concluding that the historian should be concerned “not with what was important, but with what we think was (or ought to have been) important,” cited in an excellent discussion of this issue by William H. Dray, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1956). 5. In “Present Standpoints and Past History,” in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 34, num. 18 [1939], pp. 477–489. 6. See Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and its history,” in Philosophy in History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984), pp. 17–30. 7. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas,” in History and Theory, vol. 8, p. 28. 8. It is pleasing to note that, long since Garin wrote, a number of Rosmini’s works have been published in translation by Rosmini House, Durham, U.K.
PROLOGUE IS A NATIONAL PHILOSOPHY POSSIBLE? 1. The Evaluation of the Italian Philosophical Tradition of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Renaissance Considered as the Beginning of a National Philosophy Giuseppe Pecchio, in 1849, premised his Storia della economia pubblica in Italia with these remarks from the preliminary discourse of the Encyclopédie: “It would be unfair if we were not to recognize all that we owe to Italy. It is from Italy that we have received all the sciences that have thereafter given so many rich fruits within Europe.” Italian thought was hereby posited as the beginning point of the European culture of the modern age. The reference was to the kind of culture that from the fifteenth century onward revolutionized both philosophy and what is properly called scientific knowledge. It was a renovation spawned in Italy and supported principally by Italy for almost two centuries. Enlightenment historiography, separating from the course of history the classic world as an ideal model and considering the Middle Ages to be engulfed in the darkness of barbarism, remained faithful to the polemics of the first Renaissance by opposing the splendor of the fifteenth century to the wilderness of barbarism that closed and oppressed the mind of human beings. If we look through the Disputatio physico-historica that Antonio Genovesi in 1745 premised to the work on the elements of physics by Pieter van Musschenbroeck, which contains a brief history of the scientific-philosophical thought, we will find that after the ancient Italic, Pythagoric-Eleatic, and Platonic-Stoic philosophy, after the Italic-Greek flourishing of philosophical and scientific knowledge, “suddenly the scene changed and a gloomy night descended over the whole world.” Under the force of the waves of Germanic bands, “cities burned and ruined, most prosperous beaches of Italy and Greece declined, ancient temples tumbled down, sanctuaries were violated, laws discarded and set aside, abandoned were the arts, set on fire the libraries, everything was carried away by the horrendous flood of Goths, Longobards, Vandals, Heruli, Saracens, and Turks.” But let the historian speak: “Before 1453 western philosophy had only one face (unus erat toto philosophiae vultus in Occidente). Public and private schools echoed one only doctrine: the doctrine of Aristotle. He was the teacher of men, and the god of philosophers.” This was so until suddenly and providentially Constantinople fell. Afterward, Greek scholars came to Italy, to Naples and Florence, and the resurrection of letters and minds began. “They threw off the yoke of Aristotle and the Averroists; the Platonic doctrine returned to the stage, new theories found (aut Platonica restituta, aut nova excogitata).” Why was the origin of this kind of reconstruction so dear to the whole Enlightenment and destined to survive the Enlightenment? If we were to read the pages moved almost by a breath of religious enthusiasm with which Leonardo Bruni after seven hundred years
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greeted the return to Florence of Hellenic learning; if we were to run again through the pages of Valla in which from Boethius onward ten centuries of history were accused of blind barbarism and were considered set almost apart from the development of humanity, we would become aware that the age of the Enlightenment appropriated all the polemical motives of the first Renaissance. This did not happen merely by chance. The old polemic was needed as a new weapon in the new polemic. Voltaire, putting together in his brilliant style all the themes of his contemporaries, insisted on the renewed humanism of the eighteenth century that was to complete out of the darkness of the Middle Ages the liberation started in the fifteenth century. Even Vico in his historical vision admitted the medieval darkness as a returned barbarism of Italy. In a striking parallel of the second with the first barbarous times, he assimilated to Pelasgus dressed in leather garments Bellincion Berti “dressed in leather and bone” whom Dante, the new Homer, celebrated. Of Dante Vico condemned the barbarous language of the schools with a judgment that perhaps is not as different as it appeared from the one given by Saverio Bettinelli. Muratori, the author of those dissertations numbered 43 and 44 of Antiquitates in which the presence of an important medieval culture is documented, could not abstain in La perfetta poesia (vol. 2, p. 93) from condemning the Scholastic obscurity of Dante. “He [Dante] at times, by using the barbarous language of the schools, which is extremely unbecoming to the genius of Poetry, appears very obscure not only to the crude populace but also to the learned.” Appiano Buonafede, the modest Italian compiler of the works of Johann Jakob Brucker, lamented that all the historians who spoke “of letters and literature, as they arrived at the years about the middle of the fifteenth century, identified a style of greater exuberance. With the most florid figures of speech, they recognized that they were finally coming out of the barren lands, the naked mountains, the woods, the thorn-bushes, the quagmires, and were at last stepping on cultivated fields, among vineyards, walking through gardens and charming estates. The beneficial genii that had come from Greece had at last dispelled the night and inflamed the light of the beautiful and advantageous disciplines.” Indignant was the good Celestine friar, Agatopisto Cromaziano, who rightly raised his voice against that tendentious interpretation. This was a useless effort because Terenzio Mamiani delle Rovere, connecting Renaissance and Risorgimento, was preparing himself in 1834 to restore the ancient Italian philosophy, by acknowledging the Italic-Greek wisdom of Pythagoras and Plato. From Vico to Cuoco, all scholars celebrated this wisdom with hymns and honored with incense, but Mamiani inveighed also against the false Scholastic doctrine, which perverted docile characters and often afflicted the indocile with jail, torture, and fire. The Italic wisdom of Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Zeno that had been restored by Archimedes was put out by the weight of new dogmas colored with a simulated mystical light after Proclus dressed the Platonic romances with geometric apparels. Subse-
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quently, Cicero’s sweet melodies and Galileo’s experience and reason defeated the barbarous language of the dialecticians. Galileo, indeed, brought with stability and diligence the human intellect back to the reconsideration of nature. The ancient Italic philosophy, which Mamiani wanted to disseminate with his Academy, was in reality Renaissance philosophy spirited by a rigorous and active spirit and animated by the powerful and innate inclinations of the Latin race. This Italic philosophy “was never separated from practical applications, especially from the civic and political ones, and was at the same time rational and practical, positive and Platonic, profound investigator of remote abstractions as well as of civic recent events.” It is in this view of the Renaissance, considered the central moment of Italian thought, that during the nineteenth century all historians and philosophers who in some different ways participated to the process of national unification and liberation converged. The polemic against Scholasticism paralleled the polemic against the church, a polemic required by political events. The celebration of philosophy and science from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries until the time of Galileo underlined the moment of hegemony of Italian culture in Europe. It was the moment in which the economic and political situation of the Italian states went into crisis, but after a period of flourishing that allowed the maturation of a great “national” thought. This historical position was more or less a conscious heir of Enlightenment and dear to rationalists and “laics.” Its recurring themes, not by chance, were the trials of Bruno, Galileo, and Campanella (and perhaps even of Savonarola), which were almost taken as the symbols of the split between culture and the Church of Rome. Many “liberal” Catholics were not opposed to this position, though with their many differences, they all intended to show that the conflict introduced by the Renaissance was not between science and religion, but between a thought of renovation that was nevertheless profoundly Christian and institutions that needed a radical reformation in order to be restored to their original mission. On the contrary, the part of Catholic thought that stood still and reacted against the Enlightenment and the inheritance of the rationalism of the eighteenth century connected the Italian renewal with the Church. This party was not only searching the documents of nationality within the Middle Ages, it was also underscoring the continuity of a philosophical tradition since ancient Rome, celebrating the great scholastics and finding in the germs of the most radical rebellion present in the Renaissance themes judged extraneous to the character of the Italian civilization. So did Rosmini when in 1836 he replied to Mamiani not only insisting on the most ancient Italian tradition of Great Greece (“I want to recall the national science to its principles; I go back to the glories of Great Greece”), but also pronouncing Plato interpreter of Italic traditions. Rosmini appealed to St. Augustine, Boethius (“the most ancient Italian philosopher”), the Italian St. Thomas, and the scholastic philosophy. Thus, the myth of the returning dark forest of barbaric history was rejected. Even
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Vincenzo Gioberti assailed repeatedly this myth when he numbered in the Primato four forms of Italian philosophy that existed before the fifteenth century and denied, in substance, a privileged position to the “renaissance” of the fifteenth century. 2. Vincenzo Gioberti What stands out distinctly in Italy, Gioberti observed, is the Pelasgian genius, the most perfect kind of Caucasian genius and consequently absolutely human. This Caucasian genius, we mean “Greek,” has harmony as its special dowry. Even under this aspect, Italy appears destined to bring peace to all other peoples of Europe. Italian philosophy is the only one that could bring concord to the discordant speculations of the other countries by means of a loftier wisdom that reconciles the opposites and unifies the contraries by that wise harmony whose most ancient concept was also an invention of the Italic School. Who does not see that the famous Hegel, allow me to say it concisely, in its substance is a renewal (pejorative at times) of Pythagoreanism and a return to the infant philosophy of Gentilism? It is undoubted that Italy has been the cradle of philosophy in the Occident. Pythagoras, Italian rather than Greek, nourished with ancient Doric, Etruscan, and Pelasgian wisdom, who founded the Italian school, is the most splendid portrait that history gives us of the first Italian genius. The Pythagoreans were the prophetic forerunners of Dante, Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus. The metaphysical realism of the Pythagoreans, equipped and nourished by Plato and the Alexandrines with the doctrine of the Logos and the Demiurge, was transferred into the Christian school, where it was cleansed with special industry from all stain of pantheism by Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Thomas. They formed the tetrarchy of the Catholic speculation that preceded the resurrected paganism of Luther and Descartes. From Pythagoreanism came Anaxagoras’ concept of the primacy of thought. From Anaxagoras came Socrates and “the three most celebrated Hellenistic schools, the Academy, the Stoa, and the Peripatetic, generated by the Socratic movement, descendants from the Italiote orgies.” Thus, we arrive to Latin thought. Latin philosophy was the second form of Italian speculation and was distinguished from the Greek because of its genius. Greek philosophy, returning to the peninsula and taking home in Rome, took on an aspect more austere and practical, and though not yet free from Pythagoreanism it was no less wise and in tune with correct civil consciousness. Then the Patristic philosophy came, which, though diffused throughout all Catholicity, was especially ours, and can be considered the third form of Italian thought.… The Fathers restored the Pythagorean and Platonic realism, freeing it from the pantheistic fog and shaping it with the sovereign dogma of the creation. The work of the Christian Fathers was continued and was reduced to the most rigorous terms of science by the Scholastics who were Ital-
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ian by family and place. Scholasticism is the fourth form of our native philosophy. The Scholastic disputes were nothing but the intellectual battle of the Celtic and Germanic geniuses against the Pelasgian and Italian wisdom. But the pagan sensism introduced by barbarous teachers under the mantle of a false Aristotle was contrary to the idea incarnated into Italy and the Pontiff. For this reason, to the eyes of Gioberti the Renaissance, the fifth form of Italian philosophy, was in its substance a revival of paganism, when our ingenuity, having almost totally abandoned speculation, applied itself for a period of two centuries to civil prudence, and to the science of computation and experimentation. Machiavelli, Galileo, and Sarpi were for Gioberti, the loftiest exponents of this non-philosophy until the speculative mood was again roused with Vico, who, to restore the Platonic and Christian realism, had the marvelous idea of returning to the first origins, not the Greek, but the Italic ones. Thus, Vico rediscovered the pristine Pelasgian wisdom from the residues of the Latin language and recomposed the body of that wisdom in the same way that modern geologists reconstructed from spread out bones the dimensions and features of another world. Vico, though being himself a school, had no followers. Italy was invaded by the Cartesian doctrines, which are Protestantism applied to philosophy and with Lutheranism constituted the most serious danger for the Italian genius. This Italian genius succeeded in attenuating the dangerous crudeness of the Cartesian doctrines when Gioberti tempered the doctrines of Locke with those of Leibniz, and was himself eclectic instead of Cartesian. Romagnosi was a sensist more moderate and profound than his contemporaries. The servile habit of Gallic speculations ended with him and so did the sixth form of Italic philosophy. To that the seventh form followed that was the ingenious imitation of the Scottish and German doctrines. Our proud and honorable Galluppi was the Reid of Italy while Rosmini renewed ingeniously the pretensions and the errors of German Cartesianism or Kantism. At this point, according to Gioberti, an Italian philosophy was finally having birth again, the philosophy already mentioned by Mamiani and Luigi Ornato, the philosophy that joined ideally Italian-Greek tradition with Christian inspiration. The reform conceived by Vico and continued by Mamiani could not be brought to completion if the ancient and Pelasgian tradition was not joined with the Christian, reducing both to a unique principle whose substance would root on reason, and whose significant language would be that of revelation. This was the principle of creation. In this way, Gioberti drew the map that functions as part of the ideal formula of an Italian philosophy that returns always to its sources after periods of foreign influence. While in 1836 Baldassare Poli, with his lenient eclecticism opposed to that of Victor Cousin, gave in Supplementi to the version of Wilhem Gottlieb Tennemann the first erudite outline of an inquiry that ran over the course of Italian philosophy once again from its remote classical origins,
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Gioberti instead attempted at a synthesizing interpretation in light of the principle of creation. Because of his interpretation, Gioberti was obliged to exclude from Italian thought a great part of the speculation flourished since the time Italy acquired within Europe its own precise national character, meaning from Humanism to Risorgimento. Renaissance’s Gentilism, Cartesianism and Enlightenment, the Scottish and Kantian Schools, all the philosophers between the 14th century and the age of Gioberti, with the exception of Vico, were extruded from the Italic Pelasgian philosophy. Under the aegis of the Papacy and the Church, Gioberti’s Risorgimento rejected the heredity of the Enlightenment and its interpretation of the culture of the Renaissance. The whole of this historical reconstruction kept its suggestive power and seduced at first even scholars that afterward abandoned it. This happened to Francesco Fiorentino who, writing in 1858 his Lettera filosofica to the Sicilian Antonio Catara Lettieri concerning the studies of Paolo Emilio Tulelli on Tommaso Rossi, a friend and contemporary of Vico, did not fail to yearn for the ideal continuity between Pythagoras, St. Thomas, and Vico: “Among the Italians, St. Anselm, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas are to be placed at the side of Pythagoras; Vico and Rossi can very well be placed together with these great and original thinkers.” Fiorentino asserted an ontology and a creationism, and claimed that “we were born to be ontologists and the examples of our greatest thinkers convinced us.” Writing in 1861 Il panteismo di G. Bruno, Fiorentino, perhaps in a covertly polemic with a script of Spaventa, said that the pantheism of Bruno, the humanistic, psychological, eclectic, idealistic tendencies were all alien to the Italian mentality: “Italy saw the pantheism of Bruno, but now the times have changed. To continue to look at Germany, which is still in its medieval period, does not seem to be the direction to follow. The conflict that divides today Italy from the Church is temporary, and the fight cannot bring a mutation of principles, as someone expects it to happen. Italy is, wants, and must remain Catholic.” 3. Bertrando Spaventa Within this Giobertian atmosphere that was fantasizing about the most ancient origins of the Italic speculation, the interpretation of Bertrando Spaventa, even though debatable under some of its aspects, clearly emerged. Spaventa’s vision was like Gioberti’s one rigidly connected with a theoretical formulation that served for measure and limit of every judgment. For a long time Spaventa had directed his inquiry into the Italian thought. When on 16 November 1861 Luigi Palmieri, inaugurating the Neapolitan academic year, in his hate for the Hegelians, exalted the national philosophy of Bruno, Campanella, Vico, Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti, he also thundered against “the fogs, vapors, and witches of the Nordic philosophy.” Spaventa’s reaction to this was the opening address “Della nazionalità nella filosofia” that was followed by a course of lessons on the development of Italian thought in relation to European philosophy. Spaventa does not deny a priori the nationality of thought. He stated,
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“If philosophy, is not a vain exercise of the intellect, but the real form of human life within which are compounded and find their true meaning all the past moments of the spirit, then it is natural for a free people to recognize itself and find the true conscience of itself in its own philosophers.” According to Spaventa, when we move from the empty generality of an affirmation to the concrete determination of a problem or of a specific attitude, we become aware that all the European peoples in the modern times have indeed formulated questions in different ways although nearly always constructing the stages of a single process. When we look at India and Greece, we see two distinct and definite moments of the human spirit. In the Middle Ages and in the Modern Era we find the contributions of single peoples as contributions and aspects of one unique moment in the life of the spirit. This means there is an education common to whole Europe! All nations have their representatives; each contributes with its life to the common life of thought; each affords one element for the solution of the problem and not yet the entire solution. Especially after the Renaissance, the philosophies which appear as national, like Cartesianism in France, Lockeanism in England, and so on, constitute the many stages where thought went through in its immortal course. Modern philosophy is not English, French, Italian, or German, but European.” When we try to determine what the function of Italy might be within this harmony, we must recognize that its whole function consists in being the herald. Whereas the character of philosophy, its development, and general direction among modern peoples is common and unique, a difference may be found between the Italian philosophical genius and that of other nations. In other words, if the Italian philosophical genius is or has been privileged more than that of other nations, this was only because twice it heralded the two principal periods of modern philosophy: Cartesianism in the philosophers of the Renaissance, especially in Bruno and Campanella, and Kantism in Vico. This last one was in itself an anticipation that recurred also in Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti. If it were licit to say so, the Italian originality, according to Spaventa, consisted in its open concordance with European thought in the moments of its greatest fecundity. The Italian philosophy (of a country not yet established as a state), although original because of its being a herald, never succeeded to develop in full the seeds it contained. Italian philosophy needed to consider itself within the European philosophy as within a superior consciousness. Spaventa affirmed, “We have such a greater need of mirroring ourselves within this second consciousness, because our own consciousness, for the wickedness of the human being and fortune, has never been what it could have been.” The seeds have been choked from within because of the coexistence of positive and negative forces: beside the forces of freedom and in contrast to them, the forces of oppression existed. After the long tortures of Campanella and the pyre of Bruno, two contrary currents were formed in Italy: the one of our supreme thinkers and the other of their executioners. Those of the last current naturally claimed that theirs was the true current of our life,
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the true Italian philosophy. This current is not yet completely extinct. Still it is said that the Italy we are forming is not the true one, and that the true one is the one we have obliterated. Such contradiction in the womb itself of our national life prevented the development of the philosophy of the Risorgimento and was the reason why Vico and Gioberti were little understood, or rather, frankly speaking, why they could hardly comprehend themselves. Spaventa established, though with the geniality of intuition, a historiography made up of harbingering possibilities. On these bases, an Italian thinker had value not so much for what he said on his own, which could be individualized historically in one of our national events, but for what he had shadowy anticipated, from era to era, of the doctrines of Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, or Hegel. Then the analysis began, so fastidious in servile followers, to determine in each philosopher the part of “true” and “false” philosophy, according to whether or not his formulations could agree with those of some great modern thinker. Italian philosophy was reduced to a banality expressed in a melancholic uniformity. Individual thinkers were torn to pieces without any concern for their concrete historical situation and for the value of their complete personality. At the side of these precursory events and of these intimate contradictions of ancient and modern, that is, of objectivism and subjectivism, dark periods existed, periods of deafness and silence of Italian thought, which Spaventa identified and collocated within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Naturally, Spaventa was too strong a philosopher for not going to the depths of thinkers with whom he felt some affinity, but he did that overbearingly, and his voice often overwhelmed that of the philosopher he was supposed to hear; he was the one of the two speaking continuously, while the other was silent or lost in the overbearing words of Spaventa’s exposition. The strength and the limits of Spaventa’s historiography are found in the admirable vigor and in the domineering presence of the historian himself. In the essays on Bruno or Campanella, we are looking fruitlessly for these thinkers; everywhere we find Spaventa with his torment and his own problems. Because Spaventa was a man worthy of being heard, every one of his essays is a guide for the comprehension of Spaventa and for the understanding of ourselves. Finally, he is an aid for the understanding of the author in question, because any initiation to problems sincerely provoked is always fruitful. The Italian philosophy of the past is regrettably often absent from Spaventa’s pages, which are all enlightened by genial insights, and though unfaithful, they are all beautiful. With all his excesses, Spaventa provoked many researches. We should mention an erudite thinker as Fiorentino, who could arrive to pedantic details, and was a faithful editor of texts. At the same time, he was an acute inquirer, whose studies on the fifteenth century, on Pomponazzi, Telesio, and the Telesian School, and its influences constitute an essential point of departure. With Fiorentino, two others deserve mentioning in a history of Italian thought, Fe-
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lice Tocco (a student of Spaventa) and Pietro Ragnisco. The first is still famous today for his studies on Bruno, and the second is admired for his learned inquiries about the Paduan thought in which the passion of the searcher is harmonized with the respect for each individual thinker that is studied. The contributions of these men are not bold syntheses, but accurate analyses; they have not been surpassed and remain along with the inquiries of Carlo Cantoni on Vico and some writings of Luigi Ferri about the Renaissance and the thought of the Risorgimento. This, together with the research of Luigi Amabile on Campanella, constitutes the best in the history of Italian thought that was produced by the nineteenth century. Finally, we may say that these were the researches which if continued could demolish the successive hasty synthesizing visions, preparing for more mature and solid judgments. 4. Roberto Ardigò and the Positivists The inquiry promoted by the historical school was unfortunately wasted now and then in trifling projects, even though some researches like the ones of Arnaldo Della Torre on the Ficinian Academy constituted the first step toward the discovery and valorization of the thought of the fifteenth century. On the other hand, the impulse of Ardigò contributed to the focusing on thinkers and problems heretofore neglected or little valued. In his desire to find a support and a witness to a personal position, even Ardigò came to interpret the Italic philosophy in function of its positive traditions. Although passionately unilateral, he evinced obvious motives. In La psicologia come Scienza positiva, the valuing of facts and science appeared to him as a proper and characteristic doctrine of the Italian genius since the time of Empedocles and Archimedes. In many loci of his books, Pietro Pomponazzi says that senses and experimentation are the scale of truth. Leonardo da Vinci held as his first axiom that the only interpreter of nature was experience. Bernardino Telesio intended to look only at facts. Giordano Bruno knew the true and natural division of method in the art of investigating and finding facts, in that of judging and ordering them, and finally in the art of applying the principles. Tommaso Campanella taught that the first job of the philosopher must be to compose a history of facts, not a partial history, but one most possibly complete. Galileo Galilei called doubt father of inquiry and route to truth. He professed that to try reaching the essence was an impossible enterprise and a vain effort. And Giambattista Vico taught that the true is the made. In Ardigò, the characteristic of all Italian philosophy is the positive method. “Today positivism is the son of the Italian positivism of the indicated epoch, and mostly that of Galileo.” Precisely for this reason, Ardigò, too, aimed at the devaluation of the Middle Ages and at the exaltation of the Renaissance as the dawn of the thought of modern Europe. “The modern thought, to which Europe owes its contemporary condition of greatness and power, is the maturation of a thought that was born among us during the years of Renaissance.… Renaissance required the valuing, against the mystical dreams and
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the ascetic aberrations of the Middle Ages, of the indefeasible reasons of nature in a science that should not be based on the authority of some teacher, but on the direct evidence of its own truths” (Il pensiero moderno, a cui l’Europa deve la sua attuale condizione di grandezza e potenza, è la maturazione di un pensiero, che nacque presso di noi negli anni della Rinascenza.… La Rinascenza fece valere, contro i mistici sogni e gli ascetici aberramenti del medio evo, le ragioni imprescrivibili della natura, nella scienza, che vuol essere basata, non sulla autorità di un maestro qualunque, ma sulla evidenza diretta dei suoi veri). This was the way Ardigò expressed himself in the celebrated lecture on Pomponazzi given at Mantua on 17 March 1869. Less than thirty years before, in 1842, the Rev. Giuseppe Pezza-Rossa, a professor of the Seminary of Mantua where Ardigò later studied, had published the essay titled Lo spirito della filosofia Italiana. In this writing, the professor, after having exalted the science of Pythagoras and Galileo and vituperated the medieval “barbarous darkness” together with “the yoke of Scholasticism,” attacked apriorism, concluding that “it would be ungrateful not to acknowledge our ancient positive wisdom, and follow instead some more recent splendid fantasies.” Then he proceeded with a fierce vivacity attacking Scholasticism: “Scholasticism is a philosophy that added the prejudices of the modern times to the errors of the past and that, probably because conscious of its own frailty, likes staying connected with theology, whose primacy it always recognized. Everyone can see how many damages were inflicted to both by this situation: Scholasticism introduced its vain subtleties within theology; theology brought a spirit of dogmatism to Scholasticism impeding its abilities and mired it, so that it departed from the ways of research and invention. What could then be expected from a school in which, according to Gassendi, consciousness and freedom of judgment have been laid aside?” Finally, Pezza-Rossa mocked Platonism and praised the “powerful genius of Pietro Pomponaccio” who, “with the body of a pigmy but with the mind of a giant, penetrated better than anyone else the spirit of the fatherland’s philosophy,” ultimately freeing it from theological hindrances and medieval authorities. Pomponazzi became the symbol of an Italian philosophy made of experience, concreteness, positiveness, and facts. “If at times this Italian philosophy seemed to have moved faraway from its doctrine because of the irruption of some esoteric schools, this happened only in appearance and within the walls of some peculiar lyceums, for it was always the constant practice of the masses, from which alone one should derive the character of a national philosophy.” The good priest was deprecating the old scholastic errors that were hidden but returning with the doctrine of apriorism, “Whoever searches for the origins of most errors, will certainly find the greater part of them in the blind passion for the a priori reasoning.” Heretofore a whole series of researches—some fecund for seriousness of concrete results, others more ambitious for general synthesis, mostly intended
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to exalt Renaissance naturalism as liberation from ecclesiastical and metaphysical oppressions and as a way to modern science—originated from the formulations of Ardigò. Thus, Erminio Troilo, a researcher on the Paduan school, on Bruno, Palingenio Stellato, and Sarpi, while lecturing on Telesio celebrated his “historical function … in the moment of grace of the Renaissance as a theoretical critique against fantasizing metaphysics, and sterile logic of illusion.” Troilo loved to take position against the idealists—who were preoccupied with the task of expunging transcendence and dualism from the Italian philosophical tradition—perhaps without being conscious of the intimate kinship that connected him with them. Francesco De Sarlo was also a thinker inclined to interpret Italian thought as a philosophy of experience even though he was not opposed to dualism and transcendence. Criticizing other historians for their reconstruction of the past in function of their present mental positions, he identified the beginning of the experimental tradition in the Renaissance viewed at first as exclusively oriented toward the exterior and thereafter integrated by Campanella and Vico with reference to the life of the spirit and to history. Genovesi and his disciples Gioia and Romagnosi deepened and enlarged the philosophy of experience, giving greater importance to the historicalsocial phenomena. Pasquale Borrelli anticipated Galluppi who, though Vincenzo De Grazia later completed his thinking, systematized the typical orientation of the Italian philosophy that lost itself after De Grazia in empty abstractions. Gaetano Capone Braga, a disciple of De Sarlo, was considered a historian of the Italian thought of the eighteenth century. Ending a judgment on his teacher, Braga added the words of Romagnosi, “I hope that the Italian youth will never love alchemistic ghosts or make a show of it with eccentric sibylline verses. This youth ought to be Italian, all Italian, and nothing else but Italian.” In Braga, we had “an Italian spirit” that excluded a good and important part of the Italian tradition, from Ficino to the Platonists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the Cartesians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa. In every case, to a unilaterality another was substituted that was not better than the previous and while these ones were accusing the adversaries of subordinating historical evaluations to theoretical assumptions, they were behaving not differently, even though their assumptions were different from those of the adversaries. 5. Giovanni Gentile and the Idealist Historiography Giovanni Gentile, the most important historian of Italian thought in the twentieth century, was directly connected with the tradition of Spaventa. With his inquiries, Gentile touched all historic periods, from the thirteenth to the beginnings of the twentieth century, though he never completed the planned work of a whole synthesis. He dealt with all aspects of Italian thought not only in original synopses, but also in monographs of erudite analysis, in edi-
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tions and commentaries of unpublished or little known texts. Among these editions are texts of Landino, Pomponazzi, Bruno, Campanella, Gioberti, Spaventa, and Fiorentino. He wrote works on the Scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth century, on Dante, on the first dawn of the Renaissance and on the Renaissance itself, and on Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella. He then wrote about Leonardo and Galileo, Vico and Vico's disciples and the movement of the thought of Southern Italy with Giannone. He analyzed the period from Genovesi to Galluppi, the literary tradition from Alfieri to Leopardi and Manzoni, the importance of Cuoco, Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa, and finally, he dealt with the origins of contemporary philosophy. His intuitions and reconstructions of thought may not be identical to ours; those editions and commentaries may appear to us at times superable or already surpassed. Even without mentioning the inquiries promoted, suggested, or initiated by him, the amount of works that he offered is imposing. While defining “Il carattere storico della filosofia Italiana” in the opening address of January 1918 at the University of Rome, Gentile treated explicitly from the beginning the problem of the national character of philosophy. He commented that strictly speaking “neither philosophy, nor science, nor art, nor religion have truly a national character; and every treatment inspired by political distinctions can only appear based on arbitrary, empirical, and dangerous criteria.” In the same way, there cannot be a mathematics whose truth is Chinese or an Indian mathematical truth. So “philosophy, which is the most dense and rigorous form of thought, cannot free itself from this law. It can be said that philosophy is universal and international as far as it is philosophy, and that it is not philosophy as far as it is national” (La filosofia, come la forma piú concentrata e rigorosa del pensiero, non si può sottrarre a questa legge; e può ben dirsi perciò che essa è universale e internazionale in quanto è filosofia, e che filosofia non è in quanto nazionale). This does not exclude that every philosophical problem is derived from a particular aspect of the world, is rooted in a particular rhythm of our conscience, or develops from one particular state of mind. “Philosophy is and must be personal and not only national. Philosophy is the life of the soul, which is always the individual soul, rooted with profound roots in the soil of the history determined as the history of a human being, and in that human being of a specific people, and in that people of a particular civilization” (Cosí, non soltanto nazionale, ma la filosofia è, e deve essere, personale: vita dell’anima, che è sempre anima individuale, piantata con radici profonde nel suolo della storia determinate come storia di un uomo, e in quell’uomo di un popolo, e in quel popolo d’una civiltà). Having started his intellectual journey from Spaventa, Gentile grasped acutely the connection between the historicity and the nationality of philosophy, even though historicity gradually vanished because of his conviction that the terminal point of the Italian philosophy throughout its whole course was constituted by actualism, whose distinctive character was the progressive re-
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alization of the religion of immanence or, precisely, the philosophy of the act. Hence, Gentile commenced to limit the significance of every thinker to the tension present in him between the conception of an absolute removed from the human being, transcendent, and the active awareness of the presence of the absolute in the “I” (like an act within the act). In this situation, the “transcendence” signified the past thought and the superseded positions, while the “immanence” pointed to the eternal rather than to the present. Gentile remarked that when in the history of Italy the sense of that presence was no longer felt, it meant that the religion of immanence had weakened and the “literati” triumphed: it was the time when a Pomponazzi chose death sealing “his all negative and grievous doctrine of the mortality of the soul.” When the sense of that presence was felt, although as an unsatisfied need, the obscurity of Vico triumphed, “the most religious philosopher Italy ever had.” [Yes, religious was Vico,] but not in the religion of immanence that Gentile saw incarnated in Gioberti, the religion through which “life becomes a dutiful crusade, and as such it discovers itself in the depth of reflection; life pervaded by the vital spirit of Christianity; life that philosophy advocates with a voice that penetrates the tombs and resuscitates the deads, showing the way of a life worthy of human beings, a life which moves toward a destination” (la vita diventa una milizia, in quanto tale si scopre nel profondo della riflessione: la vita compenetrata dello spirito vitale del Cristianesimo; la vita, che la filosofia promove con voce che penetra nelle tombe, e ne resuscita i morti, segnando la via per cui la vita è degna dell’uomo, indirizzato a una meta). Guido De Ruggiero accused Gentile of having presented the history of Italian philosophy in a manner that runs the risk of swinging between rhetoric and erudition. It was an unjust accusation because Gentile, by placing his emphasis on the heresy that is present in all orthodoxy, and on the conflict between the past and the future of every thought, was able to make us relive in depth the drama of research. If we must speak of some limitations in Gentile, they should be found in his use of one color alone in depicting the various vicissitudes of history. For him, the fight is one, and it is an “ideal” fight: the prologue of human conflicts is in heaven. This gives the impression that, between here and there, the contrast may be apparent because it is the representation of a drama whose ending is known from the beginning. From this comes the characteristically boring uniformity of a large part of the historiography of the “idealists” connected with Gentile. Although well deserving in the history of the national thought, they were deprived of the solid erudition of their teacher and of his rare capacity to make the past alive. Among them, Giuseppe Saitta, the author of studies on St. Thomas and Gioberti, and above all on the Renaissance for whom the vicissitude of the life of the Italian culture is reduced to the fight against any transcendent solidification and any objectivism that intends to suffocate “the freedom of the spirit.” On the one side, we have the Middle Ages, the Church, the theology, the object, and the transcendent; on the other, the modern world, the imma-
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nence, the subject, the spirit, and the freedom. The historian’s task is that of identifying, recommending them to the condemnation by the readers, the dead branches, the “medieval” residues, which dim, but without full success, the progressive enlightening of conscience. Vito Fazio Allmayer, more cautious and subtler, observed, discoursing on Spaventa (Il problema della nazionalità nella filosofia di Spaventa), that the nationality of philosophy is not found in something given, in a character naturally, or almost racially, presupposed, but, if ever, in an orientation, in a direction, in something in fieri, not in a fact. Truly, the idealists, in their philosophical historiography, spoke a lot about the Italian national philosophy, but at the end nationality and all concrete and individualizing characters are lost. The major fault, especially of the idealist disciples of Gentile, is to be found in the contradiction intrinsic to their understanding of the concept of the historicity of philosophizing. Even when it was possible to talk of nationality in terms of a history that was worldly and temporal, the history to which the idealists referred and within which they placed the various thinkers was a history disincarnated, an atemporal ideal eternal history; it was not even history but a sort of mystical resolution [absorption] in the absoluteness of the unique Act. On the other hand, Benedetto Croce, so faithful to a view entirely human and mundane of philosophizing, could not subtract himself from the temptation of removing in the thinkers he studied what was alive from what was dead, and, he the historicist (!), severing the temporal from the eternal. It is certainly legitimate to distinguish within the context of an author’s work the aspects that are still active in successive epochs from the aspects that remained without any appeal. It is also necessary, before contrasting those aspects, to show the links between them, their becoming and connecting within the complex vicissitudes of an age, a society, an effectual reality, truly “historicizing” in its totality the activity of a thinker. The characteristics found in Guido De Ruggiero are no different, either in his history of philosophy in general or in the outline of 1925 of the history of Italian philosophy, which begins with Dante and Petrarch, because before them the ideals and the institutions were common throughout Europe: one God, one Church, and one State. In De Ruggiero as in other “idealists,” the constant compelling of positions, the rhythm of the progressive development and the effort to adapt doctrines to pre-established modules are constant. It was not difficult to underline the methodological limits of this historiography, to uncover its internal contradictions or its deforming and reductive violence. It was not more arduous to demonstrate the cycle of a “nationality” theoretically justified on the grounds of historicity, but that was thereafter individualized by characteristics that were “natural” or that evaded historical becoming, considered then as it were within a theologizing frame. We must realize that the adversaries and the critics of the idealistic historiography, especially of the one molded on Gentile, though they made many appropriate particular observations, they could not avoid, just like the positivists, to fall
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into the same many equivocations. This is the reason why the discussion that was so intense in the period between the two wars achieved no great results. Pantaleo Carabellese, attempting to reconstruct what he called “Italian idealism,” doubtlessly hit the mark by underscoring, against the established pansubjectivism, the ontologism, for instance, of Rosmini, but he too kept in the dark aspects that were undeniable. Michele F. Sciacca, presenting a program for an extensive history of Italian thought, justly criticized the “Idealists” for their exaggerated insistence on the break between Middle Ages and Renaissance and on the existence of an orientation constantly immanent. On the other hand, he was opposing a profound and uniform Christian inspiration of Italian thought throughout the nineteenth century. 6. Conclusive Considerations The previous short review of modes of formulation and resolution of the problem of a history of Italian philosophy, while leaving out all particular contributions even if often relevant, has gradually underlined some preliminary questions around which the discussion has always centered. We may first ask, if it is legitimate to speak of national philosophies? If so, must we recognize the existence of an Italian philosophy? If the answer is positive, then where would we locate its beginning? Does it possess some peculiar characteristics? Which ones? The first difficulty that derives from the assumed antinomy between the “universality” of philosophy and the “particularity” of a national thought has lost a lot of its intensity as we have come to discover gradually the proper and different significance of the philosophical inquiry, and its essential connection with a specific period of time. If on one hand it may be said, to a point, that there is no Chinese, Indian, or Greek mathematics, but simply mathematics, on the other hand we have also seen an increasing evidence that philosophies, or the complex of conceptual elaborations called by that name, have a precise connection with definite historical situations, with conditions and limits actually determined or determinable. If ideas are not, and indeed they are not, born by parthenogenesis, and the philosophical discourse is always, using a Platonic expression, “an illegitimate discourse,” the historical reality of philosophizing will always assume an implicit relation to specific situations within space-time dimensions. Almost all the historians previously mentioned have admitted that it is possible to speak of an Italian philosophy possessing its own ancient tradition. The only exception may be Bertrando Spaventa who accepted that “the true and concrete life of the universal spirit is not the formal identity of all the nations, but the various and distinct manifestation of its content in the national differences.” He doubted that Italians had ever possessed that nationality— except in its dawning, intuitive and sentimental manner—in its true full form, consciously reflective, as liberty, ethicity, self-consciousness, reason, a proper and true philosophy. Italians possessed an Italian art, a language or a litera-
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ture, but not a philosophy. Philosophy merely thrived between the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and was soon suffocated by the spiritual tyranny of the Counter Reformation and by the French, Spanish, Austrian political oppressions. Italian thought, nevertheless, from Bruno to Campanella, Galileo, Vico, to mention only the greatest, flowered even where the political freedom was limited. This fact seems to have undermined Spaventa’s conclusions that were founded on the identification of a unitary national self-consciousness with an organized common state structure. Though Spaventa sustained that national unity was primarily a spiritual unity, in fieri, a will, and an ideal, he identified national conscience as conceptually conscious, and therefore capable of elaborating a philosophy in conjunction with the awareness of an existing unitary state structure. This exigency will generate poetry, not philosophy. Spaventa, in spite of the limitations of his theory, justly underscored how senseless it would be to speak of a national philosophy without the presence of a precise and concrete self-consciousness. In this way, he was establishing the basis for the resolution of the problem of the beginning of Italian thought. In fact, so that it would be possible to speak of a common though distinct from others discourse within a community of minds, it is necessary that the individuals participating in that discourse be consciously autonomous in their rapport with others. Thus, the myth of the Pelasgian philosophy referred to by Gioberti, but also the pretense of attributing “an Italian character” (italianità) to the thought of the Great Greece’s tradition of the Roman world, or of Plotinus (as Valentino Piccoli noted in his unlucky Storia della filosofia italiana) faded out. Even the position sustaining that this thought ought to be treated within a history of the philosophical thought of Italy because it ran again, as did the Augustinian thought, throughout much of the philosophy indisputably Italian, has no more validity. Otherwise, Plato and Aristotle, William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, Descartes and Kant and Hegel, should all, by greater right, be considered in a history of the philosophical thought of Italy. No more valid is the objection that thinkers, undeniably Italian, for example Valla, wanted to establish a kinship with the Roman world, and considered themselves citizens of the same ideal fatherland of Cicero. Ficino did the same with Plato, but Plato did not become Italian because of this, though he lives in the Italian thought through Ficino as Cicero did through Valla. The historian of Italian thought may discuss Plato in Ficino and Cicero in Valla, as well as Kant in Galluppi and Rosmini, Hegel in Spaventa, and Marx in Labriola. The reference to the geographic factor has even less validity. To construct a Storia della filosofia siciliana as the Most Reverend Vincenzo Di Giovanni did by searching the certificates of birth and residence of the different philosophers is an enterprise of an almost absurd naiveté. Unless we want to assert the determinism of some racial kind, the naked physical facts constitute no unitary bond. On the contrary, if the geographic circumstance is for whatever reason consciously chosen, then it may be taken as the determinant factor
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of thought. If “nationality” means the incarnation of a human being in the wider reality that is its “land”, “people,” and “city”; if it is the concreteness of growing within some ambiance and circumstances and of having specific relations with a determinate world on which to place one’s own roots and rely on; it is then evident that such form of determination cannot be reduced to a physical factor. When there is no conscious determination; when there is no conscious cultural differentiation; when there are identical speech and tone, a unique language of culture, identical schools, same texts and teachers, same educational orientation, same religious faith, and same speculative problems, what meaning could have to insist on the search of a nationally differentiated thought on the ground of geographic borders? It would mean to practice a hidden racism. This was done long time ago when Thomas and Bonaventure conceived “the root of being” to be found in the “Roman sound realism” and, indeed, they were with Rosmini and Gioberti the representatives of the Italian genius. We arrive thereby to what is the greatest difficulty for the historian: the medieval and particularly the great Scholastic thought. Should we insert within the context of the national philosophical tradition the great masters of the Middle Ages up to the thirteenth century? If we follow the considerations presented until now, it would be difficult indeed to find a positive answer. These philosophers were often educated outside Italy by non-Italian teachers; they were active outside Italy and included in a non-national scholastic and cultural organization. They enjoyed an international linguistic unity which meant for them not only the common practice of Latin, but also the reading of the same books, using the same formulas and employing the same didactic procedures. Their goals, their cares, and their needs were the same. We should not forget that the philosophical culture was mostly monastic, flourishing in the great monasteries. It was within a milieu, which for its own structure attenuated every original differentiation. Being the constructors of the city of God and citizens of the same church, these thinkers did not appear to be part of cultural worlds nationally differentiated. They gathered their libraries in monasteries where they spent the productive years of their life often away from the fatherland. In general, their political interests and aspirations were not national. This does not exclude that, even before the rising of the Communes, even before the rich in ferment twelfth century, we could see in several cities the formation of cultural groups possessing some unity and continuity from which the universities thereafter took their beginnings. They were certainly very important and altogether worthy of being included in a history of national thought, but not as the ones asserting that thought. They were too fragmented, deprived of an “Italian” communication and sometimes with little influence on the development of the most important philosophers. The civilization of the Communes and the birth of the universities determined and facilitated the flourishing of some more precise cultural individuality. During the thirteenth century until the beginning of the fourteenth, we
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cannot find a conscious characterization of a national thought. Paris was the great cultural center. In Paris, individuals were shaped at the school of doctors convened from every part of the known world. In Paris, an individual could become a doctor and begin teaching. Within this “Internationalism” of culture, we may guess national “geniuses” and national tendencies, although they are not yet fixed. In this sense we may guesstimate that some of the major personalities—because of the fame in their country of origin for having taught there or for new relations established by the birth and the growth of new orders—could certainly impose some orientations. They thus caused those cultural directions which generated by them in them alone found their source. It is indisputable that Peter Damian and Peter Lombard, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas, have influenced Italian thought, though their influence was not due to the pretended genius of the Italic stock, which is by its own nature Christian or realist or ontological or spiritualist. With others they created the bases of a cultural unity that in them was unfortunately not fully conscious. For this reason, the philosophy of St. Thomas is not an Italic or national philosophy, even though a part of the Italian philosophical tradition will be affected by Thomas and will be glad to learn at his school. It is not an Italian philosophy because the greater teacher of Thomas was not an Italian, nor was Italian the historical situation to which he wished to bring a solution and an improvement. The great expert of medieval things, Etienne Gilson, compared the actual exchanges between nation and nation to the exchanges between the LatinChristian and the Arabic-Hebraic worlds. He observed that Averroès and Avicenna relate to Albert and Thomas, as Descartes and Hume relate to Kant or Fichte. How can we consider that the same rapport existed between Pietro Olivi and Mathew of Acquasparta? In Italy, the extreme fractionalizing of the Communes within the Imperial and Papal system fragmented national unity into too many states. This unity existed already complicated for centuries by the contributions of other nations and by the residues of multiple dominations. It is enough to mention the Kingdom formed with Arabs, Greeks, and Normans. The consciousness of a cultural unity that, as soon as it is constituted, naturally searches within the past the pedigrees of its own nobility, would be hardly found before Humanism, when a direction was determined which needed justification of its origins. This implies that precedents should be found in prior centuries, either in the permanence of the civic centers of culture or in the constructs of those major philosophers who were perhaps in themselves free from any local determination. We must also add that an attentive researcher could certainly unveil as not less influential the contributions and the impact, both positive and negative, of philosophers not at all Italian and rather typically manifesting the genius of other nations. It is sufficient to think of the influence of William of Ockham and the English logicians, of Giovanni Buridano, and the Parisian physicists, over the entire Aristotelian movement of Northern Italy. If we would conceive the Italian thought as not being determinedly de-
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rived from race, but as construed with the conscious emergence of a national culture, we would then initiate an exposition of Italian philosophy only by beginning from the most remote origins of the humanistic rebirth. We can consider the “Italian” medieval heredity, with all the limitations that already have been imposed on the term “Italian” when referring to that epoch, as purely an introduction. To be truly efficacious, this introduction should gravitate around the formation of local traditions of culture, rather than insist on the great systems, which are so exorbitant that they exceed the borders not yet consolidated of every European nation. In regard to major personalities, it would be convenient to enucleate only those orientations and those themes that constituted some of the effective components of the culture of the nation. In this way, the inquiry on the medieval culture in Italy is useful for the understanding of the first Renaissance that was indisputably formed within its orbit, though at times in antithesis to it. Thus, the last of the usual preliminary problems of a history of philosophy in Italy presents itself. Are there some constant characteristics that, in some manner, single out its most salient tendencies? Here, too, we are to be watchful. Too many are those who wanted to interpret Italian philosophy as a univocal development in the light of one problem alone, as one unique orientation, which could be found at various times in immanence or transcendence, in objectivism or subjectivism, in orthodoxy or heresy. Once the canon was determined in this fashion, those who could not fit were excluded from the Italic tradition, and often the same author subdivided into parts was half accepted and rejected for another. Now, if we inspect, without arbitrary and hasty classifications, other countries which possessed a far-reaching and illustrious philosophical tradition in the ancient and modern times, we will discover the complexity of their positions. In English thought, since the most ancient time, Platonic thinking joined the empiricist entreaty; in French thought, Blaise Pascal’s modulations joined the rigid rationalism that was emphasized by Descartes. These two aspects have not always remained separate in human beings or antithetical in doctrines. They have often lived together within the dialectic tension of the same system. George Berkeley was Platonic and empiricist; the esprit de géometrie and the esprit de finesse cohabited in Pascal. In Italy, look at the origins of the Renaissance. To a philosophy linked with the experiences of art, civic life, and morality like that of Petrarch, Salutati, Bruni, Manetti, and Valla, there corresponded a logical and physical inquiry in the Paduan tradition and afterward in Telesio, and a profoundly religious need in Ficino, in the two Picos, in Bruno, and Campanella. Experimentalism and Platonic urgencies were connected in Galileo. Mundane sciences passed through the age of the Baroque. Humanism and religion lived in Vico. Civic philosophy animated and characterized the second half of the eighteenth century and a great part of the nineteenth. The exigencies for a philosophical peace between Aristotelianism and Platonism veined the constructions of Rosmini and Gioberti. Humanism, in its classic requirements, returned in con-
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trasting forms in Positivism as well as in the blossoming of Idealism. Instead of the great systematic constructions, a science of the human being and of its activities, a secular and earthly philosophy that left to religion the task of resolving the greatest problems was preferred. The two fundamental kinds of experience in which the Italian philosophical reflection was exercised were, on one side, the wealth of the artistic-literary production, and on the other, the problems deriving from the presence within Italy of the center of the Catholic Church and from Italy’s own political crises. The first fundamental experience consisted in the philology in Vichian sense as the science of human communication; the other consisted in politics and morality as the urgency of the problem of the State and of the Church-State. The second experience was religion understood especially as the need for clarification of the earthly function of the Church. The great problems, the problem itself of the relation between the world and God, were lived within the limits of political experience or of personal, moral, and religious meditation, rather than being confronted on the ground of metaphysics.
NOTICE The larger part of this treatment of the history of Italian thought from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century was composed between 1940 and 1942. It was supposed to constitute the second of two volumes dedicated to Filosofia in the well-known Storia dei Generi Letterari Italiani of Vallardi Publisher. The first volume in the series was begun by Giovanni Gentile in 1905 and was published in successive sections in 1915, arriving to the comments on Valla and then remained unfinished. At the end of the war, the Publisher asked me to write the first volume, beginning from the Middle Ages, the treatment of which I purposely conceived as an extended introduction to the thought of the fifteenth century. The work was done according to established guidelines that required rich citations of the texts and a flowing, extended discourse without notes or references to documents. Given that it was impossible at that time to have access to non-Italian critical literature on the subject, the printing itself of the book manifested in various ways the consequences of the damages of war. The book was published in two volumes at the beginning of 1947, but made no waves: it was used even though neither mentioned nor cited. Readers preferred to remark on its inaccuracies rather than to acknowledge the utility of the contributions that they themselves had derived from it. The present edition [1966] has made no substantial modifications to a text that was written a quarter of a century ago. With some corrections and some necessary additions, the work has been intentionally left as it appeared in 1947. The author today would not embark in a work of this kind; if, by the way, he were to try, he would start in a wholly different way, with criteria totally different. In a quarter of a century, especially in this field, many things have changed independently from the fashion of the age. That is the reason why the author had not even changed those parts that seemed to him not completely satisfying. What has been completely changed is the apparatus of the notes, which was transformed into an initial but systematic information on an essential bibliography that does not repeat implicit indications but follows chapter after chapter the discourse, and aims at integrating or at least providing the tools for its integration. In addition we have tried to make noticeable those writings that have changed the historical perspectives and the critical results on which our text was based. This explains the amplitude of the bibliographical apparatus. An epilogue [Chapter Thirty–Seven] has been composed for the purpose of delineating the main facts of the Italian philosophical culture of the twentieth century: the rebirth of idealism and its crisis between the two wars. We meant with this epilogue not to complete a history, but rather to show the results of what happened and to point out the formation of the actual new situation. This explains the tone and the character of the last pages. Here, too, no-
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tices and indications for a wider panorama and for an ulterior research have been limited within the area of the commented bibliography. From all of this, we have not produced a new book. The author acknowledges the limits of the work. He only hopes the book will still offer some aid to anyone who would wish to examine the vicissitudes of the philosophical culture of Italy for the period of the last several centuries. Eugenio Garin Florence, May 1966.
HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY
Part One THE MEDIEVAL HERITAGE (Chapters 1–7)
One FROM BOETHIUS TO THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 1. Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great In the fracture that invasions opened between ancient knowledge and new civilization painfully rising from the “renewed forest of barbarities,” several paths stretched into the distance to preserve the indication of an already acquired wisdom. After the Augustinian synthesis, in that last flash of classic light that was the age of Theodoric, we still see the Aristotelian translations of Boethius and the library of Cassiodorus that, in an almost tangible way, give to medieval thought the imprint of the philosophy of the ancients. The codices gathered by Cassiodorus in the monastic solitude of Vivarium will later go to Bobbio to enrich in the end the Vatican and the Ambrosian libraries. The translations of Boethius will offer to the first scholastic meditation some of the most elaborated tools of the logic of Hellenism. In the meantime, the Consolation of Philosophy, in its unexhausted humanity, will come to offer increasingly fertile themes for meditation in the profoundly religious atmosphere of the most refined Stoic and Neo-Platonic speculation. The venerable form of consoling wisdom, of the medicine of the soul, stands out almost as the guide of a greater part of the thought which follows. Themes concerning fortune, liberty, divine foresight, time and eternity, the divine being from which creation flows, the divine exemplary ideas, number and unity, pass through the Scholastic school with the exact terms used by Boethius. In some way, the authority of Boethius will be comparable to that of Aristotle and St. Augustine. The great medieval masters, from Scotus Eriugena to Thomas Aquinas, and the heralds of the Renaissance, from Arrigo of Settimello to Petrarch and Salutati, bent over to meditate the Consolation of Philosophy. To Paul the Deacon, the age of Justinian, Cassiodorus, and St. Benedict will appear a radiant and a worthy legacy of classic splendor. In Constantinople, the Corpus iuris was compiled and a temple to the “wisdom of the Fathers” was erected. Cassiodorus, “famous in the secular as well as in the divine sciences, who, in addition to many other things superbly written, interpreted with great skill the mystical meaning of the Psalms,” flourished in
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Rome. At the same time, “the admirable poet Arator, sub-deacon of the church of Rome, was singing in hexameters the Acts of the Apostles.” Cassiodorus was writing to Agapitus saying that “the secular literary studies were cultivated with such great fervor … that many believed they could attain through them the practical wisdom of the world (prudentia mundi).” Boethius, through his Stoic-Platonic education, was not conquering the prudentia mundi, but was cleansing the soul from every shadow of passion, so that truth will become clearer and easier the way to the heavenly abode (Consolation of Philosophy, bk. 1, ch. 7). “In dark clouds hidden / The stars can shed no light” (Nubibus atris / Condita nullum / Fundere possunt / Sidera lumen). Boethius’s ascension, his “return,” was tranquil and serene; it was a human ascension within a Platonic landscape, where little by little the walls of the dungeon vanish through the light of the contemplated wisdom. “If you too wish to possess the truth with clarity and proceed on the right path, dispel pleasures, fears, and vain hopes; and suffering be gone” (Tu quoque si vis / Lumine claro / Cernere verum / Tramite recto / Carpere callem, / Gaudia pelle, / Pelle timorem / Spem fugato / Nec dolor adsit). We have here harmony of rhythm, elegant refinement of phrases, and subtlety of reasoning. The body, when physically suffering for a disease, weakens, and the soul dislikes any formal leniency (afflicta mente etiam dicendi studia languescunt). Gregory the Great when afflicted by pain meditated on the suffering Job. “Perhaps the design of divine providence was that through my pain I could sense Job’s pain and that because of my pain I could better penetrate the mind of the scourged Job” (et fortasse hoc divinae providentiae consilium fuit, ut percussum Job percussus exponerem, et flagellati mentem melius per flagella sentirem). In the introductory letter to the commentary on Job, which for centuries was a book quite dear to souls loving moral meditations, Gregory expressed a motion of disdain toward rhetoric and every attempt to use elegant forms of speech. He says, “I have decided not to follow the art of eloquence, which is infused by the teaching of an extrinsic culture.… I do not shun at all the collision of mytacism or the confusion of barbarism; I disdain to observe the rules that govern prepositions and cases. The reason is that I strongly think that it is unfitting that the words of the celestial oracle be restricted by the rules of Donatus.” Elsewhere, he insisted on the same motive observing that the Redeemer did not send throughout the world some refined orators, but men who would speak words of life. The same antithesis between profane science and religion is found in the second book of the Dialogues (de vita et miraculis Sancti Benedicti). St. Benedict “was sent to Rome to study the liberal arts. When he noticed that because of these studies many fell into a life of vice … he abandoned them, so that with the excuse of obtaining the science of the world he would not fall thereafter into that immense precipice.” He entered the path toward sanctity only “by having abandoned the studies of letters.” He saved himself “by being
From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century
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ignorant of sciences and wisely unlearned” (scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus). The exhortation to reading rings insistently in the Benedictine rules: “During the days of Quadragesima, all the monks should take from the library one codex and read it entirely.” Paul the Deacon was always pleased to refer to the sanctity of St. Benedict in connection with the fortunate days of the era of Justinian and Cassiodorus. When he remembered the “suave speech” of Gregory the Great, he rejoiced for having celebrated in elegiac meter and in Archilochian iambs the miracles of the saint. 2. The Italian Cultural Centers The truth is that in Monte Cassino and in other famous cloisters, in northern and southern cities, as the gloomy domination of the Lombards ended, the custom of literary, religious, and juridical studies was preserved. Small centers of Greek culture continued uninterruptedly in the Byzantine lands of the South. Under the Arabs, Sicily became the link between East and West. The North with the new flourishing of the Carolingian age saw the resurgence of centers of learning. When Charles the Great wished to ameliorate his learning, he asked for Pietro of Pisa: “[Charlemagne] cultivated assiduously the liberal arts.… He learned grammar at the school of Pietro of Pisa” and favored Paulinus II of Aquileia, “a patriarch grammarian, poet, barbarian, and saint.” In the year 826, Pope Eugenius II ordered that “teachers and doctors be appointed to study the literary and liberal arts and carefully teach them maintaining great respect for the sacred dogmas.” An anonymous chronicler informed us that already during the ninth century, thirty-two philosophi existed in Benevento, “of which one, whose name was Ildericus, was most illustrious for his profound knowledge of letter and for his virtues.” Some people have interpreted philosophi as monachi (monks) and clerici (clerics), some others as doctores artium liberalium (teachers of the liberal arts). Plenty of literati exist similar to the one poet in Salerno who praised the abundance of beautiful women. The grammarian Eugenius Vulgarius lived in Campania during the second half of the century. He had a true devotion for the tragedies of Seneca, knew Virgil and the commentary of Servius, Horace, and Sidonius Apollinaris; studied Boethius, mentioned Cicero, Lucan, Juvenal, Petronius, and discussed logic (De thesi et ypothesi, de syllogismis dialecticae ypotheticaliter). Italy became the friend of grammarians (Amica grammaticae Italia). The Irish bishop Donatus (829–876) taught children “the letters, the forms of meters, and the famous sayings of the wise men.” Schools for laymen, where grammar and rhetoric were taught, were also founded in Piacenza, Pavia, Milan, Mantua, Verona, Vercelli, and Ravenna. The bishop of Cremona Liutprand, who died in 972, most learned in Greek, was a rhetorician, a grammarian, and a poet. As a writer, he was successful and lived for some time in Constantinople. More interesting is the episode many times narrated by Rudolph Glaber about the grammarian Vilgardus of
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Ravenna. A certain Vilgardus was not only diligent but also zestful in his study of grammar. He followed the Italian custom of abandoning all the arts except the study of grammar. Having become proud for the expertise reached in that field, he also grew in foolishness. One night, the demons put on themselves the features of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal, and appeared to him. They rendered him false gratitude for having dedicated himself so much to the study of their writings. They proclaimed him the official proclaimer of their glory for the posterity. They also add that he will be part of that glory in the near future. Convinced by this devilish trick, with great presumption he began also to teach matters contrasting faith, stating that the words of the poets should be accepted without restrictions (Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, p. 644b). The unfortunate Vilgardus was condemned as a heretic, but those seducing demons continued to hover about Italy. Pyre and sword could not destroy them, since it is known that fire burns no spirits and excites them instead. At the time of this pernicious doctrine, many in Italy perished by sword or fire … even in Sardinia. The famous Gerbert, the future Pope Sylvester II, searched all of Italy for books. Writing to Rainaudo, an Italian monk, Gerbert said: “You know how much I love excellent books from anywhere I can find them. You know also how many authors can be found in the cities and in the villages of Italy. Act now, please, and ask someone to copy for me the Astronomica of Marcus Manilius and the Rhetorica of Gaius Marius Victorinus.” Vippon, the Presbyter, admired Italian cultural centers and suggested that Henry III called the Black (1017–1056) imitate them: “In Italy, all the people maintain the custom that, after infancy, the youth should greatly achieve in school.” Alfanus of Salerno, a student of philosophy and medicine, full of classic reminiscences and learned in the Greek language, sang the praises of the city of Aversa. “O Aversa,” he wrote, “with your studies you form philosophers superior to those of other cities so that you are not less great than the greatest Athens” (Aversa, studiis philosophos tuis / Tu tantum reliquos vincis, ut optimis / Dispar non sis Athenis). In his youth, Alfanus drew from the golden streams of the philosophical eloquence of Apuleius, which he later remembered: “We were carefully studying the booklet titled de Deo Socratis, so incredibly rich with the beauty of speech.” Already a century before, the diffusion of ancient culture and dialectic passion were such that Auxilius, in Naples, was exclaiming: “Come to us not to ask the rigorous conclusion of syllogisms or the subtlety of interpretation; we are the disciples of the fisherman” (non hic sillogysmorum quaeratur arcta conclusio, non perihermeniaca subtilitas, utpote qui discipuli sumus piscatoris). The most famous incident happened to Gunzo who called himself Gunzo italicus. The venerable King Otto sent an invitation to him. Thus Gunzo, after crossing many difficult mountains and steep valleys out of Italy, finally, tired and frozen, arrived at the monastery of St. Gaul, hoping to find a peaceful rest. “I could see the frequent inclining of the scapulars, the hoods lying in a
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regular order, the slow walking, and the rare words.… I was rejoicing and hoping that by some chance a spark of philosophical wisdom would twinkle among those rare whispers” (Patrologia Latina, vol. 136, pp. 1285ff.). Unfortunately, no philosophical sparks ensued from that cloistral environment but a biting criticism of the poor Gunzo. When Gunzo used an accusative case where an ablative, according to others, was required, the cleric Achar scoffed maliciously at him with some humorous verses to make the thing appear more savory. He said that though Gunzo was old he still deserved the punishment of a young student. Gunzo described the whole story in a letter to the monks of Reichenau (ad Augienses fratres) in which he is generously cursing the daring cleric. The supercilious grammarian also referred to the Pythagorean metempsychosis to counterattack and ill-treat with risky hypotheses his adversary. To hear his news about books is truly surprising: “As I arrived, I was bringing with me about one hundred tomes, true weapons of peace, which my grudging host turned into occasions for battle. Among these books was the compendium of Martianus Capella concerning the seven liberal arts. According to those who find their pleasure only in fairy tales, this is a book to be despised; but those alone who attend to truth can understand it. Other books were the Timaeus, with the difficult to understand profundity of Plato; the Peri hermeneias, with the not yet faced or penetrated obscurity of Aristotle; the Topics, with the not despiteful dignity of Cicero and Aristotle.” The cues to theoretical arguments for discussion were even more interesting. Is the grammar contained in the hoods of the friars? Like a woman, grammar gives herself differently to the grammarians and to Aristotle. Dialectic offers more serious problems: would we assert with Plato the per se subsistence of genus, species, and differences, or would we deny it with Aristotle? Should we believe Aristotle rather than Plato? In regard to the more crucial problems of creation, shall we follow Plato? If we believe what Plato says in Timaeus, the soul conforms to the admirable composition of this world. Virgil versified this dialogue in this way [Aeneid, bk. 6, vv. 724–727]: “In the beginning the Spirit within sustained the sky, the earth, the lighted globe of the Moon, and the Sun. Then the Mind diffused throughout the members gave motion to the whole mass, mixing with the vast frame” (Principio coelum ac terras camposque liquentes / Lucentemque globum Lunae, Titianaque astra / Spiritus intus alit, totosque infusa per artus / Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet). Only the fools can consider worthless this kind of discussions, or those most serious inquiries concerning the stars and the heavens. “A great question has been raised among philosophers concerning the celestial bodies whether they are animated or inanimate. Plato is of the opinion that they are not only animated but also rational and immortal. Aristotle believes the contrary.” Gunzo is on the side of Plato and finds support for him in Solomon, and especially exhorts the monks to apply assiduously themselves to these problems instead of spending their time in conventual tittle-tattles: “Isn’t it better for a
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monk to occupy himself in things that pertain to the understanding of the Christian religion … by dwelling on liberal studies?” 3. Lanfranc of Pavia In Italy, during the eleventh century, specialized legal studies thrived and they affected in a large measure the logical-grammatical inquiries that vice versa weighted heavily on the legal ones. The fate of Irnerius and Lanfranc is symbolic. We read in the glosses of Odofredus that Irnerius “was a logician, master of the arts,” who later on embraced the juridical studies. Lanfranc, on the contrary, began his activities as a jurist, and only afterward became logician and theologian. It was for this reason that Peter Damian equally despised dialecticians and jurists. In both cases, the particular term in question must be evaluated in its importance according to its value and function. Both the dialectic disputations and the interpretive activity of the jurists are based on the development of grammatical studies. Papias, who lived around 1050 and will still be dear to the humanists, allotted a large part in his encyclopedic vocabulary to juridical concepts. This dictionary will be of use to Uguccione, who died in 1210 as bishop of Ferrara and, in addition to a Summa decretorum, composed a most popular book titled Liber derivationum (Verborum derivationes). Papias drew from Boethius and Isidore of Seville. Anselm of Besate (a town on the Ticino river), his contemporary, called the Peripatetic, was a disciple of the philosopher Drocus, a teacher in Parma, and of the rhetorician Sichelmo of Reggio. Drocus composed in three volumes a Rhetorimachia that has a close connection with the Ciceronian rhetoric. These volumes contained also some logical debates that Anselm enjoyed very much, such as the one whether between thesis and antithesis there could be a resolving middle term. Anselm sustained this thesis in Mainz and gave a particularized statement of it in a letter to his teacher Drocus. The middle term is altogether excluded given that either it contains or excludes the contrasting terms. In both cases, there can be no solution for the contrast itself. Lanfranc of Pavia, who was born in the year 1010 and died in 1089, started his activity in jurisprudence, but soon abandoned jurisprudence becoming a famous dialectician at Avranches and then at Bec in Normandy, where Anselm of Aosta succeeded him. To have a judgment on his work, Anselm submitted the Monologion to Lanfranc as to a venerable teacher (Patrologia Latina, vol. 158, p. 1134). Lanfranc’s most ancient biographer provided us with interesting news about Lanfranc’s activity as well as of the status of the culture in Pavia. “Following the customs of his country, from infancy, he was instructed in the liberal arts and in civil law. Still an adolescent lawyer, he frequently won in trial courts against veteran lawyers, because of his torrential eloquence in accurately arguing. At that young age, Lanfranc formulated judgments that jurisprudents, judges, and Praetors favorably accepted” (Patrologia Latina, vol. 150, p. 39). Although a famous logician,
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Lanfranc attacked Berengar of Tours on theological grounds concerning the debate on the Lord’s Supper. This debate was implicitly tending to free the dialectics from theology and even to make dialectic the mistress of theology when it denied the real presence of Christ in the Host. In fact, if it is true that after the consecration the accidents are still maintained, the substance itself had to have been preserved as well. “To use the dialectic in everything … is to use reason. Who does not use dialectic surrenders the reason according to which he was made at the image of God. He surrenders his own dignity.” Lanfranc precisely pointed out to Berengar: “You take refuge in dialectic because you have abandoned the sacred authorities. We hear and answer about matters pertinent to the mysteries of our faith with sacred authorities instead of with dialectical ones” (Patrologia Latina, vol. 150, p. 416). Another logician, Alberic of Monte Cassino who died in 1088 and was “most learned and erudite,” took position against Berengar. Alberic wrote a liber de dialectica and a liber dictaminum et salutationum. Lanfranc clarified with precision the task of dialectic, which he did not intend to repudiate but only to discipline. “He did not condemn the art of dialectic, but the use of it done by the disputants.… Dialectic does not combat the sacraments of God and we may say that, when it is the case, the full command of dialectic is a means for sustaining and confirming them” (Patrologia Latina, vol. 150, p. 157). It is a matter of principles, which are not the conclusions of syllogisms. The syllogisms will intervene to clarify, defend, justify, and offer support. The continuous reference of Lanfranc to auctoritates is doubtlessly intended for the polemics against those who tried to make the dialectical processes autonomous, establishing a philosophy analogous to the classical systematizations. The pamphlet contra Wolfelmum Coloniensem of Manegold of Lautenbach, written toward the end of the eleventh century, is very important because it gives an effective picture of the science that was developing and affirming itself outside the premises of faith. This discussion originated from reading Macrobius, the source of a great part of Scholastic Platonism. Wolfelmus was claiming that he liked almost everything he found in classic philosophers. Manegold had no intention of condemning all the adversary sentences (omnes eorum sententias) for the reason that for one perspective he did not understand their arcane subtleties, and from another he acknowledged that some of those sentences had already been accepted by the Fathers of the Church (quasdam a sanctis viris susceptas). Manegold wanted to remind the adversary that classic thinkers, being human beings capable of mendacity (sicut homines, et ideo mendaces), were deprived of the Spirit, which teaches the whole truth (qui docet omnem veritatem). They were subject to the influence of Evil, which, as lord of nature knows all nature’s secrets (in promptu sunt ei secreta naturae) and lays traps for minds and spirits from the pages of the literature of the ancients. Manegold pronounced a most severe indictment on a culture that never totally died and that, on the contrary, was to rise again.
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Having seen the mass of humanity prostrated and overwhelmed in abjections, Evil began to rejoice of the ruins which it had caused. Evil, as the author of divisions, separated the human animals into various doctrines and contrary sects. For this reason, Socratics, Pythagoreans, Platonists, and other innumerable movements fell into error in different manners and sustained their errors with subtle arguments. With the prosperous growing of the Evil’s plantation, crowds of poets joined it as pages participating to the wedding of idolatry. They enticed with immodest praises and fictions of imagination the souls of those who look for vain things. For reason of personal gain, they were ready to praise or to blame; they elevated to the altars wicked princes and violent pirates. With resounding words and sentences full of rhetorical artifices wholly deprived of truth, they covered obscenity and turpitude, preserving useless memories and vain glories. According to the nature of each one, some as comedians, some as lyrics, some as satirists, and some as tragedians, with their many fantasies, they seduced the souls of the sinners. The simple people, who did not know the dignity of their condition because of the deep night of their ignorance, were comparable to beasts or rather they were in a worst condition than beasts, a prey of idolatry and turpitude (Patrologia Latina, vol. 155, p. 158).
A violent invective such as this is a clear indication of a wide formation of philosophical tendencies in which dialectic wanted to get free from any supposition and proceed on its own path. In a similar tone, Bruno d’Asti, the holy Bishop of Segni, who died in 1123, discussing the Holy Trinity, cried out: “Fool they are indeed and totally insane those who try to discuss the supreme and omnipotent Trinity with Platonic syllogisms and Aristotelian arguments. The substance of God is absolutely other than the substance of all creatures” (Ibid., vol. 165, p. 977). The abyss that separates the human from the divine cannot be crossed with human force. A century later, Peter of Celle, Bishop of Chartres, will admonish John of Salisbury with these words: O city of Paris, how able are you indeed to conquer souls and mislead them! You are the bawdyhouse of all vices and the source of all evils. In you, the infernal arrows pierce the hearts of the fool.… O blessed school where Christ imparts our hearts with the words of his virtue and where without study and lessons we learn how to live for eternity. We don’t buy books in the fields of eternity, don’t applaud teachers, nor use deceitful arguments and intricate sophisms. All the questions in these fields are openly determined and their apprehension is based on universal reasons and arguments. In the grounds of our eternity, life
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contributes more than culture, and simplicity counts more than sophistry” (Chart. Universitas Parisiensis, vol. 1, p. 24, n. 22). Gerard, the Bishop of Czanád, who suffered martyrdom in 1046, and who appeared to have been born in Venice from a patrician family, studied the liberal arts in Bologna. Gerard claimed that “the most divine Cephas was more profound than Aristotle and Paul was more eloquent than all human orators.” In the Deliberatio supra hymnum trium puerorum ad Insigrinum liberalem (within which Gerard’s dependence from Pseudo-Dionysus is manifest), we can read this famous sentence: “The greatest insanity is to discuss in maids’ quarters the One whom we should glorify in the presence of the angels” (dementia summa est in contubernio disputare ancillarum de illo cui psallendum in conspectu angelorum). The phrase was popularized with the current saying that the philosophical wisdom is the maid of theology. Gerard, however, faced the definite philosophical currents of the Epicureans, against whom he inveighed: “If I would consider all the nonsense of the philosophers, one life would not be long enough, especially if I consider those who affirmed that the power of God is in the atoms, the world is infinite, and God is made out of the four elements.” Gerard was acting no differently than Attone of Vercelli who denounced the astrological and magic credence with the pagan practices that were increasingly diffused among the people. “Some little harlots … going through squares and cross-roads, along streams, and sleeping on the open fields … compose short songs and tell the fortune.… Their superstition is creating such insanity that they arrive to the point of baptizing herbs and branches in the woods.” At the same time, he renewed against the astrologists the arguments of the Fathers, that the planets are not the masters but the servants of the human being: “Deus omnipotens ideo sidera constituit in coelis, ut hominibus deservirent in terris” (The omnipotent God has placed the stars in heaven for the benefit of human beings on earth) (Patrologia Latina, vol. 134, pp. 837a and 850d). 4. Peter Damian Given his extreme dedication to the service of God, Peter Damian of Ravenna (1007–1072) attacked the dialecticians with the outmost audacity. Though he lived with little food mixed with the fruit of the olive tree, Peter easily tolerated heat and cold, and was always content in his contemplative thoughts. Having completed his basic studies in Faenza and Ravenna, he went to Parma in 1034 to teach the liberal arts (liberalium artium docendus). He was a lawyer and a teacher in Ravenna till the time when he felt the call to the claustral life. He participated to the reform of the Church “as a bitter, terrible, severe enemy of the world and of earthly joy. He was the preacher of an avenger God.” In De divina omnipotentia, one of his most significant writings, composed around 1067, Peter reproduced and renewed the discussion he had with Desiderius, abbot of Monte Cassino, on whether God could return to a woman
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her lost virginity. The violent proclamation of the omnipotence of God beyond any logical impossibility nourished an implied polemic against the teachings of the school of Chartres, in particular against Ives, a disciple of Fulbert, whom Peter perhaps audited in Italy. Everything is subject to the divine will, which has no thinkable limits. One thing alone God cannot do: evil. Evil does not exist, because what is evil has no consistency. “This question, since it is proved that it does not imply a doubt concerning the power of the divine majesty, finds no place among the mysteries of the church, which children have chanted for centuries. The question refers to expertise in the art of discussion and not to the priority and the nature of things. This question refers to the mode and the order in the discussion and to the connection between judgments” (De divina omnipotentia, bk. 6). The objection that the past is immutable does not touch God who, “persisting in that ineffable rock of his majesty, sees with one simple intuition all things being present, so that the past things do not go past and the future do not come to be” (In illa … ineffabili suae maiestatis arce persistens, sic omnia, in praesentiae suae constituta conspectu, uno ac simplici contemplatur intuitu, ut sibi numquam penitus vel praeterita transeant, vel futura succedant). In this absolute “being present,” there is neither past nor future. For this absolute power there is no impossibility. There is no natural impossibility, because “he, who originated nature, can easily remove the necessity of nature, whenever he wishes.” There is no logical impossibility because an ideal plot, autonomous from God, does not and cannot exist. If it existed, it would be constituted as a nature and, then again, subordinated to God, unless we would do as the grammarians when they “decline” the voice “god,” and venerate another God in front of God. “Behold, my brother, do you wish to learn grammar? Learn how to decline ‘God’ in the plural. This teacher is indeed skilled! While he initiates a new art of disobedience, he introduces into the world an unheard rule of declension that is suitable for the cult of a plurality of gods” (De sancta simplicitate, ch. 1: Ecce, frater, vis grammaticam discere? Disce Deum pluraliter declinare. Artifex enim doctor, dum artem inoboedientiae noviter condit, ad colendos etiam plurimos Deos inauditam mundo declinationis regulam introducit). In other words, Peter Damian wished to preserve the will of God from any exterior logical constraint which ideally also would precede God. God in himself is that luminous darkness of which the Areopagist, cited by Peter, speaks, and of which the nominalists like Cusanus will speak. To call God pure will is beyond human logic. It is to reaffirm the incommensurability between the infinite and the finite. It is to consolidate the concept of creation understood as the incomprehensible knot between the human and the divine. In short, this is to defend the originality of Christianity, which does not deny the classic logic, but wants to insert and implant it in its intuition of God. God is not the conclusion of a syllogism, nor can it be limited within one reason, because he is the unreachable source of every syllo-
From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century
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gism and reason. For this reason, science is not the way of salvation, the mystery of redemption is: Julian, the emperor, and Donatus, the martyr, studied together; but the former spent his time in studying, while the latter followed the vestiges of truth. Julian made such progress in his wisdom that he wrote eight books against the Galileians … and against the Gospel. Donatus instead unlearned this wisdom to such an extent that he reached the summit of the heavens with the aureole of a triumphal martyrdom. John the Evangelist learned almost nothing in the world and having discarded the sophistications of orators and dialecticians, from his childhood embraced the foolishness of Jesus. In the beginning of his book, as he resounds in the highest the mystery of the supreme light, the blind acuteness of the philosophers remains confused in the fuliginous depths of their studies (De sancta simplicitate, ch. 8). 5. Anselm of Aosta The clarity of positions and a special balance characterize the first medieval synthesis that appeared in the work of Anselm of Aosta who died as the Archbishop of Canterbury. For a long time, Anselm was Prior and then Abbot of the monastery of Bec in Normandy where the doctrine of Lanfranc previously shone. A look at the catalog of the library as it was between the eleventh and the twelfth century shows what great importance the ancient culture and the wisdom of the Fathers had. The writings of Palladius, Vergetius, Macrobius, Quintilian, Eutropius, Suetonius, Cicero, Seneca, Hermes Trimegist, Calcidius, Ovid, Trogus Pompeius, Valerius Maximus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Young and the Elder, and Apuleius (de deo Socratis) could be found in that catalogue. In St. Anselm, the human understanding, that is, the nature of humanity that antiquity celebrated maintains its significance, but its significance is transferred and transfigured to the level of faith. Fides quaerens intellectum, “faith searching for the intellect,” is truly the motto of Anselm’s thought and of the greater part of the medieval Christian philosophy. In the Proslogion the attitude of St. Anselm is revealed with clarity: “I believe in you, O Lord, and I give thanks that you have created in me the image of yourself so that I may remember you, think of you, and love you. I do not try, Lord, to attain your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. I do desire with my reason to understand those truths about you that my heart believes and cherishes. I do not want to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand, for I am sure that, unless I believe, I will not understand!” Reason operates on a fundamental datum, on a basis of the certainty of an experience that cannot be suppressed, faith. The philosopher asks God for a reason capable of penetrating and almost explicating faith; but reason works on faith. Faith is like the air without which the
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mind could not live. Faith is the light without which the eye of the intellect cannot understand: “O Lord, the light within which you dwell is truly inaccessible and no one can succeed in penetrating it. I don’t see your light because it is too dazzling for me, but all that I see, I see it because of it. It is as when with my feeble eyes I see everything because of the light of the sun, but I cannot fix my eyes on the sun.” Faith is this fundamental contact with God; it is this essential presence: “How very far you are from my sight, while I am so much present to yours!” Without God, without an always-present light, the soul cannot comprehend or exist. God is the truth and the life. To live life, to comprehend truth, to love the good, and at the same time to deny God, is a contradiction. The reason is that God is the good without which no good is possible. God is the being without which there is no being. God is the truth and the life, without which there is no living life or existence. To demonstrate God is not to conclude rationally a syllogism. It is to become aware of life, of the experience of being, of the primordial certainty. To demonstrate God is to translate faith in terms of the intellect: fides quaerens intellectum. Anselm’s position is presented in the clearest manner in the Liber de Fide Trinitatis et de Incarnatione, written against Roscelin: “He who does not believe, does not know. Since he who does not believe, does not experience, and he who does not experience does not know.” Anselm repeats the saying of Isaiah that was much dear to Eriugena: “si non credideritis, non intelligetis” (If you have not believed, you will not understand). In this light it is convenient to look at the double ascensions to God by the rational movement of the Proslogion and the Monologion. In the Monologion (sect. 3), Being is evinced as the condition of everything that exists: All the good things are good because of the identical something good. All the great things are great because of the identical great something. All things exist because a unique something appears to exist. Something exist which alone is the greatest and the supreme among all things. Now, what thing is the greatest among all things, through which everything that exists is good or great or truly something? That thing must necessarily be the best, the greatest, and the supreme among all things which exist. For that reason, it is something that for essence, or substance, or nature can be said to be the optimum, the greatest, and the supreme among all existing things (Non solum omnia bona per idem aliquid sunt bona, et omnia magna per idem aliquid sunt magna, sed quidquid est, per unum aliquid videtur esse. Est igitur unum aliquid quod solum maxime et summe omnium est. Quod autem maxime omnium est, et per quod est quidquid est, id necesse est esse summe bonum, et summe magnum, et summum omnium quae sunt. Quare est aliquid quod, sive essentia, sive substantia, sive natura dicatur, optimum et maximum est, et summum omnium quae sunt).
From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century
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Even here, the rigorous logical process through which from the particular one arrives to the universal is missing. From the experience of the finite, the reality of the absolute is affirmed, for the reason that the logical and ontological prius of what is relative is the absolute (especially the ontological prius). “Being” is not affirmed by way of a thinking process for reason of the inconceivability of the autonomy of finite beings. It is the perception itself of what exists that constitutes the perception of Being. “Being” is rather the only one always directly present, while the finite existent is only perceived obliquely. In the Proslogion and in the De fide Trinitatis, Anselm insists on the image of the eye that is not aware of the light through which it sees all things that it sees. The unique truth is that the “Good” makes us perceive the things that are good. The “True” makes us know the things that are true. “Being” is the condition of all beings. The proof is nothing but a recall for the human beings to find out how they could see, and the proof’s condition is a process of moral purification. “First of all, I tell you, we must move away from the flesh and live according to the spirit, in order to reason about the profundities of God.” We must be humble and become like children in order to grasp the truth of God “who reserves his wisdom for the children” (Proslogion, ch. 18, sect. 8). Only by breaking down our egoism, which is our limit, we would be able to open ourselves to God, to see God, who is beyond every limit. There is no passage or rapport to be established between existing realities and concepts (understood as entities). To know the truth is to catch the thing in the light that illumines it, in truth, in God: it is to grasp the finite in its relation with the infinite. The truth of a thing is its finitude. To comprehend a thing means to define it, to place it in relation with the infinite, to see it within the infinite. The reading of the dialogue titled De veritate sheds light in this regard by way of overturning the terms. Truth is being, truth is God, but we cannot say from this that God is in things. All things are present to God and they are never true, in a proper way, unless they are considered in the God in which they cease to be what they are. God is the truth of the thing. He is the negation of the finitude of the thing: To speak of the truth of this or that thing is improper, because truth does not depend for its existence from things, nor must be in them, from them, or for them. But, because things are for the truth … we speak of the truth of this or that thing … as we usually say it is the time of this or that thing, meanwhile time is one and the same for all of them. Time in itself is not the time of any one thing, but it is time only in relation to the things that are within time. For that reason, we speak of the time of this and that thing. Now, the supreme truth per se subsisting is not the truth of any created thing, but because a thing is because of truth, therefore that truth is called the truth of that thing.
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The Monologion is the appeal to look at Being, to pay attention to the God in which we are, move, and live. More than a logical process, it is an explication of our own fundamental experience. It is the awareness that the finite is not autonomous and that it has no meaning by itself. The thing, by the fact of existing, refers us to the infinite, to the absolute; the no being of the limited thing refers us to what is, to Being. From the reading of the Monologion, the same certainty with which the Proslogion began should become more alive. “Well then, Lord, you who give understanding to faith, grant me that I may understand, as much as you see fit, that you exist as we believe you to exist, and that you are what we believe you to be. Now we believe that you are something than which nothing greater can be thought (Et quidem credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit)” (Proslogion, sect. 2). The argument of the Proslogion must explain the absurdity of splitting in God, in Being, possibility and reality. Anselm, who has explained the contingency of the finite and the reality of the existing things in Being, moves now to the demonstration of the intrinsic necessity and the positive nature of Being. He demonstrates that the negation of the negation is a true affirmation, not a concept but a factual reality. The finitude of things, of goods, their no-being, shows their caducity, their accidental being and no-reality; they refer to Reality. Here the insipiens, the fool, claims that the limited being is an illusion, a no-being. Even the Being, to which we are negatively referred to for the negation of a limit, that is, the Absolute that we seek in the insufficiency of the world does not exist. The human being feels, without doubt, all its own vanity and the vanity of the whole, and seeks God. There will be this aspiration; but the desired object unfortunately does not exist: “In its heart, the fool proclaimed that there is no God” (dixit insipiens in corde suo: non est Deus). The proof of the Proslogion stands in the supreme Being, “of which nothing greater can be thought” (id quod maius cogitari nequit). It is impossible to distinguish between possibility and reality. The distinction essence-existence that is done in finite things has no meaning when referred to Being. To admit the non-existence of Being is an absurd, a contradiction in terms: For it is one thing for an object to exist in the mind and another thing to understand that an object actually exists. When a painter plans beforehand what he is going to execute, he has the picture in his mind, but he does not yet think that it actually exists because he has not yet executed it. When he has actually painted it, then he both has it in his mind and understands that it exists because he has now made it. And surely that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought cannot exist in the mind alone” (Proslogion, ch. 2). Besides the verbal form of his exposition, Anselm insists untiringly on this motive: it is impossible to accept that in God, but only in God, essence is dis-
From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century
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tinct from existence. The absolute Being, so far as it is “the absolute Being” and because of it, exists. Given its contingency, we may doubt the existence of what is finite, but Being cannot not exist. In the Liber apologeticus, Anselm answered Gaunilus with much clarity that his argument is valid for God alone, for Being. If the island could be a Perfect Being, it would not be a “Lost Island,” but God itself. In regard to the other objection cited by Thomas Aquinas, that if there is possibility, then there is doubtlessly also reality, Gaunilus claims that it would be necessary beforehand to prove that possibility exists. This kind of argumentation may signify two things. First, the argument may mean that it is impossible to distinguish in God concepts from reality, what-can-be-thoughtof from existence, and in this case, the demonstration shall be formulated differently. Second, the argument was aiming at the denial of the existence of the absolute, sustaining the unique subsistence of the finite that tends to the infinite but without being able to secure it in any way. In both cases, Anselm appears not to be touched by the objection. The reason is that Anselm wants to demonstrate only the absurdity of the position of the fool (insipiens) who separates in God the possible from the real. He, too, denies in God the distinction and the passage from the idea to the thing, from possibility to reality. To say as he does that what is “the greatest thing thinkable” (summe cogitabile) does not exist only in the thinking intellect (tantum in intellectu cogitante), is as much as to say that “the greatest thing thinkable” is not thinkable (cogitabile) as mere possibility. This means that the idea of “the greatest thing thinkable” is not an idea like the others. The apprehension of “the greatest thing thinkable” is not like the apprehension of the island (“the island,” Bonaventure will comment, “signifies a limited being”; insula enim dicit ens defectivum). Having excluded that we arrive to the notice of God as of a possibility, as an ens defectivum that could also not exist, we now have only to establish how we come to have notice of God. At this point, Anselm addresses himself to Gaunilus, “appealing to his own same faith, to his own conscience as a Catholic, as to an argument that does not tolerate any reply.” In other words, Anselm’s appeal is to the faith from which we saw that philosophy begins in its process of clarification. In the Monologion, that same faith examined closely itself and explicated itself in order to focus on the inseparable link between the finite and the infinite, and on the actual positiveness of the infinite Being Itself. It is not by chance that even after the observations of Thomas, Duns Scotus, recapturing the work of St. Bonaventure, will reuse the Anselmian proofs. Anselm has offered more than the arguments about the existence of God. The Monologion (ch. 3) contains an outline of his vision of reality within the divine order, while the minor writings represent some specifications of the most important points. After having presented the whole reality like a ladder of perfection, at whose vertex God is found; after having demonstrated God, he specified both the Trinity and the creation. The Word, the word of the
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mind (verbum mentis), “the word with which God says in its mind all things,” a mental act that is one thing with God, is the Word with which God claims Itself within Itself. “If [God] with a Word consubstantial to Itself says Itself and Its creatures, it is clear that only one is the substance of both the Word with which It says Itself and the Word with which It says the creatures. Now, if one is the substance, how can there be two words?” Given that to think is to refer to a similitude (similitudo), to an image (imago), when God says and thinks Itself, It “generates a similitude consubstantial to its own, that is, Its Word” (gignit consubstantialem sibi similitudinem suam, id est, Verbum suum). In such Word, whence God expresses Itself, It “signifies Itself and all the created things.” In the Word that is Life and Truth the created things are imperishable and incorruptible essences, archetypes or exemplars. The Son, the essence of the Father, is also intelligence, while the Father is memory (“the word is seen to originate from memory”—de memoria verbum nasci videtur), almost as the source from which an inexhaustible river originates. Source and river are two but are seen to convert the one into the other. “The Son, who is all that [the Father] knows and understands, also remembers. Thus, the Son is the memory of the Father, and the memory of memory. As the Son is the memory that recalls the Father, who also is memory, so he is the wisdom of the Father and the wisdom of wisdom” (Monologion, ch. 48). United and distinct, Father and Son, Spirit and Word, are bound by reciprocal love “that is neither generated nor ingenerated,” neither son nor father, but Spirit of both, because breathed out from both (“it admirably proceeds from both in an inexpressible breathing way”—ab utroque suo quodam inenarrabili modo spirante mirabiliter procedit). The human soul according to Anselm mirrors in an Augustinian way the divine reality in so far as it is memory, intelligence, and love, “true image of that supreme Essence.” Made for God and for loving God, the human soul will find perfect happiness in God alone. The Anselmian theory of knowledge considered thought as verbum, as the word spoken within (“to say the things themselves within our own mind”—dicere res ipsas intus in nostra mente). As the interior word, thought is similitudo and imago, formed almost by its own expression, and accepted within the treasury of memory from which it is unfolding itself. “The rational soul, when it understands itself by thinking, it carries with itself the image born from itself, which is the thought of itself according to its similitude, formed by the impression of itself on itself. The human mind does not always think of itself as much as always remembers itself”(Habet … mens rationalis, cum se cogitando intelligit, secum imaginem suam ex se natam, id est cogitationem sui ad suam similitudinem, quasi sua impressione formatam … mens humana non semper se cogitat, sicut sui semper meminit). For the human being, to think is to speak, to express “the image naturally impressed in it”; it is to open up and use by a voluntary act those treasures of the spirit that are consigned to the coffers of its memory.
From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century
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Anselm insists with efficacy on this act of expressing a truth that is received and is “suffered” in its objectiveness, with which somehow we are collaborating. If this truth is the Truth and the Life that manifest themselves within the human being in a manner infinitely beyond its capacities, it is also true that the human being speaks the word (parola), the verbum, which has been impressed in its spirit. The De libero arbitrio insists on this collaboration between the human and the divine that implants itself on the human frailty and joins itself to it. Rooted in Augustinianism, traversed by Platonic motives, vivacious in the anti-nominalistic polemic, the work of St. Anselm, beyond its premises and its sources, constitutes a truly new philosophical synthesis. The materials of the tradition are transfigured; the debates of the schools are transformed. The dialectic, the discussion concerning the universals, even though they are most triumphant in his first work, the De grammatico, lose all hardness in the vigor of a new penetrating as much as passionate thought. In front of the demand of reason, in front of Roscelin, Anselm must confess in the De fide Trinitatis, his deeper belief. “In the past the speculations of the Fathers reached in the contemplation of truth a loftiness that would be impossible to hope to reach again, now or in the future, by anyone else. I don’t believe that today a person who wishes, after having firmly accepted faith, to exercise reason in the inquiry into faith itself, should be blamed.” These words do not undermine the fact that Anselm is solidly rooted in the vision of a Christian philosophy understood as a reflection on the faith that cannot be generated or destroyed by a reasoning whose function is analytic. 6. Peter Lombard The work of the Magister sententiarum, Peter Lombard, has a capital importance in the systematization of the theological wisdom of the Middle Ages. He was born in Novara, but we do not know exactly in what year, and died as the Bishop of Paris in 1160. Peter at times is mentioned as the “brother” of the great canonist Gratian of Bologna, not because of a blood relation, but because of that similarity that is easily to be established between the systematist of jurisprudence and that of theology. His intellectual growth was completely French, Parisian, though a journey and the permanence in Rome gave him the opportunity of knowing and utilizing the De fide orthodoxa of John Damascene, of which Eugenius III ordered a translation from Burgundio of Pisa. Peter mentioned John “as a great Greek scholar in the book he wrote on the Trinity, a work that Pope Eugenius wanted in translation.” From the various frequencies of citations in the different books of the Sentences, it is also possible to establish that Lombard came to know about the De fide orthodoxa while he was dedicating himself to the writing of his other works. We have the confirmation of this in a gloss of Peter of Poitiers: “The magister cited this authority from that book while in Rome” (a libro isto sumpsit magister hanc auctoritatem dum Romae esset).
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A successful commentator of the Psalms and of St. Paul, Peter owes his fame and importance to the four books of Libri sententiarum that have placed their author within history precisely as the Magister sententiarum. Lombard was the continuator of a line of research begun by Anselm of Laon, to which a new original impulse was also given by Abelard and his disciples. Instead of a doctrinal synthesis, Lombard offered a collection of materials, of themes that are ordered and distributed according to principles already suggested by Abelard. “The whole human salvation consists in three things: faith, charity, and sacrament” (tria sunt in quibus humanae salutis summa consistit: fides, charitas, sacramentum). Faith was centered on “the knowledge of the Trinity and the mystery of Incarnation” (in cognitione Trinitatis … et mysterio incarnationis). The Liber sententiarum developed on this outline. Peter candidly confessed the task, the purpose, and the limits of his work. His goal was to fight and defeat the enemies of the Church and of God, “to uplift the torch of truth on the candelabrum,” compiling with much work and sweat those testimonies of truth that have been established in eternity. “Our voice is not a bombast (insonuit) and has not transgressed the limits imposed. This work must not be considered superfluous by the lazy or the very learned, because it is instead necessary to the many not lazy and many unlearned, among which I count myself. This small volume collects the sentences of the Fathers, adorned with testimonies. It is most useful for those people doing a research because they would have no need of consulting many books since this one collects and presents in its brevity all that they easily can search for.” Peter of Poitiers, one of Lombard’s glossators, commented that the “voice” of the magister rarely insonuit. In contrast with the audacities of the daring Abelard, twice rejected at Soissons (in 1121) and at Sens (in 1141), Lombard is not reluctant to attack ratiocinatores, dialectici, and scrutatores, together with their argutiae and versutiae (cleverness and cunning). Innocent III said, “I found him to be an expositor not an assertor.” That is exactly what Lombard wanted to be: to inform diligently, “without taking positions or accepting prejudices.” In front of philosophy and the free rational inquiry, in the commentary to St. Paul, Peter exclaimed: “Add charity to science and science will be useful. By itself science will be useless, but with charity it will be useful” (adde scientiae charitatem, et utilis erit scientia. Per se enim inutilis erit scientia, cum charitate utilis est, Patrologia Latina, vol. 191, p. 1601). In the Sentences (bk. 3, ch. 22, sect. 1), citing St. Ambrose, he writes: “Reasoning should be removed when searching for faith. In its own schools, dialectic is already silent; it is the time when the fishermen are believed, not the dialecticians.” His constant moderation ends in philosophical poverty. Lombard presents the ambiance of a vague Augustinianism, lightly veined by Platonism, with a substantial disinterest for the classic thinkers whom he cites for his skirmishes. This man “who is separated from Anselm of Canterbury only by one generation and who constantly nourishes himself by reading the books of Abelard, does not possess the philosophical penetration of Anselm nor the
From Boethius to the Thirteenth Century
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dialectic acumen of Abelard” (J. P. de Ghellinck). He is conscious of the new thrust that the dialecticians gave to thought and, in his own way, tried to respond to them, presenting himself as a mediator between the different opinions. His work, so harshly disputed, came to impose itself as a new cultural instrument. “Theology became more technical, more precise. In one manner, there is progress, at the condition that each one makes a synthesis by himself.” Preceded by the juridical model of Gratian of Bologna as well as by the anonymous Summa sententiarum that he used in his work, Lombard was not an original thinker but he allowed the echo of the contemporary discussions to be largely reflected in his work. From him, who so largely compiled from diverse authors, at their own turn, Magister Bandinus will draw for his Abbreviatio and Gandulphus, a theologian canonist of Bologna who lived around the half of the twelfth century. 7. Arnold of Brescia Alexander III in a letter to the bishop of Reims condemned the most disputed thesis of Lombard, “Christ is not Christ through something by which he is a man” (Christus non est aliquid secundum quod est homo). This pope was the same Magister Roland of Bologna, actually Roland Bandinelli of Siena, previously professor in Bologna, learned in human letters and famous jurist, who wrote a book of Sententiae in the spirit of Abelard. Together with another analogous work of Magister Omnibonus, a canonist, these two works testify and document the influence of Abelard in Italy. The most famous witness of this influence, though at a different level, was Arnold of Brescia with his actions and tragic end, who was an ordained lecturer (lector ordinatus) in his own city. After he moved to France, Arnold “became a disciple of Abelard, and was vehement and pertinacious in defending with him all errors that have been already detected and condemned by the church.” St. Bernard writing to the Pope lamented that “filth will join filth” (squama squamae conniungitur). After his condemnation at Sens, Arnold was the one who, “remaining in Paris at St. Genovefe Mount,” commented the Scripture in the school of his master. Imposing himself for the harsh rigor of his life, extensive culture, and great eloquence, Arnold fulminated the mundane and undeserving ecclesiastic hierarchies. Otto von Freisingen wrote: “He [Arnold] was preaching that clerics with benefices, bishops with regalia, and monks with possessions could not be saved at all. All these things pertain truly to secular authority.” In Rome, after the flight of Eugenius III (in 1146), at the pope’s residence, Arnold inveighed against the cardinals and the pope, who had transformed the Church of Christ into a market, or rather a cavern of robbers. “The pope himself is not what he professes to be, an apostolic man and a shepherd of souls, but a sanguinary man who with his authority support incendiaries and murderers. He is the wrecker of the churches and the ruin of the innocent. His life is given to the pleasures of the flesh and to filling up his safe with the wealth of others.”
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The disdain for the increasingly profound earthly secularization of the church is translated into the words of the Historia pontificalis. In its quest for worldly power, in its compromises, and in its political games, the church was appearing to betray the mission for which Christ ascended the cross. This is why Arnold invites the faithful not to approach the unworthy priests or receive the sacraments from them. At the same time, he expresses a sentiment of national pride, in which we already hear the vibrations of the language of Cola di Rienzo. “We will not tolerate the men who want to enslave the Seat of the empire, source of Roman liberty, and queen of the world” (non esse homines admittendos, qui sedem imperii, fontem libertatis romanae, mundi dominam, volebant subiicere servituti). The flames of the pyre did not extinguish the message of evangelical poverty announced by Arnold with such a polemic tone. In Lombardy, the followers of Arnold transmitted his gospel to many others, who soon afterward joined the Waldensians. These, at their own turn, were in many ways connected with that vast movement with Manichean roots of the heresy of the Cathars. Catharism permeated a great part of the medieval culture, and in its original aspect of neo-Manichaeism was largely diffused throughout Italy since the eleventh century. It was the heresy “rediscovered in Italy” (in Italia reperta), as Rudolph Glaber said, where it probably spread out throughout the South from Greek sources. St. Bernard once wrote to a correspondent: “This heresy has been hidden until now since the time of the martyrs, and it survived in Greece and some other places.” The dualism of Mani triumphed among the Cathars and the Patarins of the twelfth century, to reappear again among the Waldensians. In a process of 1387 against the Waldensians, this explicit confession is found: “To adore as their God the dragon that fights God and its angels, because the dragon is stronger and more powerful than God” (et adorare pro Deo suo dragonem qui pugnat cum Deo et angelis suis, et est fortior et potentior Deo). What is certain is that the Manichean condemnation of matter, of nature, of the body, as far as it is mundane, became the condemnation of the earthly and temporal interests of the Church and its wealth. The condemnation identified itself and joined with the call for poverty as the requirement for renunciation and asceticism. The tones, the modalities may be variegated but with an extreme tendency to vanish, so that at the core would remain one essential concern: the need for a return to the spirituality of the Christian message. Among the Cathars, the dualism dominated with the quasi Marcionite condemnation of the Old Testament and with Montanist motives. Among the Waldensians, the condemnation of the temporality of the Church persisted. Among the Patarins of the eleventh century, still rigidly orthodox, the fights continued against the priests who were Simoniacs and Nicolaitans. Among the Patarins of the twelfth century and the disciples of Arnold, the condemnation was practiced of all unworthy ministers making it impossible for them to administer the sacraments. Among all of them an ascetic motive, a devaluation
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of the world that arrives to consider it the incarnation of evil triumphed. A more intimate reason existed in this kind of movement; the need for a social reform agitated the miserable and the generous, those who ask in order to be sympathetic with those who suffer, and those who ask because they had nothing. The exigency was present for a charitas against the iniquities of the world, a charity translated into a real communion with those who suffered or rejoiced. While a profound political change began to develop, a fight initiated, as it was necessary, at the religious and moral levels, justifying theoretically the crisis caused by the Church that, having become an earthly power, started its duel with the Empire on a strictly political level. From that moment onward, religious ideas and motives were from time to time utilized by the two contending powers as weapons to be used besides those held on the fields of battle. 8. Heretical Unrest and Movements A wide diffusion of Manichaeism happened throughout the whole peninsula. Traces of this diffusion are found in the De iustitia et iusto of Cardinal Laborante who was born near Pontormo in Tuscany, but lived for a long time at the court of William I, King of Sicily. This small treatise was dedicated to the Grand Admiral Maione, and it is pervaded by the concern of demonstrating that evil does not exist. “The divine substance, called in Greek ousia, is goodness. God by essence is goodness and is unique. There is only one good and one goodness alone.” Urging objections were raised: the soul is vacillating among these uncertainties. How is possible that everything is good when God has created angels who were rebellious and who supposedly have never been good? The Truth reveals that Lucifer lied from the beginning. Those who err are sinners from the time they were in the womb; from their birth, they erred and told lies. How can those who are deprived of truth be good? How can those who are deprived of the grace of predestination be good? How can those who do not follow the precepts of sanctity be good? The good tree can only produce good fruits, and the bad tree only bad fruits. The answer of Laborante is that of Augustine. Evil has no existence. Evil is the deviating will; evil is deficiency, it is more nothing than nothing. “What we call evil is nothing. It is nothing in such a way that, if blindness as a privation is nothing, evil is more nothing that blindness itself.” In the process of the whole that moves toward God and returns to God, everything that is, is good. “For reason of his own will alone God created the universe. He produced it from Himself and directed it to Himself. In the same way that He is the Alpha of the whole universe, He is also its Omega. All things will grow to the glory of Him who is universally for all things the one and the same beginning and end. Notwithstanding the ancient and the recent wisdom that intended to eliminate the contrasts, the religious world was crossed over by cravings for renewal in the name of the spirit against the letter, in the name of the unrest
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against the satisfied, and in the name of the sufferers against the merrymakers. The pullulating heresies meant an active labor and a vital ferment and not a stasis or a ruin. During the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, thought was not languishing but operating. The accumulated materials, the planned discussions, and the fights sustained aspired to blossom in adequate expressions within which the results of so many experiences could be consolidated by taking some precise forms. The ancient culture, always better understood, the Christian spirit always richer, and the political structures always more complex, were urging, almost asking for systematizations that are more adequate. The thirteenth century saw the great “cathedrals of ideas” and a faith that appeared to have found the full force of the message of Christ. The Franciscan movement with its adherence to the actuality of life and the Thomistic synthesis were running together through this singular moment in history. Though this period was not the third age dreamed by Abbot Joachim of Fiore in Calabria, it was nonetheless and undoubtedly a grand epoch of the human vicissitude. 9. Joachim of Fiore “In Calabria, during this period of the second half of the twelfth century, an abbot by the name of Joachim who possessed the spirit of prophecy began to prophesy.” This was what friar Salimbene narrated, but also a philosopher like William of Auvergne equally acknowledged that Joachim of Fiore possessed the gift for prophecy. It was the age of prophets. Astrologers, geomancers, and spiritualists were reading the future in the stars, the earth, the waters, and were announcing the soon to come Anti-Christ. The wise like Michael Scot and the simpletons like Asdente lived in this age. “In those days, in the city of Parma, there was a poor man, pure, simple, and fearing God. He was illiterate, but with an intellect much enlightened.” The anticipation for a renewal that has always accompanied humanity during prosperous times for the tediousness of the uniform well-being, and during the harsh times for the intolerance of pain appeared to have become more vigorous, almost at the unison with the flourishing of civilization. Joachim of Fiore had an urging impatience due to the many compromises of the Church, and the decadence appeared to him as the definite prelude to the Kingdom of the Spirit. The history of the world was rhythmically following the Trinitarian model, and the prophecy of the New Testament was corresponding with that of the Old. The age of the Father, lord of justice, was the prelude to the age of the Son, and this as the prelude to the third age was leading up to the age of the Spirit. We must obey, under the stimulus of fear, which is the Father; we must read in view of the Wisdom that is Christ. We must sing psalms and pray under the spur of charity which is the Holy Ghost.… In our work, let’s fear; in our reading, let’s learn; in psalmody, let’s love.… Fearing,
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we kiss the feet; reading, we kiss the hand; singing, we kiss the lips.… The kiss of the feet is a good beginning, but the kiss of the hands is a suave perseverance, and the kiss impressed on the lips is perfect consummation.… You will not be able to taste the sweetness of the love of God, if you do not empty your mind from any reflection and concern for the things of this world. You would not be able to profit in the knowledge of the Scriptures unless you free yourself from earthly solicitudes. You would not be able to focus on the essence of God in virtue of the coming of the Holy Ghost, unless you removed yourself even from every verbal clamor and from any erudite means for the inquiry of the Scripture.… If you are seduced by the contemplation of God and wish to abandon yourself to spiritual speculation, take up secretly the decachord psaltery, penetrate into the arcane mysteries, into the hidingplaces of your heart, and begin to enjoy what human eye has never seen. Three are the epochs as three are the divine persons: knowledge, wisdom, and full understanding, and again servile obedience, filial servitude, and full liberty. At first, we are slaves in a period of testing; then, sons; finally, friends. The first period was winter, the second was the beginning of spring, and the third would bring up the lilies. The first period gives the stem, the second the ear of wheat and the third will give the fruit. The first gave water, the second wine and the third will give oil. The first age is connected with the Father who is the author of all things, the second with the Son who deigned to endure our miserable mud, and the third will be the age of Spirit, of which the Apostle said, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there liberty stands.” This liberty of the Spirit is freedom from earthly ties and rejection of mundane pomp. “It is necessary to restore the habit of that old apostolic life, when earthly inheritances were not hungrily desired, when all the inherited possessions were sold. The economy of priesthood will be followed by the economy of monasticism. The true monk will keep one thing alone: the lyre of his song and his hope.” In the light of the Spirit, Joachim could penetrate under the veil of the Scripture and see beyond the harshness of the letter the clarity of the spirit, justifying with an almost obsessing interpretive virtuosity the message of liberty. After the travail of the active life, the new age will open the ways to pure contemplation. “At first, the contemplative life existed in Paradise, and then the active life existed in the world. For the sin of the first man, it came to be that first came what pertains to the animal, and then followed what is spiritual.” The understanding of history as a triplex rhythm was the conception that inspired the solitary monk of the Sila Mountains to begin a polemic with Lombard, against the blasphemy of Peter: “The blasphemy of Peter, who by separating the unity from the trinity, introduced the quaternity” (blasphema Petri, qui unitatem a trinitate dividens quaternitatem inducit). According to Joachim, the formula of the “Magister sententiarum,” which
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thereafter became the formula of the Church, would add to the three person an essence “that is a specific thing common to the three persons, and that is not ingenerated, or generated, or proceeding.” From this, in 1215, came the condemnation of the Fourth Lateran Council against the “libel or treatise that the Abbot Joachim published against Peter Lombard’s de unitate seu essentia Trinitatis.” This treaty has not reached us, but it is easily reconstructed, not from the Liber contra Lombardum, a late work of the school of Joachim (posterior to 1234), but from the De articulis fidei, in which the thesis of Joachim is most clear. “First of all understand that your God is three complete Persons, whole and perfect, and believe that each Person is God in a full and perfect manner, and that together the three are one God, wholly simple, wholly eternal, wholly living, wholly invisible, and wholly impalpable.” The formulation of the condemnation of the thesis of Joachim was expressed in a vague terminology. He is said to have considered “that common essence as a fourth [person] … though he agreed that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one essence, not substance, and one nature. Truly, the unity of this kind is recognized as not true and proper, but almost collective and similar. This is the way we refer to many individuals and one people, many faithful and one Church.” It is not in these scholastic discussions in which the formulation of the problem of the universals is reflected, that the vital part of the preaching of Joachim is found. It is not in the abundance of hermeneutical virtuosity with which he approached the Scriptures, a fact that probably impressed Dante. The truth of the solitary monk of Calabria was the fire which burned inside him and made of him a living appeal to humanity. The truth of Joachim was his way of resolving everything in the love for God, a love that made him cry during the celebration of the mass (lacrymantem nonnumquam eum in celebratione missae conspexi) and that even during the longest sermons made him appear like an angelic instead of a human being (non jam ut homo, sed vere ut angelus). The powerful suggestions given by Joachim will influence the overexcited spirit of Cola di Rienzo in favor of a “universal reformation.” His messianic message will attract the attention of all to Cola as the prophet of the third age and will determine his encounter with the disciples of Francis. The fructificatio or the giving age of Christ as the fruit of the second age will appear to follow the initiatio (preparation) foreseen by the prophet. 10. Francis of Assisi The years when Joachim was dying were years of a great travail for Italy. The Empire and the all Europe were in ruins; Frederick II was a child, and the Crusade was at its beginning. Lothar of Segni, the gloomy author of De contemptu mundi, an arid and depressing condemnation of the world and of man, was ascending on the throne of Peter. Made with mud, conceived in the foul smell of libido, grown in the maternal womb in “the filthiness,” The human being is born crying, ugly and suffering. “Why is then the light offered to this
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miserable being?” He is feeble, open to all injuries, and defenseless: “The human being came to the world naked, and naked will return.” All human life is foul and sad. “Oh! The vile indignity of the human condition! Oh! The undeserving condition of the human cowardice! Go and inquire the grass and the trees. They from themselves produce flowers, leaves and fruits; you from yourself, you produce nits, lice, and worms. They from themselves produce oil, wine, and balm; you from yourself send out mucous, urine, and dung. They from themselves send out the fragrance of sweetness; and you make of yourself an abomination of stench!” Life is short and hard, and in every condition, in every state, it is miserable. Life is miserable for the good as well as for the wicked. “The saints have experienced insults and pains; in addition to that, they suffered chains and jailing. They have been stoned, cut into pieces, suffered, and died by the knife.… They went throughout the world in poverty, with persecution, and in affliction.” No light of comfort exists on the earth, no order, no justice. “No one should feel confident that he will suffer no pain, though he knows to be innocent. Often the innocent is condemned and the guilty is absolved; the pious is punished and the wicked is honored, Jesus is crucified and Barabbas is freed.” Lothar the Deacon was not, as often it has been said, the characteristic exponent of the medieval world. He was the expression of the perennial way of understanding life, rather than the exponent of pessimism, of the always resurgent rhetoric of pessimism, which seemed to wrap up every natural motion in a sudarium. Over this cemetery of the world, a God emerges who is not the Father who provides the quotidian bread for his sons but a terrible Lord in his abysmal incomprehensibility. In the prose of the future Innocent III, not the medieval conception of the world was expressed but a voice as ancient as the human reflection that already resounded within the pages of Aristotle and Boethius, and in those of Arnobius. The Franciscan faith is an entirely different thing. Francis, too, has known that life means suffering, and it was a bitter day for him when he met the lepers. Then, he narrates that “God, the Lord, brought me among them, and I was merciful toward them. When I was ready to leave them, what before seemed bitter changed itself into the sweetness and the light of my soul and body.” This “conversion” is the reason why everything changed its aspect, and the beautiful things become divinely beautiful, while the sad and painful also instill pleasantness in the heart. This reversal is due to the presence of God. For Francis, the encounter with God is light of the heart, light of nature, and perfect joy. The encounter with God has a requirement: humility. The human being does not renounce the world; he lives in the world, according to the will of God as a tender reed. Then everything is transformed; everything becomes a gift to be received with joy, or a sign, or a test sent by God to be accepted with confidence and gratitude. The Franciscan poverty, simplicity, and humility differentiate themselves from analogous social and political movements extolling poverty; Francis
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wishes to operate at a different level. When in the future time, the new man will be born and the Church and the Empire will ameliorate. This would be a consequence, a corollary, not a premise, or a point of departure. What is important for Francis is the soul. The salvation consists in the possibility offered to everybody of imitating Christ, in the recovery of oneself through the acceptance of all things, dreadful and blissful. “O brother Leon, write down that in this is perfect joy.” Perfect joy is found in tribulations, but also in the serene vision of the beautiful things of the world, in the love for living creatures, and in the love of brothers. To humbly accept everything from God means to acknowledge in everything the presence of God: in the wolf, also a creature of God, in the bird, in the water, and in death. Everything is a sign sent by God: leprosy, worms, plague, the dung on which the pig rolls itself, and into which the new monk is ready to jump, having become like a child. Everything is divine for the one who has found God. God is found when we are open to humbly receive him in the works of his hands. He who imagines that the Cantico is a song of praise that arises from all the creation has not understood the Franciscan spirit. Its theme is that the human being has found its salvation because it has discovered the way of accepting in the sun and in death the work of God and accepts serenely the marvelous force of the sun and the terrible cruelty of death. The praise of death and of the sun is the hymn to the rediscovered wisdom. When the human being gives up pride and renounces to open up with violence its way through the things of the world it finds the goodness of God. In the Speculum perfectionis, the antithesis is clearly stated between the person who offends God in the created things using them as their owner and the person who accepts all of them as a gift. In this view, poverty assumes a wider significance than the renunciation of the earthly goods and means the awareness that everything, even body, life, and death, are not ours but of God. “I want, for the praise of Him and for the consolation and edification of our fellow men, to make a new laud of the creatures of the Lord. We use them daily and without them we would not live, but through them human kind offends their creator. We are continuously ungrateful for so great favors and benefices because we are not praising the Lord, the creator and giver of all goods, as we should.” This is Francis: in this effort of opening the eyes of all human beings, so that they would free themselves from the spirit of dominion and possession, and learn that to live in a Christian way means to see in everything the work of a God who is wise and benevolent, a loving father. Everything is not a prey or a conquest, but a gift to be received with a gladdened spirit and by lauding the donor. This is the distance of Francis from Joachim who was all spirited with a messianic hope, tending toward a reformation of the world, which was written in the sacred books and was destined to miraculously be inserted within the course of history. The liberty of the spirit for Francis is within us, when for the love of God we will cure the leper instead of feeling repugnance, when after being beaten with a knotty stick and sent away we suffer with re-
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signed humility, hunger, fatigue, and cold, praising the Lord who for us died on the cross. In that moment, we will be free and will be able to laud God with the cantico of all creatures. St. Francis has taught no doctrine; he knew that human wisdom is found in the answer to a call, in the imitation of an example: Christ crucified for the human beings, Francis the humble praiser of the creatures of God, “Friar Francis the minimal among your servants.” Jesus taught the love of everything in God. Francis, with the most candid gesture, invites his brothers to want nothing as their own, indicating that possession is the tangible sign of the violation of the most important commandment. No thing is my own; everything is of God and of all of us. To possess is almost to detach oneself from the others, to perform an act of violence and of pride. “Poor in the things of the world and [adorned] with virtue,” this is the rule: “They should appropriate no thing, no place, no house, and not any other thing; as travelers and strangers in this world, in poverty and humility, they will serve God.” 11. The Eternal Gospel. Ubertino of Casale During the thirteenth century the encounter between the Joachimite prophetism and the Franciscan movement actualized. The new orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were pleased to recognize that they had been previously announced in the prophecy of the monk from Calabria. “At this time, two orders were founded, that of the Minor Friars and that of the Preacher Friars. Abbot Joachim had predicted them under many figures which are contained in the New and the Old Testament.” Thus, spoke Salimbene. The rigorous trend of Franciscanism relived the Joachimite message. Bartholomew of Pisa, toward the end of the fourteenth century, will show again with the texts of Joachim the correspondence between Christ and Francis. After 1247, with the election to the leadership of the Franciscans of that “august man” (uomo solare) who was, according to Clarenus, John of Parma, a great Joachimite, in the view of Salimbene, the accentuation of rigor within the order, the spiritual motive prevailed. “The companions of St. Francis who still lived at that time … rejoiced because they could see that in him [John of Parma] the spirit of St. Francis was reborn.” Salimbene attributes the crisis that brought to the estrangement of John from the order to the exaggerated love he had for the doctrine of Abbot Joachim. The cause of this should be found in the fights originated in Paris to oppose William of Saint-Amour as the teacher of the new orders. During these conflicts, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, a Franciscan, published in 1254 the Introductorius in Evangelium aeternum, in which he sustained that starting with the year 1200, the Spirit subtracted itself from the ancient and new Testament in order to reveal itself instead in the writings of Joachim. The Apocalypse, the Psalterium, and the Concordia, constitute precisely that eternal gospel (Evangelium aeternum) assigned to the Franciscan friars for their preaching. “Ung livre de par le grant diable” (a book equal to the great devil), Jean de Meung used to say, and
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Salimbene considered the book full of errors and fatuities. William of SaintAmour, a harsh adversary of the mendicants, used ably these errors for reason of polemics and with all sort of sarcasms against them. “To steal a fig for reason of need is the same than begging; therefore to steal is a work of perfection.… No woman is poorer than the one who eats her own son for reason of beggary; therefore, to eat a son is a work of perfection.… To become poor for the love of Christ is a work of perfection. The poor who goes begging when on the contrary by working he could provide his own food or live otherwise without sin, it is not a work of perfection but of sin.” The attacks of William convinced Alexander IV to reunite at Anagni a commission, whose conclusions caused the condemnation of the thesis that denies that the mendicitas (begging) of the new orders was meritorious and of the theses found in the Liber Introductorius. Then, Bonaventure of Bagnorea substituted John of Parma. The movement of the spiritualists lost no vigor. The simplest individuals alone lost their conviction for the reason that the year 1260 passed without the crisis foreseen by Gerard. Salimbene confessed: “After the death of Frederick the Emperor and the passing of the year 1260, I abandoned entirely that doctrine. Now, I want to believe only what I see.” The others, the more profound, had assigned a different meaning to the encounter between Joachimism and Franciscanism. Olivi, who repeated the commentary of Joachim on the Apocalypse, accentuated the duel between Christ and the Anti-Christ, between the Church of the spirit and the degenerate mundane Church, exalting in Francis the new redeemer. In 1287, in Florence, Olivi met Ubertino of Casale who, in the fifth book of the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu Christi, written at the Verna in 1305, developed again the Joachimite apocalypse. Pietro of Fossombrone and Angelo of Clarenus are tireless in their fight against those who appear to betray the Franciscan spirit. The love for knowledge is now corrupted because it willed to hold with violence the elusive infinity of God and has remained vain and pernicious. They gave their spirit to the curiosities and the studies of science, though it is not in the recollection of words and their composition that the love and knowledge of God is found but in the operations of faith. For the love of knowing, the first man became disobedient, lost the vision of God, the innocence, supernatural science, grace, and immortality. By faith, he came to grace again, and not by dialectic, geometry, and astrology. It is by faith, because we are saved by grace through faith. This does not come from us, but from God, because it is a gift of God.… The true science and knowledge of God is obtained by way of faith and by the operations of this faith, not by way of words or of the natural science.
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Jacopone sang: “We saw the evil of Paris / With which they have destroyed Assisi; / With all their learning / They have put it on the wrong road” (Mal vedemmo Parisi / Ch’hane destrutto Ascisi; / Con la lor lettoria / L’han messo en mala via). These verses document an opposition to knowledge and another way offered to the human spirit. In a dialogue between reason and conscience, Jacopone presents the reason asking the why of so many reprimands: “Why do you afflict me so much, put me in such solicitude and anguish?” The conscience answers that it is because the judgments of reason are unsatisfactory. “Then reason says: ‘Why do you leave me now in tranquility?’” Again, conscience answers that it is because reason has finally become aware that we must leave it in the hands of God. In the Trattato “in what way the human being can rapidly arrive to the cognition of truth,” Jacopone explains that the human soul must deliver itself from the consideration of the finite; it must give up all mundane attachment, and reach “the cordially true poverty of spirit.” Only the light of God will invade the soul, “and in this truth it sees the truth of all the creatures and knows the vile things as vile and the precious things as precious.” To do violence to things with our reason is to lose oneself in falseness; to open oneself humbly to the light of Truth is to comprehend things truly. “Is humility not the light of truth?” Humility, poverty, this is the new criterion of truth: let things speak up, you listen to them; have respect for reality, you submit to God; make yourself a nothing, so that everything be God: “If you touch love with love, by love you will be touched. / If you wear love, you will be free from yourself; / You will be altogether empty of yourself / And transformed—into the love, your guide” (Toccando amor, d’amor sarai toccato; / Vestendo amor serai di te spogliato; / Tutto serai de te allor privato / E trasformato—en quel conducitore).
Two TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GREEK AND THE ARABIC 1. Italy and the Byzantine Culture. The Swabians. Michael Scot Roger Bacon, in Opus tertium, insisted on the necessity of teaching the languages that would facilitate the direct approach to the sources of the Greek and Oriental culture. He added: It would be convenient to attain that great advantage when visiting Italy where in many localities the clergy and the people are authentic Greeks. The bishops and the archbishops, the rich and the patricians, should send someone there to search for books and for one or more individuals who know Greek well enough to teach it. Our Lord Robert, the saint Bishop of Lincoln, used to do that (Nec multum esset pro tanta utilitate ire in Italiam, in qua clerus et populus sunt pure Graeci in multis locis; et episcopatus, et archiepiscopatus, et divites ac seniors possent ibi mittere pro libris et pro uno vel pluribus qui scirent Graecum, sicut dominus Robertus, sanctus episcopus Lincolniensis, solebat facere, in Opus tertium, Brewer ed., p. 434). Bacon, who was writing between 1266 and 1267, was alluding to his teacher Robert Grosseteste, and looked at Italy as the ideal bridge between Eastern and Western cultures. Together with Spain, Italy has heretofore contributed to the spreading and circulation of the best that had been produced by the Muslim culture and has circulated an increasing quantity of classic texts. Sicily was rich of Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew elements. The Byzantines of Southern Italy, Venice, and Pisa were in a continuous contact with the Empire of Constantinople. Rome itself with its position and prestige favored in all ways the contacts, the linguistic cognitions, and the diffusion of culture. It was all a work of doctrinal exchanges through translations, discussions, and comments, which was going on almost in secrecy and that became always more fervid and public during the thirteenth century.
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Already during the tenth century we find signs of a culture not only Latin but also Greek in Southern Italy, when Leo of Naples translated the PseudoCallisthenes. A different interest is shown by Alfanus, the Bishop of Salerno, who translated into Latin On the Nature of Man (De natura hominis) of Nemesius of Emesa, attributed until the sixteenth century to Gregory of Nyssa. Alfanus was educated in the great scientific school of Salerno and in the greatest center of religious life of Monte Cassino. Nemesius was again translated toward the half of the following century by the jurist Burgundio of Pisa, who in 1159 dedicated his version to Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. Burgundio, who had been at Constantinople, did not limit himself to Nemesius. In addition to some scripts of Galen, Burgundio rendered into Latin the homilies of John Chrysostom, St. Basil, and the On the Orthodox Faith (De fide orthodoxa) of John Damascene. Jacobus Clericus of Venice or, as he called himself, Jacobus Veneticus Graecus, from the year 1128 onward made a version of the Physics, the Metaphysics, and the De anima (On the Soul) of Aristotle. After Boethius, he translated the Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, on which he commented or translated comments by others. He changed into Latin also part of the On Small Natural Things (Parva Naturalia) and a prologue to the Physics. Moses of Bergamo lived for a while in Constantinople in the Venetian Quarters where he refined his taste and culture, no differently than Hugo Eterianus, Leo of Pisa (Leo Tuscus), the translator from the Greek of the treatise on dreams by Ahmed ibn Sirin, and Paschal the Roman, a student of occultism and magic. Rusticus and Stephen, both of Pisa, were interested in questions of medicine, while in Sicily Eugenius of Palermo probably helped by someone else translated from the Arabic the Optics and from the Greek the Almagest, both of Ptolemy. At the same time, the works of Euclid, Heron of Alexandria, and Proclus were turned into Latin and began to circulate. In 1156 in Benevento, Henricus Aristippus, Archdeacon of Catania, started in the translation of Phaedo, which he completed thereafter in Palermo together with the Menon and the fourth book of Meteors, of which he had acquired the manuscripts in Constantinople. Plato of Tivoli lived in Barcelona between 1134 and 1145; he was learned in Arabic and Hebrew languages, student of astrology and collaborator of Abraham Bar Hiyya, and translated in 1138 the Tetrabiblos, the bible of the astrologers, in addition to many other scripts on geomancy and geometry. The one who emerges above all the afore-mentioned scholars for his tireless activity is Gerard of Cremona (1147–1187), not to be confused with Gerard of Sabbioneta of the thirteenth century. Gerard of Cremona, after having learned Arabic and Hebrew in Toledo in the turn of a few years, probably with the help of some collaborators, turned into Latin an entire library of philosophical and scientific works in Greek and Arabic. Limiting ourselves to the works in philosophy, different translations have been attributed to him, like that of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (from the Arabic of Matta Ibn Yunus),
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with the commentary of Themistius and the De syllogismo of Alfarabi. Aristotle’s De coelo et mundo (On heavens and world), De naturali auditu (On natural hearing), De generatione et corruptione (On generation and corruptibility), the three first books of the Meteors (from the Arabic of Yahya Ibn Batriq), De expositione bonitatis purae (the De Causis), and De proprietate elementorum (or De elementis) are to his merit. Gerard completed also a version of the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias: De motu et tempore (On motion and time), De sensu, De eo quod augmentum et incrementum facit in forma et non in hyle (On what makes a growth or an increment in the form but not in the matter), De intellectu et intellecto (On the intellect and on what is understood) from the version of Hunain Ibn Ishaq, and De unitate. Of AlKindi Gerard translated De quinque essentiis, De somno et visione, and De ratione; of Alfarabi, the Distinctio super librum Aristotelis de naturali auditu (An analysis of Aristotle’s book on natural hearing) and the De scientiis; of Ishaq al-Isra’ili, De elementis, De descriptione rerum et diffinitionibus earum (On the description of things and their definitions). To these philosophical works, he added among many other writings, the Almagest and works of Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Ipsicles, Theodosius, Diokles, Hippocrates, and Galen, without mentioning Khwarizmi, Al-Farghani, and the long list of medicine professionals, astrologists, and occultists. The thirteenth century saw a more fervid dedication to translations from Greek and Arabic in Sicily, at the court of Frederick II and Manfred, in Rome with Urban IV, in Padua, and in Venice. Sicily, with its Greek-Arabic-Hebraic character, was the admirable place that facilitated this work of vulgarization. Frederick II, learned and curious, favored in every way such kind of activities, moved especially by his admiration for the scientific Arabic doctrines. Michael Scot, who truly knew all the games of the magical frauds, came to Italy in 1220. After teaching in Bologna and having been well accepted in Rome from 1224 to 1227, he became the astrologist of the emperor at the Sicilian court. In Sicily, he translated and dedicated to Frederick De animalibus of Avicenna and brought to an end a manuscript on astrology. In Toledo, he had previously translated works of Aristotle, Alpetragius, and Averroès. The first introduction to Averroès’s works was through the court of Palermo after 1227, by way of Michael Scot. Frederick offered the translations to the University of Bologna with the famous epistle that successively Manfred used in addressing the University of Paris. This epistle is an interesting document for the various expressions borrowed from the Metaphysics of Aristotle. The emperor started with the statement that “the contributions of the sciences are necessary” (necessaria … scientiae condimenta) to those who possess the sovereign power. “For this reason, we who by divine grace rule over many nations, even before assuming the responsibility of the empire, always loved to know not only because of that natural desire that all men possess, but also because of a particular will that some enjoy in progressing. Since our youth, we have searched for wisdom, incessantly loved its form, and have
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unweariedly breathed in the fragrance of its manifestations.” This is why Frederick, though in the midst of cares for the kingdom, dedicated every free moment to reading (in lectionis exercitatione), for the acquisition of that wisdom, “without which the life of all mortals is not ruled in a manner worthy of a free human being” (sine quo mortalium vita non regitur liberaliter). In his studies, the emperor appreciated particularly the works of “Aristotle and other philosophers,” Greek and Arabic, “in the linguistic and mathematical disciplines.” He asked for translations that were faithful to the original meaning of the terms (iussimus, verborum fideliter servata verginitate, transferri) because knowledge is not a good that diminishes, but rather increases when it is shared. “The generous possession of the sciences when shared with many it is not lost, and when it is distributed in minor parts it suffers no detriment.” For this reason, he was sending the books to those who wished “to draw new waters from old cisterns” (de cisternis veteribus aquas novas). Michael Scot died before 1136. His successor Master Theodore of Antioch, an astrologer and medical doctor, came in touch with the famous Leonardo of Pisa, and in 1138 at the time of the siege of Brescia, with the Dominican Roland of Cremona who previously taught at Bologna, where he died halfway through the century. Master Theodore was the author of a Summa that is preserved in its completeness in one codex in Bergamo, in which he followed on the footsteps of Roland and engaged in a dispute with his countryman Prepositino. What is of interest in this work is the sympathy shown for the new works of Aristotle and the Arabs, and the interest for the scientific investigation. He cites Avicenna, Algazali, Alfarabi, Albumazar, and Aristotle’s Ethics, De coelo (On the heavens), De anima (On the soul), Physics, De plantis (On plants), De somno (On sleep) and alludes to his Metaphysics. In the increasing studies of astrology, the naturalistic motive clearly emerges, and in order to satisfy this need many are the translations of Salio, canon of Padua and, at the court of Manfred, of Stephen of Messina and John of Dumpno. At the court of Manfred, by his order, Bartholomew of Messina translated, in addition to other various scripts on medicine, Magna moralia and some Pseudo-Aristotelian opuscules: Problemata (Questions), De principiis (On the elements), De mirabilibus auscultationibus (On the marvelous things to hear), Physionomia (Physiognomy), and De signis (On signs). Manfred himself in 1255 translated from Hebrew De pomo (On the apple), while other Aristotelian works were turned into Latin by a certain Nicolaus siculus, who perhaps was Nicholas of Reggio, who worked as translator for Robert of Anjou. Jacob Bonacosa, John of Brescia, Moses of Palermo, and John of Capua, also translated from Hebrew and Arabic. The Latin version of The Book of Moral Philosophers (Liber philosophorum moralium) is derived from the Spanish version (Bocados de Oro) compiled by Arab Emir Abu’l Wefa. According to the opinion of many historians, John of Procida made the Latin version when, after the battle of Tagliacozzo,
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he was obliged to repair to Spain, in exile. A manuscript attributed the translation to Robert of Anjou, but because the work was already in circulation before 1309 and the presence of some Sicilian idioms, recognizable in the version itself, confirms the attribution that can be read in a Parisian codex that is signed by “magister Johannes de Procida.” William of Moerbecke, with the mathematician and astrologer Campano of Novara and the medical doctor Rosello of Arezzo, and with the encouragement of Thomas Aquinas, accomplished one of the most extensive works of revision and direct translation. In Viterbo and Orvieto, in addition to the work done in Spain, in Greece, and in Asia Minor, under Urban IV, William translated from Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Simplicius, Philoponus, Themistius, Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Heron of Alexandria. Of Proclus, he completed Elementatio theologica, in Viterbo on 18 May 1268, and De providentia et fato, in Corinth on February 1280. The most notable fact is that William, by translating the commentary of Proclus on Timaeus and Parmenides, preserved the complete Parmenides, which, in the Greek codices arrived to us, stands mutilated. With William’s versions, the corpus aristotelicum was complete. Scholars could benefit already of an abundant Platonic or neo Platonic corpus. In the thirteenth century, the re-conquest of the patrimony of ancient thought and the contacts with the Arabic-Hebrew speculation reached a sheer amplitude that people believed nothing else could be found or added. The Italian culture, as an efficacious mediator, had contributed abundantly to that accomplishment. A tangible document of this absorption of the Greek thought by the Latin people was the rich bundle of Greek codices donated by Charles of Anjou to the library of the Roman Pontiff. In Benevento, they were the treasures of the Norman and Swabian Kings appropriated by Charles. 2. Astrologists, Epicureans, and Averroists. The “Sicilian Questions” Throughout all of the thirteenth century and into the successive century, at the side of the great synthesis of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas, the activity of the translators was always connected with an elaboration, a discussion, and the divulgation of concepts. The energetic interest for the sciences of nature was documented, at the court of Frederick II by the treatise On the Art of Hunting with Birds (De arte venandi cum avibus) that the emperor himself wrote, and by Michael Scot’s astrological works. These works included Liber introductorius and Liber particularis, in which the science of the movements of the stars in their linkage with human events was developed with that completeness that will be found later in Liber astronomicus of Guido Bonatti of Forlí, probably a professor in Bologna, who died before the fourteenth century. Guido is important for his originality and for the ability of vulgarizing theses drawn from Arabic sources. The rhythm of human history proceeding according to the necessity of the natural laws, to which every event is subject,
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even the birth and fall of religions, finds its convinced assertor in Guido Bonatti, a bitter and insistent polemicist against priests and friars, in particular those of the mendicant orders. Guido attacked Giovanni of Vicenza, a Dominican, who deserved ironies and sarcasms from that eccentric spirit who was Boncompagno of Signa, an expert in the ars dictaminis (art of epistolary and legal composition): “John exalts John / who is a pantomime in the ring. / Jump this way, jump that way, / he asks for the height of heavens. / This jumps on, that jumps on, too, / and a thousand begin to jump. / Also the ladies in the choir jump, / and so does the doge of the Venetians” (Et Johannes Johanniçat / Et saltando choreizat. / Modo salta, modo salta, / Qui coelorum petit alta. / Saltat iste, saltat ille / Resaltant cohortes mille. / Saltat chorus dominarum. / Saltat dux Venetiarum). Astrology, because of its scientific appearance attracted all sympathies, and friar Salimbene, full of faith, narrated the following experience to confirm it. John of the Pian del Carpine had brought back from the land of the Tartars a wooden cup on which some astrological images were engraved, not by human beings, but directly by the stars. “He showed to me and to some other friars a cup made of wood that he was carrying with him. On the bottom of that cup, I saw with my own eyes the image of a most beautiful queen. This image had not been made by a painter, but had been impressed by the influx of the constellation, and if the cup would have been broken, every piece would have carried the impression of that whole image.” The theory of the “images,” on which ceremonial magic is based and which is the most typical of the astrological theses, is manifest in the story. In fact, with astrology, we see the triumph of hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, and geomancy of which Bartholomew of Parma will be the greatest theoretician. Speaking of Frederick II, friar Salimbene observed, “He was an Epicurus,” who tried to find within the Bible the proofs of the materiality and mortality of the soul. “As the Stoics place the happiness of the human being in the virtue alone of the spirit, so the Epicureans place it in the pleasure of the body” (sicut enim stoyci ponunt felicitatem hominis in sola animi virtute, sic Epycurii in corporis voluptate). Frederick’s Epicureanism, confirmed by Villani and Benvenuto of Imola, went with his fame of being also an Averroist and with the accusation of Gregory IX against him for having sustained that Moses, Christ, and Mohammed were three impostors who had deceived the world. “The false Vicar of Christ among other lies has fabricated also this, that we … have said that the world has been deceived by three impostors” (inseruit falsus Christi vicarious fabulis suis, nos … dixisse tribus seductoribus mundum esse deceptum). This text represents the tortuous translation of some theses of the Destructio destructionis (The Refutation of the Refutation). A document most expressive of the love that Frederick had for knowledge is without doubt the production of Quesiti siciliani (“Sicilian Questions”), with which the sheik Ibn Sabin answered the questions of the emperor. How does Aristotle demonstrate that the world is eternal? What are the
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place and the function of theology? How shall one understand the categories? On which arguments is it possible to found the immortality of the soul? To ask these questions was not proof of Averroism, but the effect of the expanding knowledge about Aristotle by way of the problematic of “The Commentator.” These were questions, which Thomas Aquinas, too, will ask. The eternity of the world was an Aristotelian dogma that not even the Angelicus will be able to dissipate. Thomism will somehow make its own the Averroist doctrine of the universals, and will discuss the theses of Averroès concerning religion and the intellect. These were not nonsense questions, but extremely hot, and the sheik answered the emperor with these words. “The questions you asked are known to all.… Given that in this country when the concerns are about these things the spirits are sharper than the swords, it is necessary that you present your queries in a more obscure and less easily comprehensible manner. Hearing us discussing on these matters is sufficient for some people to certify one of us as insane and the other as an imbecile.” Whether or not Frederick II was a true Averroist, it is certain that from the Aristotelian teachings he gained the curiosity for nature. Manfred, in the prologue to his version of De pomo, will confess, “A group of venerable doctors instructed us about the nature of the world” (Venerabilium doctorum nos turba docuerat de natura mundi). The idea of a nature autonomous although produced by God, with its own immutable laws, that must be learned empirically in themselves, in their own reality, is a conception that is clearly beginning to impose itself. Brunetto Latini in Tesoretto (a small encyclopedia of current knowledge) wrote: “He placed nature at the bottom and ordained all things from the heavens, from the top to the bottom, according to the will of the sovereign father. Hence, Aristotle said that nature is the virtue by means of which all things change and find their place of rest by themselves. This is the reason why the stone lands on the ground by itself and the fire on the contrary go up by itself.” Nature is the art of God, as Dante defined it. It is rational order, “It is the form / that makes the universe similar to God / … To the order of which I speak all creatures are disposed, each in their different way” (forma / Che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante … / Ne l’ordine ch’io dico sono accline / Tutte nature per diverse sorti, Paradise, c. 1, vv. 103–111). In Tesoretto, Brunetto mentioned the “ovrera” introducing itself: “I’m Nature / And I’m the work / Of the sovereign Maker. / I am his Work / And I do what he commands / On the earth and in the air. / Hence I am his vicarious agent. / He arranges the world, / And then I act accordingly” (I’ sono la Natura, / E sono la fattura / Del sovrano Fattore / Io son sua Ovrera / Di ciò ch’esso m’impera; / Cosí in terra et in aria: / Ond’io son sua vicaria, / Esso dispone il mondo, / Et io poscia secondo). Aristotle and the Arabic wisdom are joining in the exigency of judging and studying nature in itself, iuxta propria principia, according to its own principles, in its reality, its forms. The Composizione del Mondo (The Composition of the World) of Ristoro of Arezzo is a concrete example of this in-
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quiry for a direct observation of nature. The book opens with an exaltation of human knowledge: “The human being alone, among all other animals, stands up, straight high, and the seat of the intellective soul is found in the superior part away from earth and near the heavens” (L’uomo, intra tutti li altri animali, è ritto su alto, e la sedia dell’anima intellettiva fu su alto nella parte di sopra dilungata dalla terra e appressata al cielo). This interest for nature includes a most vivid interest for the world of humanity. Ser Brunetto abridged and commented Nicomachean Ethics, translated and annotated Cicero. Friar Guidotto dedicated to Manfred Flower of Rhetoric (the Rhetorica ad Herennium). Anonymous individuals translated into vulgar the moral treatises which Albertano of Brescia wrote between 1238 and 1246, and Disticha Catonis (The distiches of Cato). These anonymous authors translated Honorius of Autun who flourished between 1106 and 1135, the Fiore di filosofi e altri d’altri savi (The best of Philosophers and other sages), and compiled Fiori di virtú (Flowers of virtue) and Introduzioni alla virtú (Introductions to virtue). The meditations done on the examples of the ancient wisdom followed the subtle analyses concerning interiority, which originated within the cloisters. An uncommon wealth of spiritual life, some great human insights, and a constant deepening of the religious experience are all found in the prose of the mystics. We find the first efficacious prose of thought in our language in the Italian prose used by the mystics themselves or by their popularizers. The torment for the searching of God, the fight against evil, the personal scrutinizing, and the self-exaltation in the Lord, form the vast gamut of motives that nourish the reflection. The human soul, in its dramatic dialogue with God and with the creatures of God, is at the center of this meditation. It is a meditation arguing in an unphilosophic way but rich with multiple themes. The mystic that flourished on the sequel of St. Francis of Assisi joined the mystic of the Areopagite, which again during the thirteenth century was turned into Latin by the French Victorine Thomas Gallo who from 1224 until 1243 was prior and abbot of St. Andrew in Vercelli. In that encounter, the work of St. Bonaventure reached its mature stage.
Three ST. BONAVENTURE AND FRANCISCAN THOUGHT 1. Characteristics of St. Bonaventure’s Thought. Illumination St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, the Seraphic Doctor, lived in the middle of the crises caused by the ferment of spiritualism that agitated the Franciscan Order that agitated the Franciscan Order. He was implicated in the discussion at the University of Paris when William of Saint-Amour attacked the mendicant orders, and was probably the first cause of the theoretical discussions raised by John Peckham against the theses of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. His work on charity did not curtail but nourished his activity as a thinker and he found his “scholastic” systematization in the great commentary on the sentences (1250–1253). The most spontaneous and fluid expression of this system is found in the Breviloquium (written before 1257), the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (The Mind’s Road to God, 1259), the De reductione artium ad theologiam (The Reduction of Art to Theology), and finally in the Collationes in Hexaëmeron (Lectures on the book Hexaëmeron, 1273), the last of his writings. Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences (In libris sententiarum) opens with a verse of Job (ch. 28, v. 11): “The Spirit surveyed the depth of the rivers and brought to light what was hidden” (Profunda fluviorum scrutatus est, et abscondita produxit in lucem). Daniel clarifies the verse in this way: “The ancient of days sits while the vortical swirls of the currents of the river of fire flows from his face.” Bonaventure then comments, “The ‘ancient of days’ is the Eternal Father; his antiquity is his eternity. The Ancient ‘sits’ because he is immutable as well as eternal. A rapid river of fire flows from his face because the fullness of love and power were proceeding from the divine sublimity. The fullness of power was in the Son and for that reason the river was ‘rapid’. The fullness of love was in the Holy Ghost and for that reason the river was of fire.” The production of all things mundane is called river because of its largeness. The river that turns to its source is the incarnation of the Son. The river that purifies is the gift of the Sacraments. The Franciscan spirit loves to be clothed in the Platonic-Augustinian forms. Facing the moderns and the Aristotelians like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure loves to present himself as a conservative, the continuator of
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Alexander of Hales and of the tradition: “In the first book I accepted the doctrines of the Teacher of the sentences and of the common opinions of the learned, particularly those of my father and teacher of fond memory, Alexander. In the books that follow, I shall continue to follow on their footsteps because I am not trying to find new opinions but only to retain those which are commonly accepted” (Non enim studeo novas opiniones adinvenire, sed communes et approbatas retexere in Commentarius in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, In II Sententiarum, praelectio). The coincidences between the summa of Alexander and the sententiae of St. Bonaventure do not mean the dependency of Bonaventure on Alexander, but the interpolations of Bonaventure on the text of Alexander. Though undeniably original, the work of the Seraphic consciously embraced the Platonic-Augustinian tendency, “No person should think that I wish to be the artificer of a new work. This is what I believe and declare: I am a poor and feeble compiler” (Nec quisquam aestimet, quod novi scripti velim esse fabricator; hoc enim sentio et fateor, quod sum pauper et tenuis compilator). He was not a poor or feeble compiler. With Plato, he openly chose the path that from earth rises to heaven, “Plato looked especially for the things above, Aristotle for those here below” (Ille enim principaliter aspiciebat ad superiora, hic principaliter ad inferiora). The contemplative soul ascends only because the Teacher teaches from within, “One alone is your teacher, Christ” (Unus est magister vester, Christus). St. Bonaventure described these evangelical words in a sermon: “In this word it is specified what the font and the principle of cognitive illumination is, that is Christ. Christ is the splendor of the paternal glory and the figure of his substance; He holds all things with the word of his virtue.… He is the origin of all wisdom.… He is the Christ … the source of every true knowledge. He is the way, the truth, and the life.” The Seraphic Doctor cannot be counted among the preservers of a natural, scientific, and autonomous knowledge. Having embraced the tradition of Augustine and Anselm, the position of Bonaventure is based on the thesis of fides quaerens intellectum. He sees philosophy as the water that adulterates the wine of faith: “We should not dilute the wine of the Sacred Scripture with too much water; that is a bad sign.… Unfortunately, in our modern time we are witnessing the conversion of wine into water and of bread into stone.” In the Lectures on Hexäemeron, he insisted on the necessity of beginning from faith and Scripture, on the danger of descent into philosophy (in descensu ad philosophiam est maximum periculum), on the snares of the Summae Magistrorum. Thomas sustained the necessity of using pure reasoning even when convincing the infidels because reason obliges everyone. Bonaventure protested, “These three-hundred elected for the battle are the preachers of the Scripture who play the tubas of preaching; the lamps are the miracles; the jars are their bodies offered for the defense of truth. They are the peoples who strike terror into the enemy and defeat them. The others who lie down and drink are the peoples who dedicate themselves completely to philosophy and are unable to stand for a battle.” He insisted,
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“Remember the Sultan. He wanted to discuss faith with St. Francis, but Francis answered that faith is above reason and is proven only by the authority of the Scripture and by the divine virtue expressed in miracles. Then, he asked for a pyre and went through it in their presence.” Each truth, solid inquiry, well founded inquiry, correct philosophy of the Gentiles, just thought of the Christians, in short, everything descends from the light of truth which, proceeding from God, allows foresight and understanding. “The first intellectual vision is the vision of the intelligence placed in us through nature” (Prima visio intellectualis est visio intelligentiae per naturam inditae). It is the light of the soul which sees no sunset. It is the light of which we are not aware though it is the light which permits us to see: “Truth is the light in the soul; a light which knows no sunset. This light irradiates the soul in such a way that the soul cannot think of it as non-existent or find words to express that it does not exist, without falling into self-contradiction. It is indeed the light by which the soul sees whatever it sees. When the soul thinks that truth does not exist, the soul thinks something true. By thinking that the truth does not exist, the soul in itself thinks that there is truth. Thinking that no truth lives, the soul thinks that a truth lives. Rightly should prevail over the person who said that truth is the strongest!” Bonaventure maintained and continued the thematic reflections of Augustine and Anselm, which were almost summed up in Isaiah’s verse (ch. 7, v. 8): “Unless you will have believed, you will not understand” (nisi credideritis, non intelligetis). In the sermon on “Christ the teacher,” he illustrates the evolution of wisdom, the ordo sapientiae, which beginning from the firmness of faith arrives to the sweetness of contemplation: “The order by which a person reaches wisdom begins from the stability of faith and proceeds through the serenity of reason to arrive to the sweetness of contemplation. This is what Christ meant when he said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In this manner, the saying of the Proverbs is fulfilled, “The path of the just persons proceeds as a splendid light and continues to grow to be a perfect day.” This was the order kept by the Saints who followed the saying of Isaiah, “You will not understand, unless you believe.” This was the order which the philosophers did not know. They abandoned faith, based themselves totally on reason and could not arrive at contemplation. As Augustine said in On Trinity, “The feeble power of the human mind cannot gaze at such fullness of light, unless it is reinforced by the justice of faith.” In the spirit of this interpretation, the prologue of the Itinerarium acquires flavor and meaning. It proceeds according to the path that the saint followed in the solitude of Mount Alvernia when, as it happened to Francis, he had the vision of the winged Seraph in the semblance of the crucifix. He narrated: Following the example of the most blessed father Francis, I, a sinner, breathlessly sought the peace of Christ. I ascended to Mount Alvernia while meditating on the ascent to the mind of God. Among other things
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY there occurred a miracle that happened in the same place of the blessed Francis. The vision, namely of the winged Seraph in the likeness of the crucifix occurred again. While looking upon this vision, I immediately saw that it signified the contemplative ecstasy of our father and the way by which he came to it. For those six wings are rightly to be understood as the six ecstasies of illumination by which the soul, as if through many steps, would walk. Thereby it is disposed to pass into peace by way of the ecstatic raptures ensuing from Christian wisdom.
The way of ascent is that of the most ardent love, via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem. It is the love of Christ that brought Paul into the third heaven and transformed him into Christ. It is the love that absorbed the mind of St. Francis to the point that the mind manifested itself in the flesh (mens in carne patuit) and incised into it the signs of the passion. The way of love is the unique way to wisdom, for “by contemplation we enter into the heavenly Jerusalem only if, as through a door, we enter through the blood of the Lamb.” The concatenation of syllogisms does not liberate the soul; the wings of desire free the soul: “Only the man who like Daniel is a man of desires (vir desideriorum) would be disposed somehow to a contemplation that brings the mind to exceed itself. Desires are fired within us in two ways: first, by the clamor of prayer (per clamorem orationis), which makes us roar from the groaning of the heart (a gemitu cordis); second, by the lightning of speculation (per fulgorem speculationis) through which the mind intensely and directly seeks out the rays of light.” It is an ascent from things to God. It is an ascent realized in the groaning of the heart, not in the philosophical reasoning, because the light of God, which exists in everything, in every creature of the world, makes legible the mystery of the Trinity. Whoever sees an analogy between the a posteriori method of Thomas and the love of Bonaventure shall keep in mind this exhortation of Bonaventure: “In the name of Christ crucified, by whose blood we are purged of the filth of vice, I invite the reader to the cry of prayer. He should refuse that it suffices to read without unction, speculate without devotion, inquire without wonder, examine without exultation, work without piety, know without love, understand without humility, be zealous without divine grace, and see without wisdom divinely inspired.” St. Bonaventure insisted on this motive. We always know, with the help from God; we recognize God in everything. God is the teacher whose light sees no sunset (haec lux nescit occasum). God is the Being implicitly proportioned in all things that we sense or come to know (in omni re, quae sentitur sive quae cognoscitur, interius latet Deus) in the same way that It is the good that all things desire and the love by which all things move. In the Confessions, Augustine spoke with a suggestive metaphor on the mysterious union of mind and truth: “God is the light of my heart and the bread for the mouth in the interior of my soul. God is the power (virtus) that my mind espouses; he is the depth (sinum) of my thought.” St. Bonaventure persisted on the concept
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that the human intellect is united with the eternal truth. Only through that truth can the intellect achieve certainty: “It clearly appears from this that our intellect is joined with the eternal truth because without the teaching of that truth the intellect would not be able to comprehend truth with certainty.” The human intellect operates only because the divine intellect cooperates with it (cooperante divino intellectu in intelligendo) and because the divine light irradiates itself within the soul. In the second book of the Sentences (d. 28, art. 2, quest. 3), Bonaventure comments on the Augustinian thesis of De Magistro that affirms that we do not learn unless God teaches. He says that “this Augustinian thesis does not signify that all knowledge is infused, but that the created light cannot operate without an act of the uncreated light, by which every human being coming to this world is illumined” (absque aliqua operatione lucis increatae, per quam illuminatur omnis homo, qui venit in hunc mundum). In that same way, the words of Dionysius [Div. Nom., 4] and of other saints should be understood: “Every essence is from the first essence, every life from the first life, all intelligence from the first intelligence, and all goodness from the first good. They said these things not because God is the complete cause of things (tota causa), but because without Him (sine Ipso) no created virtue can operate.” In other words, God illuminates every human being as such according to a certain measure. God confers to anyone capable of understanding the illumination, which properly constitutes the capacity for understanding. We must distinguish from this natural illumination every other special light received by grace. Natural illumination is not infused science but the possibility of knowing offered in general to everyone. This illumination always remains as the divine light of Christ. This is what Bonaventure repeats in the twelfth sermon on the Hexaëmeron: “Christ is the inner teacher; truth can be learned through Christ alone. He does not speak to us as we speak, but illuminates us. It is necessary that he hold in himself the clearest species. He is intimate to every soul. He is resplendent over the tenebrous species of our intellect, which are mixed with the darkness of the phantasms and with his most luminous species to help the intellect to understand.” This is the light that is inaccessible and nevertheless nearer to the soul than the soul is to itself. This is the light that is beyond measure and nonetheless absolutely secretive. 2. God and Things. Being The concept that we know God in everything, though implicitly and confusedly, is strictly connected with the theory of illumination. In omni re, quae sentitur sive cognoscitur, interius latet ipse Deus (In everything that we sense or know, there God is). The fifth chapter of the Itinerarium opens with the triplex distinction of our cognition of God. We may contemplate God not only “outside” of us but also “within” us and “above” us. Those who reach the third manner of contemplation entered into the Holy of Holies with the High Priest. “Above” the ark are the Cherubim who represent “two ways or degrees of contemplation of the invisible and eternal things of God. One deals with
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God’s essential attributes, the other with the properties of the Persons.” The fundamental attribute of God is Being, since he himself when questioned by Moses answered, “I am Who I am” (Ego sum qui sum). God is the being that can be understood only in Itself, which rests absolutely and only “in being,” as the being that is the pure actuality, and for which it makes no sense to speak of being-in-potency. This being, that is pure actuality (illud esse quod est purus actus), is not a particular being, nor an analogous being, but the primary being, the divine being, who not only is most certain and primary, but also the “radical principle and power, through which all other things become known” (principium radicale et nomen, per quod cetera innotescunt). The mind thinks only by thinking Being Itself. Even if diverted by finite things, when the mind is not aware of coming to know the finite beings in grace of the infinite Being, still the mind thinks only by thinking Being Itself: Marvelous then is the blindness of the intellect which does not consider that which is its primary object and without which it can know nothing. Just as the eye intent upon the various differences of the colors of things does not see the light by which it sees the things and, if it sees it, does not notice it, so the mind’s eye, intent upon particular and universal beings, does not notice Being itself, which is beyond all genera, but through it comes to see all other things. It appears quite true that just as the bat’s eye behaves in the light, so the eye of the mind behaves before the most obvious things of nature. Because accustomed to the shadows of beings and the phantasms of the sensible world, when the eye looks upon the light of the highest Being, it seems to see nothing, not understanding that darkness itself is the fullest illumination of the mind [Psalms 138, v. 11]. Once the eye sees pure light, it believes to be seeing nothing. This Being which is pure being and most simply being and absolutely being, is the primary being, eternal, most simple, most actual, most perfect, one at the highest degree, God, and He Who is. The mind, gazing at that being which constituted it as mind, grasps in that same act the characters of being and finds God, finding the way through which God constituted it as an intelligence: “If you see this in the simplicity of your mind, you will somehow be infused with the illumination of the eternal light” (si hoc vides in pura mentis simplicitate, aliqualiter perfunderis aeternae lucis illuminatione). The existence of this being is this being itself. In regard to this being, the problem of existence has no meaning, for this being is the cause of being, the reason of understanding, and the order of living (causa essendi, ratio intelligendi, ordo vivendi). The affirmation of being is the affirmation of its attributes: For since it is simply being, it is simply primary. Because it is simply primary, it is not made from another or from itself; it is eternal. Since it
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is primary and eternal, and not from others, it is most simple. Since it is primary, eternal, and most simple, it contains no potentiality mixed with actuality, and thus it is actual. Since it is primary, eternal, most simple, and most actual, it is most perfect. To this being, nothing is lacking, nor can anything be added. Since it is primary, eternal, most simple, most actual, and most perfect, it is therefore one to the highest degree. The relationship of utter superiority implies the superiority over all things; and the relationship of an absolute superiority is applicable to anything but one. If God is the name of the primary, eternal, most simple, most actual, most perfect being, it is impossible that It be thought of as non-being nor as anything but one being. With Its supreme perfection, absolute presence, and stability that, though remaining stable, causes the universe to move (stabile manens moveri dat universa), the Being of God is totally within and completely without all things (totum intra omnia et totum extra). It is “the intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Being of God is the coincidence of all contraries and the peace of all contrasts. The Being of God is perfect and immense, therefore within all, though not included in them; beyond all, but not excluded from them; above all and yet not cast down beneath them. Because most highly one and all-inclusive, the Being of God is all in all, although all things are many and It is only one. This is so since through simple unity, clearest truth, and most sincere goodness in It all power exists, all exemplary causality, and all communicability. From It, by It, and in It all things exist. This is so since the Being of God is omnipotent, omniscient, and allgood (Quia perfectissimum et immensum, ideo est intra omnia, non inclusum; extra omnia, non exclusum; supra omnia, non elatum; infra omnia, non prostratum. Quia vero est summe unum et omnimodum, ideo est omnia in omnibus, quamvis omnia sint multa, et ipsum non sit nisi unum; et hoc, quia per simplicissimam unitatem, serenissimam veritatem et sincerissimam bonitatem est in eo omnis virtuositas, omnis exemplaritas, et omnis communicabilitas; ac per hoc, ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso sunt omnia, et hoc quia omnipotens, omnisciens, et omnimode bonum). The ladder of Jacob, which the Itinerarium is following, in ascending to the summit, reflects the process of the diffusion of being. The return to the promised land recovers the steps of the diffusion of the one into the whole. The world of things as exterior mirror of God, and the world of the soul as the interior image of God are the symbols that point to God and guide to Him. We have here a reciprocal penetration, a connection, a communication, in place of an accentuation of the separation from things, instead of a determination and
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autonomy. Alain de Lille, with his gemlike definition, portrayed all this: God is “the intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere” (Deus est sphaera intelligibilis, cuius centrum est ubique et circumferentia nusquam). St. Bonaventure specified this communicability by connecting it with the virtuosity and exemplarity of God. God is the cause of the whole, he is the exemplarity of all things, the model or, better, he contains the similitude of things. This exemplary similitude (similitudo exemplativa) allows the human being (similar per imitationem) the ascension in which human nature, fallen by sin and regenerated by grace, completes itself. 3. Exemplarism The theory of exemplarism has an Augustinian origin and is one of the poles of Bonaventure’s speculation. A distinct idea of multiple beings exists in God. It is an idea that can be defined similitudo rei, per quam res cognoscitur et producitur (a similitude of the thing through which the thing is known and produced). This similitude of a thing seen as the principle of production of the thing is called the exemplar. This similitude as an idea is found in the ratio of God in a position opposite to that in which it is found in the ratio of the human beings. For human beings, ratio is an image, a similitude, of the truth of the object; for God, the creature is the similitude of the ratio. For us, the similitude derives from things. For God, the similitude produces things. In God truth is expressive and creative (it is ratio expressiva); the idea is a productive rule that regulates itself and is incapable of error. God is the rule itself and the idea (Deus est ipsa regula et idea). On the contrary, in the human being the idea is caused and is not causing; the rule means an obligation from the outside and the possibility for error is present. To place the idea in God is to determine better the self-expression and productivity of divine Truth. According to the position taken by Alexander of Hales (Summa Theologica, bk. 1, p. 163), “the divine nature in conformity with its power possesses the similitude, not a similitude received from the creatures, but a similitude that goes to the creatures” (divina natura de sua potestate habet similitudinem: non quae sit a creaturis, sed magis ad creaturas). While St. Thomas sees as implicit in the term “idea” the concept of imitation of a model, the Franciscans understand it particularly as an expressive activity, a mode of self-expression. To use the words of Duns Scotus, the idea more than being a ratio cognoscendi (way of knowing), it is a ratio producendi exemplariter (way of producing by way of exemplars). To accentuate the ideal self-expression of God, to insist on an ideal of production, means for St. Bonaventure to exalt the importance of the Word (Verbum). To deny the reality of the ideas is to deny the existence of the Son of God: “Who denies the ideas, denies that the Son of God exists” (qui negat ideas esse, negat Filium Dei esse). A being that acts rationally, not by chance or necessity, is acting with foreknowledge, that is, according to reason, according to truth: “Everyone who acts rationally, not by chance or by need, knows the thing before it exists. Every one who knows must know the
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known thing according to truth or according to similitude. Before things exist, God does not know them according to truth. God knows things according to similitude. This similitude by which a thing is known and produced is the idea” (Commentary on the Sentences, bk. 1, d. 35, q. 1). These ideas are multiple as things are multiple and, in God, they are not distinct in reality, but only “according to their way of being known in God’s ratio” (secundum rationem intelligendi). As it is his custom, Bonaventure uses a “luminous” metaphor. The divine light is multiplied in a plurality of intrinsic radiations, almost as a unique splendor but various in its rays that join together in one unity. In the third question of The Science of Christ (De scientia Christi), he writes: “Let’s assume by absurdity that light is its own illumination and irradiation, then we can say that many irradiations exist of that light from that lamp for the reason that irradiation means the diametric or orthogonal direction of that same light from the lamp. For this reason, we may say that many irradiations exist of different things illuminated, but that only one light and one lamp exists. In this same way, we should think about our proposed topic because divine truth itself is like a light whose expressions in respect to things are similar to luminous irradiations, though intrinsic, that conduct directly to what is expressed.” Given the impassable distance between our way of knowing and that of the productive wisdom of God, we cannot completely understand this. The question is about a necessary divergence between a knowing dependent on the object and a knowing that is the expressive similitude of many things (similitudo expressiva multorum) in the act itself of its infinite unity: “Because the divine exemplar is most simple and most perfect, it is a pure act; because it is infinite and immense, it is beyond every kind of things. From this we derive that, though being one, it can be the expressive similitude of many things” (Breviloquium, ch. 1, par. 8). Considered as the expressive ways of God, the ideas do not undermine God’s oneness; they are not a multiplicity of things; in their source, the ideas are a perfect unity. If we think of multiple things, if we consider the terms of the rapport between God and the creatures, we may conclude that there is a kind of intentional plurality. In the Commentary on the Sentences (bk. 1, d. 35, q. 3), we read, “From this it is to be conceded that all rationes (ideal exemplars) in God are one thing alone, not one idea or one ratio, but a multiplicity” (unde concedendum est, omnes rationes in Deo esse unum quid, sed non unam ideam sive rationem, sed plures). This expressive plurality is the rhythm of divine life, the divine fertility understood as an activity and a supreme continuous acting (attuosità) rather than a concluded actuality. The divine life is continuously generating, expressing, and germinating: “All rationes or ideal exemplars are conceived from eternity in the womb of eternal wisdom” (omnes rationes exemplares concipiuntur ab aeterno in vulva aeternae sapientiae). Bonaventure insists on three images: light, expression, and productive love. Eternal life by overflowing within itself absorbs reason; it goes beyond reason but does not deny reason. From this, we see the fundamental insuffi-
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ciency of logic which, because of its definiteness, impedes the ascent to God: “Damn to those who spend their life in doing logic, physics, and jurisprudence, and find no satisfaction in them. If they would turn to the Cross of Christ, they could find a salvific science in it.… Without love, no perfect knowledge can be attained.” We can reach Reality, that is, the fecundity of life (ratio fecunditatis ad concipiendum), by way of love, not by the conclusion of syllogisms. We should remember all this when trying to clarify the rapport between the ideas and God as the rapport between Christ and God. The Word (Verbum) is the “knowable cosmos,” the intelligible world, the splendor of God, “the divine art of a God who is wise and omnipotent, an art that is full with all living and immutable reasons of things,” the bridge and the link between God and created things. Christ is the door for the ascent from the created to the eternal world: “The door to these things is the intellect of the uncreated Word, who is the root of the intelligence of all things” (horum ostium est intellectus Verbi increati, qui est radix intelligentiae omnium). The Father knows himself in his Son as he does in himself, and not as a means to know himself. The Son is the art of the Father, not an ars qua (an art used as the means of expression) but an ars quae (an art that is the artist himself). St. Bonaventure insists on the equality between Father and Son. He intends to counter the emanatist tendencies of the Arabicizing currents that intended to admit a series of intermediaries between the world and God. At the same time, Bonaventure fights against the theses of the Platonists who conceived three eternal principles of the world: God, matter, and the exemplar. “Christ proceeded from the Father as the Word that causes the whole universe because he is the virtue (power) of the supreme source.… He is the universal beginning that with his work has produced all, all, all things” (Exivit [Christus] a Patre ut Verbum universa principians, quia est fontalissima virtus.… Iste, qui est universale principium, cuncta, cuncta, cuncta fabricando produxit). As the art of the Father, the Word of the Father is the beginning of the genesis when everything was created. He is still the principle by which all things are preserved. He is the spring of light (lux fontalissima) so far as he is an ideal principle; he is the spring of life (vita fontalissima) as the origin of the universe; he is the spring of virtue (virtus fontalissima) as the conservator and the end of everything: “The reason preordaining all things, originating all things, and conserving all things is one and the same” (Et eadem est ratio omnia praeordinans, omnia principians et omnia conservans). 4. Creation We are now facing the created world that is the manifestation before our own eyes of divine diffusion. It is a minimal and precise expression when we compare it with the free and perfect diffusion of God within itself. It is the finite in opposition to the infinite. It is the total and original possession of the fullness of being in opposition to the closing of a numerable determination, for the
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term “finite” means number, division, partiality, and “nothing.” Contrary to the opinion of the philosophers, God has created the world “from nothing, when nothing existed before” (ex nihilo, post non esse). St. Bonaventure attacks in a timely manner the doctrines that disguisedly imply that the world is eternal. Contrary to what Aristotle said, God in time produced the world from nothing: “Plato recommended his soul to the Maker, but Peter recommended his soul to the Creator” (Plato commendavit animam suam factori; sed Petrus commendavit animam suam Creatori). Against Avicennianism and all the tendencies that introduce a kind of “emanation,” Bonaventure insistently refers to the concept of creation, of a divine unity that germinates within itself an infinite wealth, capable of posting outside of itself a world of finite entities. The world is a manifestation of God’s glory and as the glorification of God it can also participate in its happiness: “Things are made for the glory of God, let me say it, not for acquiring and amplifying His glory, but for showing and communicating it.… It is in this manifestation and participation that the greatest utility for the creature is found, that is, His glorification and beautification.” The entire reality of the created world, ensued from the glory of God, narrates the glory of God: the earth and the heavens are the hymn of God; while they reveal His wisdom and goodness, they are made the participant of His glory. Nature is the poem of God and speaks of His glory. Bonaventure’s metaphysics translates the hymn of St. Francis and echoes the song of the Psalmist: “the heavens sing the glory of God (coeli enarrant gloriam dei). From the greatness of the species and of the creatures, we will be able to grasp visibly the Creator. The supreme power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator shine in the created things.” Symbol and language of God, the world shares with God a profound likeness, “His wisdom is manifested as the foot in the footprint” (et manifestatur sapientia, sicut pes in vestigio), through its traces impressed on the things. This trace is the number, the weight, and the measure according to which everything is produced: “This trace brings to that wisdom in which there is a measure without measure, a number without number, and an order without order” (et hoc vestigium in illam sapientiam ducit, in qua est modus sine modo, numerus sine numero, ordo sine ordine). There is a more profound trace impressed on the creation and it is its internal structure. Every reality is constituted of matter, form, and a composite: “The foundation or original principle, the form, and the composite have substance, virtue, and operation. In them, the mystery of the Trinity is represented: the Father as the origin; the Son as the image; and the Holy Ghost as the composite.” Every being presents itself as the visible expression of God, a sign impressed by God, the letter of a book that is the whole universe. The creature is the carved simulacrum and the image of God: “A creature of the world is almost like a certain book in which the Trinity, that made it, shines, is represented, and is read” (creatura mundi est quasi quidam liber in quo relucet representatur et legitur Trinitas fabricatrix). Some individuals know how to read this book; they are the ones
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who see all creatures ut signa (as signs), that is, as a path to the Truth, “from the shade to the light, from the trace to the truth, from the book to the true science” (ab umbra ad lucem, a vestigio ad veritatem, a libro ad scientiam veram). Others take the creatures separately and consider them in themselves, charmed by the beauty of the creature (sistitur in pulchritudinem creaturae). This is the way to perdition (via deviationis); the other is the way to salvation. To detach the things from the whole and stop at them, attributing to them a fictional aseity (aseitas), is what the natural philosophers do “because they know only the things as nature and not as vestiges or tracks” (quia solum sciunt naturam rerum, non ut vestigium). To gaze at things as the indications that refer to something else is proper of the contemplative spirits who can read this book (hunc librum legere est altissimorum contemplativorum). The contemplator moves from the track to the image, from the extrinsic pure analogy to the consciousness of it, to the reflection in the soul that knows. The human soul is the image of God and carries in itself the light of God’s countenance. The human soul is a divine expression in the trinity that constitutes it without fracturing the unity of its essence. By way of similitude, the soul is deiform, espouses the Lord, and becomes the abode of the Father. From vestige to track, from track to image, from image to similitude: the book in which the eternal Wisdom has written down its concepts, that is the creatures of the world, have their own meaning which must be grasped as the meanings of the holy book. The logic of Aristotle, because it gives no help for the comprehension of the meanings of the Scripture, is unable to open the treasures of the world. The true mediator, the true metaphysician, the true logician is Christ. In the same way that through Christ the arcane meanings of the Scripture are understood, so it is through Christ, through the logos, that the mysteries of the world are revealed. Christ “is our logic, our ratiocination” (haec est logica nostra, haec est ratiocinatio nostra). Christ is the only one teacher; “Christ from his cathedra in heaven, teaches within us” (Christus habens cathedram in caelo, docet interius). While Thomas tried to proceed as Aristotle did in the knowledge of the world as much as possible in a rational way, and in the consideration of God clearly distinguished the realm of revelation from the realm of an autonomous reason, Bonaventure, on the contrary, insisted on the solidarity of the whole universe with God, with the God incarnated in Christ. 5. Angels. Human Beings. Plurality of Forms If we consider the different moments of creation, we would see that creation increases by grades from the supreme poverty of matter to the supreme richness of the angel. The economy of the universe demands that we descend from the supreme light of the divine entity through different creatures of perfection to the angels who do not represent in respect to the human being the clear superiority suggested by St. Thomas. The human being is only a little
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inferior to the angel: “You made him a little less than the angels” (minuisti eum paulo ab angelis). The human being has not been made for the angel or the angel for the human being, though it is true that the angel is a little superior to the human being. Only a little superior, since angels and human beings are citizens of the same city, for both are in the same rapport with God, “without any intermediary nature (nulla interposita natura). The human being by its raising up repairs the ruins of the angel; the angel by resisting sustains the frailty of the human being.” The angels, though not given corporeity, possess some matter, like all things created; they have a materiality that constitutes their limit, their definite being, and luminosity. They are individuated by the concreteness of their composite and not by one of the composing elements (matter and form). In that same way, the concrete individuality in the soul has its own root, not in a corporeal quantity, but in the individual substance that constitutes it. Here is where the value of the human being is; the incarnation is not needed for giving reality to the soul. The individuality does not consist in the matter quantitatively determined. The human soul is a complete substance that accepts and brings to a perfect synthesis matter and form and incarnates bringing its excellence to the body. The incarnation of the soul is a gift, not a fall; it is like an act of love that rises towards God the lower grades of creation until the individual, becoming a person, will ascend to God. Though the primordial matter, the poorest of all beings, is like a turbid and tumultuous bundle of desires, it can be configured as light, and as a light it appears to us “as the general principle of distinction of all the corporeal forms” (Lux est natura communis reperta in omnibus corporibus tam caelestibus quam terrestribus). At the same time, this matter, full of desires, is like a soil rich of seeds from which the trees will grow. The seminal reasons that lie within matter are, we may say, the possibilities that the living things will emerge from matter. The seeds will not germinate without an exterior stimulus, but the potencies pre-exist in the womb of nature. The human being stands at the center of creation and “even the motion of the heavenly stars is for the human traveler” (etiam motus caeli stellati non est nisi propter obsequium hominis viatoris). We saw already how the soul, in a concrete individual composed of matter and form, does not depend on the body, but incarnates in the body for an act of overabundant goodness. The soul, by its intervention, completes and perfects the corporeal constitution, to which its own perfection is added. This doctrine, by implying the plurality of forms, opposes the Thomistic position. “It is foolish,” Bonaventure observes, “to say that the ultimate form is added to prime matter without the intermediary of other forms” (insanum est dicere quod ultima forma addatur materiae primae … nulla forma interiecta). An antithesis between Thomism and the Franciscan doctrine, presented in simple terms and without consideration of the different ways of understanding the forms, is badly introduced. For Thomas, the forms are the Aristotelian ones which are fixed and complete. To admit in the same individual the pres-
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ence of a plurality of forms is to admit a plurality of separated entities, a plurality of distinct realities, and a plurality of things. Bonaventure’s form has the fluidity of the Plutonian form: the superior form completes, resolves in itself, and potentiates the inferior form; the hierarchy of forms ends in a dynamic process capable of resolving any crystallization of independent completed things (res completae). These are two conceptions that present two diverse points of view; they are not the antithetical solutions of the same point of view. In this sense, Gilson could correctly say that Bonaventure does not even formulate the thesis of the “plurality of forms” precisely because he does not speak of forms as understood in the Aristotelian way. If, within the consideration of the soul we now move to the problem of knowing, which Bonaventure introduces with much urgency, we may prospect it as a problem of illumination. To know is to be enlightened by the rays of the spirit so that we can reach the summit (illuminari per radios spirituales et reduci ad summum). Sensualitas (sensuality), spiritus (spirit), and mens (mind) are the three powers of the soul. They operate through the senses, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and apex mentis (or synderesis), the ways through which the soul reaches the divine light in order to guide and orient the whole process. The human forces by themselves are powerless: “even if you will live a hundred years, you will not be able to know perfectly a straw of hay, a fly, or any other minimal creature of the world” (Si per multos annos viveres, adhuc naturam unius festucae, seu muscae, seu minimae creaturae de mundo ad plenum cognoscere non valeres). It is true that the soul is born for knowing everything, but it is also true that the soul would reach its goal in God alone. Only with God’s help would the soul be capable of grasping the truth of which the saint affirms: “The divine truth itself is light, and its expressions in regard to creatures are luminous radiations” (Ipsa divina veritas est lux. Et ipsius expressions respectu rerum sunt quasi luminosae irradiations). Christ alone shining with “his most splendid species” (suis speciebus clarissimis) illuminates our mind and brings to clarity the obscure species darkened by the phantasms. Only within grace is found the solution to the problem of knowledge. Within the dilemma Plato-Aristotle, St. Augustine has found the way of Christ. Plato indicated the sources of wisdom, but excluded that the human being may reach them. Aristotle who is rooted in science denied wisdom to human beings. St. Augustine, by establishing a regulative aeterna ratio, resolved the antithesis and healed the dissension: Plato placed all cognition of certainty in the intelligible world of ideas. For this, he was justly reproached by Aristotle not for having said that there are ideas and eternal reasons … but because he dejected the sensible world and located all certainty of cognition in those ideas. By doing this, Plato established the way to wisdom, for it proceeds by way of eternal reasons, but destroyed the way to science, for it proceeds by way of created reasons. This way to science is what Aristotle estab-
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lished, neglecting the way to superior things. Among the philosophers the speech of wisdom was assigned to Plato, while that of science was given to Aristotle. Plato concerned himself with the loftiest things, Aristotle with the lowest. Augustine, by the power of the Holy Spirit, received both the speech of wisdom and that of science. We saw that the idea of being is the connection with a fixed rule within the mobility of the experience; it is the ring between the multiple realities and the certainty of God; it is the perennial intervention of God within our knowledge. The divine light, the eternal exemplars are the fontal object (objectum fontanum), the primary source of the fertility of our knowledge that does not reach the exemplars as objects but by them is induced to grasp the eternal within the changing and the absolute in the contingent. The illumination, mediating between the natural experience of the image and the deification of grace, “moves us from within as a hidden force.” The intellect does not reach the pure idea, but uses its efficacy through its intimate regulating action for drawing the essence “from under the enigmatic and obscure sign of the substance in which it is individualized.” Parallel to the action of the illumination of the understanding is the work of the ardor of the will that incites to goodness: “As the intellect needs illumination to judge fairly, so the center of affections needs some ardor and spiritual power to love properly” (Sicut intellectus indiget lumine ad iudicandum, ita affectus indiget calore quodam et pondere spirituali ad recte amandum). 6. Mathew of Acquasparta Mathew of Acquasparta was a faithful disciple of St. Bonaventure: he taught in Bologna and Rome, was General of the Order from 1287, and cardinal from 1288. Though his work was of minor importance, the accentuation of Augustinianism against Aristotelianism, both of the Averroistic and the Thomistic kind, is interesting. St. Augustine is “the most important teacher” (doctor praecipuus) against whose authority we shall not go. “It is unwise for teachers of theology to take a position contrary to that of the eminent doctor Augustine.” The knowledge that Acquasparta has of Augustine is truly special. His entire work was defined by Ephrem Longpré as “an exposition and a justification of the thought of Bonaventure through Augustine.” The foundation of knowledge, Acquasparta remarked, cannot be based on sensation: the senses are mutable, deceiving, uncertain, and should be refused: “The objects of sensation always include something deceptive so we cannot properly rely on them. We may have the images of the objects of the senses even when the objects are absent, as it happens in dreams or in a condition of madness. We are incapable of discerning whether we sense the objects or their images.” Because we cannot discern between the objects and their images, our certainty cannot be founded on the senses (quaest. disp., 3, resp.). Having asserted the unreliability of the senses, Acquasparta affirms that we still may
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rely on “the power of judgment” (iudicandi potentia), “the presence of intelligible things” (rerum intelligibilium praesentia), “the evidence and immutability of things true” (verorum immutabilitas et evidentia), and “the assistance of the divine light” (divinae lucis assistentia). The human mind, with its own native power and the light of God that illuminates, can arrive to the eternal verities of things: “The intellect, with its active power and its acting light, is capable of abstracting the universals from the particular things, the intelligible species from the sensible, the quiddity from things actually existing. The universals, the intelligible species, and the quiddities of things do not relate to any thing actually existent; they relate indifferently to both what exists and what does not exist. They refer to no place or time, and they are of no help for the understanding of the existence or non-existence of the same thing. The intellect through the intelligible species can understand the quiddity of a thing when the thing exists, as much as when the thing does not exist” (quaest. disp. 2, resp.). In a clear way, Gregory of Rimini would ask himself the same question and would equally answer: “In regard to intuitive knowledge it does not matter whether or not the object really exists,” given that God in the case of the prophetic intellect, allows one to see things that yet do not exist (Sentences, bk. 1, d. 3, q. 3, a. 1). Acquasparta in order to sustain the possibility of knowledge of the non-being, referred to prophetic illumination, foresight of the future and memory of the past. What gives us an absolute valid knowledge of a thing, in spite of its existence or not, is the pure intellectual cognition: a science of ideas that, through the light of God, permits us to take hold of the immutable quiddities: “If we are speaking of the intellect in regard to its straightforward, absolute, and pure operation, then the existence or nonexistence of the thing is of no importance” (Si vero loquamur de intellectu in quantum ad operationem illam simplicem, absolutam et puram, nihil facit existentia vel non existentia rei). As the sensible is empty of functionality, the possibility and the validity of our knowledge are founded exclusively on God “and perhaps here is where the principles of philosophy are lacking, and we must address ourselves to the principles of theology.” Skepticism then becomes the menace to all our knowledge but it is overcome through faith. Franciscanism takes the path that will bring to William of Ockham. As Pietro Olivi could observe, a double danger was challenging Augustinianism: first, the removal from the intellect of any judging activity, reducing it to an intuition; second, the vain glorification of the intellect with Plato, who transformed it into a treasure house of ideas. While they recognized that the human being possesses natural dignity as mirror of the divine, they denied human beings their spiritual dignity as autonomous constructors of true knowledge.
Four ST. THOMAS AQUINAS AND THOMISM 1. Life of St. Thomas The introduction of Aristotle in the Latin world was not facile or peaceful. The topics on which the ancient and the new thinking had to confront themselves were the conception of a nature autonomous in its own processes: a God, unmoved motor, wholly by itself (aseity) in its natural egoism; a reality of things, not of spirits; a divine action resembling the work of the human artificer; the surreptitious dualism between pure act and first matter; and a universal necessity controlled not by the free will but by chance. Human beings and their souls no longer are the center of reflection; Aristotelian naturalism is. Averroism has already consolidated its polemic on the contrast between reason and faith, a rational universal and a living individuality, eternity of the world and creation, death and the immortality of the soul, and between the necessary laws of things and providence. An orientation of Christian thought in a Platonic sense seemed highly justifiable. In the Sermones, Bonaventure had declared that Plato was essentially concerned with the things above, while Aristotle was mostly interested with the things below (Ille enim principaliter aspiciebat ad superiora, hic vero principaliter ad inferiora). Thomas of York declared that the Platonic position was totally consonant with the thought of Augustine (vide igitur positionem Platonis per omnia consonam sententiae Augustini) and that Augustine had indicated the way to go. What dominated in Platonism were the desire for the divine and the need of escaping from this world. These impulses turned into the denial of the finite that Christianity could not indiscriminately accept because Christianity was born for the redemption of the finite. Medieval thought had already acquired and modified Platonism according to its own exigencies. Etienne Gilson said, “In order to explain Thomism we must admit the rational value, or its appearance, of the idea of nature. The historian faces a pure philosophical decision.” The expression intends to point out an original orientation intended for the valuing of experience. Is it possible to conciliate with the God of Israel, with the God of love and consolation of which Blaise Pascal will speak, the idea of one or more natures, selfsufficient and capable of causing? “God,” answered Aquinas, “is capable of producing all the natural effects, but other causes are not superfluous. Their
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existence is not due to a defect in power but from an excess of goodness. Because of his goodness, God wished to communicate to things its own similarity in such way that they not only exist but are also capable of causing at their own turn.” The efficacy of the secondary causes, cooperators with God (dei sumus adiutores), established the value of the concept of nature, and in turn established the value of the person. In this kind of naturalism, humanism is revealed. This understanding of nature points to God, and physics points to theology: “All nature is intended for the knowledge of God as its ultimate goal and, for this reason, is known as divine science” (tota ordinatur ad Dei cognitionem sicut ad ultimum finem; unde et scientia divina nominatur). Thomism, in this sense, in its effort to continue the absorption of the Aristotelianism that had already been initiated earlier in the field of physics and metaphysics, aimed also at finding the answers to the demands of Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas was probably born between one of the last months of 1225 or one of the first months of 1226 at Roccasecca, near Aquino, not far from Monte Cassino. In Monte Cassino he received the first rudiments of education and then moved to Naples where, according to his biographer William of Tocco, his teachers were Martin of Dacia for logic, and Peter of Ireland for physics. Between 1243 and 1244, Thomas joined the Order of the Dominicans. In 1245, he was a student in Paris under Albert the Great, whom he followed to Cologne in 1248. By 1252, he was back in Paris where he remained until 1259 in the midst of the contrasts created by the maneuverings of William of Saint-Amour, who was trying to exclude the regular Dominicans and Franciscans from teaching. After his troubled first period of teaching in Paris (1256–1259), Thomas taught for ten years (1259–1268) at the Studium Curiae, moving from Anagni to Orvieto, to Viterbo. In this way, he came in touch with William of Moerbecke and established his friendship with Reginald of Piperno. After a new teaching period in Paris (1269–1272), he returned to teach in Naples, Italy. He became ill on his way to the General Council of Lyons and died at Fossanuova on 7 March 1274. Thomas had completed a gigantic work, though he was only forty-nine years old. His writings include quaestiones disputatae (Disputed Questions, 1256–1272), quaestiones quodlibetales (1256–1271), commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, De Causis (On the Causes), Summa contra Gentiles (1261–1264), and De substantiis separatis (1272–1273). In 1266, he began the Summa theologica that remained incomplete at his death but was enriched with the Supplementum of Reginald of Piperno. The De regimine principum (1265–1266) ended with the fourth chapter of the second book and received a conclusion written by Tholomeus of Lucca. Thomas produced also a series of short works: De ente et essentia (On Being and Essence, 1256), the De aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes (On the Eternity of the World against Murmurers), and De unitate intellectus (On the Unity of the Intellect, 1270).
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2. Thomistic Formulation Aquinas was a sharp commentator, a penetrating historian, and a philosopher of rare greatness; he formulated in clear terms the problem that the previous Scholastic speculation confronted. Plato or Avicenna? Again, Avicenna or Averroès? According to a suggestive observation of Gilson, St. Thomas charged all the philosophers he came to criticize with Platonism: Avicebron and his voluntarism, Avicenna and his theory of the intermediaries, and St. Augustine. Avicebron, as the loquentes Maurorum (the sages in the Moorish books) did before him, insisted on the divine will, on a God understood as absolute will. This destroyed the autonomy of the secondary causes and of a science of nature. Avicenna, with the theory of the intermediaries, made impossible an immediate link between the human and the divine beings and seemed to deny that God has the knowledge of the world of concrete particulars. Platonism, or better, the Platonism that he fights, is for St. Thomas a separation understood as a negation of the finite in front of the unique true reality of God: “Plato has assumed that the species of the sensible things are some separated forms that are the cause of being of the sensible things in the measure according to which they participate of those forms. Avicenna, on the contrary, thought that all substantial forms derive from the agent intellect.” Against Plato, Thomas repeats, “The quiddities and the forms are immanent to the particular things themselves, according to the doctrine of faith and to Aristotle.” Reality is the concrete thing that experience shows us. Our inquiry must move within the sphere of experience. Among the things of this world, we must search for analogies to God. Thomas opposed nature to Platonism and Augustinianism, since they substantially devalue what is earthly and natural. Nature is valued to such point in his philosophy that the Cardinal of Acquasparta thought of charging him with the accusation of semi-Pelagianism. Gilson has efficaciously outlined the Thomistic doctrinal “choice”: “On one hand, there is Plato who derived the logical consequences of the materialism and the skepticism of the predecessors, the first philosophers, who claimed that the bodies are all that exist and that no knowledge exists except for sensation. The bodies are in a perennial becoming and the senses in a perpetual contradiction. We cannot attain truth. That is why Socrates abandoned the science of physics for that of morals, while Plato relegated to the ultrasensible world of ideas all the reality and the intelligibility of things. From then on, the Platonists always situated in this world of pure forms the source of effectiveness and of every reality. On the other hand, Aristotle refuted the latent skepticism of Platonism and traced the logical consequences of that refusal. An element of stability exists in sensible things, and it is for this reason that the senses do not deceive themselves when they judge, in normal conditions, the object of sensation. For this same reason, things, by existing, are necessarily intelligible as such and efficient in the operations they accomplish. Knowledge is explained through an intellect endowed with a natural light that produces the intelligible and not through a world of intelligible
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things that are foreign to thought.… Thomism as a philosophy is born from a pure philosophical decision. To make the choice in favor of Aristotle’s doctrines against those of Plato was to bind oneself to the reconstruction of philosophy on foundations wholly different from those of Augustine.” It meant opening up to nature with confidence in order to reach it in all its reality; it meant recognizing its forces, its rationality, and its sufficiency. Confronting the Augustinian pessimism that emptied the world born from sin, Thomism reaffirmed reliance on the human beings, the earth, and the world: “The human being through freedom of the will, with the normal means of nature, without special help or the gift of a grace gratuitously given, doing all that can be done from the human side, can dispose itself … to the infusion or reception of grace” (2nd Sent., d. 28, q. 1, a. 4). This was exactly the proposition that the Augustinian Matthew of Acquasparta had identified as “being very near to the error of Pelagius, because it attributes too much to the virtue of free will, as if free will could do something sufficient enough for obtaining grace. This would mean that human beings with their own forces could move out of sin and, for some kind of necessity, obtain grace” (Quaestiones de gratia, bk. 4, sect. 94). 3. Need for Concreteness and Communication. Nature and Grace. Faith and Reason The above orientation is indisputably a more diverse orientation than the one taken by Augustine. We should not forget that for Aquinas nature and reason are always the work of God. Nature is given a value, reason is vindicated, but God remains their foundation. God is what is implied in the whole process. We must recognize the gifts of God and conceive of God sub specie rationis (as reason). The Augustinian trends submerged every ideal plan into the fire of the creating will so much so that every plan gradually melted. On the contrary, St. Thomas consolidated the rational aspect of God to the point that it became the fundamental aspect of divine essence. The rapport of participation of the world with God is based on the value assigned to reason. Curiously enough, it was St. Thomas who, much more than the Platonists, assigned an importance to a rationality that has validity per se. From their premises, the Platonists arrived at the exaltation of the divine absolute will (Avicebron), and they assumed the human-divine rapport to be a contact and a presence. But the validity of reason and the sufficiency of nature preserved Thomas from even the minimal speck of Pantheism. It is certain that the Thomistic orientation was clear in its initial direction, but soon revealed itself complex in its own development. A critic rightly observed that underneath the lucid prose of the Summae there is something more than a linear and compact system. Aristotle himself had his own Platonic residues and Averroès, of which Thomas felt the influence, was not entirely happy with his own positions. No matter how many difficulties he encountered, Thomas was firm about one thing: the exigency that oriented him in
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favor of the Aristotelian direction. “The being of every thing is proper to that thing and distinct from that of any other being” (esse uniuscuiusque rei est ei proprium et distinctum ab esse cuiuslibet alterius rei). In the commentary on De causis, he will state, “the things that subsist in nature by themselves and that we designate with concrete names seem to be perfect” (Perfecta quidem videntur esse ea, quae per se subsistent in natura, quae a nobis significantur per nomina concreta). A good part of the discussion of Thomas moved between these two poles: the Aristotelian “synolon, completeness” that is, the exigency of a concrete individuality in the composite structure of matter and form, together with the refusal of every atomism, in particular, that of the loquentes Maurorum. St. Bernard had said, “God is the being of all things, not as their essence but as their cause” (Deus est esse omnium non essentialiter sed causaliter). This divine causality manifests itself “by a diffusion of unity in all things according to the mode in which they participate in the unity” (diffundens unitatem in omnibus quocumque modo unitatem participant). Thomism is not only the philosophy of the concrete individuality and of the unity understood as the perfection of being (ens et unum convertuntur); it is also the philosophy of participation. Two opinions concern Thomism: first, to affirm participation, without falling into forms of hidden or explicit pantheism; second, to affirm the individual unity of the concrete beings without gliding into the atomism of the loquentes Maurorum, who are always ready to see the world as a perennial miracle of God. According to them, everything is dissociated into atoms, which are “some particles which do not communicate in existence, but God always create these substances at will” (particulae quae non communicant in esse, sed creat [Deus] semper substantias istas quando vult). Maimonides, who was Thomas’ source, speaks with great acumen about the consequences of this multiplicity that is established against any monism and is dissolved in a dusty whirl of entities incapable of communication. Everything is dissolved, time as well as space, into a multiplicity of points that stand by themselves. For the fear that the acceptance of a natural communication among things would bring in a hidden immanence or a veiled pantheism, the finite entity was excluded from participation, causality, and rapport. St. Thomas illustrated extensively the consequences of this conjunction of mysticism and atomism. The vindicated real individuality of the concrete at the end revealed itself as a mere appearance. The world loses its autonomy, if everything from the smallest motion to the loftiest act of will is due purely to the work of God: “If no inferior cause, especially one which is corporeal, would operate anything, then God alone functions in all things. God does not vary because of the way He functions in different things. There would be no diverse effect coming from the diversity of things in which God operates” (Si nulla inferior causa, et maxime corporalis, aliquid operatur, sed Deus operatur in omnibus solus, Deus autem non variatur per hoc quod operatur in rebus diversis, non sequetur diversus effectus ex diversitate rerum in quibus operatur). In this universal
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uniformity it is hard to understand what significance has the multiplicity produced by God: “If the created things do not function in any way in the production of effects, God alone directly operates all things. Then God would have been using in vain other things for the production of effects” (Si autem res creatae nullo modo operentur ad effectus producendos, sed solus Deus operetur omnia immediate, frustra essent adhibitae ab ipso aliae res ad producendos effectus, in Summa contra Gentiles, bk. 3, sect. 69). To save reality through this method means to overturn the pantheistic position and at the same time, in a complete absence of the cosmos, reality vanishes. If God is a perfect agent, it is necessary that when producing he would produce good things, given that goodness diffuses itself in the product. The thing produced is good if it is capable of operating the good: “If a creature cannot act to produce an effect, then it is lacking much perfection; it is from the abundance of perfection that a creature would communicate to another creature the perfection it possesses” (Sed si nulla creatura habet aliquam actionem effectum producendum, multum detrahitur perfectioni creaturae; ex abundantia enim perfectionis est quod perfectionem quam habet, possit alteri communicare). For its inability of acting, not only the value of the creature is diminished and annihilated, but that of God, as well: “God has communicated his goodness to the created things so that each would transfer to another creature what it has received [transfundere: almost as pouring from one vessel into another]. To detract from the created things their proper actions means to detract from the divine goodness” (Sic igitur Deus rebus creatis suam bonitatem communicavit, ut una res quod accepit, possit in aliam rem transfundere. Detrahere ergo actiones proprias a rebus creatis est divinae bonitati derogare). To deny communication is to deny order, Thomas insists, because order in the world means participation: “If we detract the capacity of acting from created things, we detract the reciprocal order between things. The connection in some ordering unity between things that are of a different nature is possible only when some things are active (give) and others passive (receive)” (Si rebus subtrahantur actiones, subtrahitur ordo rerum ad invicem; rerum enim quae sunt diversae secundum suas naturas non est colligatio in ordinis unitatem, nisi per hoc quod quaedam agunt et quaedam patiuntur). Reality, understood as a divine product, in order to have meaning must be a reality of causes; reality is a world of natural agents in the likeness of God. The philosophy of a multiple reality is converted into a philosophy of participation in which the creature, because of its likeness to God, communicates with other creatures and God: “We do not say that the creature conforms to God almost as if God would participate in the same form in which the creature participates. We say that God is substantially that same form in which the creature by way of some imitation is participant” (Creatura non dicitur conformari Deo quasi participanti eandem formam quam ipsa participat, sed quia Deus est substantialiter ipsa forma cuius creatura per quondam imita-
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tionem est participative, in De veritate, q. 23, a. 7). The Platonic problem of participation is resolved through a methexis (participation) by means of a mimesis (imitation). God has truly created beings similar to himself by endowing them with the capacity of operating. Nature, thus vindicated by Thomas, is not a self-standing nature, but a nature that is the blossom of divine creation. Acquasparta used to refer to Thomas as “the Pelagian,” but Thomas would not abate grace to nature. Thomas could very well have called himself Pelagian only in the sense that he looked at all nature as grace, including the Augustinian grace through which, because of the sacrifice of Christ, all men are made citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem: “This grace is a loftier grace than the grace by which human nature has been constituted and which is common to both Christians and Pagans. By grace, we are created human beings through the Word, but by grace through the incarnated Word we are made believers” (Excepta ergo illa gratia, qua condita est humana natura—haec enim Christianis Paganisque communis est—haec est maior gratia, non quod per Verbum homines creati sumus, sed quod per Verbum carnem factum fideles facti sumus, in Augustine, Sermones, num. 26). Because all nature is created through the Word (per Verbum), nature is autonomous. Its autonomy differs from the Aristotelian one, which was founded on its being just nature, eternally existing by itself, an entity as eternal as God. In the same act in which he justifies the initiative, the order, and the communicability of the created world, Thomas wishes to place himself beyond Aristotelianism by excluding the problem itself of the eternity of the world. The world can be, such as it is, a real world and not the shade of reality by a gratuitous act of creation. Sufficient because of God’s presence, the world needs in its insufficiency the presence of God. It is with this paradoxical condition of the world that the Thomistic system is dealing. The world for its finitude cannot be sufficient and divine. It has to invoke God; but in its finite sufficiency, the world cannot be reabsorbed in God. It is grace and liberty. The Thomistic world remains a Christian world that, far away from the Aristotelian naturalism, moves within the dialectic of liberty and grace. Starting from the premise of Thomistic Aristotelianism, we should ask ourselves in what it truly consists, besides a few evident instruments, logical motives, and a call for concreteness and experience, justifiable also on different levels. We found that the greatest Thomistic problem is that of communication. In the polemic against the Platonic separation, as far as it is frozen in the Aristotelian presentation of it, Thomas encounters the concept of the dynamic articulation of matter and form. Participation, the great PythagoreanPlatonic reef, disappears as we face the rhythm of act and potency that allows understanding the relative presence of the one in the many, without the dissolving of the one into the many: “What has generative power is not the form alone, but the compound of matter and form. The cause of the forms which are in the matters is not a species of the separated things, as the Platonists sustained, nor the agent intellect, as Avicenna claimed, but this compound of
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matter and form.” No intermediaries between the world and God exist. No descent is possible through hierarchies of agents, along which the creative rhythm would weaken. Homogeneous structures and capacities for the real exist: “Everything that has a form by way of participation would certainly not receive that form immediately from that which is essentially the form. It would receive it immediately but from something else that possesses a similar form obtained in the similar way of participation.” The two ways for the explanation of unity and diversity are the causality of the finite and the complexity in the unity. This unity of every being means the intimate structure of existence; it is not a solid block without interior differentiation, nor something (quid) superadded: “Existence is what is most interior to every being and what is most profoundly inherent in all things, because it is the formal principle of everything that is found in beings” (Esse est illud quod magis intimum est cuilibet et quod profundius omnibus inest, cum sit formale omnium quae in re sunt). 4. Knowledge The discourse of Thomas concerning the rapport of faith and reason can be better understood if what was previously observed would be kept in mind. Thomism, at its origin, was forced to face the conclusions of Averroism that was considering philosophical research as the highest form of cognitive activity and the worthiest with which humans could address themselves to God. In the long commentary on the Metaphysics, Averroès wrote, “The proper religion of the philosophers is to deepen the study of being. We could not honor God in a more sublime manner than with the knowledge of His work. This would guide us to the knowledge of Him in all His reality. This, in His eyes, is the most noble of all actions. The most vile action, on the contrary, is that of charging with error and vain presumption those individuals who practice this cult, the most noble among all cults, those individuals who adore Him with this religion, the loftiest indeed among all religions.” In his work against Algazali, Averroès addressed his polemic to the theologians, opposing the philosophical reasoning to all religious visions, mythical, and imaginative. If Averroism could be interpreted as an exasperated rationalism, the Augustinian position could be said not to fuse, but confuse faith with reason. The fides quaerens intellectum excludes any proper dominion of reason. Thomas moves between these two positions vindicating for the human being the right and the duty of reasoning, identifying a ground of clear reasoning also for what concerns religion. The two “truths” of the Averroists, reason and revelation, no longer opposed, are now reconciled, and reveal themselves at two levels of an ascension that begins with natural forces and reaches its peak at the supernatural level: “I say that a double truth exists concerning divine things, not from the side of God, who is the one only and simple Truth, but from the side of our cognition that in regard to the knowledge of divine things can behave in diverse ways” (Contra Gentiles, bk. 1, sect. 9). Thomas knows with Averroès and Aristotle that truth is one. If a contrast existed between
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faith and reason, a choice would be necessary, and Thomas would choose reason, as did Averroès, for reason is the living revelation of God. Between prophetic knowledge and reason there is no contrast. Prophecy opens horizons that are precluded to reason, but that are not contrary to it. Placing Thomas beside Averroès is no temerity. The exaltation of knowledge accomplished by Thomas Aquinas may well remind us of some major accents of the Arabic philosopher. Repeating the argumentation in the Nicomachean Ethics of a hierarchy of goods, cognitions, and arts, it is said that supreme among all goods is the knowledge whose object is the supreme good: “The name of sage, simply and purely, should be reserved for the person alone who considers the universe and its end, which is the beginning of everything.” Thomas adds to this, “The ultimate end of anything is what has been disposed by the first author or by its motor. As we will show below, the first author and motor of the universe is the intellect. The ultimate end of the universe is the good of the intellect, and this good is the truth. The truth must be the ultimate end of the universe and the sage should particularly persevere in the consideration of this end of the universe.” Knowledge is the supreme end of human beings. The loftiest of all human activities is the study of wisdom (studium sapientiae) and the Scripture says, Beatus vir qui in sapientia morabitur (Ecclesiastes, 14: 22). And again, “It is the most sublime activity because human beings through such activity reach a better likeness with God, who functions with complete wisdom. Given that likeness is the cause of love, the study of wisdom joins the sage with God in friendship, deo per amicitiam coniungit. Hence Wisdom (7: 14), says, ‘Wisdom is for man a treasure without end; those who make use of it are established in friendship with God’” (Contra Gentiles, bk. 1, sect. 2). This exaltation of knowledge refers to natural wisdom, common to all human beings, and valid also in the field of religion. Since no apologetics would be possible if we had to begin always from a given statement of faith, which, someone, precisely an unbeliever, could reject. “We must necessarily find refuge in natural reason, with which everybody would feel obliged to agree.” The validity of naturalis ratio is evident by itself; it obliges agreement by the mere fact of being postulated. Natural reason is valid in the sphere of experience, but cannot deal with the infinity of God since that would create a contradiction: “For everything we attribute to God, the truth can be presented in two ways. Some things true about God exceed the capacity of human reason, for instance, that God is one and three. Other things that are true about God may also be understood by natural reason, for instance, that God exists and that he is unique and other things of this kind. These are the truths that the philosophers have proved with the sole light of natural reason.” It is no wonder for us to know that divine infinity is beyond human limitations. To admit what is beyond reason is not contrary to reason. The truths of faith cannot be contrary to the truths of reason. The truths of reason cannot be discussed because “all that is naturally inherent to reason is considered the truest so that
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we would not even be capable of thinking of them as false” (Contra Gentiles, bk. 1, sect. 7). Faith is not contrary to reason. Faith finds its support in reason and is elevated by reason. Faith finds its basis and guide in reason and in the defenses against the attacks that try to demonstrate that it is irrational. Faith finds in reason the demonstration of the reasonableness of believing. If the “double truths” understood as a contrast between faith and reason vanish, the position of those who beginning from faith reduce philosophizing to a simple, more profound study of faith vanishes. On the opposite hand, when thinking is let free in itself, it guides to believing and its access to God is not precluded, even though, if abandoned to its own forces, thought is destined to encounter serious difficulties. “The truth about God is attained by a few peoples and only after a sustained and lengthy effort and with a mixture of many errors” (Veritas de Deo, a paucis, et per longum tempus, et cum admixtione multorum errorum). This, no matter how limited, was in itself a great acknowledgement of the powers of the human being. Thomas sees this naturalis ratio as a gift of God, the fruit of natural grace. What has been said about nature should also be understood to apply to reason. Our ascent to God by means of reason should not make us forget that reason is given from God. Humans arrive to God, but not by construing God nor by making themselves God. The human being is returning to God. The cognitive ascension is the fruition of a divine gift: “For this reason, the intellectual faculty of the creature is called intelligible light, as if it were derived from the first light, whether we understand by it a natural faculty or some other perfection added for reason of grace or glory.” In this regard, the citation from Pseudo-Dionysius is proper: “In order to see God, a similitude (likeness) of God is required to be present in the visive faculty” (Requiritur ergo ad videndum Deum aliqua Dei similitudo ex parte visivae potentiae, in Summa Theologica, bk. 1, q. 12, par. 2). Our seeing is always seeing in the light of God: “We understand and judge everything in the light of the first truth. The reason for this is that the light of our intellect, natural or gratuitous, is nothing but a kind of impression of the first truth.… All other things are known by us … through God … not as if God were the first truth known, but through God as the first cause of the cognitive faculty” (Summa Theologica, I, q. 88, a. 3). We know everything through God, not in God. God is the light that illumines (In lumine tuo videbimus), not the object illumined. 5. God: Essence and Existence The insistence on these themes, even though they are obvious, has its relevance. The Cartesian problem of the validity of reason (ratio) is absent in Thomas because already from the beginning of his reflection Thomas accepts reason as given by God. Reason is natural like “the grace with which human nature was formed” (illa gratia, qua condita est humana natura). The peculiarity of Aquinas, his merit, is to have centered his interest on this ratio, ac-
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knowledging its wide efficacy, valuing its processes, without continuously calling for the intervention of some “added perfection” (perfectio superaddita). St. Thomas wants to employ more widely the ordinary powers of man, determining their limitations, but also using them in their proper order. This order consists precisely in retracing “gnoseologically” from the end to the beginning the ontological process. The process of knowledge is arising from the senses, from what is first for us to what is considered first in itself: “The knowledge of our intellect begins from sensation, according to the proper conditions of present life. All the things that evade our senses cannot be comprehended by the intellect. Things can be known only so far as the cognition of them is collected from the senses” (Intellectus nostri, secundum modum praesentis vitae, cognitio a sensu incipit. Et ideo ea quae in sensu non cadunt, non possunt intellectu capi, nisi quatenus ex sensibus eorum cognitio colligitur, in Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 1, sect. 3). The human soul is an incarnated soul. It is a being enclosed within corporeal limits that does not constitute a prison, but is an instrument: “For the soul, the separation from the body is beyond the proper reason of its nature” (esse separatam a corpore est praeter rationem suae naturae). For this reason, the knowledge of the soul is tied to the senses; it is tied to the phantasma: “To understand without recurring to the phantasma is beyond nature” (intelligere sine conversione ad phantasmata est ei praeter naturam). In the Summa Theologica (bk. 1, q. 89, art. 1) it is found that to act according to nature for the soul means to act as an incarnated soul. It is true that the Platonists affirm that knowledge begins from pure reason, from pure intelligibility, and that man is a being contrary to nature. According to the words of Aristotle, we can experience that the human being is real in its concreteness and in the whole complexity of its structure. This means that the human being is an incarnated spirit, and would know material things only through the phantasmata (nihil intelligit, nisi convertendo se ad phantasmata). Human beings would know immaterial things and even God by way of a similitude (per similitudines), arising himself from the experience of the senses. The human intellect contemplates the invisible divine reality only through the mediation of the created things (invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciuntur). The Thomistic reaffirmation of natural reason (naturalis ratio) signifies, therefore, an opposition to the Augustinian and Platonic tendency of considering knowledge as a pure spiritual process, which happens within us through a direct contact of the human spirit with the spiritual divine world. Thomas denies this contact. He accentuates the fact that the human being, being a synolon (the concrete instantiation of two substances) of body and soul, is tied to the body and to the senses, to the phantasmata, from which any process towards the spiritual world must initiate. The spiritual world as a pure spirituality is precluded to human nature that is an incarnated spirit. Only an extra revelation, a supplementary perfection (perfectio superaddita) will be able to offer what is beyond human nature in the present life. St. Thomas still accepts
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in part the Platonic motive of a separated soul and the Avicennian affirmation of a pure spirituality of human thought grasped as thought. In De Trinitate (ch. 9, sect. 3), Augustine affirmed in a Cartesian way, “As the mind collects information about corporeal things through the senses, so it collects information about the incorporeal things through itself (per semetipsam).” In The Summa Theologica (1, q. 88. art. 1), Thomas comments, “On the authority of Augustine, we may assume that what our mind can gather about incorporeal things is what it can know about them through itself (per seipsam cognoscere possit). This is true according to the Philosopher [Aristotle], since he defines the soul as ‘the principle for the knowledge of separate substances’. Given that our soul knows itself, it succeeds in obtaining some cognition of incorporeal substances. This cognition is suitable to the soul, but this does not mean that the soul by knowing itself knows the separate substances directly and perfectly.” The limitation of this cognition is great since the soul is not a separate substance and does not possess among its operations a pure intellectual power. Against Avempace, Thomas insists that in the soul no abstractive process of quiddities exists, which would allow the reaching of immaterial substances. The Platonists alone could think in that way because they conceive the ideas as separate forms. Aquinas instead believes that immaterial substances are completely different from the quiddities of material things and that the process of induction will offer only a similitude. 6. Analogy, Voluntarism, and Intellectualism. Eternity of the World. Creation The necessity to prove the existence of God through a process that begins from sensation, a unique way open to the human being, is due to the premises given above. Even the physical color given by Thomas in Summa contra Gentiles to the Aristotelian proofs requiring a first immobile motor confirms what has been observed. This argument from motion originally found in Adelard of Bath was taken and developed by Albert along the line of Maimonides. Thomas articulates his own proofs for the existence of God following the Aristotelian way of the necessity of the causal link (because a motion must have a mover) and of the impossibility of a process that goes on to infinity. For Thomas, the first immobile mover is manifestly God. Thomas’s second proof is from the nature of the efficient cause (ex ratione causae efficientis) and is based on the principle that “no thing can give existence to another thing unless it participates in the divine virtue” (nulla res dat esse nisi in quantum est in ea participatio divinae virtutis). The third proof is rooted in the call of the possible for the help of the necessary; the fourth is from the gradation to be found in things that requires the Greatest Being (maximum ens); and the fifth derives from the concept of the universal order. Augustine and Anselm embraced an apriorism that was renewed by Alexander of Hales, by John of Rochelle and, more so than others, by St. Bonaventure. For them, these Aristotelian proofs of Thomas are merely dialectic exercises that can have mean-
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ing only in conjunction with an experience of God: “God is the most present reality in the soul and thus knowable” (Deus praesentissimus est ipsi animae et eo ipso cognoscibilis). To them, Thomas opposed his conception of the ratio naturalis, the light of God that we see only in illuminated things. Only by starting our reasoning from them can we infer the presence of an author of the whole world. We do not see this light that allows us to see, though through it we see all things. It is the light by which we know, it is lumen quo intelligitur. It is not the light that we know, quod intelligitur. Thomas is aware that the five proofs can only prove the need of the existence of “some kind of a first entity, that we call God” (aliquod primum ens, quod Deum dicimus). It does not mean that we know God. We could determine God’s characters and attributes uniquely by the way of negation (per viam remotionis), given that the divine substance infinitely surpasses the human intellect. We could exclude from God all that remains below the infinity of God. It is a negative way that possesses its own positiveness. Primarily, it teaches that it is absurd to speak of an essence of God distinct from his existence: “God is his own essence but also his own existence” (Deus non solum est sua essentia, sed etiam suum esse). The distinction of the essence is possible only by accepting the distinction between possible and real, cause and effect, and matter and form, when the form is not exhausted in the process of actualization: “Because God is not composed of matter and form, he must be his own godhead, his own life, and whatever else is so predicated of him” (Summa Theologica, 1, q. 3). To distinguish essence from existence means not to recognize self-sufficiency to existence. Thomas insists on this point, and he both criticizes the proofs of God from the idea, which separates essence from existence, and defends the importance of the distinction between essence and existence in the realm of the finite. For what concerns the proof of Anselm, Thomas’s criticism could very well be turned into a defense. For the reason that we cannot divide essence and existence in God, the concept itself of God would mean the certainty of God. Thomas could reply that man does not arrive to the divine essence by a natural light (lumine naturali), but only by a “light of glory” (lumine gloriae) through which alone the rational creature becomes deiform (per hoc enim lumen fit creatura rationalis deiformis). To speak of the idea of God or of the Supreme Being implies a twofold impossibility. But again, either we deny that the human being could have a concept of God (and in this case all argumentation from effects would also fail because this kind of argumentation rests on the principle of causality and should at some point conclude positively), or we admit a positive notion of God (in which case this concept would make us certain about His existence in the measure itself of the positiveness of the concept). We may perhaps wish to reverse the anti-Anselm objection that is found in Contra Gentiles (bk. 1, q. 2. art. 1, objection 2), and say that in the case of the coincidence between essence and existence it would be only and properly in the measure that we have knowledge of God that we would be certain of His existence.
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Everything that is known (cognitum) is found in the knower according to the capacity (measure) of the knower (est in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis). In the case of God, what is known (cognitum) exceeds the (measure) capacity of the nature of the knower (modum naturae cognoscentis). Thus, we can reach God only through his creatures, applying to him in an eminent and perfect way what in a limited manner we perceive in the world. We refer to God as the One to whom all worldly order is attracted, that is, as the One to whom the likeness of things points. This relation between the characters of things and God is not univocal; it is merely analogical. The transfer of the terms to infinity radically transforms their character. Cajetan, in De nominum analogia, clarifies that likeness or similitude through univocation implies the same foundation in the two terms placed in the relation, while the likeness through analogy excludes an identical foundation for the terms. The ratio or reason for the comparison is different in the terms compared. Their foundation remains distinct, but proportionally similar. Duns Scotus subjected the analogical consideration to a strong criticism. Thomas definitively wanted to underline the clear separation between the divine being, which is Existence Itself, and the being of the creatures that comes from nothing. The continuously unresolved problem is that of the possibility of arising from a deformed effect to an eminent cause. The analogy, reaffirming the distinction between the fundaments of the similitude (fundamenta similitudinis), seems to cut the possibility of explaining how to comprehend the likeness according to a proportion (secundum proportionem). Let us consider the example given in the Summa Theologica (bk. 1, q. 13, art. 5): “By this term ‘wise’ applied to the human being, we signify some perfection distinct from the human being’s essence, and distinct from its power and being, and from all similar things.” On the other hand, when we say that God is wise, we do not want to refer to something distinct from his power, essence, and existence. When this term “wise” is applied to the human being, in some degree it circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified. When the term is applied to God, it leaves the thing signified as incomprehensible and as surpassing the signification of the term. Duns Scotus, in the Ordinatio (Balíc edition, 1, dist. 3, pars 1, qs. 1– 2), observes that on these foundations, we could as well say, “God is a stone.” The reason for this is that “in regard to the things that are applied to God as they are in the creatures for no proper reason, nothing can be concluded about God, because they are found in God and creatures in a totally different manner.” We are faced with the choice of admitting that between cause and effect there is the same fundament and thus changes the analogy into univocation, or accept the knowledge of God that is knowingly chimerical. The passage from the effects to God is possible only when we admit something common between God and the creatures. To accept that there is some common concept applicable to God and to the creature is compatible with God’s simplicity.
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In Reportata Parisiensia, Duns Scotus affirmed that even the supporters of analogy could formulate at the end some positive propositions about God within their system. In Thomas, this becomes clear when he begins to illustrate the knowledge that God has of everything, even of the singulars, similar to the knowledge of the likeness that a creature has with its creator: “God knows things by proper knowledge in respect to the likeness that every individual creature has with him” (Deus intelligit proprium respectu assimilationis quam habet unaquaeque creatura ad ipsum). Interestingly enough, Thomas also inserts inside his Aristotelianism the Augustinian-Platonic theory of exemplarism: “In this sense, Augustine stated that God made men and horses with different criteria. In the mind of God the intelligible species are multiple. In this way, the Platonic opinion on the ideas, according to which all that exists in the material things is formed, is also preserved” (Summa contra Gentiles, bk. 1, sect. 54). God’s cognition of everything consists of the unique act by which he knows himself: “Without any discursive knowledge of the intellect, God knows others in the act of knowing himself” (absque discursu intellectus cognoscendo se cognoscit alia). It is a cognition, which is paired with a unique act of the will, by which God desires himself and all other things (Deus uno actu voluntatis, se et alia velit), “since the will follows the intellect.” The divine will has for its object God and desires from condition or supposition (vult necessario ex conditione vel suppositione) every thing implied in the rationality of God (Summa Theologica, bk. 1, q. 19, art. 3). His will necessarily wants only what is the good of the intellect. Thomas says in Contra Gentiles (bk. 1, sect. 84), “The will wants nothing but what is known as good, because what is not an object of the intellect cannot be an object of the will” (Voluntas non est nisi alicuius boni intellecti; illud igitur quod non cadit in intellectu, non potest cadere in voluntate). Thus, everything that implies a contradiction or a logical impossibility cannot be desired by the divine will (voluntas Dei non potest esse eorum quae secundum se sunt impossibilia). In 2nd Sententiarum (q. 9), Ockham accepted this conclusion, and in more than one passage insisted on the principle, “God can make all that in becoming includes no contradiction” (Deus potest facere omne quod fieri non includit contradictionem). The voluntarism of Augustine and Anselm would be used against Thomas, but Duns Scotus would assign a different significance to it, in particular to the thesis that “the will commands the intellect” (voluntas imperat intellectui). Scotus in Ordinatio (bk. 2, d. 25, q. 1, n. 7) clarified the sentence in the sense that “it is the will that determines the intellect to consider this or that thing” (… determinare intellectum ad considerationem huius vel illius). As Scotus further explains, between will and intellect there is the rapport of an ideal anteriority, an anteriority of value. Peter of Aquila, called Scotellus (Scotus minor), commented by saying that a servant cannot be greater than his master for the simple reason that he precedes his master with the chandelier in his hand (II Sententiarum, d. 24, q. 21). Thomas had insisted on the theme that God can-
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not not-will what he wills (vult necessario ex suppositione), but he also insisted on the thesis that the intellective light ideally precedes the will. Now, if we accept the distinction in this sense, we would imply the conforming of the activity to a nature or structure already understood or contemplated. The “before” and the “after” may signify an anteriority purely ideal in an ideal distinction, but it does not reduce the value of the implicit admission of the eternal necessity of a rational structure, a knowable cosmos. The Scotist reversal does not imply the destruction of the principle of non-contradiction, but resolves within the primary actuality of the will the possible foundation of a pre-constituted rational structure. In other words, God cannot will and not will. The will does not follow the good intellect; the will determines the direction that the intellect takes. This difference that meant the exclusion of all residual proximity to God as “noesis noeseos, the knowledge of all knowledge” becomes a divergence when we consider the human creature. Thomas claimed for the human creature an anteriority of the intellect determined by the object and the possibility of action within the limits imposed by nature. On the contrary, Scotus held that the primary orientation of the intellect was due to the will. The demon does not choose us; we choose our own demon: “Volition is in the power of the will so far as it has to determine the intellect to consider this or that thing or to move it away from the consideration of this and that thing. This explains how much volition is in the power of the will.” The omnipotent God is the supreme principle of goodness and creates the world from nothing in the sense that he does not use, like the demiurge, a preexisting entity. However, that the world comes from nothing does not mean that in God there was not an exemplary world of ideas and essences that constituted the essence of God. Every essence derives from the divine essence (omnis essentia derivatur ab essentia divina). In Summa Theologica (bk. 1, q. 15, art. 3, resp.), Thomas insisted that the idea “as an exemplar is related to everything made by God in any period of time; whereas [the idea] as a principle of knowledge is related to all things known by God, even though these entities would never come to be in time.” This exemplary world exists in God, an ideal world that constitutes the metaphysical foundation of the analogy of the being created with God the Creator. Looking now at this created being, the world, it is manifest that it is a contingent world since God wants necessarily only himself, the work of divine will. By accepting eternity as the necessary continuous Presence of Being, we understand that the world is not necessary and not eternal. Still the question can be raised whether the world has always existed, a question that, as Boethius remarked, presents a problem different from the previous one. The problem of the eternity of the world has already been resolved negatively. Its acceptance would have made the world not the fruit of a free and gratuitous act, but a necessary emanation from God, and thus it would destroy the concept of creation. Given that the world is the fruit of an act of free will, it
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cannot for this same reason be demonstratively proven that the world always existed or that it had a beginning. The existence of the world is ascertained only through the direct experience of the world; “the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated from the world itself” (novitas mundi non potest demonstrationem recipere). The eternity of the essence is established by reason and the actuality of its existence regards exclusively the will of God: “For the will of God cannot be investigated by reason, except as regards those things which by necessity God must will.… But the divine will can be manifested by the revelation on which faith rests. Hence that the world began is credible but not demonstrable or knowable” (Summa Theologica, bk. 1, q. 46, art. 2, answer). A factual truth is verifiable by experience alone. 8. The Human Being and the Problem of Individuation Considering the created universe, we face the problem of multiplicity with its implication of limitation and distinction. Thomas, in Summa Theologica (bk. 1, q. 47, art. 1), maintains that multiplicity is the intention of God the Creator: “For he brought things into being in order that his goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be manifested by them” (propter suam bonitatem communicandam creaturis, et per eas repraesentandam). This representation could be adequately obtained only in a harmony of diversity that through the connectivity of the harmonic order would render testimony to the divine generosity. Dante, in The Divine Comedy (Paradise, Canto 1, verses 103–113), celebrates creation: All things, among themselves, / possess an order; and this order / is the form that makes the universe similar to God. / Here do the higher beings see / the imprint of the Eternal Worth, / which is the end to which the pattern I have mentioned tends. / Within that order, every nature has its bent, / according to a different station, / nearer or less near to its origin. / Thus, these natures move to different ports / across the mighty sea of being, / each given the impulse that will bear it on” (Le cose tutte quante / hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma / che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante. / Qui veggion l’alte creature l’orma / de l’etterno valore, il qual è fine / al quale è fatta la toccata norma. / Ne l’ordine che io dico sono accline / tutte nature, per diverse sorti, / più al principio loro e men vicine; / onde si muovono a diversi porti / per lo gran mar de l’essere, e ciascuna). It is a multiplicity of incorruptible forms that necessarily implies inequality, as Aristotle says in Metaphysics, bk. 7, ch. 3 (1043b 34), “because the forms of the things are like numbers in which the species vary by addition or subtraction from unity.” Thomas continues in Summa Theologica (bk. 1, q. 47. art. 2), “And since matter is for the sake of form, material distinction exists for the sake of formal distinction. Hence, we see that in incorruptible things
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there is only one individual of each species, for the species is sufficiently preserved in the one; whereas in generable and corruptible things there are many individuals of one species necessary for the preservation of the species.” Limitation is necessarily connected with multiplicity. Nothing, privation, the deficient will are what we may call “evil.” Evil in itself has no positive reality and is attributed to God only for the positiveness, or goodness of the thing that comes with it. From Paradise, Canto 7, verses 64–80: The Godly Goodness that has banished every envy from Its own Self, burns in Itself; / and sparkling so, It shows eternal beauties. / All that derives directly from this Goodness is everlasting, / since the seal of Goodness impresses an imprint that never alters. / Whatever rains from It immediately is fully free, / for it is not constrained by any influence of other things. / Even as it conforms to that Goodness, so does it please It more; / the Sacred Ardor that gleams in all things / is most bright within those things most like Itself. / The human being has all these gifts, / but if it loses one, then its nobility has been undone. / Only man’s sin annuls man’s liberty, / makes him unlike the Highest Good, so that, / In him, the brightness of Its light is dimmed (La divina bontà che da sé sperne / ogni livore, ardendo in sé, sfavilla / sì che dispiega le bellezze etterne. / Ciò che da essa sanza mezzo piove / libero è tutto, perché non soggiace / a la virtute de le cose nuove. / Più l’è conforme, e però più le piace; / ché l’ardor santo ch’ogne cosa raggia, / ne la più somigliante è più vivace. / Di tutte queste dote s’avvantaggia / l’umana creatura, e s’una manca, / di sua nobiltà convien che caggia. / Solo peccato è quell che la disfranca / e falla dissimile al sommo bene, / per che del lume suo poco s’imbianca; / e in sua dignità mai non rivene). The exit of the whole universe from God (exitus totius universi a Deo), according to Thomas, is disposed in an order of creatures that gradually pass from the angel to the infamous among beings. In the book Le Cagioni, Dante writes, “The First Goodness sends his goodness over all things by means of a gradation (con uno discorrimento).” Dante thereafter continues with the description of the discorrimento: God’s goodness is received in different manners, beginning from the separate substances, that is, the Angels, which being without the grossness of matter are diaphanous for the purity of their forms. The human soul also receives God’s goodness but in two different ways, in the part that is free matter and in that which is impeded. It is as if a man was immersed in water, except for his head, so that we could not say that he is totally immersed in water or totally out of the water. In an additional and different way, animals receive this same goodness of God. Their
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soul is all enclosed in matter, but becomes much ennobled. The manner in which God’s goodness is received is otherwise in plants, in mines, and in soil. The earth receives it in a manner much diversified from all the other elements. It is the most material, the most remote, and the one largely not proportional to the first simplest and noblest virtue, which alone is intellectual, God. This gradation founded on a formal distinction encompasses also a second one, internal to every species, founded on a material distinction. We have seen the general grades within the gradation, but there are also singular grades; for instance, what one human soul received of goodness is different from another soul. Within the intellectual order of the universe, ascent and descent are done by means of grades that are almost continuous, from an infamous form to the highest.… Between the angelic nature that is an intellectual thing and the human soul, no grades exist on which to stand, but a process of continuous passage through the orders of the grades. It is the same between the human soul and the most perfect soul among brute animals. For this reason, we see many individuals so vile and of such base nature that they seem to be like beasts. Equally, this explains also why we may meet someone so noble and of such high condition that we can think of him as of an angel. If things were not this way, the human species could not be continued in all its variety (in Convivio, bk. 3, ch. 7, sect. 3–7; Summa contra Gentiles, bk. 2, ch. 91). Besides acknowledging an aesthetic exigency in this intuitive representation of the angelic natures, we see in the Thomistic conception the coming together of astronomic motives, Neo-Platonic influences, and Arabic tendencies. Contrary to the thesis of an angelic corporeity supported by St. Bonaventure, Thomas reaffirms the pure spirituality of the intelligences. To solve the problem of individuation outside of the corporeal limits, Thomas posits with Avicenna the theory that its form individualizes each angel; an angel is a species in itself: “It is impossible … to have two angels of the same species … in the same way that there is no plurality for whiteness … for humanity.…” Untouched by corporeity, turned toward God, the angels have no divine knowledge and are nevertheless extraneous to what is sensorial. Again from Paradise, Canto 29, verses 76–81: “These beings, since they first were gladdened by / the face of God, from which no thing is hidden, / have never turned their vision from that face, so that their sight is never intercepted by a new object, and they have no need” (Queste sustanze, poi che fur gioconde / de la faccia di Dio, non volser viso / da essa, da cui nulla si nasconde: / però non hanno vedere interciso / da novo obietto, e però non bisogna / rememorar per concetto diviso).
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Graded in different choruses, according to the mentioned principle that “the order of things must be such that the passage from one extreme to another is by way of intermediate grades,” the angels constitute the ladder from God to human beings. . 9. Plurality of Forms Within the sphere of reality, the world of the intellect gradually weakens in human beings and descends to the point of bordering with that of the elements. It is in the human being that the world shrinks and the creatures of the world come together: “The human being is called ‘the lesser world’” (homo dicitur minor mundus). In Summa Theologica (bk. 1, q. 96, art. 2), it is written, “In the human being, in some ways, we can find all things.… Four things can be considered in the human being: reason, the sensitive powers, the natural powers, and the body. By reason, the human being is like the angels. By the sensitive powers, it is like the animals. By the natural powers, it is like the plants. Finally, by his body, it is like the inanimate things.” The human being is a living synthesis of corporal matter and intellect. Angels also possess a limitation; because of the distinction between essence and existence. The angelic being implies a potentiality, but a potentiality that does not mean corporeity. On the other hand, we agree that the soul has intelligence, but an intelligence of so low a degree, so full of frailty that it must rely in its operations on a material organ. The union of the soul with the body is not accidental: “The soul has it from nature that it is capable of unity with the body.” In short, man is not this material body nor this soul, but the synthesis of the intelligible and the sensible, the human composition. Such synthesis is an immediate connection between the two terms; the soul is the form of the body and this means that the soul is the principle “by which we can nourish, sense, move from places, and similarly the prime means by which we understand” (Summa Theologica, bk. 1, q. 76, art. 1). The soul in relation to the body is not an exterior motor, nor something inhabiting a prison of flesh. The human soul is an incarnate soul, whole in every part of the body (tota in qualibet parte corporis), the act of the body, its substantial form, and not accidental form. When the soul vanishes, facing the corpse we do not speak of the human being, not even of its arm or eye, except in an equivocal manner, as if we were in front of a portrait or of a marble arm of a statue. The human being is therefore an incarnation, an intelligence searching for the perfection of the unity that is never attained through the multiplicity of the individuals of the species. The initial unbalance of its nature, which constituted it as a substantial form of a body, forces it to the multiplication of itself. Still, it can never reach the equilibrium of a pure intellect like the one of the angels. The relative perfection of an angel makes of every angel a species, whereas the radical imperfection of the soul obliges the soul to be the mover of a body. The anxiety inherent in its corporal limitation brings the soul to multiply the individuals within the species, almost in order to finally obtain
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the understanding that is human perfection and happiness. The process of incarnation, seen as a kind of continuously renewed immersion within the corporeal, means the continuous request of the soul from the corporeal for obtaining some support in the rescue of the intellect. On the contrary, the corruptible corporeity, which is the continuous loss of itself within time, seeks through the multiplicity of the individuals its own salvation from time: “What can exist only within time seems according to nature to possess a subordinate place, as if in function of something else. When it perishes, nature seems to have been frustrated” (quod autem est solum secundum aliquod tempus non videtur esse principaliter de intentione naturae, sed quasi ad aliud ordinatum: alioquin, eo corrupto, naturae intentio cassaretur). No human being, not even Adam, in so far as he was a human being, has ever possessed the perfect intelligence that is the complete vision of God. Exactly for this radical insufficiency that was manifested in the incarnation of the human being as the participant in corporality, even before sin, humanity was multiplicity, man and woman, generation, and individuation of the species. Thomas with these theories was rejecting the conception of an androgynous Adam, unique expression of the human species (Summa Theologica, 1, q. 96, art. 3; and q. 98, art. 1). It was a theory that from Philo passed into the Fathers’ writings and was used advantageously by John Scotus Eriugena. In the concreteness of its individualization, human beings reject all Platonic tendencies of separation, not only that of the intellectual potencies, but also of an agent intellect. This is a function of the soul, something of the soul, as a proper virtue of every individual. If the human intelligence, the intellective principle of the human being, is by its own nature incorporate, a substantial form of a body, “though it is not constituted by matter, … nevertheless it is the form of some matter … and, thus, according to the division of matter, there are many souls of one species” (Summa Theologica, bk. 1, q. 76, art. 2, resp. 1). No matter from which point of view we look at this, the idea of a unique separate intellect is absurd. Thomas remarks that if we accept the Platonic thesis that maintains that “the human being is the intellect itself,” what follows would be that Socrates and Plato are one man alone with two sets of garments: “The distinction between Socrates and Plato would then not be other than that of one man with a tunic and another with a cloak.” If thereafter we consider with Aristotle that the intellect is a part of the soul, which is the form of the human being, it is impossible for many distinct individuals to have one form, for the form is the principle of their being (nam forma est essendi principium). The attempt by Averroés to explain the individual differences through the differences of the phantasmata is no more successful (Commentary on De Anima, bk. 3, ch. 36). In fact, if we posit one agent that uses two instruments, we will have two actions, but always one agent. If the instrument would be one alone and many the agents (many men who with a rope pull one cart), we would still have many agents and only one act of pulling. In whatever manner
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we conceive the bond between the intellect and the human being, we should agree on the supremacy of the intellect over the whole human being. If we posit more than one intellect and only one organ, we will have many who see, but only one vision. On the contrary side, if “the intellect is held to be one, no matter how diverse may be all those things which the intellect uses as instruments, it is in no way possible to say that Socrates and Plato are more than one intellect.” If to this we add that the organ of the intellect in its strictest sense is the intellect itself, we will only have one intellect and one act of intellection. But, someone would say, there still is the diversity of the phantasma. Thomas objects that the intellection “is not a form of the possible intellect, but an intelligible species abstracted from the phantasmata” and it is unique. In other words, from the various sensible visions of the stone that we had, we abstract only one concept of the stone, a unique intelligible species: “If there were one only intellect for all human beings, the diversity of phantasma in this individual and in that would not cause a diversity of intellectual operation in this or that individual” (Summa Theologica, q. 76, art 2). All this meant again to reaffirm against every resurgent Platonic theory of separation the unity of the concrete and the unity of the human being made of soul, flesh, and bones (ex anima, et carnibus, et ossibus). This concrete individual finds his own individualization in the process itself of selfindividualizing. It is an individual in his own being, indivisum in se (undivided in itself), ens in actu (a being in actuality): “Every entity possesses jointly both its being and its individuality” (unumquodque secundum idem habet esse et individuationem). Coherent with what he said, Thomas insists on this interdependence between matter and form (materia enim et forma dicuntur relative ad invicem). Against Avicenna, Averroés, and the Platonism of Avicebron, Thomas, dealing with the problem of the individuating principle, claims that it is found in matter, which is born to receive, and it is thus limited. The form, on the contrary, is indifferently received by one or by many (indifferens est quod recipiantur in uno vel in pluribus, in De spiritualibus creaturis, art. 2). This individuating matter is not the prime matter, which is pure passive potentiality, without any form. Thomas, in search of a solution, on the tracks of Avicenna, at first introduces the idea of a form of the corporeity (forma corporeitatis), then the undetermined dimensions of Averroés, and finally the theory of a quantity of matter diversified in view of the form. In the Summa Theologica (bk. 3, q. 77, art. 2), he writes, The principle of individuation is the dimensional quantity, from which derives that one is born as one individual that means to be undivided in itself and separate from all other things. Separation and division of substance is possible in relation to quantity.… Dimensional quantity is a principle of individuation for the forms of this kind, as far as the differ-
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ent forms are exactly in different parts of matter, whereby the dimensional quantity has in itself an individuation. Consequently, we can imagine many lines of the same species but that are different for their position that is possible for reason of this quantity because dimension is a quantity holding a certain position (Principium individuationis est quantitas dimensiva ex hoc idem aliquid est natum esse in uno solo, quod illud est in se indivisum, et divisum ab omnibus aliis. Divisio autem accidit substantiae ratione quantitatis.… Et ideo ipsa quantitas dimensiva est quoddam individuationis principium huiusmodi formis, in quantum scilicet diversae formae numero sunt in diversis partibus materiae, unde et ipsa quantitas dimensiva secundum se habet quondam individuationem: ita quod possumus imaginari plures lineas eiusdem speciei, differentes positione, quae cadit in ratione huius quantitatis: convenit autem dimensioni, quod sit quantitas positionem habens). 10. The Sensible The Thomistic discussion concerning individuation intended to affirm that individuation derives from the union of the substantial form with the quantified matter without any need of intermediary forms. This discussion aimed at the solution of the more serious problem of Platonic origin of the plurality of forms. The supporters of this second opinion have claimed that it was absurd to admit the immediate union of the highest form with matter without any previous preparation completed by the intermediate forms. St. Bonaventure, In Hexaëmeron (bk. 4, ch. 10), stated, “It is insane to claim that the ultimate form would be added to prime matter, without the intervention of something that would have a disposition or would be in potency to the ultimate form, or without the mediation of any other form” (Insanum est dicere quod ultima forma addatur materiae primae sine aliquo quod sit dispositio vel in potentia ad illam, vel nulla forma interiecta). Giles of Lessines was the first who initiated this discussion when, around 1270, raising the issue of the plurality of forms in a letter to Albert, stood on the side of Thomas. John Peckham, probably with the support of Bonaventure, pointed out an Averroistic motive in the thesis of the unity of the forms, a thesis not included in the 219 Parisian condemnations of 1270 and 1277. On 18 March 1277, Archbishop Robert Kilwardby of Canterbury, himself a former Dominican theologian in Paris, condemned 30 related propositions, including the one in favor of the unity of the forms. Kilwardby had ties with the Platonic-Augustinian current that widely accepted the opinions expressed by Avicebron. With Alexander of Hales and Robert Grosseteste, Kilwardby sustained some positions on the rapport between the soul and the body that Aquinas strongly criticized. According to the theory of the plurality of forms, a hierarchy of forms exists that mediates the connection of the intellect with matter, filling up the abyss that separates their dignity. For instance, the rational soul would lighten only after the body has been formed by the sensitive soul. More than one dis-
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tinct form would exist in the human creature. St. Thomas, while insisting on the strictest connection between soul and body, observes at the same time that “it is not absurd to affirm that the effect of a superior agent has the virtue of the effect of an inferior agent and something more, whereby also the intellective soul … has the power that the vegetative and sensitive souls possess.” Repeating an Aristotelian motive, Thomas says, “The vegetative and sensitive parts are in the intellective as the triangle and the quadrangle are in the pentagon. The quadrangle is, we agree, a figure simply diverse in species from the triangle, but not from that triangle that the quadrangle contains potentially (Summa Theologica, q. 76, art. 3). In the same manner that the number four is not diverse from the three that is a part of it, but from the three that exists separately … so also the vegetative soul, when it exists in itself outside the sensitive soul, is another species of soul (De unitate intellectus, 50). When a superior form assumes the vegetative soul and performs the functions of the vegetative soul, the vegetative soul would be completely absorbed by the higher form and its autonomous subsistence would become useless. 11. Beatitude The preceding analysis of the concrete, of the rapport matter and form, discredited all together a complex of classic theories of the medieval thought, from the plurality of forms to the universal hylemorphism, to the rationes seminales. It was a return to the simple clarity of the Aristotelian thought resting upon the synolon. For this reason, the Thomistic positions taken all together gave way to a strong reaction within the cultural ambiance of the time that tried to include them in the same condemnation of the Averroism of Siger of Brabant. This was the precise conception that Thomas criticized particularly in his examination of the cognitive processes and of all that they imply and presuppose. To understand is the proper characteristic of the human being. The nature of human intelligence is tied to the body, is incarnate, human understanding is connected with the senses. This means that the human intellect does not learn directly what is intelligible, but that it reaches the intelligible through the sensible. The external senses moved by the sensible offer an instrument to the human intellect, our interior light, and this instrument makes our intellect capable of expressing the intelligible: “It is a small light of the intelligence that is innate in us, but it is enough for our understanding of things” (parvum lumen intelligibile, quod nobis est connaturale, sufficit ad nostrum intelligere). In Summa Contra Gentiles (bk. 2, chs. 76–77), Thomas makes the effort to explain the solidarity of activity and passivity that goes on in our cognition. Premising that the senses moved by the sensible determine the phantasma (sensus … motus a sensibili exteriori imprimit in phantasiam), we acknowledge before us the intellective soul and the phantasma and that both possess something in potency and something in actuality. The soul has the immateriality in which the understanding consists as a capacity of assimilating this or
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that between the corresponding similarities of things. This immateriality is in potency in respect to the determinate similitudes and act in so far as it is the “intelligible light innate in our soul” (lumen intelligibile animae nostrae connaturale). The substance of the human soul is immateriality … from which derives its intellective nature.… It cannot be assimilated to this or that determinate thing; something is required so that our soul would be able to know in a determinate way this or that thing. All cognition happens in the knower according to the likeness of what is to be known. The intellective soul is in potency to the determinate similitudes of the things that can be known by it. These similitudes constitute the natures of sensible things (Habet … substantia animae humanae immaterialitatem; et … ex hoc habet naturam intellectualem … Ex hoc autem nondum habet quod assimiletur huic vel illi rei determinatae; quod requiritur ad hoc quod anima nostra hanc vel illam rem determinate cognoscat; omnis enim cognitio fit secundum similitudinem cogniti in cognoscente. Remanet igitur ipsa anima intellective in potentia ad determinatas similitudines rerum cognoscibilium a nobis, quae sunt naturae rerum sensibilium). If we now examine the phantasmata, we would see in them “the determinate natures of the sensible things” (determinatas naturas rerum sensibilium) but “according to their material conditions, which are their individual properties, [these determinate natures] are also in the material [sensorial] organs” (Secundum conditiones materiales, quae sunt proprietates individuales et sunt etiam in organis materialibus). These phantasmata are not intelligible in actuality, “nevertheless, they are intelligible in potency because in the human being is found the power of removing all individualizing conditions, of reaching the universal nature of what the phantasmata are a representation” (Et tamen quia in hoc homine, cuius similitudinem repraesentant phantasmata, est accipere naturam universalem denudatam ab omnibus conditionibus individuantibus, sunt intelligibilia in potentia). The phantasmata possess determinateness in actuality and intelligibility in potency. The soul instead possesses the active power over the phantasmata in actuality (virtus activa in phantasmata, the agent intellect), a power that makes the phantasmata intelligible in actuality. The soul has the power to assimilate determinate similitudes of sensible things in potency (virtus ad determinatas similitudines rerum sensibilium). These similitudes, in order to become actual, must be elevated to intelligibility, and this can be done through the agent intellect: Let us give an example. Let us assume by hypothesis that the eye, beside being diaphanous and capable of seeing colors, had in itself so much light as to be able to make the colors visible in actuality, as it is
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This theory of knowledge rests on a double basis. One postulates the substantial unity of the human being as a concrete synthesis of matter and spirit. Another assumes the triple existence of things: individually in matter, by abstraction in the intellect, and exemplarily in God. The unity of the three orders of existence and the substantial human unity make possible the process of ascension from the sensible to the intelligible that, in a last analysis, is a process of return. It is the process by which the orderly unity of the universe is reflected within the bond of the human substance. This is the solution to the problem of the universals, but also the fight against a Platonism understood as a break from the levels of reality. The polemic of Thomas against Siger of Brabant was on the subject of the resurgent radical separation and of the Averroistic theory of the unity of the possible intellect in the human being, a theory even more absurd for someone who also resolved the agent intellect into an aspect of the single soul. Two doctrinal positions resulted and, no matter how many of their points of contact were essentially antithetically, came to face each other in the clearest way in the question of the intellect. One made its own the Platonic principle of the separation of the universal from the particular, of the idea from the thing, and of the mind from the senses; the other held firmly on the solidity of the limits of the concrete, of the human being, of the senses, and of the world. Dante alone (Paradise, Canto 10, verses 99–138) could imagine these two thinkers who in life had been separated by such a profound abyss finally pacified in the unique love for truth! 12. Characteristics of the Thomistic Philosophy The inspiration of Nicomachean Ethics integrated with Christian inspiration provides the Thomistic vision of the return of the whole toward beatitude. The God who is the cause is also the God who is the end. The reason for the being of all things, which is the constitutive law of their own nature, becomes the rule of conduct oriented toward happiness in God: “The good of the human being is to be in accordance to reason.… For that is good for a thing which suits it according to its form” (Bonum hominis est secundum rationem esse … unicuique enim rei est bonum secundum quod convenit ei secundum suam formam, in Summa Theologica, bks. 1–2, q. 18, art. 5 ). In Dante, Paradise, Canto 1, vv. 109–114: “Within that order, every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Thus, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that
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will bear it on” (Ne l’ordine ch’io dico sono accline / tutte nature, per diverse sorti, / più al principio loro e men vicine; / onde si muovono a diversi porti / per lo gran mar de l’essere, e ciascuna / con istinto a lei dato che la porti). The rational creature that possesses intellect and love lifts up to a rational consciousness, to a free decision, the orientation of its nature, which is rational. Every one of our acts is directed, it must be directed, if it is truly ours, toward beatitude, in order to find a place in the moral order of the whole, a given order that becomes a wanted order. In Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (q. 22, art. 5), Thomas writes: Nature and will are regulated in a way that the will would also have its definite nature.… In the will itself a natural appetite exists for a suitable good which suits it.… Besides that, the will has the capacity for desire according to its own determination, not by an external necessity; and that determination is what fits the will in so far as it is the will” (Natura autem et voluntas hoc modo ordinatae sunt, ut ipsa voluntas quaedam natura sit.… Unde et voluntati ipsi inest naturalis quidam appetitus sibi convenientis boni; et praeter hoc habet appetere aliquid secundum propriam determinationem, non ex necessitate; quod ei competit in quantum voluntas est). The morality of the act consists in willing rationally, through the love of God, what nature wants naturally. It consists in a well-defined parallelism with the theoretical level, in raising the particular to the universal: “The human will must conform to the divine will in what it formally wants” (Voluntas igitur humana tenetur conformari divinae voluntati in volito formaliter). It must be wanted “formally” [formaliter, expressly and directly]; all goodness must be wanted in the divine love, for the divine love: “The divine common good must be wanted for the common good, but not materially” (In Summa Theologica, bks. 1–2, q. 19, art. 10: in bonum commune, velle bonum divinum et commune, sed non materialiter). Human activity, which changes from being natural to being moral through the intervention of reason, assumes all its significance only when reason is truly brought back to its first root: “The rule for the human will is double: one is internal and homogeneous, it is the human reason itself; the other is truly the first rule, the eternal law, which is almost the reason of God” (Ibid., q. 71. art. 6: regula autem voluntatis humanae est duplex, una propinqua et homogenea, scilicet ipsa humana ratio; alia vero est prima regula, scilicet lex aeterna, quae est quasi ratio Dei). The law of God that the rational creature follows “for intellectual love” (per intellectualem amorem) comes to be concretized in life and in its order with the overcoming of the limits of individuality through the bond with the group. Even before the rise of reason, we can observe that, for a natural inclination, the part promptly sacrifices itself for the good of the whole (quod unaquaeque pars naturali quadam inclinatione operatur ad bonum totius,
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etiam cum periculo aut detrimento proprio). When this natural inclination becomes the political virtue, the good citizen is ready to face even death for the common good: “It is evident that God is the common good of the entire universe and all its parts” (quodlibeta 1, art. 8). Thomistic philosophy is characterized by the concept of unity. It is a philosophy of the concrete unity. It would be more correct to say that it consists in the effort to converge the concreteness of the individual unity with the harmonic tending of the whole toward God. The significance of Thomism is doubtless well presented in the formula, “Being is what is most intimate to every one thing and what is most profound in all things, for it is the form in relation to all things that are in reality” (esse est illud quod est magis intimum cuilibet et quod profundius omnibus inest, cum sit formale respectu omnium quae in re sunt). In this formula, we have the compendium of the metaphysics of the rapport between actuality and potentiality. The solemn epigraph of all the system may be probably found in the commentary on the PseudoDionysius, where Thomas claims that the order of the universe manifests how the will of God is actualized: “The divine peace makes all things grow mutually together” (Divina pax facit omnia ad se invicem concreta). Dante (Paradise, Canto 27, verses 106–120) portrayed this universal harmony rooted in God when, at the highest level of paradise, represents the divine light irradiating over the immense mass of creatures. In Thomas, we have the unity of the concrete singular and the supreme reality of Being. We have Plato and Aristotle, or an Aristotle who relived in himself a lot of Plato. Thomas could read in the commentary on Metaphysics of Aristotle (bk. 1, tr. 5, c. 15) the recommendation of his own teacher Albert: “Learn that a human being cannot advance in the study of philosophy unless it would learn from the doctrines of the two philosophers, Aristotle and Plato” (Scias quod non perficitur homo in philosophia nisi ex scientia duorum philosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis). 13. Italian Thomists The complex events, which accompanied the rising and the consolidation of Thomism in Paris, of which an echo is present in the condemnations of 1277 that also attacked some Thomistic theses, are mostly known. It was a Dominican from Italy, Giovanni of Naples, who around 1315 accepted in Paris a public debate on “whether it would be licit to teach in Paris the doctrine of friar Thomas particularly in regard to its conclusions” (utrum licite possit doceri Parisius doctrina fr. Thomae quantum ad omnes eius conclusiones). The answer was that, unless a better judgment could be made (salvo meliorum iudicio), nothing could be found in a doctrine that was contrary to faith and good customs (contra fidem et bonos mores). Giovanni of Naples debated the serious question of individuation in angels (whether there could be many angels of the same species) and in human beings (whether the soul of Jesus could be the same as that of Jude). Giovanni’s exact conclusion was that Thomas’s
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doctrines could not be confused with those condemned, but that Thomism constituted the true foundation for their condemnation. In Italy, Thomism easily expanded, both because it found within the Dominican Order a ground particularly favorable, and for the direct influence of Aquinas, who dedicated a grand part of his teaching activity in Rome and at the new school in Naples. Thomas, abandoning the subtleties of the Scholastic disputes, dedicated himself to preaching in the vulgar language and joined Proino of Pisa. Friar Proino, like Thomas, was a general preacher of the Dominican Order, but he had put together a library that included many writings of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Alfarabi. This fact shows how much the prescription contained in the Constitutions of the Order of 1228 according to which the friars were forbidden the studying from the books of the gentiles and of the philosophers was obeyed. The prescription said, in libris gentilium et philosophorum non studeant … seculares scientias non addiscant (Do not study the books of gentiles and philosophers … do not learn secular sciences). In the catalogue of the books of friar Proino, we see among the many other works the Summa Magistri Monetae, which reminds us of a nucleus of philosophical culture existing in Cremona. At the time of St. Thomas, this group included, among the Dominicans, Moneta, the confuter of Cathars and Waldensians, and Roland, professor in Paris between 1229 and 1231 after teaching in Bologna, where he died in 1259. Moneta’s Summa was a commentary on the “sentences” in a traditional form. It does not mention yet the possible contrast between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism, but cites already various Aristotelian works (Ethics, Physics, and De Anima) and even Arabic texts (Avicenna, Algazali, Alfarabi, and Albumazar). In the library itself of Proino, donated perhaps in 1248 to the Convent of St. Catherine in Pisa, are found Metaphysics, Libri naturales, and Commentus super libros physicorum et super quartum Mathematicorum of Avicenna and of Aristotle Libri naturales and Metaphysics. Going back to Roland of Cremona and to the Cremona cultural group, it is clear that his work is modeled on Summa Theologica of Prepositino, also of Cremona. Of Cremona we should count another author of Summa, a Magister Martinus. Prepositino taught in Mainz and in Paris and died in 1210. Among other works, he compiled Summa contra hereticos, in which he adopted the method of the pro, contra, and solution. Doctor Angelicus was the one to give with his work a great stimulus to the advancement of the Dominicans of Italy. His theories were made public by a group of the most faithful disciples. Among these was friar Reginald of Piperno, who kept the notes of his teacher and used them in order to complete some of his own writings. Friar Tommasello of Perugia was an excellent lecturer in Sacred Theology; friar Jacopo of Benevento composed “an essay on the powers of the soul”; and friar Simone of Lentini prepared different quodlibeta (essays in questions and answers format). Pietro of Andria taught in Bari. Nicola Brunacci of Perugia, who was called by his teacher Albert the Great, “the second Thomas Aquinas,” taught
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in Pistoia, Perugia, Orvieto, and Florence. Among the biographers and the historians were Guglielmo Tocco, Bartolomeo di Capua, and Giovanni Colonna. Among those who probably contributed to the assimilation of Thomism was the Dominican Bambolognus of Bologna. He was a contemporary of Thomas, the author of a comment on the sentences that preceded Thomas’s Summa. In it, Bambolognus agreed on many questions with Thomas, as, for instance, the rapport between the knowledge of nature and that of theology, the questions whether the creatures can know God, and whether the soul is composed of matter and form according to the opinion of Avicebron and the Franciscans. Martin Grabmann admits some contacts between the two thinkers, but he supports the denial of a positive direct influence. The interesting proximity of thought shows how the ground was prepared for the reception of the Thomistic theses. On the other hand, Romano of Rome of the Orsini family, a Dominican who succeeded Thomas in Paris, was far from agreement with Thomas. In his comment on the sentences, Romano is Augustinian and takes positions similar to those of St. Bonaventure and Mathew of Acquasparta. With an abundance of texts from Augustine, he sustained the proposition much beloved by the Franciscans, Christus verus omnium magister. Romano inclined toward the conception of the illumination and was indignant at the thought of the eternity of the world. A true Thomist was instead Hannibaldus de Hannibaldis, a friend of Thomas and for a short time his successor in Paris, where he died in 1272. He was the author of a commentary on the “sentences” that was justly defined by Tolomeo of Lucca as a Thomistic compendium (or “nothing else than an abridgment of the sayings of friar Thomas”) that was printed with Hannibaldus’s works. Ramberto Primadizzi of Bologna, who died as bishop in Venice in 1308, defended Thomism against the accusation of William de la Mare, a friend of Roger Bacon. William had written Correctorium (Corrections), which Ramberto attacked with Apologeticum veritatis super Corruptorium (An Apology of the Truth against its Corruptions). Tolomeo Fiadoni of Lucca, disciple and confessor of Thomas in Naples, was for a while the Prior of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and died as the bishop of Torcello around 1327. He is mostly known as historian and politician, and for his completion of the De regimine principum, but it is in the Hexaëmeron that he was the first to give a personal systematization of the thought of his teacher. This comment on the six days of the creation offered the chance for a wide series of philosophical digressions, particularly of psychology and physics, in a manner new to the Scholastic method of quaestiones and disputationes. Tolomeo relies a lot on Augustine, on all the Patristic tradition, and uses Avicenna, Averroés, Maimonides, Liber de Causis, and Proclus. Of a particular interest for the influence of Thomism in the whole history of the Italian culture is Remigio Girolami who, during his teaching in Santa Maria Novella, was supposedly heard by Dante. Remigio was a Thomist, a sustainer of the distinction between essence and existence, who insisted on the anti-Averroistic polemic on
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the primacy of theology over philosophy. A sign of the diffusion of the Thomistic thought is given by all the works of Remigio, whereas the oppositions, at least within the Dominican Order, were waning and disappearing. It is true that we have news of a strong anti-Thomistic attack that happened in Florence due to the intervention of a Dominican by the name of Uberto Guidi. The information is derived from the statement that the provincial chapter of the Order formulated in Arezzo in 1315. Friar Uberto was put to bread and water for ten days and forbidden to teach for two years: Friar Uberto Guidi, a lecturer from Florence, while discussing this year in the Convent of Florence in the presence of a multitude of friars, lay peoples, clerics, and other religious persons, asserted temerariously many things against the right and sacred doctrine of the venerable doctor and Friar Thomas Aquinas. He did this also while teaching his courses, and irreverently referred to the previously mentioned holy doctor (Frater Ubertus Guidi Bacellarius Florentinus hoc anno in Conventu Florentino dum disputaretur de quolibet, in conspectus multitudinis fratrum, saecularium, clericorum et aliorum religiosorum, temerarie non solum in ipsa disputatione, sed etiam in cathedra dum legeret multa assertive dixit contra sanam et sacram doictrinam venerabilis doctoris fratris Thomae de Aquino, quoque in irreverentiam praefati sacri doctoris). At this same time, Giovanni of Naples was defending in Paris the right to teach the Thomistic theses, and was repeating in his quaestiones disputatae the fundamentals of the thought of Aquinas. Giovanni Balbi of Genoa did the same with his Catholicon, a lexicological composition that was also going to be widely diffused throughout the fifteenth century. The Provençal Bernard Lombardi followed Balbi, and like Balbi partially accepted the Augustinian tradition. Dedicated to practical theology are the works of Albert of Brescia, who died in 1314, and Ranieri of Pisa, who died before 1351, a learned compiler of Pantheologia, and a text well known and useful at the time. In the second half of the century, Tommasino of Ferrara lived, who was a Thomist of strict observance. Thomism also touched the Dominican Giovanni Graziadio of Ascoli, who died in 1341 and was a student of logic and a wellknown commentator of Aristotle. The Thomistic tradition continued with full vigor during the Renaissance and tackled social problems with St. Antonino of Florence (1389–1459) whose Summa became very popular. The Thomistic tradition answered the exigencies of new thought with Thomas De Vio and, in 1516, Francesco Silvestri of Ferrara offered a vast commentary on Summa Contra Gentiles.
Five ARISTOTELIANISM AND AVERROISM Toward the middle of the fourteenth century Giusto de’ Menabuoi painted Averroès in the Cortellieri Chapel of the Augustinian Friars in Padua as their supposed protector. The esteem that the Commentator enjoyed was well known and Dante’s verses witnessed it. We must not forget that the Arab, in addition to being the one who illustrated in the most complete manner the “maestro di color che sanno” (the teacher of those who know), was also seen as a scientist and distinguished doctor, free from any vulgar superstition, and as the rigorous scrutinizer of the secrets of nature. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Pico wrote in praise of him, recognizing that he was not given to astrological superstitions: “Averroès, a celebrated … philosopher and a serious investigator of natural phenomena.” Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary on the twentieth canto of Dante’s Inferno includes this interesting appeal to Averroès: “I declare with Averroès that the astrology of our time has no worth. But an astrologer promptly replied: ‘Averroès knows nothing about astrology and, by the way, the stars do not lie’.” 1. The Presumed “Averroism” of Pietro d’Abano. Guido Bonatti The astrologer mentioned above was Pietro d’Abano whom Pico would dare to ridicule for having also translated into Latin the astrological writings of Abraham ibn Ezra. Pietro was the typical exponent of the naturalistic inquiry that later characterized the Paduan School, superior at times to that of Bologna. Pietro could be called the characteristic product of the influence of the Arabs and the Hebrews in the scientific inquiry, and not the representative or founder of the Paduan Averroism, as someone else suggested. We would not be surprised if we were to realize that all manuals, all repertories and inventories, and all commentaries on the works of ancient writers were in Arabic or Hebrew. Pietro accepted typical doctrines of Averroism and divulged them by teaching from the cathedra or writing them in his works, though there are some precise affirmative statements in this regard, the whole thing has not been definitely proven. Some persons have insisted on the value that astrology had in the thought of Pietro and on the fundamental place that he gave to the thesis of the “horoscope of religions,” and that of this thesis he should be considered “the first
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true formulator in the most careful and audacious sense.” Historically, these statements are without any foundation. These doctrines were formulated long before Pietro and they were presented with great precision by Al-Kindi in a small book that soon afterward circulated also in Latin. The thesis was developed and clarified by Albumasar in writings that became most famous in the western world. Before Pietro, the Franciscan Roger Bacon in the Opus Majus (1266–1268), which he dedicated to the Pope, held that thesis. Between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, Pierre d’Ailly, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, assigned great importance to this same thesis. To conclude that from the doctrine of the “horoscope of religions” Pietro d’Abano “with his heterodox doctrines intended that the old world was changing” by bringing to an end the Medieval Ages and giving way to the “exciting youth of the Renaissance,” is to fall into a double error. On the one hand, the error consisted in admitting that the determination of the mutations of faith in connection with the “great conjunctions” was impiety; on the other, in accepting that the doctrine, no matter how impious, of the horoscope of religions announced the end of the Medieval Ages, when instead it was the characteristic expression of that age. The Fathers of the Church were already concerned with the tie between the stars and Christianity, a tie established in the Gospel by the star of the Magi. The connection between the events of the world (mutations of kingdoms and of religions) and the “great conjunctions” is quite ancient and of a Mesopotamian origin. Its widest diffusion went first throughout Greece and then through the Arabic, Hebraic, and Christian worlds, even in thinkers who were most religiously zealous like Abraham Bar Hiyya, the first to write philosophy in Hebrew, and Abraham Ibn Ezra, the commentator on the Bible. On the evidence that Roger Bacon and Pierre d’Ailly accepted the doctrine demonstrates that it had appeared reconcilable with faith. If certain historians were to have read Vigintiloquium (verb. 5) of Cardinal d’Ailly, whose piety cannot be doubted, they would have found the most plausible justification for the fact that the celestial spheres foretold the birth of the Son of Man: “Nature, as the maid of its own Lord and Creator and subservient to the divine omnipotence, could cooperate for the conception and child-bearing from which God was born. Nature also concurred through the virtue of the stars and of heaven with the natural virtue of the Virgin Mother” (huic operi deifico conceptionis et nativitatis natura tamquam famula Domino suo et Creatori subserviens divine omnipotentie cooperari potuit et in his per celi et astrorum virtutem concurrere cum virtute naturali Virginis matris eius). Friar Roger Bacon, a soul deeply mystical, who, like Tommaso Campanella, saw the world as the living codex of God, could write, “When Jove … comes into conjunction with Mercury, we have the Mercurial law, of which kind is the Christian law.” Nature is the maid of God and it is subservient to the Creator: Famula Domino suo et Creatori subserviens. “The heavens sing the glory of
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God,” as it is written in the Psalms, and as the most pious Abraham Judaeus and the Cardinal d’Ailly repeat, the stars, too, are the angels of God. Returning to Pietro d’Abano, we may concede that he accepted many astrological superstitions, but no substantial arguments exist that demonstrate Pietro’s clear adoption of a position in favor of Averroism, or of a sympathy openly stated for the eternity of the world, which is a thesis he recognized to be against faith. Not even his position in regard to the intellect, which he approached with much caution, acknowledging that according to Aristotle the agent intellect is part of the human soul, can be taken as an Averroistic doctrine. What we find in Pietro d’Abano is his acceptance of all the practices of astrological medicine with their relative magical performances. This reveals that he was not holding on to a declared Averroism, but he acquired those naturalistic interests that the Arabic influence had widely divulged. These interests in nature in the field of astrology and magic gave way to a most abundant literature, in which most often a polemic was assumed against the members of religious orders. More than the semblance of a battle of ideas, this took the curious aspect of a competition in the use of miraculous prescriptions. It is the impression gathered from reading Liber astronomicus of Guido Bonatti of Forlí, a professor at Bologna who died before the fourteenth century. He was a vivacious polemist against theologians and friars, especially against Giovanni of Vicenza, whose miracles attracted, as we have seen, the satires and the jokes of the eccentric Boncompagno. It is not here the time to stop and consider the many treatises on geomancy in Latin and vulgar of Bartholomew of Parma, even though the growing curiosity for the sciences of nature transpires from them. This curiosity was characteristic of the compilers from Arabic, whether or not they were interested in astronomy and geology as was Ristoro of Arezzo, who followed faithfully on the footprints of AlFarghani, or cultivated medicine as Dino del Garbo, a student of Taddeo Alderotti. Like his son Tommaso, Dino del Garbo also had philosophical interests. Some of these compilers were famous anatomists, such as Mondino, or disciples and admirers of Pietro d’Abano, or well-known professors such as Niccolò di Santa Sofia and Gentile of Foligno. These compilers are not to be considered all as Averroistic or classified under the same label of Averroism, simply because they inclined toward the experience and the cultivation of the sciences and because they favored the autonomy of nature as a system complete in itself and regulated by fixed laws. This, taken in its generality, was an Aristotelian conception, not necessarily heretical, although it mostly excluded divine intervention. 2. Cecco d’Ascoli Equally, nothing of obvious Averroistic doctrines can be found in Cecco d’Ascoli, a famous astrologer and professor in Bologna, in whose book of Commenti we searched in vain the motive of his condemnation. On the contrary, we see Cecco inveighing against the books of the Pseudo-Zoroaster and
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defending the miracles that show in Jesus “the true Son of God not made by the nature of the heavens, but the maker of the nature of the heavens” (quod vere sit Filius Dei et non factus a natura coelestium, immo natura caelestis factor). In the Acerba, Cecco insists on criticizing “the false Averroès” who “with his sophisms and a new five pointed star, now has more virtue than when he was alive” (bk. 1, ch. 3). The soul, lord of its own destiny, stands at the center of the universe: “To benefit the human creature / God made the heavens with the earth, / Creating in the creature the divine figure, / In the likeness worthy of his form, / And placing it on the vast horizon, / Where one perishes or becomes worthy” (Per grazia de l’umana creatura / Deo fe’ li cieli col terrestro mondo, / In lei creando divina figura, / A somiglianza de soa forma degna, / Ponendola ne l’orizzonte fondo, / Ove se damna over se fa benegna). The various stellar influences reign over the soul, and they incline the soul without obliging it, since it can free itself from them or use them to its own advantage. Then, the soul è donna sopra tutte stelle” (is a maiden above all the stars): “Virtue is acquired from the rays of stars, / Though virtue is not natural to us, / But it disposes the soul to beauty, and / To the conquest of a virtuous goodness. / Virtue is an elective habit / That stands in the midst of two extremes.” (Vertú s’acquista per raggio di stella, / Non dico ch’a noi sia naturale, / Ma in quanto se dispon l’anima bella / Ad conseguir el virtuoso bene … / Donqua vertù è abito electivo / Che sta nel mezzo de do parti estreme). Cecco d’Ascoli formulated critiques and sarcasms against the Averroistic conception of the unity of the intellect: “If everything were one soul or intellect / My own saying would be that of all / For it would be in the soul as its subject … / The intellective soul is our substantial / Form, that gives us existence, / As it is demonstrated by reason. / O Averroès, with your silly sect, / You have closed your eyes to the good, / And this reason destroys your arguments.” Se tucto fosse un’alma o un intellecto Seria la mia sententia dico in tucti Perché è nell’alma come in suo subiecto … L’anima intellectiva è forma nostra Substantial, che dà l’essere a nui, Secondo che la mia ragione demostra; O Averroisse, con la secta sciocca Se tucto fosse un’alma o un intellecto Seria la mia sententia dico in tucti Perché è nell’alma come in suo subiecto … L’anima intellectiva è forma nostra Substantial, che dà l’essere a nui, Secondo che la mia ragione demostra; O Averroisse, con la secta sciocca
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Che verso el ben chiudesti l’occhi tui Questa rascione tuoi dicti sbrocca Against Averroès, Cecco insists on the creation: “I believe with the light of nature that nature comprehends creation” (Io ciò confesso in lume di natura, la qual comprende creazione). He concludes with a hymn to the theological virtues: “Our end is to see God in the Highest. / With our holy faith, we ascend to Him, / For without faith its creature is damned. / To the holy kingdom of eternal peace / One arrives climbing the three stairs / Where human safety is not silent, / So that I would see with the divine souls / The supreme goodness of the eternal end.” El nostro fine è de vedere Osanna. Per nostra sancta fede a Lui se sale, E senza fede l’opera se danna. Al sancto regno dell’eterna pace Convence de salir per le tre scale Ove l’umana salute non tace, Aciò ch’io veggia con l’alme divine El sommo bene de l’eterna fine 3. John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua John of Jandun acted as the bridge between the Averroism of Paris and that of Padua. He held a position as moderate as the one held by Siger under the Thomistic pressure after 1270. Though he denied that the soul is to the body what the form of a seal is to the wax, John recognized, in the vexata quaestio of the intellect, that human thought operates only in collaboration with the images of the senses. Antonio Nardi gives this synthesis on the thought of Jandun: “the intellect is … tied with the human being by nature with a bond so intimate that the human being would not be performing according to its natural functions, like the one of understanding, without the cooperation of fantasy. Man is a composition of animality and rationality, and the intellect is the principal part of this synthesis.” This opinion concerning the soul as a forma operans intrinseca ad corpus (a form operative within the body) was shared by the Averroist Taddeo of Parma, a teacher in Bologna whose quaestiones on the soul, composed about 1320, ended with this classical formulation: However, everybody be aware that in these writings I have said things that I have sustained not as my own opinions, but only as their expositor. The truth is that our intellective soul is the substantial form that perfects the human body inherently and was infused by the first principle by way of creation.… The truth is that there are as many intellects as there are human bodies (advertat tamen quilibet in his scriptis … me
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This line of thought of Magister Taddeo in Bologna, around 1325, was also embraced by Angelo d’Arezzo. John of Jandun took part in the Paduan Averroism, but his name was also strictly connected with that of Marsilius of Padua. Marsilius was born in Padua between 1275 and 1280 and died in Munich in 1342. The two were bonded by a strong friendship consolidated by a constant collaboration and a community of experiences that included those of thought. “His most dear Marsilius” was the one to introduce John to the reading of the problems of Pietro d’Abano. When Marsilius taught in Paris it was said that his opus magnum, the Defensor pacis, had been partially composed by John. The figure of Marsilius calls to mind those of Ubertino of Casale, William of Ockham, and Ludwig of Bavaria, all of whom practiced Marsilius’s teachings. On the theoretical level, Marsilius’s figure focused attention on the fundamental exigency that will be the characteristic of the Renaissance, of a natural science of human aggregates, considered as natural organisms. It has been said that this meant an integral humanization of the State, no longer anchored in religious presuppositions, but founded on the concreteness of human volition, that is, based on the universitas civium (on the universal participation of all citizens). Under this aspect, we may say that a thematic of the Renaissance thought was already in its process of germination.
Six THE THOUGHT OF DANTE Of the philosophical thought of Dante, Giovanni Gentile wrote the following assessment: The French people love to remember that the beginnings of their national prose are due to philosophical writers such as Montaigne and Descartes. Italy did not wait until the sixteenth or seventeenth century in order to produce great philosophical works in the new language. Under this aspect, the work of Dante is exceptionally important. Thomas and Bonaventure wrote in Latin. Their thought, the soul of their thought, goes beyond the borders of their nation; it is Scholastic, European Catholic, and Christian. It is Italian only so far as it is the substantial feeding of a movement of thought without which the Italian civilization would be inconceivable. At the head of this movement is Dante. Dante is the one who, in respect to the history of the vital thought of Italy, made Scholasticism Italian and perfected it. 1. The Problem of Dante’s Philosophy The above evaluation gives way to some spontaneous remarks. It is undeniable that Dante as a philosopher, in the course of the European speculation, has left no trace comparable to that of Descartes. Dante was not the first to write philosophical matters in the Italian language, or his work was the one that inserted Scholasticism into Italian cultural life, or he represented a speculation so characteristic to be destined to orient any successive process of thought. The Franciscan movement and the Aristotelian-Thomistic tendencies assumed their own “Italian” colors independently from the poetry of Dante. In Dante, these tendencies evolved into Italian poetry only because they were already previously oriented in a manner that Alighieri profoundly felt as his own. The grafting of Augustinian Platonism in the Franciscan movement, the sense of a widely embracing humanity that transfigured the whole philosophy of ideas, and the wise Thomistic adaptation of the Aristotelian philosophy in order to build a great Christian apologetics, revealed the particular tone of the Franciscan speculation. It was a speculation with a humane tone, with inter-
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ests strongly turned toward the society of human beings, to their living together, to their earthly obligation, without forgetting their destiny, which was not going to conclude on earth. Though allowing a Platonic craving for the divine, the Franciscan current divested Platonism of its ascetic tone, meanwhile translating its eros into charitas. Thomism brought the pure Aristotelian science down to earth to fight within the history of humankind. This humanizing, realized certainly at the light of a profound religious experience, was the characteristic that tied to a historical situation and to the vicissitudes of the Italian life the meditation of Bonaventure and Thomas. This meditation that in its character was universal was now tinted with colors that at least in part were different from the medieval thinkers of other nations. Hereby, Dante could more profoundly draw from them since they were more congenial. Even if we think of Dante in this way, we should conveniently tone down the conclusion of Gentile and articulate better the contention, not acceptable, as it is, of Guido De Ruggiero, that Dante is the foreteller of Humanism. It will be difficult to find in Alighieri some “Renaissance” tonalities more alive than in one hundred medieval writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is true that some of Dante’s attitudes seemed equally congenial to some significant thinkers of the fifteenth century, such as Leonardo Bruni or Giannozzo Manetti, who saw in Dante a champion of that “civil” humanism that they wanted to realize in literary humanism. We recognize that Dante contributed to link several themes of the great theoretical elaboration of Bonaventure and Thomas with the civility of the Italian communes. In connection with this, we must also state that a conspicuous wing of the culture of the fifteenth century referred back to Dante, to his conception of life, to his idealities, construing a posteriori a continuity that would be erroneous to assume already operant in causative terms. It is true that Dante subsumed in his thought Franciscan as well as Aristotelian-Thomistic motives, and that a whole vision of things is transformed in him into high poetry. It is as well true that we cannot speak of his work as of a great speculative synthesis of the two currents of thought that found their expression in St. Bonaventure and in St. Thomas. His great labor in philosophy was Convivio, which is a work of popularizing nature but aimed at a readership of high intellectual capacities. The book was intended “to initiate to philosophy those who, for public office or family responsibilities, or simply, material circumstances, could not educate themselves about the greatest problems, and derive from them those benefits to which everyone is entitled.” This is what the author confessed the book to be, and this, the book was. Convivio acquires significance as a means to penetrate the mind of Dante, the author of Divine Comedy. In itself, the book does not rise to the level of the great speculation. Conscious of this, Gentile searched for the philosophy of Dante in Divine Comedy, a philosophical poem. He writes that it is a poem “with the same right of all the ancient philosophical poems of Greece and Rome.… In Dante, philosophy is not a particular and accessory element, but general, pervasive of
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the whole, and principal. The poetry is rather in the particulars.” We must agree with some reservation, and accept probably a rapprochement between Dante and Lucretius, but not Parmenides. The reason is that we will find in Dante some fortunate presentations of theses that may be Aristotelian or even Platonic, but not an original and thoroughly argued conception of reality like the one we see in the verses of Parmenides, which often are not so beautiful. Recalling an abused similitude, if we could say that St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure erected cathedrals of ideas, then we could also say that Dante elevated cathedrals but with music, sounds, and light. He constructed—if we wish to continue with the pious metaphor—the temple of God. Leaving out all images, he expressed in the Comedy his conception of reality, as Giotto translated it into his frescoes or the Campanile (Bell Tower) in Florence, or Leopardi in the Idilli. As it is, the Campanile is not a work of philosophy. When the most famous students of Medieval thought—Pierre Mandonnet, Étienne Gilson, and Bruno Nardi—faced the reconstruction of the Dantesque philosophy, if they did not abandon themselves to strange fantasies as did Mandonnet, they restricted themselves to determine on particular points the dependence of Dante from one or another thinker, or stopped to consider one of his interesting elaborations on a topic. After hearing these experts, we will remain convinced that the poet followed the thesis of the plurality of the forms and had been subjected to Platonic, Avicennian, and perhaps Averroistic influences. We will cite a verse, a strophe, or a period that have been illustrated, but we will not say that we discovered a supreme philosopher in the technical meaning of the term, as the author of a new elaboration performed at the level of critical consciousness. Bruno Nardi, who has acquired the greatest merits as illustrator of the Dantesque thought and who maintained that “in regard to some problems the poet shows to have gone deeper than his contemporaries,” when asked to specify his judgment, admitted that he was speaking of some particulars inserted within “the general scheme ... of the Christian Scholasticism.” We may conclude that a vigorous vision of the whole, rationally argued, is absent in Dante, even though some theses concerning language, beauty, and the “cagion che il mondo ha fatto reo” (the reason why the world has gone bad) (Purgatory, Canto 16, v. 104) impress us because of their originality. 2. What Philosophy Is for Dante At the beginning of De monarchia Dante makes the interesting declaration that the principal duty of all human beings, who are by superior nature directed to love truth, is that of recognizing that all human beings have enriched themselves with the fruits of the labor of their ancestors. At their own turn, they must labor to produce something that will enrich the posterity. He confessed: “I think of this very often and, so that I will not be reproached for having hidden underground the coin given to me, I intend to entertain some fecund reflections for public utility, and also to produce some fruitful conclu-
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sions concerning arguments not yet explored. What advantage would ever offer whosoever was to demonstrate again a theorem of Euclid, or reveal anew the happiness described by Aristotle, or defend old age already defended by Cicero? It would be a tedious superfluity, a source of fastidious and unfruitful things.” It is the duty of every person to bring to humanity, in order to accrue its patrimony, the fruit of all personal experiences. In this regard, Dante underlined two things. There must be continuity in the growth of human knowledge that is not like a vortex that engulfs everything. It is rather like the tree that sprouts, flourishes, and fructifies, nourished by spring from the depth. On the other hand, there is always the necessity of contributing the fruit, no matter how limited, of personal reflections. This last consideration ought to be kept in mind, given the many pure and simple reductions of the thought of Dante to one or another kind of an already well known systematization. In an often cited passage of the Convivio (bk. 2, ch. 12, sects. 1–8), Dante narrates his initiation to philosophy, which happened later in his life and was sought after in consolation of the loss of “il primo diletto” (the first love) of his soul. No comfort comparable to this loss existed, and Dante searched in the documents of the ancients how they found consolation in the time of great suffering: I began to read that book of Boethius, unknown to many peoples, in which he consoled himself, after he was condemned and imprisoned. But I heard that Tullius also wrote a book in which, treating of friendship, he used words of consolation for the loss of Laelius … and I applied myself to the reading of that, too. In the beginnings, it was hard to penetrate their sentences, but finely I succeeded to capture their meaning as much as the art of grammar that I knew and the ingenuity I possessed allowed me. With my ingenuity, almost like dreaming, I used already to see many things as one can find in the Vita Nuova. And as it usually happens that, when man goes searching for silver, he finds gold, beyond his intentions … I, who was trying to find consolation, found not only a remedy for my tears, but also words of authors of science and of books. Considering then these authors, I formulated the judgment that philosophy, which was the mistress of these authors, was the supreme thing among these sciences and these books. Then, I was imagining this lady like a gentle lady, and I could not think of her in any other way than in a merciful posture. She was so resplendent with the splendor of truth that I could hardly turn my sight away from her. After all this imagining, I started to go to the places where she shows herself veraciously, and this is in the schools of the peoples given to religious life and in halls where the philosophers dispute. Thus, in a short time, perhaps by the end of as much as thirty months, her sweetness was pervading me so that with her love I was banishing and destroying every other thought.
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We must focus on several places of this confession. First, as Giulio Salvadori did with refinement, we should focus on the particular nature of the two works from which the poet asked help for his most bitter pain: Cicero’s Laelius and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In both these works, the consolation is based on the dialectic of love that from an earthly passion is Platonically transfigured in the search of a goodness that is not of this world. We see that to a desire that functions as the adversary of reason, and which is lost in an image of a fictional goodness, the authors substitute an enlightened love that ceaselessly strives for the supreme goodness, which is the first principle of existence. This love substitutes the earthly lady with “the most beautiful and noblest daughter of the emperor of the universe, to whom Pythagoras assigned the name ‘Philosophia’.” Philosophy, after illuminating the mind, helps the orientation of the will, by correcting the natural tendency of the human being towards the right goal. This doctrine of love, before being expressed in the Purgatory (Canto 18), where it is treated in the discussion on free will, was found in a passage of the Convivio (bk. 4, ch. 12, sects. 14–18), justly evinced by Nardi: The greatest desire, which was at first given by nature, of every thing is to return to its own principle. Now, God is the principle of our souls and the maker of those things that are similar to Him. The soul wishes most greatly to return to its principle. The pilgrim, who goes through places where he never went before, seeing some houses in the distance believes erroneously that they are the inn, remains disoriented and looks carefully from then on at each house until he finds the inn. In the same way, our soul, as soon as it enters into the new and never done before path of life, fixes intensely its eyes to the end wishing for the supreme good, but is averted by things possessing some particular good. Since the soul’s first knowledge is imperfect, having no experience or doctrine, small goods seem to be great; the soul becomes desirous for the first time. We see small children greatly desire an apple; as they grow, desire a small bird; and again later, desire clothing; after that, a horse; subsequently, a woman; following that, they desire some wealth; thereafter, a great wealth; and again, more and more. The soul encounters these things because in none of them can it find what it is searching for, and it believes it to be able to find it farther, in the next one. The reason is that every desirable thing is one alongside the others and stands before the eyes of our soul almost in a pyramidal fashion, in which the minimal desirable thing at first covers all desirable, and it is as if it were the point of the last desirable that is God, the base of them all. The more we advance proceeding from the apex to the base, the greater the desirable appear; and this is the reason why the more we acquire the more widely we desire, one thing after another. In this way our path goes astray as it happens to the roads in this world.
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In Convivio, the lover of the donna gentile (the gentle lady) satiates his thirst for love in the Sapienza [Wisdom, a feminine term in Italian], in conjunction with Her who gathers in herself all that humanity may desire, with her who was beside God when God made the universe: “I say that She is completely motherhood and that She was before any other principle. I say that God together with Her initiated the world, especially the movement of the heavens, which generated all things and from which every motion was initiated and caused. The one who has put the universe in motion was thinking of Her (Costei pensò chi mosse l’universo). This means that She was in the divine thought, which is intellect, when God made the world. Consequently, She made the world.” Sapienza is the object of our first natural inclination. We are by nature intrinsically constituted of a need for knowledge (sapere): “Every thing has received an imprint from the providence of nature to be inclinable to its own perfection. Hereby, since science is the ultimate perfection of our soul, in which all our happiness is found, we by nature are all subject to the desire for it.” The desire for knowledge in this life is commensurate with our capacities and susceptible to being satisfied within the limits established for it. Someone has observed that in the third treatise of Convivio Dante accepts the possibility that the human being will achieve full satisfaction, a happiness acquired naturally in a human perspective, different from the situation presented by the verses of Purgatory (Canto 21, vv. 1–3): “The natural thirst that never can be quenched / except by water that gives grace, the draught / the simple woman of Samaria sought, / tormented me” (La sete natural che mai non sazia / se non con l’acqua onde la femminetta / Sammaritana dimandò la grazia, / mi travagliava). Undeniably, Dante faces the difficulty: if the highest cognitions, “God, eternity, and the first matter,” are beyond the capacity of our intellect, how can anyone speak of an earthly perfect joy? The answer that he gives in Convivio, should we truly consider it uncertain and variable within Convivio itself, distinguishing between the third and fourth treatise, and changing more sharply coming to Comedy? Human knowledge—he writes in the third treatise (ch. 15, sects. 6–10)—is in its ultimate perfection commensurate to the human thirst. Nature has done nothing in vain: The natural desire possessed by each thing is measured according to the possibility of the being that desires.… The human desire is measured in this life according to the science that we can here have, and this limit is trespassed by error alone.… [the desire] is commensurate to the angelic nature, but it is limited in the sapienza [knowledge, wisdom] that can be acquired only according to the nature [capacity] of each [human being]. This is the reason why the Saints suffer no envy, since each one has reached the end of his desire, and their desire was measured with the goodness of nature. Hence, given that the knowledge of
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what God and other things are is not possible for our nature, we are naturally not going to desire that knowledge. In the fourth treatise (ch. 13, pars. 7–9), in which the above passage is cited, the following is added, “our natural desires … reach to a certain limit; [the desire] of the science is natural, so that it, too, reaches an established limit, given that only a few for the difficulty of the path can complete the journey.” Dante quotes, “even Paul says: ‘Do not know more than it is suitable, but know according to measure’.” This thesis, in relation to a different matter, is precisely the same that we read in the third canto (vv. 85–87) of the Paradise: E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace: / ell’è quel mare al qual tutto si move / ciò ch’ella cria o che natura face (And in his will there is our peace: / it is that sea to which all things move, / the beings he creates or nature makes). The natural thirst for knowledge that characterizes the human creature finds, on earth, an adequate fulfilment in Sapienza, in the measure that each can know her on this earth. The measure is graded according to human limits, until this cognition is human cognition, but it always means in some guise a contact with the noblest daughter of God. When this contact is truly actualized, then full happiness exists. We should not forget that the donna gentile of Convivio cannot be sic et simpliciter identifiable with the Aristotelian philosophy, that excludes from itself the conquest of the Christian revelation. The terms with which Dante represents her, connecting her at the same time with the Sapienza [Wisdom] of the Proverbs and with the Word of the Gospel of John, coincide with those with which the more orthodox theologians speak of the Son of God as the world of the exemplary ideas. In the third treatise (ch. 12, sect. 13) of Convivio, Dante speaks, with terms that could not be more explicit, of the understanding that God has: “Looking at himself,” God sees, “all things together, since the distinction of the things is found in him in the same way that an effect is found in its cause.” He still sees the things in their distinction in the unity of Sapienza. “She [Sapienza] is thus the divine philosophy of the divine essence, because in God there cannot be a thing added to his essence; and she is the noblest, since most noble is the divine essence; in him she is in a manner perfect and true, almost as in an eternal matrimony.” It is to this strong expression that we must return, better than to the testimonies, as rich as they are vague, searched in Thomistic and Aristotelian texts, when referring to the phrase of St. Bonaventure, “omnes rationes exemplares concipiuntur ab aeterno in vulva aeternae sapientiae” (all exemplary ideas are conceived from eternity in the womb of the eternal Sapienza). It is Bonaventure’s developments concerning the divine Sapienza and the exemplary ideas, identified with the Son, which these Dantesque considerations bring us to: “[She is] the spouse of the Emperor of the heavens … no, not only the spouse, but the sister and the most delighted daughter!” Sapienza, because she is daughter of God, satisfies our natural cognitive needs in a manner adequate to our being and, at the same time, founds and rouses faith, hope, and
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love for the One to whom she is eternally attracted: “By way of these three virtues, we philosophize and ascend to those celestial Athenian places, where Stoics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans, through the light of eternal truth, unanimously in one act of will, come together.” 3. “La Donna Gentile.” Philosophy and Theology. Morality. Martha and Mary We return to the ancient and tormented question of la donna gentile in relation to Vita Nuova and the Beatrice of Comedy. Dante openly declared that he intended to identify la donna gentile of Convivio with the “gentile donna giovane e bella molto” (gentle young maiden, very beautiful) who, compassionately gazing at him from a window, came to alleviate his suffering. Dante, moving from one work to another, used, in referring to the woman, terms, which are almost opposite. In Vita Nuova, the love for la donna gentile moves in the ambiance of a desire that contrasts with reason: Oi anima pensosa, / Questi è uno spiritel novo d’amore, / Che reca innanzi me li suoi desiri (Hear me, O pensive soul, / This is a new spirit of love, / That brings in front of me its own desires). In Convivio, the donna gentile is daughter to God, and her eyes are lights of Paradise. Gilson believes that Dante, in Vita Nuova, wanted to represent the comforting philosophy as a remedy so to forget in a variety of profane studies the woman he loved, who had already risen to heaven, and therefore was in the opposite condition to that of the Dantesque frailty. This ingenious interpretation does not explain the citation in Convivio, where la donna gentile, in a moment that should have been successive to that in Vita Nuova, is shown as the guide to Paradise. According to Michele Barbi, in Vita Nuova the allusion is to a real love of Dante, who at times cunningly excused himself for it, but that was a true bewilderment, caused by a real woman in flesh. Nardi supposed the goal, to which Dante alluded to have been different, in Vita Nuova, and thus the version that reached us must be other than the original. It is difficult to affirm that the amiable lady of Vita Nuova, in the manner in which she is now represented, could be interpreted as philosophy [Filosofia], even if seen in subordination to the beatific vision of Beatrice. We cannot see how it can be considered as the prelude to the Convivio. No matter how much Dante could subordinate philosophy to faith, he could never reach the point of considering philosophy and the love for it a sinful thing and the progeny of a desire contrasting with reason, before or after the production of Convivio. The relationship Vita Nuova and Convivio concerning la donna gentile, within the terms in which it is presented, is unsolvable in a linear and satisfying form, no matter how very subtle the interpreter could be. For this reason, the presupposition of Nardi, at least for its refusal of all other interpretations in this regard, appears as the most persuasive. In Convivio, the questions concerning what place to assign to philosophy in regard to theology and what conception Dante effectively had of philoso-
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phizing are even more complex. The thesis most frequently supported is that Dante’s philosophizing is Thomism. This cannot be, and the clearly cut affirmation that the donna gentile represents the Aristotelian philosophy and nothing else, is not persuasive. We have seen above in clear terms how insistent Dante is when speaking of the divine Sapienza as the divine Logos, as the daughter of God, as the first cause of the whole universe, the love of which constitutes human philosophy. It is love for the Son of God: “It can be said that her aspect is useful / For reaching what seems the wonderment, / Hereby our faith is helped; // Although it was from eternity so ordered. / Things appear in her aspect, / That show the pleasures, I say, of Paradise, // In the eyes and in her sweet smile, / That Love brings as to its proper place. / These things surpass our intellect, // As the ray of the sun a frail sight: / And since I cannot gaze upon them, / I am content in saying little about it.” E puossi dir ch’l suo aspetto giova A consentir ciò che par maraviglia; Onde la nostra fede è aiutata; Però fu tal da etterno ordinata Cose appariscon ne lo suo aspetto, Che mostran de’ piacer di Paradiso Dico ne li occhi e nel suo dolce riso Che le vi reca Amor com’a suo loco. Elle soverchian lo nostro intelletto, Come raggio di sole un frale viso: E perch’io non le posso mirar fiso, Mi convien contentar di dirne poco. The love that inflames the poet, the love addressed to “the most beautiful and noblest daughter of the Emperor of the universe,” completely invests the divine Sapienza, which as a motion of research culminates in her first principle that is Moral Philosophy. When this ceases to act, “all the other sciences are for some time forgotten; there will be neither generation nor life or happiness, and they would be written down in vain and found too obsolete.” On the contrary, Moral Philosophy finds peace in the Divine Science that is theology, which “does not suffer from battles of opinions or sophistical arguments, for God is its subject and its most excellent certainty.” This is the doctrine, which gives the peace of spirit for which the soul goes searching throughout the world. Citing the Song of Solomon (6: 8–9), Dante adds (Convivio, treat. 2, ch. 14, pars. 18–21), “Sixty are the queens.… My dove, my perfect one, is only one.” His comment says, “He calls all the sciences by the name of queens … but he calls this one dove because it is not touched by disputes, and he calls it ‘perfect’ because it shows the truth in which our soul finds tranquility.” The principal force for any research derives from the desire for happiness. Any research is an action; the end is peace in the divine vision. The various specu-
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lative sciences move between these two poles which are the need for happiness and the return to the mansion of the Father. The supreme goal of the human being, the pilgrim (in statu viatoris), is the good, and everything is subordinate to an ethical criterion. The supreme good in patria [at the mansion of the Father] is God’s vision. Within the allegory of the heavens, il primo mobile (the first mobile) represents ethics, and the Empyrean represents theology. The fixed end, the unmoved motor, represents divine science, principle and end of human anxiety. The moral norms are cause and rule of every process directed to God. If we read the epistle of Dante to Can Grande della Scala, we see that the subject of Comedy is the human creature. It is the human being who “in so far as it performs with merits or demerits through the choices of free-will, becomes subject to the justice of rewards and punishments” (prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem est iustitiae premiandi et puniendi obnoxious). The end of Comedy is “to bring the living from this life of misery to the kingdom of happiness” (est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miseriae et perducere ad statum felicitatis). Dante (Epistles, num. 13, pars. 3–1) concludes, “This work, in its general outline and in its parts, falls under the field of moral philosophy or ethics. The whole of it and the complex of its parts are organized in view of behavior, not of speculation. Even though in some parts the treatment assumes a speculative form, its purpose is not speculative but practical. Aristotle in the second book of Metaphysics said that at times, and for some reason, even people of action speculate.” Martha dominates in statu viatoris, Mary in patria. Both Martha and Mary express two kinds of activity, two virtues on earth. Even contemplation on this earth is a human activity and the loftiest of all activities. It must be distinguished from the kind of seeing that constitutes supreme vision and is supreme peace. The part that Mary has chosen is the best and will not be taken away from her. This is the part that will achieve total fulfillment. Everyone sees the difficulty of the task of bringing to an agreement the Dante who places moral philosophy before metaphysics, and the Dante who, though acknowledging of the human being “in this life two forms of happiness, according to two paths, one good, the second best,” does not hesitate to claim that of contemplation to be the best (Convivio, 4, ch. 17, par. 9). Even his explanation, taken in its literal simplicity, does not immediately convince. He claims to have accepted the primacy of the moral virtues only because the audience, to which the Convivio speaks, consists of followers of Martha more than of Mary. Dante faces the dilemma between the earthly primacy of active charity and the Aristotelian thesis of the supremacy of contemplation. On this, the Thomistic thesis is clear (Summa Theologica, 2–2, q. 182, art. 4): “According to its own nature … the contemplative life has the primacy over the active; … according to us, the active life comes before the contemplative, because it disposes to the contemplative.” The supremacy of moral philosophy maintains all its value, even with the ideal primacy of Mary, since the ethical virtue constitutes the condition and the basis for contemplation. If the
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human being does not overcome sin, struggle, climb with the proper outfit of good actions toward goodness, it will not see God. Jacob married Rachel only after seven years of matrimony with Leah. The image in the Purgatory (Canto 27, vv. 97–108) is transparent: “In my dream, I seemed to see a woman / Both young and fair, who along a plain, / gathering flowers, singing she said: // “Whoever asks my name, know I’m Leah, / and I apply my lovely hands to fashion / a garland of the flowers I have gathered. // To find delight within this mirror I adorn / myself; whereas my sister Rachel / never deserts her mirror; there she sits all day. // She longs to see her fair eyes gazing, / As I, to see my hands adorning, long: / She is content with seeing, I with labor.” Giovane e bella in sogno mi parea Donna vedere andar per una landa Cogliendo fiori; e cantando dicea: “Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda Ch’I mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno Le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda. Per piacermi a lo specchio, qui m’adorno; Ma mia suora Rachel mai non si smaga Dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto giorno. Ell’è de’ suoi belli occhi veder vaga com’io de l’adornarmi con le mani; Lei lo vedere, e me l’ovrare appaga.” Rachel sits on the Empyreal with Beatrice; Dante is leaving Virgil to meet Beatrice (Purgatory, Canto 27, vv.115–117): “Your hunger will find its peace, today, / through that sweet fruit, which the care of / mortals seeks among so many branches.” Quel dolce pome che per tanti rami Cercando va la cura de’ mortali, Oggi porrà in pace le tue fami. They are the words of Virgil to Dante. The labor and anxiety of purification, the moral liberation of the soul, whose subordinate assistance comes from the earthly science, will give way to the peace of the science of God. Beatrice is coming. Leah has gathered the flowers of good actions but with Rachel man will be able to contemplate. The soul has gone through the temporal and eternal fire. At the service of moral conduct, natural reason, moved by the intervention of Beatrice coming from the Empyrean, has guided the soul. The human creature is finally capable of raising toward God “in a free, right, and reasonable way,” ready to focus seeing on the smile of those beautiful eyes (ibid., vv. 136–137): “Until the coming of the glad, lovely eyes / That, weeping, sent me to your side.”
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The place assigned to morality means that every science is subordinate to the supreme end, which is the science of God. Contemplation is no longer on the natural level, because only the divine light moves all our knowledge, “lume tra ’l vero e lo ’ntelletto” (Purgatory, Canto 6, vv. 43–48): “But in a quandary so deep, do not stop, / but wait for words that she, the light / between your mind and truth, will speak. / Lest you misunderstand, the she I mean / Is Beatrice; upon this mountain’s peak, / There you shall see her smiling joyously.” Veramente a cosí alto sospetto non ti fermar, se quella nol ti dice che lume fia tra ’l vero e lo ’ntelletto: Non so se ’ntendi: io dico di Beatrice: Tu la vedrai di sopra, in su la vetta Di questo monte, ridere e felice. The immobile Empyrean, symbol of theology, is the root of the motion of the sciences, but the motion is transmitted by the First Mover. This is Ethics, the ruler of all goodness, to which all inquiries are subdued. Beatrice is the one urging the purifying ascent of the soul within the creation, with natural reason as its guide. Every knowledge, every science, is planned to move toward the first object of love. The reason for the existence of all things is the supreme Reason of the whole. This Reason is not known in earthly exile, but it is the Reason that consolidates by faith every syllogism, which is always posterior to a primary credence (Paradise, Canto 24, vv. 70–77): “The deep things / that on me bestow their image here, / are hid from sight below, / So their being lies in faith alone … and / it is from this faith that we must reason, / deducing what we can from syllogisms, / without our being able to see more.” Le profonde cose Che mi largiscon qui la lor parvenza A li occhi di laggiú son sí ascose Che l’esser loro v’è in sola credenza … E da questa credenza ci conviene Sillogizzar, sanz’avere altra vista. Everything is truly founded on faith, every knowledge and every virtue (Paradise, Canto 24, vv. 88–96): “Next, from the deep light gleaming, I heard: / ‘What is the origin of the dear gem / that comes to you, the gem on which all virtues / are founded?’ And I, ‘The Holy Ghost’s abundant / rain poured upon the parchments old and new; / that is the syllogism that has
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proved / with such persuasiveness that faith has truth / when set beside that argument, all other / demonstrations seem to me obtuse’.” Appresso uscí de la luce profonda Che lí splendeva: “questa cara gioia Sopra la quale ogni virtú si fonda, Onde ti venne?” Ed io: “La larga floia De lo Spirito Santo ch’è diffusa In su le vecchie e ’n su le nuove cuoia, È sillogiusmo che la m’ha conchiusa Acutamente sí, che ’nverso d’ella Ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa.” Our certainty of God is implanted on faith, not only on physical and metaphysical proofs (Ibid., vv. 130–138): “I answer: I believe in one God—sole, / Eternal—He who, motionless, moves all / The heavens with His love and His desire; / For this belief I have not only proofs / Both physical and metaphysical; / I also have the truth that here rains down / Through Moses, prophets, Psalms, / through the Gospel and you who wrote / words given to you by the Holy Ghost.” Io credo in uno Dio Solo ed etterno, che tutto il ciel move, Non moto, con amore e con disio. E a tal creder non ho io pur prove Fisice e metafisice, ma dalmi Anche la verità che quinci piove Per Moisè, per profeti e per salmi, Per l’Evangelio e per voi che scriveste Poi che l’ardente spirto vi fe’ almi. Philosophy, the human reflection of the divine Word, the love of the Spouse and Daughter of God, is founded at its root in the divine science that is “lume tra ’l vero e lo ’ntelletto” (light between the true and the intellect). As Bonaventure wrote, we know “per illum, qui est superessentialis radius, Christus Jesus” (through the one who is the highest essence of light, Jesus Christ). Queen among monarchs, similar to the candid dove, the science of God is the Empyreal among the various circles of the heavens of the sciences, which are all pervaded by the need of salvation. The goal of the universe is action, not speculation: “non ad speculandum, sed ad opus incoeptum est totum.” Dante, who has found consolation after the death of Beatrice in la donna gentile, discovers, as he gradually penetrates the significance of Sapienza, that la donna gentile is now assuming semblances similar to those of Beatrice. She brings him to the Empyreal where he finds the deceased maiden, who is in eternity alive and the first cause of his moral redemption
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and intellective ascent. Where Convivio ends, Comedy begins. La Donna (the Woman), who is contemplating God in the highest of the heavens, sends natural reason for the mortal redemption of Dante. Although the terms of the plot are the same, they pulsate with life, and are far richer. 4. The Sciences. Guido Vernani. The Averroism of Dante. The De Monarchia A pretended “rationalism” of Dante finds no confirmation in all of what we saw. We do not deny a relative autonomy in every section within the hierarchic order of the whole. In the frame, within the limits and the specified foundations of each, the single sciences, the various activities, move freely, as the heavens revolved, each in its own orbit, according to an eternal law, though the first cause and the supreme rule of their revolving remain fixed. Here is Aristotle, the incarnation of philosophy, at the natural level, the “maestro di color che sanno” (the teacher of those who know). Here is Siger, the symbol, we may say, of an acknowledgment of the value of Aristotelianism as a reasoning by syllogisms, as a philosophizing perfect and complete in itself, or, let’s say, the symbol of perfection of human natural inquiry. Here is Virgil, the supreme authority that reaches the limits of the eternal. Here is the relative autonomy of the Emperor on the political level. But on the spiritual level, here is the subordination of every thing to the Church: “There are sixty queens. … My dove, my perfect one, is one alone.” Since reality is founded on eternal reasons, the levels of reality implanted on the eternal reason have their relative independence. The ancient sages, each of which may be taken as exemplars in an area, as Tholomeus in astronomy or Aristotle in philosophy, are established as the perfect conscience of some spheres of the whole. These sages are nothing but instruments of the unique Reason that shines in them and brings them to cooperate for the actualization of the plan of which they know not the goal, which no natural light can grasp, though they are almost a preparation and entrance to it: “Per la luce della veritade etterna, in uno volere concordevolmente concorrono” (Through the light of the eternal truth, they all agreeably concur in one will). Before examining some particular facets of Dante’s thought, let us look at a problem that is pressing. What was his background, the philosophical culture of Dante? We saw him conquering in Cicero and Boethius that medicine of the soul, “che il mondo fallace / fa manifesto a chi di lei ben ode” [the medicine, which shows the fallaciousness of the world to the one who well hears about it] (Paradise, Canto 10, vv. 125–126). A common opinion among the schools of the different religious orders is that Dante frequented particularly the convent of Santa Maria Novella. It is here that friar Remigio de’ Girolami taught with success at the times of Dante. Remigio was no stranger to Thomistic influences and his Prologus super scientia generalis has been mentioned for the same thesis supported by Convivio, a thesis very common within Aristotelianism, on human creatures’ thirst for knowledge. During his
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childhood, he may have frequented the school of the Minor Franciscans in Santa Croce, a fact that could explain why Dante’s works have traces of the disputes of the Spiritualists and smack of Joachimite doctrines. Public disputations of philosophers were common, and they may have added new notions to the preexisting ones. Influences from friends existed: from Brunetto Latini to Guido Cavalcanti. Brunetto was rich in Aristotelian motives. He summarized and commented on the Ethics of Aristotle and the Rhetoric of Cicero. Cavalcanti was a subtle psychologist and one who audaciously denied traditional beliefs. Being open to extreme audacities of thought, Dante certainly enriched his world of thought with the most various experiences. Did he go to Paris? Boccaccio and Villani both stated that Dante visited Paris, but we cannot rely simply on their words. The story may have been generated, more than from anything else, from Dante’s exaltation of Siger of Brabant in heaven. This is the same Siger that Fiore [an anthology of 232 sonnets, attributed to Brunetto Latini, then to Dante, and finally to Durante] presented with William of Saint-Amour as the victim of friars’ hypocrisies: “With my bartering, I can sink anyone. / If it happens that a great literate comes / With the intention to reveal my sins, / With the force I have I’ll confound him. / Master Siger was not too happy: / They sent him to die with great pain / In the court of Rome, at Orvieto. / Master William, the good Saint-Amour, / I made prohibited in France and in public / That he be expelled from the kingdom.” Con mio baratto ciaschedun affondo; Chè sed e’ vien alcun gran litterato Che voglia discovrir il mi’ peccato, Co la forza ch’i’ho, i si’l confondo. Mastro Sighier non andò guari lieto: A ghiado il fe’ morire a grand dolore Nella corte di Roma, ad Orbivieto. Mastro Guglielmo, il buon di Sant’Amore, Feci di Francia metter in divieto E sbandir del reame a gran romore. Why has Dante exalted the condemned Siger to the glory of Paradise? How consistent is the old accusation made in the fourteenth century by the Dominican Guido Vernani in De reprobatione Monarchiae (On the Confutation of the Monarchia) that Dante held some Averroistic views? The origin of the accusation is in Monarchia, the most robust and passionate among the Dantesque philosophical works. It is imbued with a continuous meditation, and presented as the original fruit of a painful experience. It is not like Convivio [a banquet of knowledge] that has the pretense of vulgarizing knowledge and making it available to the best among his contemporary fellow citizens. God and nature, its minister, never act in vain. A proper end of the human family exists. This end is to actualize the potential intellect, the human intel-
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lect, which cannot be actualized in a single individual or group alone. It demands the participation of the whole humanity. In De Monarchia (bk. 1, ch. 3, par. 8), we read: “This special power (potentia) cannot become totally actualized (in actu reduci non potest) in an individual human person or some particular or distinct communities. A multitude of human beings is needed in order for this total power to be actualized. The same happens with prime matter that needs a multitude of generable things in order to be in actuality.” If this is the end of humanity (universalitas hominum), it is necessary that peace cement together the humanity: “It is in the quietude or tranquility of peace that humankind finds the best conditions for fulfilling its proper task, almost a divine task, as we learn from the statement, ‘Thou has made him a little lower than the angels’.” Only a universal agreement can bring humanity to become what it truly should be. Human beings are complementary and communicative; they can accomplish their mission exclusively in the unity of a common work: “Hence it is clear that universal peace is the most excellent means of securing our happiness. This is why the message from on high to the shepherds announced neither wealth, nor pleasure, nor honor, nor long life, nor health, nor strength, nor beauty, but peace. The heavenly host, indeed, proclaims: ‘Glory to God on high, and on earth peace to men of good will’” (Monarchia, bk. 1, ch. 4, pars. 2–3). Now, peace is achieved only in unity. Partiality and many groups with many leaders give way to many ferocious battles and contrasts. Every kingdom divided within itself will be subject to desolation (Omne regnum in se divisum desolabitur). From this comes the necessity of the coordination of all humankind and of its total subordination to a unique leader, the Monarch, who will be subject to God alone: “Human kind is in the best condition when, in the best possible way, it resembles God. But human kind resembles God in the greatest way when it has the greatest unity, because the true nature of unity is in God alone.… Thus, human kind is one in the greatest form when it comes together in unity, which can happen only when it is subject to one prince” (Monarchia, bk. 1, ch. 8, pars. 2–5). Monarchy is the only one that by offering peace offers to humankind the possibility of accomplishing collaboratively its mission. Unique, without enemies, with nothing else to desire, the Universal Monarch, free from every passion, would realize supreme justice without any difficulty. This Universal Monarch would be the living proof of earthly happiness: “A cause, more universal it is, more of the force of the cause it possesses, because an inferior cause is a cause, only in virtue of a superior one, as it is said in the De Causis. As much as a cause is a cause, so much it loves its effect, since this love is the function of a cause as such. Given that the Monarch is the most universal cause among all mortals so that humankind could live happily, this is so since the other Princes are the cause of happiness only through the Monarch, the Monarch is then the one who most greatly loves the well being of humankind. Who would doubt that the Monarch is in the best condition for administering justice? He alone,
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who does not understand the meaning of the term. If the Monarch is one, no enemy exists” (De Monarchia, bk. 1, ch. 11, pars. 17–19). In the world, the unity of the human species is expressed in an earthly manner in the imperial unity that absolves the responsibilities assigned by God and that to God alone must render justification. Besides this earthly beatitude, there is the celestial happiness of the paradise, which the Church provides, whose jurisdiction is necessary for all that does concern the kingdom of this world. The two parts of the nature of the human creature collocates it in the middle level of the universe; soul and body are corruptible and incorruptible: “it is rightly like the philosophers who are similar to the horizon, which is the meeting point between the two hemispheres.” Given that every middle has in itself the potential for extremes, the human creature, too, has a double nature and must answer for a double duty. One is according to its corruptibility, another according to its immortal soul: “The ineffable providence of God has proposed to the human being two ends. One is the happiness of this life that consists in the operation of one’s own virtue, and it is represented as the earthly paradise. The other is the beatitude of eternal life that consists of the enjoyment of the divine countenance, to which our own virtue cannot bring us unless helped by divine light. This is what we intend by the heavenly paradise.” As the beatitudes are two in number, two are also the pathways open to the human creature: the first proceeds per phylosophica documenta (by philosophical rules and proofs); the second per documenta spiritualia, quae humanam rationem transcendent (by spiritual rules and proofs that transcend human reason). In the first pathway, philosophy, the moral virtues dominate; in the second, theology, the theological virtues operate. In the first way, “The Roman Prince rules so that we live freely in peace in this garden of mortal beings.” In the second path, the Roman Pontiff is the guide. Two are the ways and two are the powers, but without interference. Both authorities are elected and confirmed by God alone (solus eligit Deus, solus ipse confirmat). The earthly electors only manifest the design of the divine providence. Pope and Emperor are two of the rays of light that originated from the same source. They are completely autonomous in regard to each other, even though God brings them to converge in the unique supreme end (De Monarchia, bk. 3, ch. 16). See Purgatory, Canto 16, vv. 106–108: “For Rome, which made the world good, used to have two suns; and they made visible two paths: The world’s path and the pathway that is God’s”) Soleva Roma, che il buon mondo feo, Due soli aver, che l’una e l’altra strada Facean vedere, e del mondo e de Deo. This is not the Thomistic conception expressed in the clear paragraph of De regimine principum (bk. 1, ch. 14): “All the kings of the Christian nations must be subject to the Supreme Priest, the successor of Peter, the vicar of
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Christ, the Roman Pontiff as to Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.” It was exactly for this sentence that the Dominican Guido Vernani charged the De Monarchia with Averroism and together with the Franciscan Guglielmo of Sarzana asked for its condemnation. Pope John XXII, in 1329, ordered the burning of the book, which appeared in the Index of the prohibited books in 1554. During an antipapal polemic, when the Medici of Tuscany were at war against the Pope, Ficino, for the motives mentioned above, translated the work into Italian. It was at this time that the book came to light and was circulated in Protestant lands. To this regard, can we truly speak of Averroism, in a correct sense? Thomism meant the subordination of the natural to the supernatural, whereas Averroism meant the autonomy of reason in respect to all revelation. This was reduced to being a fantastic construction for pedagogic purposes. Dante wants to separate the two spheres: that of philosophy (earthly natural happiness) and that of revelation (eternal beatitude), wishing to make them independent and autonomous. The two kingdoms, of this world and of the world that is God’s, will thus be separate, distinct, and unopposed. They will be diverse, but not in contrast. Exactly for this reason, says Gilson, Siger is collocated in Paradise, as the symbol of an autonomous philosophy, which proceeds on its own pathway without any preoccupation of faith. This is an ingenious thesis, but it is impossible to sustain it. Siger and the Latin Averroism received the condemnation for their doctrine contrasting with the Christian faith. We cannot say, as Dante does in Divine Comedy, that syllogisms are based on faith, and then to philosophize by denying some points fundamental for every religion, not just for the Christian religion. In Dante, we do not find the conception of philosophizing as a mere Aristotelian exegesis, outside therefore, at least in a certain sense, of the laws that regulate the dominion of Sapienza. What survives is the conception of the two beatitudes, as they are found in De Monarchia. Here, too, we are faced with the difficulty of the Dantesque conception, in which it could seem that our preparation for God’s kingdom has no incidence on the earthly kingdom. But, if the two kingdoms are harmonized in God and if the human creature has to be a unity of spirit and body, we must accept that the earthly kingdom, at least through divine intervention, should orient toward the heavenly kingdom, subordinating itself ideally to it, and concur with it. The absurdity of the separation between the two kingdoms could be overcome, perhaps by way of the absurdity of an occasionalism. Philosophy and revelation, nature and super nature, encounter each other. Body and soul are the constituents of the human creature, which alone becomes a concrete ideal synthesis forming the horizon between earth and heaven. In conclusion, the position of the Monarchia, interesting from the polemic point of view, must rest on the harmony created by God between the two Suns, so that neither of the two would become superfluous. Why was Siger placed in Paradise? No plausible explanation has yet been given on the decision made by Dante. The position of Gilson tends in favor of
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the thesis in the Monarchia. Gilson does not seem to consider sufficiently that if Dante wished to exalt as truth the Averroistic doctrines, representing them with the salvation of Siger in Paradise, at the same time he went against the spiritual magisterium of the Church, if not against the usurped temporal power. It was like saying that Siger entered in Paradise as “the vicar of Aristotle,” that is as the symbol of pure philosophy? But, how can we forget that a pure philosophy in a Christian, in Christian times and after the revelation, is an error to be condemned? How can we be oblivious to the fact that Dante exalted Aristotle because his thought can be adopted by Christianity as the pagan foreshadowing of the truth? Averroism is completely something else, meaning the Averroism of a Christian. It means taking a negative position in regard to religion. Averroism is pure speculation, but at the same time it is capable of challenging the basis itself of Christian thought. It is a speculation that introduces a crisis not only within each religious position, but also in every “law.” These are the alternatives. We may concede that Dante was Averroist to the point of accepting the thesis of the possibility of a philosophizing totally autonomous. This cannot be conceded because in too many texts in Convivio and Comedy Dante is preoccupied with the demonstration of truths that Averroism negated. Another alternative is to admit, keeping in mind the intentions of Siger which Dante wanted to glorify, the victim of Falsembiante, instead of the effort of a heterodox thought. This was the man who died on the way to render reverend homage to the head of the Church, in order to defend, clarify, and perhaps, repenting, disavow his own position. This alternative conforms better to Dante’s character. In a third alternative, we could assume that Dante was not aware of all the possibilities implicit in Siger’s position. This would then justify the position taken by Gilson of connecting the exaltation of Siger with the dualistic thesis of Monarchia, which, as it is, reveals of having been born from a polemic that offers no positive solution. The solution is found in the sacred poem, in which any independent philosophy is plainly rejected, and Aristotelianism is overcome through the mystical union implored by the “santo sene” [the “holy elder” is St. Bernard, Paradise, Canto 31, v. 102]. We should not forget that though Dante as a poet expresses a solemn vision of things in a splendor of images in which heaven and earth, time and eternity, converge, he was not a technical philosopher. As Gilson has observed, Dante “has not joined a definite philosophical school, he is not concerned about rigorous historical distinctions.” Nardi rightly said, “He is neither Averroist nor Thomist; he is neither exclusively Aristotelian, nor NeoPlatonic, nor pure Augustinian.” He is certainly and always a Christian. In the darkness of Inferno and in the lights of Purgatory, beside Virgil, Beatrice is always ideally present. It is nonsense to speak of a Dante theoretician of the pure natural human reason, fully self-sufficient, in its total detachment, as the temporal from the spiritual in De Monarchia. A kingdom of corporeity that lives with a soul in a kind of legal separation is also nonsense, in the same
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way as no true sky illumined by two suns exists. If the De Monarchia concludes paradoxically, the Divine Comedy fundamentally is a harmony that we cannot separate in order to resolve the enigma of Siger, according to our points of view. Let Siger’s glory be placed beside the redemption of Manfred [Purgatory, Canto 3, vv. 108–145], in the dismissal of this matter in the inscrutability of the divine decrees and the infinity of human possibilities. 5. Language We are not reducing to a system or analyzing singularly the different solutions of the particular difficulties that the study of Dante had gradually outlined. The acute inquiries of some scholars, especially of Nardi, have shown many interesting aspects: the independence, in many places, of Dante from Thomism; his drawing from multiple sources; his adoption of motives proper to the Franciscan movement, to St. Bonaventure, to Albert the Great; his sympathy for the Joachimites, even in the disagreement of Ubertino of Casale. This does not exclude that interpretations exclusively Joachimite, or Platonic, or Franciscan would not be destined to failure. Should we conveniently examine, in the fourth treatise of Convivio [ch. 7], the generous discussion concerning “nobility” that is not tied to some given conditions, but must be conquered by the human being with its virtue? Guido Guinizelli already proposed it: “Che non de’ dar om fede / Che gentilezza sia fior di coraggio, / In degnità d’erede” (Let human beings accept / That nobility is the flower of courage, / not the privilege of inheritance.) Let us not dismiss the possibility of discussing what Dante so acutely affirmed about language, going beyond the thesis that God gave humanity language once and for all. Speech was given to the human creature alone, not to the angel or to the beast. The beasts are guided by pure instinct, while the angels are like mirrors, full and perfect in the immediate intuitive vision of all truths. We find in this the same thesis as in Monarchia. The thesis has Aristotelian-Thomistic roots and concerns the multiplicity of the individuals in the human species, a multiplicity connected with the singular position of the human being, at the border between heaven and earth, matter and spirit. For reason of its own frailty, the human species cannot be actualized in one single individual, as it happens for the angels, and goes searching for its perfection in actualizing itself through the plurality. This multiple unity means simultaneously both communication and language. It is a communication between rational beings, which reveal to each other their spiritual life, and it is a noble enterprise because to speak is to express oneself and actively communicate. For the first time the human being spoke addressing God. Then, sin, confusion of tongues, and dispersion throughout the different parts of the world came to be. And human creatures forgot the first language: “Given that the human being is an animal extremely instable and variable, our language can neither endure nor continue. As all our habits and costumes change, so language too would change by necessity in different times and places” (De vulgari eloquen-
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tia, bk. 1, ch. 9). Dante remarks that if the ancient inhabitants of Pavia were to come back to life, no one would be capable of understanding them. It is a slow mutation, of which we are almost not aware, but that over great distances and long periods would make a language totally different from what it previously was: “If the speech of the same people is successively modifying itself in times and cannot be stopped in any way, it is necessary that the speech of those who reside far removed or separate also be in different ways modified.” This would happen in the same way that customs, which are not fixed by nature or law, whereas the rules of grammar, of grammatical art, are preserved, harmonized, stable, because they are the fruit of human activity. Latin is elevated to a superior level of perfection in so far as it is not a natural tongue, but the fruit of a human norm. It has reached the nobility that goes with stability and regularity. It is a grammatical art ennobled by the elaboration that made it more secure, but it is less worthy than the vulgar speech, which is born out of nature. In this contrast, we find the solution of the contradiction between De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio, in which the Latin is proclaimed “not subject, but sovereign,” for its nobility is superior to the natural speech in general and to the Florentine vulgar in particular. In Convivio, Dante Alighieri pours forth a hymn that can be left as the epigraphy of his work understood as a conscious attempt to a composition of a philosophical script in the national language: Now a thing is nearer a man in proportion to its being the most closely associated with him, among all things of its own kind. So a son is closer to his father; medicine, of all the arts, is the closest to the doctor; music to the musician. These things are, respectively, more closely associated with these individuals than other arts. And of all lands the closest to a man’s heart is the one where he has his home, because it is most closely associated with him. Likewise, a man’s native speech is closest to him, for it is closely united with him. Language has a special, unique place in man’s mind above all others; not only it is united with him essentially, in itself, but also accidentally in so far as it is connected with those closest to him: his relatives, his fellow citizens, his own folks. Therefore, as we said above, if closeness is the seed of friendship, closeness must clearly be among the causes of the love I bear my native tongue, the one thing nearest to me above all others (Convivio, bk. 1, ch. 12, pars. 5–6).
Seven THE DECLINE OF SCHOLASTICISM 1. Giles of Rome. The Polemic with Henry of Ghent. Giles of Rome and Thomas Aquinas The Thomistic influence was doubtlessly felt within the Order of the Eremites of St. Augustine, founded in 1260. Its first great representative was Giles of Rome, who did not simply repeat the Thomistic theses. Giles was born in Rome (perhaps from the Colonna family) around 1247, and frequented probably in Paris between 1269 and 1272 the lessons of Aquinas, taking openly a position against the theory of the plurality of forms: To admit the plurality of forms contradicts the Catholic faith as well as the things that are derived from the senses. If by positing one form we can save the tenets of the Catholic faith and the data of the senses more successfully than by positing many forms, then it ought to state that the plurality of forms cannot be accepted (Ponere plures formas contradicit fidei catholicae et contradicit his, quae ex sensibilibus habent ortum; propter quod, quia ponendo unam formam magis possumus salvare quod tenet fides catholica, et quae sunt sensibus apparentia, quam ponendo plures, videtur omnino fatendum, quod non sit ponere plures formas). During 1270 or about that time, Giles attacked the many theories of his contemporaries with De erroribus philosophorum (On the errors of philosophers). Only in 1285, he was singled out in a condemnation from Bishop Etienne Tempier, but after his recantation, he was allowed to return to teaching. Giles became General of the Order in 1292 and his authority continued to grow. During the meeting of the General Chapter in Florence in 1287, it was said, “with his doctrine he enlightens the entire world” (doctrina mundum universum illustrat). He died in 1316 in Avignon, after participating in 1311–1312 in the Council of Vienna that condemned the theses of Pietro di Giovanni called Olivi. In the thought of Giles of Rome, we repeatedly find Platonic and Augustinian motives, even in the theses that are exclusively Thomistic, such as that of the real distinction between essence and existence. The strong influence of Proclus, the accentuation of the theory of “participation” in terms that
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are virtually those of Meister Eckhart, brought Giles to move away from St. Thomas. In regard to the existence of God, though acknowledging the value of the a posteriori demonstrations, Giles repeated that it is evident by itself as the necessity of the pure being. God, the absolute being, who is the absolutely simple, creates all things, and every created reality, because created, is constituted of essence and existence. With this, we arrive at the center of Giles’ doctrine, at the motive for the most violent disputes with Henry of Ghent that erupted in 1276 and continued till 1287. In some points, Giles is indisputably Thomistic, but, even where some common movements are evident, in Giles developments are found that are foreign to Thomism, full as they are of an ultra realist inspiration nourished by the neo-Platonism of Proclus. According to Giles, the question pivots around the concept of creation: “The complete cause of our inquiry is that existence is different from essence. From this, we can assume that created things are composite, that they can be created, and that they can either be or not be” (Quia tota causa quare nos investigamus quod esse sit res differens ab essentia, ex hoc sumitur ut possimus salvare res creatas esse compositas, et posse creari, et posse esse et non esse). The demonstration is always the same: if there was no distinction between actuality and potency, there would be no generation. Analogously, if essence was not distinct from existence, it would be impossible to speak of creation, at least regarding the angels. “Oh false and fantastic imagination!” (Falsa, phantatisca imagination!), exclaimed Henry of Ghent, who reproached the adversary for transforming in physical distinction what in Thomas was a metaphysical distinction. Giles leaned upon the comparison of matter and form with the process of generation: “the first example is taken from the way in which matter is coupled together with form” (prima via sumitur from eo quod materia comparatur ad formam). Edgar Hocedez has summarized Giles’s reasoning: In the same way that the process of generation presupposes the real distinction between matter and form, the process of creation requires the real distinction between essence and existence. This is particularly clear in relation to pure spirits. In these spirits, as in all things that are subject to mutation, there must be potency and actuality. Because these spirits are pure forms, we must conclude that it is their essence, which is potency in respect to existence. In the same manner that the philosophers who could not conceive of matter as potency could not explain the process of generation, so those who refuted to posit the real distinction between essence and existence were incapable of explaining creation, or at least the particular creation of the pure spirits. If essence and existence were coinciding, the eternity of essence in the divine exemplar would carry with it the eternity of existence, and therefore the impossibility of creation and destruction: “What is incredible cannot be destruc-
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tible” (Quidquid non est credibile, non est annihilabile). By denying the real distinction, it would be impossible “to admit that the creature proceeds from God by pure freedom of choice” (salvare quod creatura procederet a Deo ex mera libertate arbitrii) and it would be required to agree that the creature “had to proceed by reason of some necessity” (quod procederet ex quadam necessitate). Creation implies the unity of a composition. Henry of Ghent was in favor of the necessity of God, if not for the existence, at least for the essence, but Giles rebuked him by affirming that the priority of the essence over the existence was a pure logical priority. Fortunately, Henry of Ghent has given us a notable summary of the fundamental points of his adversary: “If we accept that the creature is something subsistent and also that it could be its own existence, then the same creature would be a subsistent existence. But a subsistent existence is a pure existence, which God alone is” (cum ipsa creatura sit quid subsistens, si ipsa esset suum esse, ipsa esset subsistens esse. Subsistens esse est esse purum, quod non est nisi Deus). The second argument, which Henry preserved, is presented in this way: “Let us admit that the creature is not something different from its own act of existence. But then, because existence in itself is not limited, the creature would be infinite. Every creature would be infinite in its own nature” (si creatura non esset aliud re a suo esse, cum ipsum esse in quantum huiusmodi non est limitatum, et ita infinitum, esset quaelibet creatura in natura sua infinita). This is the third argument: “Let us admit that the creature is not something different from its own act of existence. But then, because existence cannot be separated from itself, existence could not be separated from the thing created. Thus the creature would be completely incorruptible” (Si creatura non est aliud a suo esse, cum ipsum esse non potest a seipso separari, esse non potest separari a re creata, et sic esset omnino incorruptibilis). To these counter arguments raised by Henry, Giles could always reply with the usual [or a similar] paragraph: “Let us assume the quantification of both essence and existence into two things. Then, the problem of creation would be reproduced for both, instead of one time only, as in the case of the individual concrete creature.” Giles who is Platonic in accentuating the separation derives from the De Causis images to explain the passage from existence as a participation to the divine esse (being) from which the existence flows into the finite essence (Ab illo esse separato participatur et fluit esse in essentia creaturae). From the generous goodness of God, who offers itself totally, the human creature, like a chalice, receives only as much as it is capable within its own limitation: “The water of the ocean, for its part, gives itself totally to all containers; but, since all containers are not equal, the water of the ocean is unequally received” (Sicut enim mare, quantum ex se, se offert totum cuilibet vasi; tamen, quia vasa non sunt aequalia, ideo non aequaliter recipiunt de aqua maris). It is an image typically of Plotinus (Enneads, bk. 3, ch. 8, par. 10): “Think of a source of spring water that has no other origin than from itself, which nevertheless gives of itself to all
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the rivers” (Cogita super fontem aquae quae fontem non habet sed est fons sui ipsius et ex seipsa aequaliter omnia flumina adornat). The consequence is Neo-Platonic, and carries the most complete and total univocity of existence in the creator and in the creature, in the fullness of its metaphysical value. To this doctrine were to be compared both the thesis of the individuation according to quantity, and, on the cognitive level, the affirmation that through its various realizations the form or essence is clearly only one. “If it were possible to remove with an instrument these individual differences in the individuals, all the individuals of the same species would be one individual alone” (Si quis posset per dolabrum vel cum alio instrumento removere has differentias individuales in individuis, omnia individua eiusdem speciei fierent unum). From this we have that Giles accepted the Thomistic thesis of the identity, in the angels, of the species with the individual and his protestation against the condemnation of 1277. In 1287, Giles observed: I tell you that this refers to the articles of Paris. In those articles, the affirmation that God cannot create many intelligences of the same species because the intelligences are without matter was declared erroneous. We wish that those articles were formulated with a more careful judgment. Perhaps, in the future, it will be possible to consider them in a more mature and wiser way (Respondeo dicendum quod de hoc est articulus parisiensis. Sic enim dicitur in articulis quod error est dicere quod, quia intelligentiae non habent materiam, Deus non posset plures eiusdem speciei facere. Vellemus autem quod maturiori consilio articuli illi ordinati essent, et adhuc forte de eis in posterum habebitur consilium sanius). The encounter with Thomistic theses was not essential. Giles was drawing from different sources, and different was his inspiration, even though he appeared as the one who brought a thesis to its extreme consequences. The discussion centered on a central problem of Christian thought: creation. Under the influence of the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Avicenna, the necessity of creation, the eternity of creation, was insinuating itself. The metaphysic Thomistic distinction of essence and existence was passing through the physical distinction of Giles, who by so doing broke reality and made it inconceivable and absurd. Ockham’s treatise on De principiis theologiae raises the objection by absurdity—God could create the existence of an angel without the essence—turning upside down the observations of Henry of Ghent (doctor solemnis), and moving on the same plain. On the other hand, if the “monster” of Giles, the real distinction, had to be fully destroyed, its Thomistic roots had also to be uprooted. This was exactly what Olivi and the Carmelites, Gerard of Bologna and Guido Terreni, did. Then, Ockham pointed to divine omnipotence and integrally developed the motives implicit in the saying of doctor solemnis. In doing so, Ockham destroyed every real intermediary between
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absolute divine will and created individuals by contrasting the intuitive knowledge of the existing reality to the cognition of God, while all mediation between the two extremes disappeared. It is undeniable that the position, which the intermediaries assumed through a double process of consolidation, initially and intentionally antithetical, but truly convergent, contributed to their own destruction by the razor of Ockham: “We should not multiply entities, unless the need for them exists” (Entia non sunt praeter necessitatem multiplicanda). Faced with the physical conception with which Giles hypostatized pure essence and pure existence in the plane of the creative act, Henry of Ghent, accepting the physical knowledge of the existent, opposed to this unique reality of existence a plane of ideal essences (esse essentiae) that is the foundation of the metaphysical knowledge of the ideas. Giles wanted to shy away from the Platonic construction of a world of entities of reason (Esse essentiae prout est aliud ab ente naturae est esse rationis). He eventually fell into the opposing physical plane of an essence and an existence conceived as things (res) whereby the divine creative action could not end to make out of them a unity of an articulated structure, but merely an assemblage of res that are independent and self-sufficient. These res, essence and existence, were not “entities of reason,” but real entities whose relationship remained unjustifiable or justifiable only through an appeal to divine omnipotence. This omnipotence was operating beyond every comprehensible economy because it was multiplying entities totally useless. 2. Giles of Viterbo and Agostino of Ancona Giacomo Capocci known as James of Viterbo was a student and the continuator, with Agostino Trionfo of Ancona, of Giles’s work and thought. Giacomo would not support in full the thesis of the real distinction between essence and existence and, without abandoning the presuppositions of his teacher, began to modify it by way of an inverse process. To a quaestio of 1293–1294 asking “whether the essence of a creature, before effectively receiving existence, could be a true and real entity” (utrum essentia creaturae antequam habeat esse in effectu sit verum ens reale), Giacomo answered in this way: “The creature or the essence of the creature, before being actualized [through existence], is some thing, not simply some thing, but something determined by the fact of being an object of knowledge” (Creatura vel essentia creaturae, antequam sit in actu, est res aliqua, non simpliciter, sed cum determinatione, scilicet ut obiectum cognitum). To this he added that these things are true things in so far as they are oriented toward an exemplar (hae res sunt verae res ut exemplatae). This exemplar of the creatures is “radically the divine essence in so far as it is imitable and contains the creature by virtue, this is to say as a cause” (Radicaliter quidem est divina essentia, ut imitabilis est, in quantum continet virtute creaturam, et hoc est dicere ut causa est). At the same time that the difficulties of Scholasticism were increasingly influencing the different efforts of the new attempts to systematization, the
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School of Giles of Rome (schola aegidiana) were to be characterized by a wide political interest. The major fruits of this new interest were Giles’s most famous De regimine principum and De ecclesiastica potestate, which was the prelude to the Unam sanctam. In addition, the scripts existed: of Giacomo of Viterbo, De regimine christiano (1302); the masterpiece of Agostino of Ancona, Summa de potestate papae (1320), well known also for Milleloquium, derived from St. Augustine and completed by Bartolomeo of Urbino. In regard to Giles of Rome, it has been observed that he sustained the temporal power simultaneously subordinated and emancipated from the Papal power. It was subordinate to the Papal power because every political activity must aim at the supreme good; it was free from the Papal power because in the sphere and within the assigned limits the Prince possessed the widest liberty of action: God has absolute power over all the things of nature so that he can make the fire not to burn and the water not to wet. God also governs the world according to the common law and, if there is no spiritual obstacle, allows things to follow their course, without forbidding that the fire burns or the water wets. The divine vicar, the supreme pontiff, in the same way of God, has a universal power over all temporal things, but, willing to exercise it according to the common law, if there is no spiritual obstacle, allows earthly powers, to which earthly things are entrusted, to run their course and exercise their judgment. 3. Gerard of Bologna and Iacopo of Ascoli. Hugolin of Orvieto At the root of the discussion between Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent we have seen the difficulties derived from the demand for justification not only of the knowledge of the physical reality, but also of the metaphysical knowledge of an intelligible world that seemed necessary in order to give foundation to the science of the universals. The opening of a path in the direction of Ockhamism was then also underlined. The theory of illumination taking away the value and the meaning of the faculties proper to the human being, contributed to the devaluation of the rational processes of knowing. The criticism of the Thomistic attempt, whose intrinsic paganism was then revealed, brought us directly to the thesis of the immediate intuition as the unique basis of knowing. Gerard of Bologna, the first magister in Paris from the Order of the Carmelites, who died in Avignon in 1317, author of quaestiones, quodlibeta, an unfinished Summa theologiae, and a commentary on the Sentences, began systematically to dismantle the Aristotelian ratio, opposing it to a form of non-demonstrative knowledge. In regard to the Aristotelian proofs of the existence of God, he observed, “The reason of the argument is quite obscure … and so are its premises. It is more secure to accept by faith that God exists and
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that he is immobile, instead of relying on these arguments” (Valde oscura ratio, et … sunt valde oscurae praemissae eius. Melius igitur et securius est tenere per fidem quod Deus est, vel quod omnino immobilis, quam per talem rationem). He even courts a doubt concerning all Aristotelian demonstrations, asking whether they are demonstrations: “It is uncertain whether they are or they aren’t demonstrations”(Non est certum quod sint demonstrationes, vel non sint). Ultimately, if we examine specific demonstrations, our perplexity grows even more by hearing Gerard saying, “[Aristotle’s syllogisms] do not prove fully that there is the first being, singular, unique, and omnipotent as the Catholic Church affirms God to be” (Non plane probant quod sit dare unum ens primum, singulare et unicum, omnipotentem, qualem fides catholica praedicat Deum). Under his unceasing criticism not even the basis of all the Thomistic Aristotelianism holds the notion of God as the Cause: “It is clear that it is not easy to prove that God exists or that he is the efficient cause, at least by way of demonstration” (Patet quod non est facile probare, Deum esse vel esse causam efficientem, saltem demonstrative). Among the propositions condemned in 1277, there is the one negating that God has knowledge of the particulars: “God knows by the intellective virtue, which cannot know the particular” (Deus autem cognoscit virtute intellectiva, quae non potest cognoscere particulare). The reason is that only the senses could distinguish between Socrates and Plato: “Hence if there were no senses, the intellect perhaps would not distinguish between Socrates and Plato, though it could distinguish Plato or Socrates from a donkey (Unde si non esset sensus, forte intellectus non distingueret inter Socratem et Platonem, licet distingueret inter hominem et asinum). Gerard of Bologna recognized that it is rationally impossible to admit in God the cognition of the particular, though all believers are prompt to admit this by faith. To the quaestio, “whether God knows the particular,” Gerard responds, “I answer by saying that all Catholics hold that God knows everything, the universals and the individuals. But, for this truth, it is difficult to find a reason that concludes with validity” (Utrum Deus cognoscat particularia…. Respondeo dicendum, quod hanc conclusionem omnes catholici tenent, quod Deus cognoscit omnia, et universalia et singularia. Sed assignare rationem huius veritatis, quae concludit efficaciter, est bene difficile, in Sentences, bk. 1, q. 25, art. 5). The same uncertainty manifests itself also in the question concerning the soul, an uncertainty that goes together with the widest appreciation for the intuitive cognition (quodlibeta, bk. 2, q. 6). Iacopo of Ascoli is all fixated with the irreducible singularity of concrete things, even though he is still searching for a way to preserve a certain conceptual order of the esse obiectivum or intentionale. Konstantin Michalski, in his inquiries on the thought of the fourteenth century, has revealed the genesis of the movement called Ockhamism and of the logic of the school of Oxford. He found the beginning of this in the logical conceptualism derived from Richard of Middletown, who influenced Hervé de Nédellec and Durand de
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Saint-Pourçain, and from Iacopo of Ascoli, who influenced the Franciscan Pietro Aureoli. Between the Platonism still alive in the theory of the esse obiectivum, connected with the conception of Henry of Ghent of an esse essentiae, and the Nominalist Ockhamism, there was only one single step. Implicit in both positions was the devaluation of the discursive processes in favor of the intuitive ones. Countering the consequences of the Aristotelian kind of rationalism, an appeal was made to the immediacy of experience, the only one capable of giving a concrete content and a solid basis, the unique one that could save the certainty of God. During the fourteenth century, thinkers of the most various tendencies took a skeptical standing in regard to reason. The Augustinian friar, Hugolin of Orvieto, in his commentary on the Sentences (prologue), outlined a philosophy that meant the destruction of the philosophy that Thomism and Aristotelianism intended to construct: “I call this by the name of philosophy only in an improper manner of speaking, since properly speaking it is not a science, but a mixture of falsities” (Voco autem philosophiam more improprie loquentium, quia proprie loquendo non est scientia, sed mixtura falsorum). Theologians and philosophers do not speak the same language even though seemingly they deal with the same matters: “The significant primary truth that God exists has not the same meaning for the theologian as for the mind of Aristotle. This is evident from the fact that for the theologian esse in the predicate stands for the infinite … in the subject stands for God or the Trinity. It was certainly impossible that in Aristotle … that signification could be assigned to either subject or predicate” (Significabile illud primum verum, scilicet Deum esse, non est idem apud theologum et apud mentem Aristotelis; patet, quia in praedicato esse apud theologum stat pro infinito … in subiecto stat pro Deo, Trinitate. Et apud Aristotelem erat impossibile … tale significatum esse subiecti vel praedicati, in Sentences, prol., art. 1). Philosophy is all intertwined with errors, in particular that of Aristotle, for whom “it is impossible that God create, it is impossible that God began to make the world, it is impossible that God is omnipotent” (quod impossibile sit Deum creare, impossibile sit Deum incepisse facere mundum, impossibile sit omnipotentiam esse). Hugolin does not limit himself to the demolition of metaphysics; he equally hits the ethics of Aristotle: About ethics, I claim that to those who believe it is superfluous…. Then, I state that for the larger part, it is a false doctrine, and for the part that is not false, it is deficient and useless because Aristotle knew no virtue but an appearance of virtue and gave no rules to follow. We know that he regarded vice as the highest place among virtues, for instance, magnanimity instead of humility. Where juridical justice triumphs, no justice is truly done unless faith is presupposed (De ethica dico, quod superflua est fidelibus…. Secundo dico, quod pro maiori parte ethica est falsa doctrina, et pro tota parte qua non est falsa est diminuta et inutilis, quia nec virtutem cognovit Aristoteles, sed simula-
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crum virtutis, nec regulas dedit. Patet, quia vitium posuit pro summa virtutum, ut magnanimitatem contra humilitatem. Ubi enim est legalis iustitia, iustitia nulla, nisi praesupponatur fides). Recognizing that the philosophers have said some truths, Hugolin remarks that if in the judgments and in the acts of assent we turn our attention to the “light” that allows them, we find ourselves always in the presence of God: “If by light we understand the principle itself of illumination, that is to say formally assistant, and not the effect that is the act of understanding and assenting, then the agent intellect is God” (Si lumen capiatur, non pro effectu, qui est actus intelligendi vel assentiendi, sed pro ipso illustrante et quasi formaliter assistente, sic est Deus intellectus agens). Those philosophers, who did not humbly acknowledge that the light that shined in them was coming from higher places than their intellect, were made blind as the fool of the Psalm: “God revealed many of the things true about God, but when they came to know God, they did not glorify him as God; the heart of the foolish remained in the darkness” (Deus multis ex illis revelavit vera de Deo, sed quia cum cognovissent Deum, non sicut Deum glorificaverunt, ideo obscuratum est insipiens cor eorum). Bonsembiante Badoario, in Principia (“Codex Vaticanum, Latin, no. 981”), arrived at the analogous conclusion of the necessity of a divine light superior to the agent intellect. He was a member of the group of individuals frequenting Petrarch in Padua. Bonsembiante observed, No faithless philosopher has known the essence of the divinity, since it is not knowable by the natural light alone. We may prove this by reason in this way. Infidel philosophers thought of God as a finite power, but intensively omnipotent, capable of producing new things or to move them from non-being to being. This truly is repugnant to God.… I conclude saying that though the philosophers could demonstrate a posteriori the proposition Deus vel primus motor est (God or the first motor exists), of the thing itself, that is of God and of the first motor, they had no profound understanding.… In the philosophers without faith there must be some kind of light, a light superior to the natural light, but inferior to the light of glory, for them to come to inquire about God, what God is (a nullo philosopho simpliciter infideli divinitatis essentia fuit nota aut est cognoscibilis in solo lumine naturali. Ratione arguitur sic: philosophi infideles putaverunt Deum esse virtutem finitam intensive omnipotentem aliquid de novo producere vel de non esse ad esse, quod Deo repugnant…. Ex hac conclusione infero, quod licet philosophi a posteriori demonstrare potuerint hanc propositionem Deus vel primus motor est, de re tamen illa, quae est Deus et primus motor, nullam penitus habuerunt cognitionem…. Sequitur quod ad investigandum Deum, quid est Deus … in philosophis carentibus fide fuit
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY lumen aliquod, superius lumen intellectus agentius, et inferius lumine gloriae, in Principia, bk. 1, q. 91).
Scotists and Ockhamists eventually came together in the consolidation of knowledge on intuition and credence. Landolfo Caracciolo, in the comments to the Sentences, opposes intuitive acknowledgment (notitia intuitive) that always reaches existence (semper concernit existentiam) to the abstractive acknowledgment that finds no reality. Gregory of Rimini, of the Order of the Eremites, professor in Bologna, Padua, and Perugia, was a keen logician. His discussions on infinity considered in actuality and in potency, applied to the problem of the eternity of the world, are full of ingenious observations. Gregory examined the foundations of certainty and of the formido errandi (the fear of error), and advanced that the firmness of an opinion depends on a greater or minor sum of probabilities: “If someone has doubts about a conclusion, he must be aware that more probable reasons he has in favor of that conclusion, so much less he should fear of being in error. If he were able to increase those probable reasons, he could adhere to the conclusion without any fear of error” (Si quis dubitat de aliqua conclusione, quanto plures rationes probabiles habebit ad illam, tantus minus formidabit circa eam, ut patet; immo tantum poterit multiplicare rationes probabiles, quod ei adherebit omnino sine formidine, in Sentences, prol., q. 2, art. 4). The unique basis of certainty remains the intuition, which puts us in direct touch with existence in its presentiality. Again, in Sentences, bk. 1, d. 3, q. 3, art. 1: “The intuitive knowledge is a simple knowledge, by which something is formally known immediately in itself” (notitia intuitiva est notitia simplex, qua formaliter aliquid immediate in seipso cognoscitur). Actual existence alone, and the omnipotence of God, can generate the intuition. The Thomistic attempt to the establishment of a permanent union between Christianity and Hellenism, between faith and reason, through an articulated distinction, seems to have now to face either an exaltation of the reason of the philosophers (Averroism), or an exaltation of faith, or a renewed affirmation of the validity of experience. These two last ways, far from being divergent, presented themselves most often as an appeal to a mystical experience that was parallel to a scientific experience. This, within its own limits, dares to undertake fearlessly all kinds of inquiry. Even the Averroistic separation could at times, at the scientific level, find points of convergence with the consequences of a certain type of Ockhamism. What moved toward a dead end was the effort of presenting a reason that was simultaneously exalted but limited, autonomous but dominated by something else than itself.
Part Two THE AGE OF HUMANISM (Chapters 8–14)
Eight THE ORIGINS OF HUMANISM 1. Middle Ages and Humanism. Consciousness of Renovation In recent times, the evaluation of humanism has been profoundly influenced by the problem of origin and its relationship to the Middle Ages. The historical inquiry centered its attention as to determine precisely in what sense it is still possible to justify the thesis of a fracture due to the imitation of the classic world and the renewed importance of the studia litterarum. The thesis of a humanistic age with its “discovery of the human being,” with its exaltation of the ancients, with its profane and mundane education veined with a touch of immanentism destined to develop into positions mostly a-religious, is openly revolutionary. A conception of this kind, tied to the exaltation of individuals of exceptionality rebellious to any bridle, artists and dreamers, living in a world believed to be fantastic, was clearly revolutionary. This interpretation connected with the inquiries of an artistic and literary nature demands from us to deal with the problem of the more or less reality of the antithesis Middle Ages and Renaissance and of the nature of this antithesis, once acknowledged. The origins of this antithesis should not be searched for in a late illuministic or romantic myth; they were already present in the first beginnings of humanism, in its polemical force that elaborated early in time the myth itself, an instrument of debate and also an expression of the consciousness of an actual renewal. This consciousness was equally and vivacious rousing in artists, thinkers, and political individuals. Cennino Cennini of Colle Valdelsa wrote in Libro dell’arte that Giotto “changed the art of painting from the Greek to the Latin style, and made it modern.” Filippo Villani celebrated Giotto as the suscitatore (provoker) of an art that had become lifeless, and Lorenzo Ghiberti in Commentari opposed the arte nuova (new art) of Giotto to the rozzezza bizantina (Byzantine rudeness). Leonardo Bruni, too, in no different way saw the resurgence of the studia literarum after seven hundred years of silence. He described to us the thrill of enthusiasm that he experienced the day when the treasure of the thinking humanity, kept away for seven centuries, opened up before him. “Until the time of Dante, a few people knew the literate style, and those few knew it very badly.… Francesco
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Perarch was the first man to have had a sufficiently fine mind to recognize and bring back the gracefulness of the lost inert style.” The hymn to the Latin language written by Lorenzo Valla is a living symbol of a spiritual empire already eclipsed with Boethius, but again resurgent. Famous are the pages written by Poggio Bracciolini about the classic authors who, finally free from the ancient captivity, become the educators of humanity. “The time has come to arise from slumber and give ourselves to work, so that … the authors we possess and read every day would be of some advantage to our customs and life” (tempus iam de somno surgere et danda opera, ut aliquid … prodessent ad vitam et mores illi [auctores] quos habemus et quos quotidie legimus). Toward the end of the fifteenth century, we can see the consolidation of the myth of the returned “golden age” (aurea aetas), of the light at last triumphing. Carrying its own significance, we see this happening in the Ficinian NeoPlatonic entourage, in Cristoforo Landino, and in Marsilio Ficino. Testimonies of this kind could be easily multiplied. They reveal that beginning with Petrarch and Coluccio Salutati there was the awareness of a great reform that set civilization in contrast to barbarism. The Greek-Roman world, considered as the imperishable model of humanity, was set up in contrast to the barbarous world of the Goths. The new age as the age of light is set up as a contrast to the previous age seen as the age of darkness. In the elegy for Bracciolini, Cristoforo Landino sings, “Poggio fortunately has brought great men out of the blackness of gloom up to where the eternal light is unconcealed” (Poggius at sospes nigra e caligine tantos / ducit, ubi aeterna lux sit aperta, viros). By the end of the fifteenth century and especially after the discovery of America, there were doubtlessly some souls particularly sensitive, which thought of a dawn of a new epoch of the world. Proof of this is an epistle all infused with a profound emotion that Giles of Viterbo on 18 August 1508 wrote to the Pope. Already several years before 1508, under the influence of Ficino, Giles had praised the return of the golden kingdoms of Saturn, “O Marsilio, these are the kingdoms of Saturn; this is the golden age (aurea aetas) that the Sibyl and the seers vaticinated; these are the times that Plato announced in which his studies will be known.” 2. The Interpretation of Burdach. Renovatio and Rebirth We must rightly acknowledge that this religious feeling, this pious interpretation of the kingdom of light, was affirmed after the increasing diffusion of the Neo-Platonism in Ficino’s circles. The first humanism, though it insists on the triumph over barbarism, does it without any mystical message of the kingdom of the spirit, remaining on the modest grounds of the human life, enriched at last by a new and wider liberty. The exaltation of the humanae litterae in Salutati or Bruni remains an instance of a worldly formation, in order to construct and complete the earthly city. On the contrary, the human being about
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whom we speak appears in Pico or Ficino not as the incarnate being in its corporeal limit, but as the eternal Adam of the Hebraic-Christian gnosis. This distinction indeed is so much needed for the evaluation of the first century of humanism and of the effort by part of Konrad Burdach of connecting it directly with the hopes of a renovatio at the religious level, largely diffused throughout a great part of the Middle Ages. It is easy to think of comparing Cola di Rienzo to Petrarch and at the same time remember the renewing anxiety of that Roman tribune! God intends a universal reformation, which many spiritual men have predicted through the prayers and the mediation of the glorious Virgin.… He sent a great plague and many earthquakes because of many sins and was planning to send something even worse because of corrupted pastors and people. These were the castigations imposed by God before the advent of St. Francis to the Church and its people. For the intercession of these two, Domenic and Francis, who, preaching in the spirit of Enoch and Elias, sustained the crumbling Church, the judgment of God was procrastinated till our time. We see that … now no one of good conduct exists, truly not even one, and those chosen to save the Church possess none of the ancient virtues. Thus, God being justly angry prepared and prepares his avenge, and … shortly there will be great news, especially because the Church will be reformed and brought back to its pristine holiness. A great peace will come among the followers of Christ and between Christians and Saracens. On all of them the grace of the Holy Ghost will descend, which will bring them under one Shepherd alone. The beginning of the age of the Holy Spirit is approaching. In these words, with which Cola di Rienzo repeats the sermons of Angelo of Monte Vulcano, we see alive again the prophetism of Joachim of Fiore and of the spirituals. Here is the anxiety of reform and of a religious and political peace that permeates with an increasing frequency since the twelfth century the works of poets and thinkers. “They will reform the world at once with the elected emperor.” The age of gold has returned, “Redit aurea aetas” sang Arrigo of Settimello. Savonarola will dream of a ruined and restored Church. The Franciscan, Roger Bacon, talking with a parochial emphasis, thought of magic as the instrument for the instauration of the Monarchy of the Messiah. Astrologists and necromancers, from Arnold of Villanova to Pierre d’ Ailly, were reading in the stars and in the mysterious signs of things the advent of the Anti-Christ. The direct dependence of the renascent renewal from the prophetic and reformatory movements, simply stated, cannot be supported. Some approaches and a desire of religious peace that progressed by stages and appeared in the Council of Florence were manifest in the works of Nicholas Cu-
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sanus and in the letter of Pope Piccolomini to the Sultan. The education classically human that Petrarch and Salutati cherished was not the fruit of a mystical crisis; it was an earthly measure and an awareness of limitation. They possessed religiousness, and religion is the spirit of humility by means of which one bows before a typical expression of humanity: the classic humanity. The connection between the rebirth of the classic world and the religious renovatio was consciously made very early in time, especially under the pressure of the Hermetism circulating already through the Asclepius of the Pseudo-Apuleius and Lactantius, and then in the Ficinian translations. The hermetic myth will have its own apostles and confessors. Ludovico Lazzarelli will sing in Latin verses the universal palingenesis and Giovanni Mercurio of Correggio will preach it throughout the streets of Rome in April 1484. In these beginnings, the people who were meditating alternatively and reconciling Nicomachaean Ethics and Gospels were repeating that the kingdom of God was not of this world. They were anti-ascetism and all pervaded by the ideal of the common good, far removed from believing that the kingdom of the spirit was imminent. “Though I believe that the reformation of the holy empire is not excluded from the spiritual plan” (licet credam reformationem sacri imperii a spirituali opere non excludi). 3. Cola di Rienzo We must recognize the grand merit due to Konrad Burdach and Paul Piur for their insistent reference to Cola di Rienzo and for having clarified the connection that the tribune operated between the renascent cult of the world of classics and the spiritual values of the mystical renovatio. What makes actual the palingenesis on the practical level in Cola is a religious movement that we would be hardly capable of finding in the major representatives of the humanism. Petrarch, alien to that messianic spirit, interprets the work of the tribune as a communal recovery or, at most, national, and detaches himself from Cola when he sees him deliriously concerned about his universal mission. The Renaissance celebrated the third kingdom (the Third Age) in its own way, and never had the illusion of translating it into practice on earth, except in literary terms. Its reform and peace were the reform of the heart and the peace of philosophy. To this regard, the cited statements of Poggio are perfectly clear: “The time has come to arise from slumber and give ourselves to work, so that … the authors we possess and read every day would be of some advantage to our customs and life” (tempus iam de somno surgere et danda opera, ut aliquid … prodessent ad vitam et mores illi [auctores] quos habemus et quos quotidie legimus). Cola, too, had written: “I was convinced of having done nothing, if I were not to practice what I had learned in reading” (nichil actum putavi si, que legendo didiceram, non aggrederer exercendo). For the tribune this practice meant the practical instauration of the Lord’s Monarchy within the Holy Roman Empire. For the humanist, on the contrary, this meant the education of a man, or of a group of men, who would live in an ideal and in-
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visible republic for the wise. “Having learned … from the chronicles of Rome that for a period of more than five-hundred years no Roman citizen, for cowardice of heart, had dared to defend the populace … I decided to take upon myself that difficult task.” And the announcement followed. The heavens have opened and the light of Christ, that originates from the glory of God the Father and diffuses the splendor of the Holy Spirit, is come to you who live in the darkness of death offering the grace of an unexpected and admirable clarity. This is the most clement Lamb of God, which removes all sins. This is the holiest Roman Pontiff, the Father of the City of Rome, the Bridegroom, and the Lord who, moved by the cries, the lamentations, and the sorrows of his spouse … by inspiration of the Holy Spirit has opened the womb of his clemency … has granted you grace and forgiveness, and promised redemption to the whole world. The messianic faith of Cola transforms every small event into an announcement of the Reign of the Spirit. What for Petrarch was the renascent liberty of Rome, for the tribune was the palingenesis of the world. The universality of a spiritual rebirth is for Cola a reconstruction and a reform of the earthly city that finally becomes the divine city on earth, in the universal redemption and remission of sins: “The entire universe would be redeemed … and nations would be purged of their sins.” For the humanistic age, the human measure decides the human limit on earth; we possibly will reach the heavenly glory by fighting on earth and acknowledging our earthly temporary permanence with our divine destination. Libertas, pax, renovation (Freedom, peace, and renewal). These three terms maintain their diverse flavor on the political and spiritual levels. They are not confused, as in the thought of Cola. The divine Adam is the soul that with its works makes itself suitable to Heavens, but does not live already in Heavens. Because humanism wishes to connect the classic exigency of the earth with the Christian thirst for the Heavens, establishing a link of peace between flesh and spirit, it is alien to the idea of an imminent advent on earth of the Reign of the Spirit. 4. The Religion of the Humanists Burdach does not properly take into account the diverse flavor of this medieval mystical expectation of the kingdom on earth and of the entirely interior humanistic reform. It is to him that the merit is due for pointing out the necessity of reconnecting the medieval and renascent spirituality beyond the radical fracture operated by Jacob Burckhardt and his followers. Burdach has evinced profound religious motives where with exaggerated ease many saw indifference, or a pagan cult of a mundane beauty. Fortunately, all those who have rightly reacted to this easy antithesis between medieval and renaissance piety have underlined the religious aspects of the renaissance. Those instead who
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came to find out in the Middle Ages some pre-renaissance or pre-humanism testimonies, less fortunately opposed the traditional vision of the sudden fracture. The effective crisis in the field of thought and at the same time its suture has not yet been determined. It is not enough to recognize, as it has been done, that the reading of the classics was not the determinant factor of the new movement of thought; an already incumbent crisis was the factor that made several peoples see the classics in a new perspective. It is not enough to admit that the classics were the instruments and not the causes of the new education. It is not sufficient to be aware that there was no real discovery of unknown works; if anything happened, it was an enrichment of a patrimony already quite vast. What we must search for is what has helped to view the world with new eyes, with a new capacity of penetration, and read new words in the syllables already for a long time meditated. Gone was the beautiful fable, so dear to Poggio, in which the ancient prisoners, once freed, became the liberators of their liberators. Beyond that, we must ask what made Petrarch so prone to Plato, whose dialogues he possessed but was not able to read. In short, we must tell the story of a greatly complex crisis. The purpose is not to explain it, but to situate the dawn of humanism, with its intertwined cult of letters, of man, and of God; with its conviction that the salvation of humanity comes with the education in the humane letters, in the reading of the classics, in the reading of the book of God, and in the human activity on earth that transforms itself into an ascension to God. 5. The Crisis of Scholasticism. Scotism. Ockhamism The exasperated positions taken by the late Scholasticism, its abuses of an arid technicality, contributed indisputably to the spirited revolt, at which thinkers arrived by the stages that the most mature medieval reflection marked out. People cleverly followed the latent process by which the last physics of Ockhamism came to germinate the science of Leonardo, who resolved in new intuitions the exasperated and exasperating Parisian positions. When we see that Coluccio Salutati at the end of the fourteenth century has put together the reevaluation of the humane letters and the exaltation of the active life with the primacy of the will, we become aware that the new is the new and original answer to problems that have slowly matured and have been for a long time meditated. It is a resolution perhaps revolutionary, but it is a resolution of the questions historically determined by the awareness of the many ways that conjoin the ancient with the new. We make this same consideration when we find Ermolao Barbaro uniting the cult of philology with the calculationes suisethicae at the same time when Pomponazzi takes the first steps of his inquiry beyond the studying of the scholastics; when we observe that the professors in Padua oscillate between Averroism and Ockhamism, Scotism and Thomism; when we hear that Pico exalts the Parisian style and Ficino begins to move within the traditional ambiance of the Platonism of Avicenna or Bonaventure.
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How can we not consider the insistent Scotist vindication of the values of the actual individual in its precise living determination? “The human being is the link of all natural beings and conjoins the superior and the inferior beings. The human being participates in the purely natural and in the purely spiritual beings, since it contains in the unity of its essence a body perfectly natural and a supernatural soul. As Dionysius says, the human being in this manner conjoins the bottommost with the supreme and the loftiest with the lowest.” The Cardinal Vitale du Four in De rerum principio, a work attributed beforehand to Scotus, sets forth in efficacious terms the doctrine of the haecceitas (“thisness,” “haecceity”). This doctrine should not be isolated; it must go together with the thesis of the univocity of being, which establishes the profound ties of reality that are categorized in a system of connections that have God at its apex, hereby our thought can rise up to God. On the other hand, against Godfrey of Fontaines and on the footsteps of Henry of Ghent (doctor solemnis), we have here the valorization of the will, of the primacy of the will, which on the level of the human being means the vindication of the value of the human individual in relation to its object. Giovanni Pico in the theses secundum Joannem Scotum will observe, “The act of understanding is caused by the intellect in a nobler manner than by the object” (Actus intelligendi nobiliori modo causatur ab intellectu quam ab obiecto). He will insist on univocity, saying, “Existence is predicated of God and the creature in a somewhat univocal way” (ens dicitur de Deo et creatura univoce in quid). Concerning “haecceity,” he will add, “each individual is an individual for reason of a proper individual difference that is called ‘haecceity’” (unumquodque individuum est individuum per propriam differentiam individualem, quae dicitur haecceitas). One century before, the Dominican Giovanni Dominici with scorching and offensive remarks had attacked Salutati for his proclamation of the primacy of the will. How can we forget the Ockhamist exigency of the concrete, the appeal to the immediacy of experience, the destruction of the superfluity of intermediaries, the affirmation of a unique principle of reality? “God can do everything that in its becoming is not contradictory” (Deus potest facere omne quod fieri non includit contradictionem). Because of this, all limitations are removed from God, but also the reality of separate essences, existing independently, is gone. Gone are the difficulties of individuation because every individual is firmly based on the concrete fullness of its own integrity into which the determinations elaborated by abstraction have contracted themselves. Potency, act, privation, negation, unity, and distance are not distinct realities from the substances. Equally, motion, space, and time are not distinct realities from the entities that move, continue, and occupy a space. The divine omnipotence excludes what is not an actual individual, knowable through the immediacy of an intuition in a direct experience. “Let’s say that someone could see heat intuitively through the intellect and know distinctly that the sun heats up these earthly things; but if he never knew by experience that heat would produce
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heat, because he never approached anything capable of producing heat, this person would not know what it means that heat is calefactive more than what is meant when we say that whiteness is the cause of white” (Sent. prol., q. 9). Potency is nothing but the capacity of doing something. The principle of economy would not tolerate an intelligible world of essences: “A plurality should not be postulated unless there is the need for it” (pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ponendi). Conceptual necessities do not exist. The absolute freedom of the Creator is the foundation of the contingency of everything and it is also the exclusion of formalities independently subsistent. Formal distinctions do not exist among things, but the real distinctions do. “Between Socrates and Plato, there is a greater similarity than between Socrates and this donkey, not because of something distinct in them but because of their greater conformity.” The universe of Ockham appears extremely simplified, but also greatly unconnected; language alone with its logicalgrammatical links establishes the connections of similarity between entities completely independent and separate. The universal reduced now to a word (res-vox) is nothing but a sign. “The universal is in the thing no more than the term ‘man’ is in Socrates or in the things that the term signifies” (universale non est in re plus quam haec vox homo est in Socrate vel in illis quos significat). Paul Vignaux concluded, “Nominalism appears to us as the ontology of the thing in which logic of language meets with a theology of omnipotence.” To the metaphysical foundations of the omnipotence of the divine will and of the concrete individuality correspond, in the field of knowledge, an experimental knowledge and a grammar, and in the field of theology, an act of faith in an unreachable divine infinity. For this reason, Cusanus’s mysticism and Ockham’s nominalism have been considered as parallel to the antidialectic position of Peter Damian. The fracture between God and man is overcome not by logic but by love; God’s creatures are encountered at the level of direct experience. Language is a complex of signs required by human cohabitation and communication. Ockham, in opposition to Aristotelianism, wants to reaffirm, outside of all abstract schemes, the vital terms of Christianity. This is why, like Bonaventure, Bacon, and Scotus, Ockham is a follower of Saint Francis. Attached to concreteness, Ockham wants to bring humanity back to the genuine originality of experience, to the listening to the language of the world and of the divine scriptures; he wants to move away from the constructions and fictitious justifications of the Schools. How can we now not be amazed seeing this convergence of an accentuation of the will, of doing, of the practicality of knowledge, of the concreteness of the individual and of experience, of the word as a vox that points to a res, in opposition to the abstract universal, to faith and charity, and to the original values of the Christian intuition? Even though the paths of the traditional philosophers and that of the new thinkers would not converge, should we not remain impressed by the fact that the humanistic philology and the humanistic
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need for individual concreteness, and the exigency of returning to nature, to the origin, to the beginning, arise right after this work of criticism and demolition? Would we not be surprised that Ermolao Barbaro, after studying the complicated puzzles of the logic of the calculators, reverently bowed at the same time before Christ and the philological expertise? In Epistle 76, he stated, “I recognize two Lords, Christ and letters” (Duos agnosco Dominos, Christum et litteras). 6. New Lines of Orientation We must acknowledge that Averroism itself often demonstrated its critical spirit, its interest for nature, the sciences, and the singular sensible thing. The humanists like all innovators have accentuated the polemic and humanism, collocated in this convergence of motives and difficulties, from which it intended to take the most of all advantages, gradually underlined in a new sense those points of the problems of the past that every single thinker discovered as more congenial to himself. To grasp the value of the culture of the humanists, including that of the grammarians, we must become aware of what has been called “humanism of letters,” in an artificial contraposition to what has been called “humanism of spirit,” which was truly a new and original answer to the rising of the profound problems that originated from the crisis of the traditional philosophical thought. The appeal to the classic humanitas was a way of liberation from a culture become wholly antiquated in those aspects in which it failed to respond to the new exigencies. It was the expression of the need to return to life, to sense again, beyond the disputations of the schools, the genuineness of truly felt problems. The discussion concerning the most abstract terms of Medievalism and Renaissance may still continue for a long time, but a page of Petrarch, Salutati, or Valla would never be confused with those of the contemporary late Scholastics. In the Renaissance, it is this urgency of problems and the need for human sincerity that surprise us. Religion, the Christian religion, wants to be the return to the origins of Christ and Francis; and the return to nature consists always in the renewed appeal to the rebellion against obsolete structures. The new studies on grammar are an answer to the need for a concrete logic of the concrete thought in the same way that the return to the ancients is a return to original sources of genuineness and purity. The only field in which the human beings are tested is found in this earthly life and everything is measured in accordance to their mundane fecundity. This is not intended for the denial of other values, but simply because, as Salutati writes, our gymnasium is an earthly place. It is impossible to leave out of our consideration this complex of exigencies for renewal, this need to go back to what is primary, fundamental, and essential. Though all this was born at the limit of an extreme decadence and of a crisis of old age, it certainly cannot be confused with that contradictory disintegration of a society, beyond which “the new age” was going to be built. A
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sick and sensual love for life, the grossness of some manifestations of the extreme Middle Ages only by way of misunderstood analogies can be compared with this wave of fresh experiences destined to nourish a new clearness of vision. It is the rediscovery of aspects of things with which we are again in touch after having abandoned aged structures. The species of the schools, Descartes will notice this, which was assumed as the way our mind could reach things, had become the diaphragms that prevented human beings from having an immediate rapport with the world, other human beings, and God. The humanist culture with its appeal to things was exactly this effort of liberation, or, as it was often said, a kind of new rebirth, of a reconquered purity within a rediscovered reality.
Nine FROM PETRARCH TO SALUTATI 1. Albertino Mussato. The Love of Petrarch for the Ancients. Studia Humanitatis and Pietas. Solitude and Death In Ciceronianus, Erasmus wrote, “The prince of the renewed eloquence of Italy appears to have been Petrarch. He was famous and great at his time, but at the present there is rarely someone who would pick up and read his writings” (reflorescentis eloquentiae princeps apud Italos videtur fuisse Petrarcha, sua aetate celebris ac magnus; nunc vix est in minibus). It is common, and justly so, to search within Petrarch’s rich Latin writings the lines of the new age. The interest for everything ancient, his attitude toward the classics, his love for the humanae litterae, his desire for knowledge, his criticism of the Scholastic culture, all of this possesses already the flavor of the nascent humanism. Georg Voigt, and after him many others, has underlined the importance of the Paduan Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), a poet dear to Salutati, a historian known to Petrarch who remembers him as “an anxious researcher of new things” (novarum rerum satis anxius conqui-sitor). As the grammarian Giovanni of Venice wrote in 1315, Mussato drew his poetry directly from the ancient Fauns who were still going about throughout this land. He used to say, “They made me a poet according to the ancient forms of poetry.” Mussato wrote also of moral philosophy and composed a treatise about “the contest between nature and fortune” (de lite naturae et fortunae); he strongly defended poetry against the “theological” attacks of friar Giovannino of Mantua. Mussato exalted in Latin verses his countryman and friend Marsilius of Padua, an audacious and innovative spirit, still removed from the humanistic mentality, though ideally a very part of it, who on the speculative and practical realms agitated the setting of the Middle Ages with the first vibrations of the Renaissance. An ideal connection that may not justify the inclusion of Marsilius within the new age, but that explains the unfailing reference to his writings made by anyone beginning to narrate the origins of humanism. Petrarch, speaking of himself and his studies, in the letter Ad posterum, underlines forcefully his own love for the world of the ancients. “Among my many studies, I was interested in the knowledge of antiquity, inasmuch as I have always disliked my own age, so that, had not the love of dear ones restrained me, I would always have preferred to have being born in any other
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age. And still now, leaving aside my own time, I’m wishing in spirit to inhabit continually other ages.” This need of communion with consenting souls that Petrarch reveals in the cult of friendship could not be satisfied among his contemporaries and he was forced to make contemporary to himself the masters of the ages past. “He was a most desirous cultivator of honest friendships and a most faithful friend” (amicitiarum appetentissimus honestarum et fidelissimus cultor). From this originated his delight for history (historicis delectatus sum) and his appeal to humankind for a communication beyond time (nisus animo me aliis semper inserere). On the vicissitudes that fall ceaselessly into a contingency of an inexorable flow, a spiritual city is gradually built that, like the Hades imagined by Socrates or the noble Dantesque castle, consolidates the dialogue of the souls along the paths of truth and beauty. Because of the annoyance derived from things, the human beings turn to the joys of an interiority examined in all its most intimate crumples, and celebrate and paint in poetry the motions of the soul, where they consider in moral philosophy the value of things, and finally understand their significance by way of a religious meditation. Petrarch confesses, “My ingenuity was good rather than acute; it was suitable to any beautiful and advantageous study, particularly inclined to moral philosophy and poetry. In the process of time, I abandoned poetry, delighting myself in the sacred letters, within which I found the hidden sweetness that I never tasted before.” Of all this unfolded humanity, the world of antiquity remains for Petrarch a paradigm that does not wane. Even pietas forcing poetry to the second place does not reject and is part of the love for antiquity. The theme of Salutati concerning the coming together of the studia humanitatis with the studia divinitatis is already aired in Petrarch’s epistles: “Divine piety has freed me from all fires of human desires” (Jam ex omnibus humanarum cupiditatum ardoribus … divina me pietas eripuit). He is controlled still by an inexpli-cabilis cupiditas, which he did not wish uprooting because “the cupidity of honest things is not dishonest” (honestarum rerum non inhonestam esse cupidinem). This inexplicabilis cupiditas is the burning desire for the classics, for those who in their conversation realized the ideal city of the human spirits. In Le Familiari (bk. 3, num. 18), we find, “Gold, silver, diamonds, purple mantles, marble houses, cultivated gardens, paintings, adorned steeds, and all the other things of this kind, generate a mute and superficial pleasure. On the contrary, books delight deeply, they speak to us, they console us, and remain with us in a familiarity that is alive and witty.” Books establish a colloquy between men, a colloquy that defeats the silence of our solitude with the voice of the immortals, while in that total absence of the noises of the world the sound echoes of the truth that never wanes. This rhythm of solitude—spiritual society, silence of things— discourse of the soul, within which often the Petrarchan meditation moves, and that with an Augustinian color grows and evolves in the Secretum, pervades the whole celebration of letters. The education through the letters
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reaches a religious tone that is proper of this return of man to man through a contact with men. In this ideal society, God is always present. The solitude and the silence of the sage becomes the appeal to a communion of spirits. It is the solitude from the plebs, from things insignificant in which one gets lost; it is the silence from useless and vain sounds. It is a populated solitude and an eloquent silence, where, by not saying what is transient, speaks, outside the decadence of time, what is beyond time. “In the brief Evangelical words, in the silent meditation, I understood all the misery of human error. Human beings, neglecting the most precious things they possess, lose themselves in the multiplicity of things, waste themselves in the vanities of this visible world, searching outside themselves what they can only find by looking within themselves.” In the shocking contemplation of his own interior life (Le Familiari, bk. 3, num. 1) Petrarch sees the alpestrine peak whose top he reached with sweat and fatigue, becoming smaller than one cubit. For this reason, to philosophize is to die. To transfigure the world is to gather it in the light of the spirit and rediscover its value through the discovery of its unworthiness. Meditation alone, the discourse of interiority, brings us to the reconquest of ourselves and the world in the right light. Letters have this exact function: to retract us back from the regions of dispersion and to make us citizens of the world of spirits. To this regard, let us reflect on the letter sent to Boccaccio when he wanted to drop all literary studies because of the prophecy of his approaching death received from the Carthusian monk, Gioacchino Ciani, who received the information from the dying fellow-monk Pietro Petroni. Petrarch begins with the demonstration that the fear of death, which makes us vile, is transformed by way of a meditation on death. “In the thinking of death—he repeats with Ambrose—the soul finds safety from the pains of dying.” This in no way means to conquer death, but the transference from having fear to being conscious. This supreme strengthening and education of oneself is made easy or possible by the study of letters. “Neither the love of virtue nor the thought of impending death should detain us from the study of letters, which, when done with good intentions, awakens the love of virtue and reduces or destroys the fear of death. Letters are no obstacles to any person with a well-disposed spirit attending to their possession; on the contrary, in the difficulties of this earthly journey, letters count not as a hindrance but as true comfort and help.” Letters are no distraction for the soul; they constitute its spiritual sustenance. You can reach sanctity without culture, but culture is not its obstacle; it is its help and most solid sustentation. In Le Senili (bk. 1, num. 5), Petrarch says, Many who were without culture have obtained a high degree of sanctity; to no one culture has been an obstacle for becoming a saint.…The end of all goods is unique: but the roads that bring to it are many and different. One is slow, another proceeds more rapidly; one goes
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With much eloquence, Ernst Cassirer has portrayed a Petrarch at the limit between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, renunciation and worldliness, Augustine and Cicero. The impossibility of a resolution of the conflict would have generated indolence. In reality, in those same pages that Cassirer cites, Petrarch insists on the ideal encounter in the unique common humanity of Augustine and Cicero. In the letter to Colonna mentioned by Cassirer (Le Familiari, bk. 2, num. 9) the conflict is open, but it is not between the medieval and the classic world, but between one and the same, in the fight that is perennially renewed in all human beings in order to constitute them as human beings. Cicero and Augustine, far from opposing each other, come together to represent the eternal drama of humanity. Augustine was never ashamed of proclaiming the greatness of Cicero. Why should anyone blush in referring to Cicero? No guide who shows the path to salvation should be despised. What obstacle to the search for truth could Plato or Cicero represent? Is not the school of Plato supporting and teaching the true faith rather than opposing it? Are not the books of Cicero guidance for those on their way to faith? In the assiduous reading of Augustine, who arrived at philosophy through the reading of Hortensius, Petrarch was finding not an antithesis but a perfect harmony between antiquity and Christianity: “Augustine liked to converse familiarly with the classics and openly confessed that he found in the Platonic books a great part of our faith. After the reading of the Hortensius, he admirably converted and, leaving all the fallacious hopes and the vain disputations of the schools, dedicated himself to the study of the unique truth.” It is certainly not true that the classic philosophers appeared to Petrarch as the pagan extollers of worldliness, if he repeats the Platonic definition that philosophizing means to die to the life of the world. The conflict that Platonism, Stoicism, and Augustinianism, converging together, generated in his spirit was between the earthly and the celestial love. It was the same interior division that Augustine illuminated by way of a sharp light when he scrutinized the most hidden corners of his own soul. From this, his disperse life seems to the poet a light sleep and a most volatile phantasm
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(leve somnium, fugacissimumque phantasma). From this, the portrayal that he does of himself, of his pains: “My decisions are fluctuating, my desires are discordant, and with their discord they lacerate my all being” (Vuluntates meae fluctuant, et desideria discordant, et discordando me lacerant). This is not Cicero against Augustine; this is simply Augustine: “I was the one who wanted and did not want. I did not really want, but at the same time, I truly wanted. I was fighting with myself, wasting myself away” (Ego eram qui volebam, ego qui nolebam; ego eram. Nec plene volebam, nec plene nolebam. Ideo mecum contendebam et dissipabar a me ipso). It is an appeal to the interior life, to the life of meditation and philosophy, to the thought on the path toward God, in opposition to the dispersion that is exaltation of things and of one in things. It is the return to oneself that is not an ascetic denial of the world, but the rediscovery of the value of the world. The process of the Petrarchan thought is unique. It is a retreat in solitude in order to find a spiritual societas; it is a retreat from the things in order to find anew the truth of the things and of the persons, Laura included, who was first loved in the furor of the senses, and then in the serenity of a truer affection. This retreat in solitude—understood as the denial of the individual’s dispersion within the multitude and as the denial of a true solitude understood as isolation, in the name of the meeting of souls—is a spiritual communication. It is not the refusal of the world, but of the falseness of the world, of the sadness of the world, in order to find once more the truth of the world within the truth of God. Toward this goal, the magistral path is found in the letters, in Cicero, who is always loved as the initiator of Augustine and not as the fascinating enemy of Augustine. In Le Senili, bk. 15, num. 6, in the letter to Luigi Marsili, probably of the end of 1373, we see these motives and these themes all harmonized and converging. “Whether you sit and stay, move and walk, are in an assembly or within a multitude, you can gather the powers of your mind to meditate on yourself” (O che tu sieda e stia fermo, o che ti muova e passeggi, e nelle adunanze e in mezzo alla folla, tu puoi raccorre le forze della mente a meditar di te stesso). Solitude is here seen not as a retreat on the top of a mountain, far away from men, but among men, that is, as the finding of the communion of spirits. Of this communion, of this civitas Dei, the human city, the active solicitude of Martha (actuosa Marthae solicitudo), can be a preparation better than the monastic isolation. In one of Le Familiari letters (bk. 3, num. 12) Petrarch repeats to a friend who wanted to join the monastic life the words of Cicero: “There is nothing that happens on this earth more pleasing to God, the Prince who rules this world, than men united by social bonds in assemblies and meetings, which are called cities” (nihil est principi illi Deo, qui omnem hunc mundum regit, quod quidem fiat in terra acceptius, quam concilia coetusque hominum iure sociali, quae civitates appellantur). With Plotinus and Macrobius, Petrarch was also reminding the young aspirant to the monastic life that one acquires the contemplative virtue through the political virtue, which is like the vigil at the dawn before the coming of the
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glory at the noon of the spirit. To Luigi Marsili, Petrarch gave this advice, “I tell you what Cato, according to Cicero, once said. Follow your nature as if it was God, or even better follow the God sovereign of nature and of all things.” Only in this manner, we can make sure that “there is no field so sterile, or spirit so obtuse that could not assure a fecund, diligent, and continuing cultural growth.” Letters, culture, Cicero are the elements that prepare the soul to the bonds of charity, by opening the doors of what is the truer world of human beings: No thing exists that could stop me from advising you not to listen to those who insist that the mind must apply itself to theological studies with the intention of diverting you from the literary studies. Acknowledge that if Lactantius and Augustine (without mentioning others) were without letters, how would Lactantius have fought the superstitions of the pagans or Augustine built that loftiest monument of the City of God? After this exordium, Petrarch continued: As one is the God from which all things depend, one is also the science of God to whom all other sciences obey and serve. As Augustine reason on them in the second book of the Christian Doctrine, you too follow his counsel. Read everything, study everything, learn all that you can, as long as you possess intellect and memory, and so long as your sight is always fixed on the end. Remember that you have to think as a theologian, not as a poet or a philosopher, unless you think of the true philosopher, the one who loves the true wisdom, which is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 3. Science and Philosophy. Plato and Petrarch. Barlaam and Leonzio Pilato For Petrarch, this philosophy manifesting Augustinian tones consists of a life with the living Logos, in a humble listening to the magisterial Word; opposes the abstract and verbose science that isolates the world from its roots; raises veils and diaphragms in the eyes between the human being and the world, and is concerned about everything else but the soul: “Allow me to add that to whatever science you wish to apply yourself, you must rest only on the part that is true and certain, and not value what is abstruse and sophistical, dubious and uncertain.” Such a science must be a Socratic science, a reform of the soul, an interior renewal. What the studia humanitatis possess is exactly the ability of opening, beyond our eyes of flesh, the mind, renewing the human being in a manner that it would comprehend things in their radical truth. In this is rooted the polemic against the naturalists, the medics, the scientists, Averroés, Paris that has destroyed Assisi: the science of the world is known
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through the soul and God, not vice versa. We arrive to comprehend things by immersing them in the fire of the life of universal charity from which they flourished. Cicero, the prince of classic authors, is most dear to Petrarch. Petrarch draws from the Latins, the Latins the Greeks and, among the philosophers, from Plato, who of all the thinkers seems the one occupying the same place that Homer occupies among the poets. The text in Le Familiari (bk. 4, num. 15) says, “philosophorum principem ac talem inter eos qualis inter poetas est Homerus.” We do not know if Petrarch knew about Plato more or something different than his contemporaries; what we know for sure is that he possessed sixteen Platonic dialogues and had knowledge of the existence of others. In De ignorantia, with his polemic he attacked the Paduan Aristotelians (or those of Bologna), the Averroists, the physicians and the logicians, and the English sophists: They assert that Plato, whom they hate, whom they do not know, and dislike, did not write anything except one or two small little books. This they would not have said if they were as learned as they declare me to be unlearned. I am not versed in letters and am no Greek. Nevertheless, I have sixteen or more of Plato’s books at home, of which I do not know whether they have heard even the names. They will be amazed when they hear this. If they do not believe it, let them come and see. ... These most literate men will see not only several Greek writings of his but also some which are translated into Latin, all of which they have never seen elsewhere. They would then be free to judge of the value of these books; of their number they should not dare to judge otherwise than according to what I say and hopefully they will not dispute it, though they are very litigious. And how small a portion of Plato is this! I have seen many other works of Plato with my own eyes in the hands of Barlaam the Calabrian, the modern example of Greek wisdom, who once began to teach me Greek because he was ignorant of Latin learning (Latinarum inscius). He would have helped me make good progress if death had not enviously bereaved me of him, thus obstructing honest beginnings as it is death’s custom. This appeal to the reading of Plato was purely polemical. The mentioned Latin dialogues to which Petrarch alludes were probably, beside the Timaeus, the Phaedon (which he read), and the Menon, but of these two last titles he made no much use. He mentioned also The Republics, but it is clear that he had a vague knowledge of it. He assiduously studied the Timaeus, lamenting that the author who advanced so far on the path of truth had not reached Christian atonement. On 19 November 1355 he annotated in the codex of the Timaeus he owned, “O fortunate and unhappy soul who, though knowing all these things, had no knowledge of their origin!” (felix miser, qui haec sciens, unde ista nescisti). Cicero, Apuleius, St. Augustine, the Platonic medieval
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tradition, the comments of Calcidius and Macrobius, and perhaps the conversations with Barlaam gave Petrarch some knowledge of Platonism, in which he liked to see the classic philosophical current most near to Christianity. The Petrarchan Platonism, even though on the traces of St. Augustine it was pleased to celebrate Plato and Plotinus (ingens Platonicus), limited itself to being an exigency that was satisfied only in mid fifteenth century. As we saw, this was a polemical argument addressed to the Aristotelians more than to Aristotle. The Aristotelians were the ones who corrupted and polluted the golden river of the Stagirite’s eloquence that was “sweet and smooth, but they made it harsh.” Before stating Petrarch’s position in regard to Aristotelianism, we must declare that though his contacts with Barlaam were sterile, he began, thanks to this influence, to clearly affirm another exigency proper of humanism, that is, the studying of the Greek language, the necessity of entering in a direct contact with the primary source of the classic culture. Barlaam (Bernard, as a layman) was a Basilian monk, born at Seminara in Calabria, lived in the Orient, was learned in theology, and represented the extreme decadence of the Byzantine culture, which was most removed from the humanistic mentality. Barlaam had no opportunity of teaching Greek to Petrarch, and equally did not influence his philosophical formation. We may say that in general the Greeks and the whole sunset of the Greek culture offered to the humanists some instruments of work, that is, some linguistic data and codices, but very little in regard to suggestions and ideas. Examining the Ethica secundum stoicos of the Calabrian monk, Giovanni Gentile saw in it the source of some Petrarchan positions, which can be more easily explained with Cicero and Augustine. Barlaam, better than being considered a Platonist, was a critic of the Platonic separation and against the view of happiness made of pure spirituality, consisting in total ascetic and complete detachment from the life of the body: “We call beatitude a perfect life that is greatly suitable to the human compost, truly according to the capacity of the human nature, without need of adding anything alien or incongruous. This is what man can attain. They, on the contrary, consider beatitude possible only to the separate souls, and consequently deny that man while existing in this life will be capable of reaching it.” This thesis of Barlaam, of which there are instances also in Petrarch, is a Christian thesis, but it approaches Aristotle more than Plato. Is it really necessary to assume that Petrarch, an assiduous reader of ancient texts and of the Scholastics, was directly influenced by that teacher who in his opinion was very poor in Latin learning (Latinarum inscius)? Even Boccaccio could not draw very much from Barlaam. Boccaccio refers to Barlaam, in addition to some quotations used in De genealogia deorum, as the teacher of Paolo Perugino, the learned librarian of Robert of Anjou, at whose court there was no lack of experts in Greek and translators. Boccaccio mentions Barlaam again as the teacher of the strange Leonzio Pilato who, as he was saying, came from
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Thessalonica, but was born, he too, in Calabria. Leonzio was a difficult man and a weak translator of Homer and other Pseudo-Aristotelian writings; he was probably the first public teacher of Greek in Florence. “Our Leonzio,” Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio (Le Senili, bk. 3, num. 6), “in truth, was born in Calabria, though he insisted that he was born in Thessalonica, because he was of the opinion that to have Greek rather than Italian origins was more honorable. He always pretended to be a foreigner, Greek among us, and Italian among the Greeks. But no matter from where he came, the fact is that this Leonzio is certainly an idiot.” After Leonzio decided to go to Byzantium and then requested to be called back to Italy, Petrarch wrote again to Boccaccio (Le Senili, bk. 5, num. 3): “Though Leonzio is insistently asking and praying that I recall him, this will not happen, not by letter or messengers. There he should stay where he went after disdaining our hospitality. He could have been of a great help in our studies, if his manners were not so extremely crude and his customs so eccentric. To hell with him! Let him keep his villainous manners, his beard, his mantle, and his anger. What one has sown, he will harvest.” 4. Petrarch and Aristotle. Against Science If of Plato, whom he loved much but knew little, Petrarch studied little more than Timaeus (and Phaedon), toward Aristotle, coarse and difficult, he was never particularly inclined. He knew from Cicero and Quintilian that Aristotle had been a writer exquisite for his abundant eloquence, but he could not forget the Aristotle of the schools, an Aristotle essentially “dialectic” and “physical.” We know that Petrarch, contrary to Boccaccio who studied accurately Aristotle’s works, was a distracted reader even of the most Platonic of Aristotle’s works, the Nicomachean Ethics, which he owned with the comment of Eustrazio. Salutati and Bruni instead liked very dearly the Nicomachean Ethics. The anti-Aristotelianism of Petrarch could not possess the importance attributed to it by Georg Voigt. Facing the hard judgments of Petrarch on Aristotle, Voigt used to claim, “they have an epochal importance in the history of the sciences, like a great battle in political history.” He continued saying, “By reason of his opinions, Petrarch did not face one adversary alone or a particular school, but confronted an authority against which for many centuries nobody had dared to rebel. That strike was falling not only on Aristotle, but also on the Church and the institutions accepted in the Middle Ages.” To this regard, nothing has been said that was more excessive. The authority of Aristotle, greatly contrasted at the beginning, was still strongly debated. The opposition between faith and Aristotelian science in the De ignorantia was diffused throughout Italy in the schools of the Franciscan friars and Augustinian monks. The words just cited of Bonsembiante Badoario opposed faith to the pretensions of science; and admits science only as a humble acceptance of experience. Petrarch would confess of having benefited from the wisdom of Bonsembiante and from the conversation he had with him (Le
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Senili, bk. 11, num. 14). He was near Bonsembiante when he exclaimed, “Let God take my life and everything dear to me instead of permitting that I refuse this compassionate, true, and saving belief or renounce Christ for the love of Aristotle!” Then he added: The secrets of nature and the more difficult mysteries of God that we with humble faith accept, they with disdaining self-confidence try to comprehend, but without success because they do not reach them nor can get near to them. The fools believe to hold the heavens in their hand and in their false believe they feel as if they truly held the heavens, happy as they are in their error. From such great madness, not even the absurdity of the enterprise so well-expressed by the words of the Apostle to the Romans can save them. “Who knows the arcaneness of God? Who can share his judgments?” Petrarch accepted the extreme consequences reached by the Scholastic physics, but only so far as to be able to use and turn them against the scientists. He seems to tell them that with their methods they are reduced to count the hair on the lion’s tail. It is necessary to abandon a path that brings to absurd consequences; we must retreat from the world of the physical facts and from the palestra of logical virtuosity, and enter the richer fields of interior life where we will find the truth. Here is found the origin of Petrarch’s polemic against the medics, the scientists, and the Aristotelians in general. Here is also found the root of his Augustinianism. The frequent attacks against medicine as a typical science of nature, which would run throughout the whole fifteenth century, were very different from the purely rhetorical disputes to which someone has believed to be able to reduce them. What was questioned was the rapport between the knowledge of nature and that of the soul, and implicitly there was a discussion on a conception of the spirit and of nature. Petrarch fought the Aristotelians who sustained a nature in itself that was knowable by rational means and ruled by its own laws. Embedded by Augustinianism, Petrarch rejected this vision of things detached from their basis. Unknowable in themselves, things are, in their closed, detached, and abstract singularity, purely illusory. The cognition of this kind, completely fictitious, would also be useless. The scientist who studies nature in this way would know many things about animals, birds, and fish. He could tell how much hair a lion’s mane has, how many feathers in the hawk’s tail, with how many tentacles the polyp rolls up around a shipwrecked man. He can explain how the elephants bashfully mate, how long their period of pregnancy is, how docile and strong they are, how their intelligence is a little less than that of man, and that their life span is of two or three centuries. This scientist may narrate how the phoenix is reborn
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right after being burned with the aromatic fire; how the sea urchin can stop a ship at any speed it navigates, but once extracted from the water has no power at all; how a hunter with few mirrors may tease a tiger, the Arimasps with their sword can pierce the griffins, and the whales turning on their back deceive the mariner. And what about the knowledge of how deformed is the delivery of the bear, how rare that of the mule, unique and unfortunate that of the viper? What about the belief that the mole is blind, the bees are deaf, and the crocodile is the only one that moves the upper jaw? All these things are for the most false, as it appeared when we put them to a test, or unknown to those who described them. Generally, these things are too easily believed because they are far removed from us and easily accepted. But even if they were true, of what use are they for the life of beatitude? I ask myself, what is the use of knowing the nature of beasts, birds, fish, and snakes, if we ignore or disregard the knowledge of the nature of the human being, why are we born, whence we come, and whereto we travel (De ignorantia, ch. 3, sect. 2). The two motives that we see here converging are the impossibility of the true knowledge of reality through the empirical science and the uselessness of this science for the salvation of the soul. From this we derive the necessity of a radical conversion from exteriority to interiority, and consequently from the soul to God. Through this path alone, we will newly give a convenient meaning to the things themselves. “It is useful, putting aside all subtlety in arguing, to contemplate with our eyes the beauty of those things that we know to be governed by divine providence. No excuse exists for the people who having known God do not glorify God as it is suitable to a deity, nor give God thanks, but lose themselves in their own thoughts.” In the De ignorantia (ch.7, sect. 2), two are the conflicting conceptions, that of nature and that of the science of nature: the first considers the phenomenon in itself, while the second is like the letter and the syllable in the divine book: Imagine that a human being saw how exactly the motions of the sky are determined, how accurately the order of the stars is calculated, and how all things are so harmoniously connected with and adapted to each other. This human being might believe that there was no reason in all this and say that everything of which we by no means succeed in finding out with how much prudent counsel it is managed, came to be by chance. Should we call such a human being human? We see something moved by machinery, for instance, a sphere, a clock, and a great many other things. Are we not convinced by such a sight that they are works contrived by reason? When we see the moving impulse of the sky rotating around and revolving with admirable swiftness, most constantly producing the annual alterations for the more perfect welfare of every-
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Petrarch, under this perspective, concerned as he was with human problems as moral problems, entered into a conflict with the theoreticians of inquiries merely naturalistic. The manuscript of the work preserved in Venice at the Marciana, as it is known, provides the names of the four interlocutors of the De ignorantia: “Leonardus Dandolus, Thomas Talentus, Dominus Zacharias Contarenus, omnes de Venetiis,” and Magister Guido de Bagnolo de Regio, medic and astrologist. They all possessed a unique attitude of exaltation of earthly wisdom, of physical knowledge, while in Petrarch the philosophical problem was a human problem; even the problem of the world has to be seen as a human problem because of its incidence on the moral problems. Though Petrarch, the moralist, disregarded the morality of the logical inquiry and of the continuous natural research, he was a subtle and profound inquisitor of the human spirit in the footsteps of teachers like Cicero, Seneca, and Augustine. If once, following the major Italian philosophical tradition of which he felt to be a part, he included Peter Lombard, St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and Giles of Rome, the reason for it was probably a polemic motive against the Gallus calumniator. The main experience by which Petrarch intimately agreed with Augustine was the “sickness of the soul” (aegritudo animi) that consists in the soul being divided, in some way willing and in some other way unwilling (partim velle, partim nolle) in a perennial interior crisis. It was what he called accidia (indolence, sluggishness) something that was more than anguish; it was the tedium and the unhappiness that worried him constantly; it was the love of glory and the consciousness of caducity, the anguish and the desire of what is eternal contrasted by what is temporal. Petrarch tries to free himself from a life divided, ambiguous, unhappy, and proposes death as the resolution of the crisis, as the separation from the world, as the premise to a new vision of the world. The pages of the first dialogue of De secreto conflictu curarum mearum (On the secret conflict of my worries) are revealing: It is especially at night, when the spirit is relaxed and rests after accomplishing the daily tasks that it turns into itself. At that time, I lie down and dispose my body in the position in which the cadaver of those who have died is placed. I imagine the hour of death and all other horrendous things that my mind can picture in such a way that sometimes, falling into the agony of death, it seems that I see the Tartarus and all those evils. Because of this vision, I am so much agitated that becoming fearful and all shaking, I awake myself up. In this terror that looks for a refuge with the invocation for help addressed to others, the insufficiency of a soul, which fondles but does not educate itself, is
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manifest. Augustine, in the dialogue, reminds Francesco of that “perverse and morbid libido of deceiving oneself, of which in the present life there is no other deadlier plague.” The victory over the fear of death requires a daily meditation that presents all the horror of that changed and estranged face. “When all these things will appear before you, not as fictional but as true things, not as possible but as things that will necessarily and without any protection happen in your presence, then through all these cares you will move not as a desperate but as one of hope abundantly enriched.” It is then that the way of salvation will be gained. The awareness of death in opposition to the fear of death becomes the solid rock in the river of time: it is the crisis that liberates from time. At that moment when death is inalienably accepted with its horrors because comprehended as the necessary conclusion of the caducity of life in time, the soul will be safe and will begin its return to the true fatherland: Remove the veil, fight the darkness and then fix your eyes on death. … The heavens, the earth, and the oceans are mutating.… The different cycles of time end their courses and recourses, without ever stopping.… Do not be deceived by the plurality of your days, or by the difficult distinction of the ages. All the life of humanity, no matter how extensive you could imagine it, is like one day.… Think about these things … and value all that is written in the lives of philosophers as a commentary on death. This meditation will teach you to despise all mortal things and will indicate another way of living that you have to choose. You may ask what is this new way of living and how can anyone go through it. I will answer that you will have no need of long explanations. Listen right now to the spirit that continuously call and exhort you by saying, “The way to the fatherland begins here.” 5. Coluccio Salutati and Petrarch. Francesco Landini. The Thought of Salutati There is no lack of documents that support the fame and influence of Petrarch. Count Roberto Guido of Battifolle, to whom Coluccio Salutati sent a moving epistle in memory of the deceased friend on 16 August 1374 from Florence, wrote that the hills of the Apennines, the sacred mountain of Alvernia, the woods of Camaldoli, the solitude of Vallombrosa were combining their praises to those of humanity. This letter, collected with many others in Salutati’s Epistolario (bk. 3, num. 15), was giving a very precise judgment, both critical and constructive, of the philosophical position of Petrarch: Not to mention the liberal arts in which how much gifted he was by nature it is manifested in his writings, he was eminent in that philosophy which is a divine gift, a guide for all virtues, and with a Ciceronian term a purification (expultrix) from all vices, mistress and instructress
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY in all sciences and arts. I am not thinking of the philosophy that modern sophists frivolously praise in their schools. I am thinking of that wisdom that shapes the soul and the virtues, exterminates vice and illuminates the truth, far removed from all subtle dialectics. Let those who wish for the glory of the scholastic palestra hold on the first kind of philosophy, applying themselves with great efforts to the search of the arguments they call indissoluble. We instead venerate in our mind the other philosophy, and embrace it with all the forces of our soul.
The antithesis between the thought of Petrarch and that of the terminological logic of the calculatores and of the Aristotelians in general could not be presented in a clearer and more definite manner. We find this antithesis again, in a similar way, in Dialogi ad Petrum Histrum [in Kirner edition, pp. 20–21] of Leonardo Bruni, when Niccolò Niccoli, conversing with Salutati, inveighed against the subtle quibbles of the English logicians: What can we say about dialectics the art most necessary to argumentation? Would its kingdom flourish without any damage from the offensive from ignorance? Certainly not indeed, because even the barbarism that come from over the ocean has harmed it. O good gods, what kind of people are they? Even their names make us fearful: Farabrich [Richard Ferabrich], Buser [Entisber?], Ockham, Suiset, and others of this kind; they all seem to us to have taken their names from the cohort of Rhadamanthus! And what is there, tell me Coluccio, so that I stop joking, what is there, I ask, that in dialectics has not been corrupted by the sophisms of these British individuals? What is there in the old and true way of argumentation that they have not altered and reduced to trifle and nonsense? In those years, Francesco Landini, il Cieco degli Organi, attacked an equal criticism of the “new logic” of the Nominalists and with a short poem in laudem loice Ocham, inveighed at the anonymous critic of Ockhamism, “This rude malignant idiot is attacking / You, you, O Dialectics, which he has / Given up to learn, though without you, / Who rules over all the arts, none / of the arts can be completely learned.” (Rudis hic idiota protervus / Quam se scire suo toto desperate in aevo / Acriter impugnat te, te, Dialectica, cunctis / Artibus imperitans, sine qua non creditor / Ullam posse artem scire perfecte). The new doctor, continued Landini’s Ockham, knows nothing but to cite Cicero, his Cicero, without having any serious scientific preparation: “He runs through the pages of your works, O Marcus, / He called you “his Cicero” and frowning insistently / Cites now one volume of yours, now another. / New words always terrorize the simple people; / With immense praises, he extols Cicero to heavens” (Percurrit tua cuncta volumina, Marce, / Teque suum appellat Ciceronem, et nomine crebro / Nunc hoc, nunc illud rugosa fronte
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volumen / Nominat. Exterrent ignota vocabula vulgus; Laudibus immensis Ciceronem ad sidera tollit). Two worlds were coming into conflict, and the ancient one was not aware of having nourished in its womb the modern one. Niccoli, always according to Bruni, was adamant in his pitiless vituperation of St. Thomas, the Angel of the Schools; but Salutati and Bruni, who were more moderate than Niccoli, never noticed the measure in which the “new logic” opened the way to the kind of grammar that they were beginning to conceive. Salutati, in the cited letter of praises for the defunct Petrarch, exalts the studia humanitatis as the study of eloquence. In this letter, though he shows a notable effort in the depth of his thought, he does not yet reach the maturity that he will demonstrate thirty years later in the letter on the same argument to Giovanni Dominici. Since the human being is born for the human community (cum hominum causa homo sit genitus), he finds in language, in the communication of words, the cement that makes him a member of the city, the means by which to concretize collaboratively the bond of charity. “We have speech so that we can awaken with the fire of reciprocal love our neighbor’s mind that has been oppressed by corrupt customs and excessive inclinations of the body. Let the eloquence of our neighbor restore and rebuild where nature has failed and bad habits have destroyed.” These are affirmations that remind us of the considerations on language and education in letters that will be made one century later by Cristoforo Landino in the prologue to a course of lessons on Petrarch: [A word] can very easily arouse all the excited and turbulent emotions of the spirit, according to need.… At the beginning, speech brought men to abandon their fashion of living like beasts in woods and caves, without customs, without laws, and to join in groups and assemblies. Once they came together, speech convinced them to live according to justice. What the poets meant when they narrated that Orpheus with the lyre tamed the beasts, moved the rocks and the trees, and stopped the rivers, is that he with his persuasive speech convinced men who were insensitive like stones, voluptuous and furiously subject to the pleasures of the body and violent, to submit to a regulated civil life. 6. The De saeculo et religione If we believe Giannozzo Manetti, who in De illustribus longaevis gave us a biography of Salutati derived in its complex from that of Filippo Villani, Coluccio “from the youngest age, among all other arts dedicated himself particularly to the study of grammar and dialectics. He assiduously studied many writings of ancient grammarians and dialecticians.” Soon he turned his interest to the study of jurisprudence, and finally applied himself almost completely to rhetoric and moral philosophy. Starting in 1374, as Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, Coluccio was a valiant adversary of the Visconti who
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feared his letters more than an army, and exalted the Florentina libertas, that he celebrated as the heiress of the Romana libertas in the invective against Antonio Loschi. Salutati continued in Florence and Italy the Petrarchan impulse, and his letters as an eminent monument of thought circulated widely throughout the Peninsula proclaiming everywhere the announcement of a renewed culture. He always participated in the literary and philosophical disputations that flourished so intensely in Florence. He appears as a figure of first rank in Paradiso degli Alberti and in the dialogues dedicated to Vergerio by Bruni, in which are recorded the colloquia of the sessions of Santo Spirito with Luigi Marsili, of which Coluccio was the dearest friend. Mainly for the intervention of Salutati, Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to Florence to teach Greek. From him, Coluccio, like Cato the Elderly, hoped in vain to learn the language of Hellas, of which he was most curious. In one of the codices he owned that contains the commentary of Eustratius to Nicomachean Ethics, we can still today verify with how much care he was transcribing the Greek terms that within the Latin version he was encountering in his reading. The first of his moral treatises, De saeculo et religione, he produced around 1381 with the purpose of comforting Niccolò of Lapo Uzzano who joined the monastic life entering on 23 February 1379 the Convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli with the name of Girolamo. This treatise with its negation of the world and the exaltation of the ascent at first appears in sharp contrast with his insistent celebration of the civil life, of the duty of the man toward other men, of the human solidarity. “What is indeed this world that we love so much? Is it not the field of the devil, the palestra of temptations, the laboratory of evils, and the factory of vices?” The world, he insists, is a filthy sink of turpitudes, a fallacious snare, a sad merriness, a false joy, an empty cheerfulness, a field of tribulations, a paludal terrain of miseries, a shipwreck of virtue, a source of evils, a spring of crimes, a horrendous precipice, a place of anxiety, a sea of tempests, a valley of calamities, a mansion of sufferance, a mirror of vanity, the corruption of the minds, a trap of the soul, the father of death, the inferno of the living, and the sum of all caducity. The whole first book of the treatise insists obsessively, almost with a macabre satisfaction, on the self-inclusive vanity of things and on the painful sufferance of the world. Religion alone can offer the consoling ray of light in this night of darkness: The way of religion is difficult, but it is of virtue. It is the way of mortal beings, but it brings to things that are immortal. It is a way of solicitudes, but ends with tranquility, and, what is most pleasurable, it guides beyond the abrupt obstacles of the century to the wide joyful spaces of paradise. [O religion,] you are the state of perfection, though not always the assembly of the perfect ones. You are the school of truth that purifies from vices; the rule of customs, and the garden of virtue. You are the custodian of modesty, the doctrine of obedience, the mother of honesty, and the teacher of sobriety. You conquer inso-
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lence, overcome futile glory, suppress inane exaltation, and pacify contentions. You give precepts, oblige to counsels, increase merits, make crimes heavier, and what is the most important of all, you alone are the bond of charity by which we are united and bounded with God. When Salutati refers to religion, his tendency is to accentuate the earthly conflict and the human bond of charity; he exalts the earthly challenge rather than the heavenly triumph. Sufferance and sin are the realities of this world; but this suffering is enlightened particularly by hope. If we do not fight in the earthly arena, we will have no access to the city of peace. “The world is the way of all mortals, the guide and the trail of our pilgrimage.” The complete De saeculo et religione expresses only one motive: we are like gladiators thrown into the arena that is the world. “Doubtlessly, the fatigue in this battlefield is enormous but as equal is its merit. We shall desire to be placed in this pit so that we will exercise ourselves and be challenged not just for being tested but also for being allowed to reach gloriously the peace that surpasses every understanding.” We must continue faithfully in the fight, since the world is a place without peace. The peace that man thirsts for is elsewhere. “We must remain in the battle, engaged, fighting for justice, truth, and honesty” (Standum est in acie, conserende manus, luctandumque pro iustitia, pro veritate, pro honestate). This insistent recall to the reality of life with all its bitterness and all its sufferance, which is one of the first characteristics of the humanism as described in so many pages of Petrarch, pervades the work of Salutati. This sense of reality penetrates and dominates even the exaltation of the monastic life that is presented almost as a place resounding with rumors and clashes of battle, as an exemplar theater of the daily fight of human beings. Rather than being a shelter from the world, the retreat from it is an invitation to live more profoundly the drama of the world, absorbing it in its totality and exalting it within our being. 7. The De fato. Eulogy of Socrates. Grace and Freedom In 1396, Salutati began De fato, fortuna et casu that was completed in 1399. Presented in a scholastic structure, the treatise is imbued with an alive sense of problems conjoined with an exaltation of human actions that dominate in the convergence of Socratic motives with Augustinian and Scotist ones. The power of the treatise is found in the preeminence of the will, the exaltation of man in his earthly reality, and the celebration of the active life understood as the free construction of the human kingdom. The De fato begins with an ironic attack against those fanatics who fill up their writings with interjections like Medius fidius, Edepol Castor, Hercle and ends with the exaltation of Socrates, the hero, who to remain faithful to his mission freely chooses to die and preserve the significance of the laws whose historical inadequacy he had criticized in his life. Coluccio writes in De fato (bk. 2, ch. 8):
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY O most honorable man, if you were born in the Christian era, you were to have been admired as the prince of our martyrs, not for the glory proceeding from your virtues, but as the one who knowing the true happiness died to witness the certainty of justice and truth! It is probable that he may have asked himself, “What will you do, O Socrates? With the help of friends and their protection, you could assault the guards and escape the necessity of death with help from outside the law. Your death or life is in your own hands.” While meditating these things, he considered also the contrary reasons that we may assume to have been of this kind, “Oh, how beautiful life is! How sweet it is to exchanged it for the price of a glorious death! O Socrates, if you care for life, you would live in exile; by escaping, you will be free, but by dying you will be freer! A death touched by infamy is villainous, but more villainous is a life touched by crime. It is not a crime, when there is no other way to escape death and injury. Crime is to commit what a law forbids. O good gods, if Socrates is going to die, should he better die as innocent or guilty? How can we escape a death that agrees with our life? I live as innocent, let me die as innocent. I have taught that to despise death is the highest wisdom and the greatest virtue. We must sometime confirm by action what we have preached by word. It is foolish to throw oneself precipitously into danger, but it is a virtue not to look for danger or to turn your back to coming danger. Let us gloriously die then if that is what the gods want, if so it has been disposed by the magistrates, if it is the wish of the people who has offered abundant opportunities of escape. Let us take our vengeance on the judges who delight in might but not in right. They use death as a constriction and as a deterrent, but we can show that they have no power over those who spontaneously accept to remain and die.”
For Salutati, liberty and therefore Socratic dignity are found in the transformation of the necessity imposed upon us into an act of the will through a serene acceptance. The significance of a life is measured in the acceptance of a death into which all the values preached and practiced seem to have converged (“we can show that they have no power over those who spontaneously accept to remain and die”). In this conquest of liberty, the more serious problem of liberty itself is exactly manifested. In Coluccio, this difficulty presents itself in the terms of the antinomy grace-liberty. In De saeculo et religione (bk. 2, ch. 6), he already observed, “With our deeds we cannot oblige God to ourselves. … If we could oblige God to us, we would not be saved by benignity of grace, but by necessity of justice.” In De fato (bk. 2, ch. 10), he insists, “No one is saved by works, but by grace. If salvation would be attributed to merits, it would not be by grace but by justice; it would not be freely given, but somehow due to justice.… Grace through faith is the cause of salvation. This is not from us, but from God’s gift, not from our works.”
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If it is true that salvation is through faith, and faith is a gratuitous gift, it is also true that the gift of ourselves to God is transformed in the gift of God to us: “We know for certain that we will not lack grace in acting, if we care for rightly tempering the will according to the rule of reason” (certique simus numquam gratiam nobis in agendo deficere, si cura fuerit voluntatem recte rationis regula temperare). The ethical religious dialectic of virtue-salvation is not based on the conception of the causality of a giving that demands a receiving. It is instead an effusion of love to which no agreed upon compensation corresponds, except for an infinite love. God, who represents this sublimation of love, is not the obstacle but the guarantee of this mutual correspondence; even better, God is the only one who can constitute this warranty. In this break of logical schemes due to the appeal to the dialectic of the will understood as an active and creative spontaneity is found the basis of the preeminence that Salutati continuously reaffirmed of the will over the intellect. The intellect enlightens the way, but does not decide; the under-standing is instrumental in relation to the will; nature is the means for the liberation of the soul. As Giovanni Dominici will underline in his polemic, this is an attitude rich of Scotist motives. To the exaltation of the free will that is present in every aspect of the human life, Salutati raises the polemic concerning every physical determinism, and in a particular way concerning the astrological one. It is not in this or in the interesting disputations on the theories of Cecco d’Ascoli that his thought is brilliantly alive, but in the attempt of determining once more the relation between time and eternity seen as the rapport between man and God. This problem has already been proposed in the analysis of the rapport of the terms grace-liberty that like before cannot be resolved within rational limits. The being present of the divine eternity is seen tota simul, that is, it is all displayed in the same intuition of the whole, so that “in Its divine intuition nothing is past or future,” all succession of events being excluded. Temporal human life is after all a perennial decadence from divine participation. The antithesis temporality-eternity that translates the antinomy of manGod is translated at its own turn into the tension of a movement toward God, which assumes at the same time a rhythm of presence and absence. Human life is temporal, but being conscious of the limits imposed by its temporality, in a certain way can go beyond them and for this reason it appears contradictory. The modern sophists cannot understand it with their “dialectical” argumentations and it is to them that Salutati seems to oppose the wealth of the interior life all displayed in the religious experience. According to Coluccio, the studia humanitatis are the introduction to this life of the soul, which is found once more beyond the logical subtleties of the sophists. In De fato, the antithesis is clearly outlined between a humanism taken as the imitation of antiquity in regard to its content and a humanism understood as the rediscovery of the genuine human form. “Until the present, few were inclined to the study of the humanities, though everybody seemed to praise them, many enjoyed it, and some delighted in it” (Usque adeo pauci
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sunt qui studiis humanitatis indulgeant, licet illa commendentur ab omnibus, placeant multis, et aliqui delectentur in ipsis). In the polemic that exploded in regard to the studia humanitatis between Coluccio Salutati and Giovanni Dominici, Dominici in its confutation tied together the two theses, that of the primacy of the will and active life with the other of the formative importance of letters. Doubtlessly, it would be erroneous to consider the Dominican Dominici simply as the blind praiser of antiquity, since he was well aware of the new exigencies of an earthly life in which man should be engaged. He permeated the Regola del governo di cura familiare (1401) with a notable sense of fidelity to things, a sense that does not contrast the ardor of charity that runs through all the activity of Dominici. He could not remain unresponsive to that continuous insistence of Salutati on action, will, and works. Here is the indignant exclamation with which the Dominican expressed himself in the Lucula noctis (1405): “I don’t know how and from which sources some have dared, against reason and the authority of the saints, to place the will and its acts before the intellect and its operations. Perhaps people discuss just for the pleasure of discussing or they refer to some evidence of facts that they experienced, no differently than what happen in many homes where the wife commands and the husband obeys.” Dominici’s attack was directed against the new literary formation, against the studia humanitatis. In a letter of 1406 that remained incomplete Salutati explained that the study of words should not be considered a vain curiosity concerning grammatical subtleties. The study of words expresses the need to identify the significant direction of language “not in its appropriation, which is due to habit, but in its intentionality.” For this reason “the grammar” becomes the basis of all other sciences, not so much as it is a true and proper grammar, but so far as it is the science of the linguistic expression, the science of the manifestation of thought and of its becoming determinate and articulate. In this way, grammar becomes the science of form and content (noticia rerum), the doctrine concerning how the mind models itself and assumes a posture in regard to reality. “Grammar itself without content and without the ways in which essence changes in things cannot be learned” (ipsa grammatica sine noticia rerum et quibus modis rerum essentia variestur, sciri non potest). The word, which is born with the thing itself (verbum velut cum ipsis rebus natum), is the key needed to understand the mind that expresses itself in it and the object that with the mind becomes determined. To try to rediscover the first genesis of a word is like to try to become present to its rebirth within our horizon, and to our actualization in the world. For this rediscovery, we need to descend to the underworld and break through that crystallization into which the consuetudo has solidified the expressive form of a term so that we can find its primary intentio. From here, we have that frequent research of etymologies in dictionaries, which is so much different from the analogous medieval practice, and that underlines the exigency of making the history of the
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word in order to penetrate the values of the concepts. From here, the connection of grammar and theology, of studia humanitatis and studia divinitatis, without which no other true and complete science can be given (Connexa sunt humanitatis studia, connexa sunt et studia divinitatis, ut unius rei sine alia vera completaque scientia non possit haberi). We have here a renewed Baconian motive: the science of religion is biblical hermeneutics, it is philology applied to the Old Testament. As we discover the intentio humana under the shell of the words of men (sub cortice verborum hominum), in that same way by reaffirming the primary directions of the divine word, we will comprehend the meaning of the word of God in its extension and power. If we were to express ourselves in terms certainly different from those of Salutati, we would say that all knowledge is philology because to understand is to deepen the significance of a communication. From time to time, we will read the grand living book of God, nature, or the soul of man, or the revealed book, and find in each one, sub cortice (under its shell), the same indication of directions. What counts is to penetrate the heart of the life where the expression is born, where reality is bustling, which is a dynamic operation rather than a rigid and static structure. The significance of the great work that Salutati dedicated to the poetic fables, where he intentionally concentrated on the myth of Hercules, which during the Renaissance became the symbol of the human nobility active in building a world, is an example of that reality: I subdivided the great work concerning the allegorical meanings of the fables of Hercules into four parts. In the first part, I discussed the meaning of being a poet, what is poetry, and many other things on the same subject; in the second, I considered conception, birth, and infancy of Hercules; in the third, I dealt with the labors of Hercules. Then, I ended considering the underworld, the descent to the underworld, the wives of Hercules, the Mount Oeta, and the second capture of Troy. Poetry, in one sense, is essentially allusive expression (est poetica ars bilinguis); in another, poetry is exaltation of man the fabricator. “The strongest men, who have won the monstrous fatigues on earth, rightly deserve the stars.” 8. Martha and Mary We are returning to one of the central moments of Salutati’s speculation, the consideration on the value of human activity and on the bond that ties human beings moving toward their common good: Though the monastic life is considered more secure, it is not truly more secure. To be honestly occupied in honest activities, if it is not holy in itself, it is certainly holier than to be idle in solitude. An active holiness is of advantage to many because it is seen by many and will guide
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY many on the way to heaven, giving them an example, whereas the sancta rusticitas profits only oneself. To live in holiness in the world is such a great merit that the bosom of Abraham is said to be place and receptacle of the elects. In that place, the rich man will see Eleazar rest in peace. I have never heard anything like this said about any idle person, no matter how resplendent he was with sanctity.
The solitude understood as isolation means the betrayal of the human mission that is the social mission: the construction of the city of God through the construction of the earthly city. “Do not believe that to remove oneself from people, to avoid seeing beautiful things, to close oneself in a cloister or segregate in a hermitage, is the way of perfection.” The only solitude that has value is that of withdrawing within yourself (in te ipsum redi) to find a new encounter; it is to escape from a false society in order to build the true city. “What conquers the title of perfection for what you do is within you.” This is a process of purification, for which the monastic isolation, with the seduction of remembrances and regrets, can result more obnoxious than useful. God has clearly taught that he is found where human beings are united and collaborate: Who do you believe pleased God more, the inactive Paul the Hermit or the active Abraham? Don’t you think that God loved Jacob with twelve sons, two wives, abundant herds, more than Macarius, Theophilus or Ilarion? … Don’t you believe that you are justified because you have withdrawn from the world, forgetting that by so doing you may fall from heaven to earth, meanwhile I, remaining in the world, will be able to raise my heart to heaven? You, too, if you will provide, serve, and care for your family, your children, your friends, and your whole city, will be able to raise your heart to heaven and please God. Being involved in these cares, you probably may please Him even more, because you have not pretended to find your peace in solitude with God, but, relying on what He would grant you, you have united yourself to Him, the One Who cares for the things necessary to family, dear to friends, advantageous to the fatherland. Salutati has no doubt, about whom, between Martha and Mary, Leah and Rachel, he must choose: on earth, we must be active. “In this life, Leah precedes Rachel.” In this life, glory is attained in relation to the deeds one has accomplished. In the world, he who dedicates himself to contemplation in such a way to ignore the suffering of the neighbor, to be indifferent to the ruin of the fatherland and the death of the relatives, “this individual should be considered not a man but a piece of wood, a useless piece of wood, a stone, a very hard stone.” How can one like this be a disciple of that Christ who was moved by the death of Lazarus and cried over Jerusalem? In the last judgment, what counts is the work of charity. “He alone who clothed the naked, fed the hun-
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gry, gave the drink to the thirsty, freed those in jail, visited the sick, and received the stranger, will hear the sweetest call. ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father! Enjoy the kingdom which has been prepared for you ever since the beginning of the world’.” In a typically humanistic mode, Salutati for the same reason exalts the matrimony as the duty of man toward God, the fatherland, and other men. If everyone would embrace the virginal life, “what would gradually happen to the immensity of the world? The families would extinguish, the castles and the fields would be abandoned, the cities would vanish, the kingdoms would disappear, the earth would return to be covered by thorn-bushes and thickets!” This celebration of the human family will later inspire De re uxoria of Francesco Barbaro, De dignitate matrimonii of Giovan Antonio Campano, and influence Guiniforte Barzizza and Marsilio Ficino. Again, what makes Salutati almost the exemplary expression of the nascent humanism is the justification that he gives of the construction of the human kingdom, when he renews the Petrarcan polemic against medicine. With a polite letter of 20 January 1390, Antonio Baruffaldi, the medical doctor of Faenza, questioned Salutati on whether modesty was to be considered a virtue or a vice. This was not a new problem. St. Thomas discussed the issue in Summa theologica on the footprints of Aristotle and the Fathers, in pages that Coluccio will often cite. In his letter, Baruffaldi referred also to the thesis of Petrarch that there is a fundamental incompatibility between medicine and rhetoric. In his answer, Salutati takes no position against medicine and prefers to insist on the fact that if the physician is a human being, he must be eloquent, because humanity and communication are two inseparable terms. What is notable in De verecundia is the celebration of conscience as the principal fundament of moral values: Let us fear the secret judgment of our own conscience and invoke it as the witness of our actions! When we sin, let us value its scrutiny not less than that of other peoples. Let us fear conscience more than anything else, because we know that conscience not only sees what we do, but also, prior to what we do, is aware of all our inner emotions. Conscience is testimony to our goals, is present to our thoughts, and is company to our actions. Conscience speaks to us after our actions have been executed and does not allow that we enjoy what is evil.… We cannot escape from our conscience. Conscience is infallible, it cannot be deceived. We cannot avoid it as we avoid those who have seen the evil we did. Human beings speak about us with others, but conscience speaks about us with us. Conscience alone accuses us, shows our faults, and judges us.
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 9. Law and Medicine
The problem of medicine came to be formulated as a problem of the rapport between the knowledge of the physical world and that of morality. The work in which Salutati faced this problem, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, was written in reaction to a small treatise of a Florentine doctor, Bernardo, perhaps Bernardo of Ser Pistorio, who was known for having accepted a friendly competition with Franco Sacchetti. In that treatise, Bernardo sustained the preeminence of medicine, and to that opinion, Salutati reacted with De nobilitate legum et medicinae (On the excellence of laws and medicine). In this antithesis, “medicine” meant physics, knowledge of the world of nature, search of pure knowledge, knowing for the sole pleasure of knowing; “law” instead signified the world of man, his actions, the will, but within the limits of an absolute norm, rooted on a divine basis. The Stoic conception of the absolute foundation of norms that Salutati was deriving from Cicero is clearly outlined at the beginning of the treatise: The true law is from nature, not from a human decree, even though it is called human. No specific human statement can become law if it does not agree completely with the natural law that is the divine imprint. The divine law imprints on the human minds the natural law that is the common principle of human actions and that, living in our souls, directs us toward what is decreed by that first, immutable, divine and eternal law. The principle and the end of the law are not as some sustain to repress the evil-doers, but to establish the city, the human kingdom, and the common good. From this, the clear superiority of law over medicine is manifested, even when medicine is considered not just as a technical application, but also in its speculative significance of physical cognition of nature. “The end of speculation is ‘knowledge’ whose object is truth. The end of the law is ‘guidance’ for human actions. The object of laws is therefore the good, not just any good, but the most divine good that is the common good.” This good is wanted, conquered, and not given: “It is not the goodness by which we are good, but the goodness by which we make ourselves good. The first goodness is from nature, reason why we do deserve neither praise nor reprimand; praise or reprimand is the prize of actions.… We are praised for the good that we do, because God makes us worthy to act and properly deserve merit with him.” Salutati does not stop at the consideration of his old thesis of the preeminence of doing over knowing. He hits the mark of the pretenses of the science of nature in what the naturalists retained to be the highest title of their dignity: certainty founded on experience. Salutati claims that medicine never reaches universality because it is obliged to proceed per infinita media, so that it is lost in the particulars and becomes their prisoner. On the contrary, the human sciences that include also jurisprudence, “have principles that are not in the
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things outside, but principles that are within us; they are inserted naturally into our minds with such certitude that they cannot be ignored.” Medicine offers a drug that may at times heal and at other times kill; the laws, divine in their origin, drawn by our spirit from their proper roots, give us a concrete universality: “The civil laws have the infallibility of human promulgation and contain inherently the natural reason that every human being with a healthy mind can see or can find by meditation and discussion. The principles of medicine, on the contrary, when experience is lacking, are uncertain and can deceive, or they do deceive by not showing the common reason or producing the desired effects.” In his progressive acquisition of knowledge in the studia humanitatis, Coluccio Salutati grasped and made his own a special concept of the human mind, which he repeated again in the praise of the laws that medicine itself formulated in the final peroration of De nobilitate legum et medicinae: Within my own self, I have reflected about the mystical body that is constituted by the human multitude as it is united in families, regions, cities, nations, kingdoms, and empires. I have observed how the laws order, support, and preserve everything and at the same time I have remarked that our science, art, and work, can do nothing more than perhaps to prevent the diffusion of the diseases of the body.… The true health of human societies does not depend from medicine, but from spiritual agreement.… All the beings that constitute the human consortium, all humankind, are beyond our cures. Humankind maintains itself, progresses, and prospers through laws. These goods [of the laws] by being more common are also more divine than the goods that benefit singular [individuals] and are provided by medicine. There is no way to compare the goods of medicine with the advantages of laws. Then medicine itself turning to those who exalt it, reproaches them in the following fashion: Alas! Why did you exalt our certitude? We [medicine, physics] are certain in the mind of our creator, where the clearest reason of all things exists and where the laws, too, are found stable and most certain. We are also valid in things and in the essence of a veracious science. Laws, however, are most valid in the relationships between human minds, and they are not just most certain, but also well known. How can you know us [medicine, physics], when you barely can grasp even the minimal part of the things that exist? How can you know us, when the things that you accept as verified truth cannot be experimentally verified? How can you know us, when everything changes because of the stars’ influence and the difference of position within space or time? … We [medicine] are born from the earth, the laws instead from the divine mind. God has given the laws with his word, and has
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The discussion of Salutati was reaching beyond the limits of an academic disputation. It formulated the problem of the relationships between the science of man and that of nature, a problem that returned throughout the entire fifteenth century in the terms established by the ingenious chancellor. Just to mention the greater thinkers, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Galateo, and Niccoletto Vernia became involved in the discussion of this theme. In a famous letter, Leonardo Bruni praised the dignity of the studia humanitatis declaring that they are called in that manner because they guide man to his perfection (quod hominem perficiant). Changing most clearly the perspective of Salutati, Bruni contrasts letters with jurisprudence, and explains that letters form the good person, while jurisprudence punishes the wicked ones. Salutati’s conception of justice as morality was in this way diluted, since such conception was responsible for giving to positive laws a meaning that could not be supported: These studies [of the humanities] are totally aimed at making the good person, of which nothing more advantageous can be found. Civil right, on the contrary, is not concerned at all with the good person.… The good person will pay the legatees and will comply with the requirements established by the testator, even though the testament may lack the solemnity of the seven witnesses. But civil jurisprudence demands the opposite. Goodness and virtue are stable, while rights do change with place and time, as it happens often that what is right in Florence, is contrary to law in Ferrara. Not too much different from that of Bruni is the point of view expressed by Poggio Bracciolini in Historia tripartita (1450). In the second question, while Poggio is discussing with Carlo Marsuppini, Benedetto Accolti, and Niccolò Tignosi of Foligno the theme proposed by Salutati, the thesis is presented that laws are useful for the scoundrels and the plebs. “Human beings who are serious, prudent, and modest need no law. They have already assigned to themselves the law of honestly living, having been educated by nature. They study to act with virtue and according to good customs” (Homines graves, prudentes, modesti non egent legibus. Ipsimet sibi legem bene vivendi indixere, natura et studio ad virtutem et bonos mores instituti). Poggio goes even far beyond Salutati. Coluccio founded his position on the Stoic and Ciceronian thesis of a natural law, eternal and absolute, the root of all civil laws. Poggio denies the premise of this way of thinking. Laws have no intrinsic value, nor the dignity that demands respect. Laws are disregarded by those who hold power; their arbitrary will is law itself. The laws are not respected by the defenseless who obey because of fear, “The plebs and the
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lowest class alone are obliged by the laws.… The powerful despise and violate them, but they are agreeable to the men who work for a daily pay, for the artisans, for the retailers, for the lazy, and for those of minimal income. All these individuals are regulated by force and fear of punishment more than by laws.” From the statements of Bracciolini, we can see clearly how tyrannies, violence, and conflicts influenced greatly the spirit of the people: “I never read, saw or heard that a republic or one of the major princes have obeyed your laws. I never read or heard either that laws were ever imposed on them. On the contrary, we see that commonwealths have arrived at the supreme power by the use of violence, and kingdoms have been formed not by law but by the use of force, which is contrary to law.… Not without reason, indeed, Anacharsis compared the laws to the spiderweb that can entrap the powerless but is broken by the powerful.” 10. Giovanni of Imola. Niccoletto Vernia and Galateo The dialogue de medicinae et legum praestantia (on the excellence of medicine and laws) that the physician Giovanni d’Arezzo dedicated to the young Lorenzo de’ Medici right after the death of Piero, his father, offers much interest in the history of the present discussion (ms. “Laur. 77, 22”). Interlocutors were Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, and Niccolò Niccoli, who even mentioned ironically the fashion already diffused of discussing the argument. Marsuppini, who sustained with particular emphasis the superiority of laws, agreed with Bruni when he affirmed the absolute validity of jurisprudence: “It is my opinion that the legal discipline can never be praised enough.… In fact, this discipline does not compel and limit only the farmers, or the city dwellers, or the nobles, but also the judges and the magistrates. It rules over kings, dominates lords, and instructs emperors.… Jurisprudence defends the powerless from the powerful and preserves equity between equals.” Niccoli, on the other hand, insisted on the arbitrariness of the law, which he considered based on the capriciousness of those in power, and reinforced by the agreeability or fear of the subjects. Marsuppini counterattacked by stating that the sovereign power rests on the consent of the people and is determined by certain objective considerations of value. The laws are eternal imperative canons that stand and are not shaken or crumbled because of human errors or changes. They are immutable rules of rights whose significance nothing can impair. It is true that we see them changing, but it is “the nations that change them when in different times they have different opinions and judgments; by doing this, however, they deceive and delude themselves, not the sacred ancient laws.” Among the codices once in possession of Niccoletto Vernia and now at the Marciana Library, a quaestio is asked by the Augustinian monk, Giovanni of Imola, a doctor in theology, “whether the civil science or canon is nobler than medicine,” where the answer is expressed in favor of jurisprudence as the science that makes man nobler. Vernia to his analogous quaestio “whether
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medicine is nobler and more eminent than civil right,” will answer by contradicting point by point the adversary thesis in the name of the superiority of speculation. “Without any doubt, we can say that natural science is greatly preferable to political science because the science of nature examines the glorious and heavenly bodies in relation to their essence.” Civil virtue will never provide us with that complete and perfect happiness that resides exclusively in science: “Without nature’s science God or the other intelligences cannot be known, in whose cognition the true happiness of man is found. To this cognition, the laws’ experts by means alone of their legal practice would not be able to arrive, because the goal of a legal position is the achievement of a certain happiness to be obtained in the common civil life and social interrelationships. This is not a true happiness.” To this identical conclusion, Antonio de Ferrariis, called Galateo, will arrive in his booklet on the dignity of the disciplines (della dignitá delle discipline). He reached that position perhaps under the influence of Vernia and in an open polemic with Salutati, “who knowing nothing, pretends to speak about all things” (qui cum nihil sciat, omnium rerum notitiam sibi vindicat). Galateo claims that the jurists exalt their profession for motives of pure propaganda, without recognizing that the social instinct on which their profession is based is common to both the humans and the animals (cum belluis quodammodo communem). At times, this instinct is even superior in animals than in human beings: “Without speaking of big animals like lions, bears, horses, elephants, and big birds, which at the established seasons and times migrate to different regions, let us consider the bees and those tiny animals like the ants. Who does not know of how much prudence they give a show? I will dare to say that in many animals more justice and piety can be observed than in some human beings.” And insisting against Coluccio, Galateo, in an Aristotelian fashion, turns upside down the thesis of Salutati by opposing the contemplative science to action. Medicine, understood as the complex of the sciences of nature, as it “considers the physical elements, the regions, the position of the cities, the character of places and times, the virtues of herbs, of metals, of animals, and at last the structure of the human body, is by far more excellent than the laws themselves. All the things considered by medicine are the work of nature and God; laws are the product of man. This part of medicine is somehow classified under the contemplative disciplines. The civil discipline consists totally of some acts.… As much as the contemplative disciplines are nobler than the active ones, so much this part of medicine is nobler than the civil discipline.”
Ten THE WORLD OF HUMANITY 1. Luigi Marsili. The Meetings of Santo Spirito. Niccolò Niccoli. Leonardo Bruni. Manuel Chrysoloras. The Translations of Plato Coluccio Salutati, writing to Poggio Bracciolini in December 1405, with words full of emotions pointed out friar Luigi Marsili of the Augustinian Order as the teacher of the new Florentine culture: Was any perfection of eloquence missing in our venerable father, the teacher Luigi de’ Marsili? … Of what was he lacking in eloquence, erudition, and virtue? Which orator moved more profoundly than he the spirits, and guided them wherever he wished? In the human and divine sciences, who knew more? Who was more expert, immediate, and rich in narrating the stories of the Gentiles? Who was more enlightened in theology, more subtle in the arts and philosophy, more erudite concerning antiquity, more learned in prose and poetry? But he left no writings. Pythagoras of Samo never wrote anything.… Socrates did not write a thing.… Neither did Christ. Poggio, too, in the funerary praises of Niccoli will present, on the footprints of Salutati, Marsili as the teacher of the Florentines, without mentioning the part that the same Salutati had in all this. In Dialogi, Bruni will act no differently, exalting together the doctrine and the goodness of Marsili: “The names of Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and other ancients were always on his lips.” Petrarch in one of Le Senili (bk. 16, num. 7) assigned ideally the torch of humanism to Marsili with the duty of confuting Averroès. The citizens of Florence loved him not only as the teacher, but also as the defensor of the Florentine liberty, the florentina libertas against the papacy of Avignon, whose corruption Marsili strongly condemned. We see Marsili at the center of a gathering of learned men in Paradiso degli Alberti by Giovanni of Prato. At one side of the picture there are the representatives of the culture and of the schools beginning with Francesco Landini, Cieco degli Organi, whose Ockhamism we already mentioned, Biagio Pelacani of Parma, famous philosopher and scien-
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tist, teacher in many literary centers of Southern Italy. For a short time, Pelacani was also in Florence, from where he was called to Padua at the beginning of the fifteenth century. After ten years in Padua, Pelacani was put aside because he had become unable to teach and without a following of students. With Salutati, we see Marsilio of Santa Sofia, representative of a famous family of physicians, who in those years was teaching the most orthodox Aristotelianism at the learning centers of Padua, Pavia, Piacenza, and Bologna. Marsilio of Santa Sofia died in 1405, leaving various quaestiones, for instance, on the elements (de elementis), on whether it is required for sensation that the object produces some sensible species in cooperation with the sensitive faculties (utrum ad sensationem requiratur production specierum sensibilium ab objecto in medium et sensitivarum potentiarum), and some commentaries on Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna. In the pleasant Florentine villa, the discussions of the mentioned literati were centered on the preeminence of the ancients over the moderns, and knowledge was popularized beyond the walls of the schools, making wisdom an open thing for a different and wider public. This happened not without arising the despiteful reaction of a more conservative spirit such as that of Angelo Torini, a member of the literary circle of Giovanni delle Celle, who in 1363 wrote a brief treatise “on the misery of the human condition.” The treatise was divided into three parts, and Torini described each in this way, “In the first part, I will show how great the misery of the human creature is, starting from the beginning of its birth; in the second, I will show the misery of being in the world; in the third, I will describe the misery at the time of death.” It is not strange then that Torini, having such ideas, disdainfully exclaimed, “Veder mi spiace molto / Tener donne o’ in chiesa è concestoro / Da facundi in vertú religiosi” (I don’t like much to see / Women holding meetings in the church / Under the direction of monks advanced in virtue). The reference seems to have been to Marsili, who had been a friend of Torini, and in Paradiso degli Alberti was consistently interpreting morally the fable of Circe, showing how the responsibility for transforming men into beasts was evil doing and not the enchantments. Though not in agreement with Pelacani, Marsili was perfectly concordant with Salutati, Roberto de’ Rossi, and Niccolò Niccoli in the meetings of Santo Spirito. Of Niccoli, we must remember the splendid praise of the Camaldulensian Ambrogio Traversari (Epistles, bk. 8, num. 2): “You have called back to life the almost buried humanity. You were the first to awake up the idle spirit of man to engage in these noblest studies” (tu sepultam fere humanitatem excitasti; tu sopita hominum corda ad haec honestissima studia prior evigilare fecisti). When we think of humanism, we cannot avoid mentioning Niccoli, a man with a strong language and a strange spirit, who appears to us in the exquisite portrait left by Vespasiano da Bisticci. He was most elegant, and always dressed in beautiful pinkish clothes. “At the table, he ate always using ancient most splendid plates; his all table was full of dishes of porcelain and of other most ornate
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jars.… It was a pleasure to see him at table, so ancient as he was, among so many ancient objects.” He was always surrounded by many beautiful things that came to him from everywhere in the world. Though deeply absorbed in his studies, Niccoli tried to make of his life in Florence a masterpiece of harmony. Florence was the place where everything seemed to be done according to an esthetic inspiration and where the chancellors of the state were chosen according to their “humanity” and not according to their technical ability. Pious II wrote (Opera, p. 454), “We should commend the prudence of the Florentines in many areas, especially in the election of their chancellors, because they do not, as many other cities do, inquire about the ability of the perspective chancellor in the art of jurisprudence, but about his proficiency in oratory and the studies of the humanities.” After Salutati, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pious II) mentioned Bruni, Marsuppini, and Poggio, as the great chancellors of Florence. Leonardo Bruni himself described the enthusiasm with which he abandoned the studies of law for those of the humanities, in the pages of Rerum suo tempore gestarum (On the great events of his time): During this time of peace, the studies developed beyond belief, primarily because of the addition of the knowledge of the Greek letters, which for seven hundred years have not been in use in our nation. The Constantinopolitan Manuel Chrysoloras, a man of noble family and most learned in the Greek letters, has advantaged us with this knowledge. When his country was placed under siege by the Turks, by way of sea, he escaped to Venice, whence, as we learned about his fame, he was benignly invited to come to Florence, be paid a salary from the public treasury, to give show of his doctrine to our youth. At that time, I was studying civil law, though not deprived of other studies because I was naturally burning with love for the sciences and had already done much work in dialectics and rhetoric. For this reason, when Chrysoloras arrived, I began to be troubled by doubt. To abandon the study of the civil law seemed to me inconceivable, but at the same time, not to take advantage of the learning of the Greek letters appeared almost like sin. Many times I heard myself like an infantile saying, “Are you letting and abandoning the chance of seeing, talking, and filling yourself up with the admirable doctrines of Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, and other poets, philosophers, and orators, of which so many and so admirable things are told? Are you going to let this divinely offered opportunity escape you? For seven hundred years, nobody in Italy has learned the Greek letters, even though we confess that all our doctrines came from them. How much advantage for the understanding must be derived from the knowledge of this tongue! How much fame and pleasure I may increase for myself! The teachers of civil law are many and can be found everywhere and you will always have the commodity
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Manuel Chrysoloras accomplished in Florence what had been the dream of Petrarch and those who made this possible were Salutati with Niccoli, Roberto Rossi, Jacopo d’Angelo of Scarperia, Antonio Corbinelli, and Palla Strozzi. Rossi, Scarperia, Strozzi, and Vergerio were together with Bruni the individuals formed at the Florentine school of Chrysoloras. Around this group moved also Uberto Decembrio, Guarino and the new school of translators from Greek and of teachers of philology. Almost a century later, Paolo Cortese will mention Chrysoloras as the point of departure of the Renaissance in Florence: When, after a long time that the loftiest studies have been shamefully neglected, it was without doubt Chrysoloras from Byzantium who brought back to Italy from beyond the ocean that sublime culture. The people of our nation who were completely ignorant of disciplines and arts, with his assistance began with the learning of the Greek letters and then embraced enthusiastically the studies of eloquence. These statements are truly debatable because the humanistic movement already before the coming of the Greeks was ardent and the culture of Byzantium, in its declining old age, was less capable to make it fruitful. In the words of Cortese an echo is reflected of the enthusiasm with which the men of the generation of Bruni approached the original sources of the ancient wisdom. From it, with new translations, they drew off important stimulations and came to drink at the same time from Platonic and Aristotelian sources, becoming amazingly aware of their internal agreement. Between 1400 and 1403, Manuel Chrysoloras and Uberto Decembrio applied themselves to the translation of the books of The Republic. It was not a successful translation, even though the important factor was the important realization that the new translations began with Plato’s books regarding the State. About this translation, Bruni will say, “I don’t know by which interpreter these books were so unsuitably translated” (a nescio quo interprete ineptissime traductos). Between 1437 and 1447, a new translation of Pier Candido Decembrio will appear and then another of Antonio Cassarino, with great offense for Decembrio. Then again Pier Candido translated Lysis; Trapezuntios, Parmenides (for Cusanus),
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Laws, and Epinemides; Filelfo, Euthyphro and three letters; Rinuccio Aretino, Crito, Euthyphro, and Assiacus; Lippi, Ion; Politian, Charmides; and Cencio de’ Rustici, Assiacus. In the meantime, Vergerio was reading and rereading Gorgias in the original text loaned from Jacopo d’Angelo. Guarino, who loved Chrysoloras like a father, depended directly from him and formed at his own school Vittorino da Feltre. Later, we will speak of the translations done by Bruni. What counts in this fervor of studies, translations, and researches of codices, is not the complex of the new acquired texts, the number of the Platonic dialogues in possession, or at last the possibility of reading them in their original text. What counts is the value assumed by this new teaching, the tone and the meaning attributed to this new contact with antiquity. 2. The Aristotelianism of Bruni. The Ancients and the Moderns In De compositione of Gasparino Barzizza, it is affirmed that “art” must be “at the service of things” and not vice versa. In this, we see that rhetoric is understood not only as an elegant means of persuasion, but as the medium for the formation of the mind in its rapport with human beings, even more in its rapport to the whole of reality. Vergerio in De ingenuis moribus teaches us that the liberal arts are so-called because they make human beings free. “They are rightly called ‘liberal’ because the study of them renders humans free” (idcirco est liberalis, quod eius studium liberos homines efficit). True wisdom resides in the cities and moves out of the solitary life (in urbibus habitat et solitudinem fugit), acting to contribute to the common good. True wisdom establishes a concordance between mind and speech, speech and action (mens cum lingua, sermo cum opere); it is a school of sincerity and civil life. To be a literate person (literatus) meant to be a complete human being. Maffeo Vegio will look at the studia humanitatis as the most effective way for the realization of the human being who can live among human beings, whereas Guarino and Vittorino will search for the technique capable of realizing the new human being. The “humanistic” formation did not center its value on the content, the classic world, though the classic world functioned as the paradigm of the “humanistic” education. The value of the classical studies included the access to the ancient republic of sages; and once part of this republic, the acquisition of a common humanity, free from time and space; and consequently the finding of oneself being involved in a “human” communication that transcended all impediments and was fully “human.” To the sophistic logic of the “modern” dialecticians that has remained trapped within the analysis of the structures of the discourse without any reference to the things and to the man who thinks and feels, a study of language is substituted that is like taking an immediate possession, an immediate contact [with things and human beings]. At the beginning, the formation of the humanists was especially a “civil” conquest of a discourse open to all human beings. In the epistles of Guarino Guarini (of Cremona), the coming together of grammar and politics, language
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and civic life was a continuous reality. Latin and Greek, that is, the ancients who no longer are but always live, allow our soul to open up, beyond egoism, and become accustomed to communicate with every human being, with all humanity, and to live together in an ideal plan. Only our participation in this society can make us suitable to civil living. This is the reason why the learned person is not a solitary; he can easily convert his dialogue with the classic authors into a kind of Christian charitas. Because the critics of the humanists are concerned about the religious consequences of the new culture, the humanists replied to them that the pagan societas is nothing but the preamble leading up to the Christian community. Vittorino da Feltre was almost the saint of this kind of education and “his house was like the sanctuary of customs, facts, and words,” but its most limpid theoretician was, perhaps, Bruni. Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo (1370–1444), Chancellor of the Signori di Firenze from 1427, disciple, as we have seen, of Chrysoloras, was greatly fond of Salutati and Poggio. Bruni considered himself as the spiritual son of Salutati because, as he used to say, “I learned the Greek letters, thanks to Coluccio; I perfected the knowledge of Latin, thanks to Coluccio; I read, learned, knew poets, orators, and other writers, thanks to Coluccio.” Bruni translated many works from Classic Greek, beginning with Plutarch, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and particularly Plato and Aristotle. Of Plato, Bruni translated Phaedo (1405), Gorgias (1409), Phaedrus and Apology (1424), Crito and Epistles (1410–1427), and Symposium (215a– 222a, in 1435). His versions of Aristotle’s writings brought him wide criticism because, though the versions are more elegant, they are certainly less faithful than the medieval versions. Perhaps, behind the question of faithfulness to the text, we may have a question of interpretation. The translation of Nicomachean Ethics was completed in 1417, Oeconomicus in 1420, and Politics in 1438. The document showing Bruni’s love of the Stagirite remains the Vita Aristotelis that he wrote in 1429. Moral and political Aristotelianism, given Bruni’s love for the concrete, was capable of satisfying Bruni’s needs more than Platonic asceticism: If to conquer happiness for one person alone is such a great act, how much more splendid is it to acquire happiness for everybody? Man is a frail animal and must derive from the civil society the sufficiency that he cannot achieve by himself alone. Therefore, there is not a discipline more convenient to man than to come to an understanding of what “city” and “commonwealth” mean and learn how the civil society can be preserved. In my opinion, who ignores these things is equally going to ignore himself and to despise the commandments of the highest divine wisdom. The civil nature of the human being, his being human only in a society, could not have been proclaimed with more emphasis. The life of the polis was for Bruni as already for Salutati and afterward for Manetti, Palmieri, and Rinuc-
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cini, the only one true human life. In one of his public speeches of 1443, found in a manuscript form (ms. “Laur. 42, 10”), Bruni wrote with vivacity the following lines: “Science, literature, and eloquence are not comparable or equal to the glory obtained in the military life. The supreme philosopher should bow before the supreme commander. Plato cannot be compared to Alexander, or Aristotle to Caesar.… Would Plato, assuming that he were born in Rome, have been for the Romans of such a great usefulness as Marcus Furius Camillus was by having been born in Rome?” As for all the other human beings of the early fifteenth century, Socrates and Dante incarnated the ideals of Bruni. His biographies of Dante and Petrarch are in this regard clear and explicit. “I would like to correct the error of many ignorant peoples, who believe that no one can be a scholar except those who hide themselves in solitude and leisure. To choose to become estranged and cut off from conversation is truly of those who are incapable of anything at all because of their low ingenuity in initiating things.” After mentioning the matrimony and the five children of Alighieri, Bruni argued with Boccaccio for his remarks against the poet: Does he [Boccaccio] not remember that Socrates, the supreme philosopher who ever existed, had wives, children, civil powers within the commonwealth of his city? Does he not remember that Aristotle, whose wisdom and doctrine are beyond expression, had two wives in different times, children, and riches? Does he not remember that Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cato, Seneca, and Varro, who were excellent Latin philosophers, all of them with wife and children, covered public offices and powers within the commonwealth? Forgive me, dear Boccaccio, but your judgments this time are very frivolous and far different from a true opinion. All philosophers agreed that man is a civil animal and that the first union between husband and wife when multiplied gives origin to the city. When this does not happen, nothing can be functional. Then, at the end, significant is the parallel that Bruni makes between Petrarch and Dante, in which he praises the doctrines of Petrarch, but exalts without any reticence the superiority of Dante for his involvement in the civil life. This was a remarkable conclusion in line with the beliefs of Salutati of the controversy between the ancients and the moderns that Bruni had already outlined in 1401 in Dialogi ad Petrum Histrum. In Dialogi, Niccoli is introduced as the individual interpreting the hard criticism addressed to the moderns. Proof of the diffusion of this criticism is the document titled, Invectiva contro cierti caluniatori di Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, composta pello iscientifico e circuspetto uomo Cino di Messer Francesco Rinuccini (An invective against some calumniators of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, composed by that scientific and learned gentleman Francesco Rinuccini). Benedetto Accolti, the successor of Bracciolini in the first Chancellery, in his beautiful dialogue De
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praestantia virorum sui aevi (On the excellence of the men of my own time), in 1460, will quietly determine the limits of the polemic between ancients and moderns. For Bruni, the preference for Dante instead than for Petrarch, did not mean the denial of humanism, but the concern for a humanism taken as the conception of life and education instead than a humanism considered simply as a literary movement. When in Vita di Dante, Bruni scorned those who in order to cultivate the studies retreated in temples and towers of ivory, never concluding anything (was he thinking of Niccoli?), he came to face the crude satire Intercoenales of Leon Battista Alberti. At the same time, Bruni had the support of the moderate Giannozzo Manetti who, according to Vespasiano da Bisticci, was inveighing against those too much refined but sterile grammarians, sterile because sterile and arid was their humanity. Bruni intended to criticize also, on the example of Salutati, every ascetic, monastic, and solitary ideal of life. Considering certain positions of the Aristotelianism that he loved and admired, he could not cease observing that the physical sciences “offer excellent theoretical knowledge, but of little practicality in life” (habent cognitionis eximium, vitae autem utilitatem non habent). Morality is indeed a different issue, “Truly, our philosophy deals totally, as I said already, about things that concern us personally” (at vero haec altera philosophia tota, ut dixerim, de re nostra est). He was Socratic and, like Socrates in the Phaedrus, had no interest for walking beyond the walls of his own city! To morality, Bruni dedicated his famous Isagogicon moralis disciplinae ad Galeottum Ricasolanum (1423) that was destined to become known as an introduction to the Aristotelian ethic. The treatise was included in the sixteenth century editions of Aristotle, and in the conjoined Aristotle-Averroès corpus, with the spirit of which the treatise was in a clear contrast because of its polemic against natural philosophy, which, though sublime and egregious, is much less useful to life than [the philosophy] that deals with the customs and virtues of human beings. This is certainly true, unless we believe that those human beings would be more suitable to good living who have learned the causes of frost, snow, and the colors of the iris; unless, again, we believe that the life of those who know the haloes and the gales is purer than of those who ignored them completely! During the discussion, a certain agreement was made between Stoics, Epicureans, and Peripatetics concerning the concept of happiness understood as a fulfillment reached within the harmony of virtue with joy: The practice of virtue, the science, the contemplation, and the conscience itself of having done the good, contain in themselves an immense pleasure, so much that the doubt arises whether pleasure is searched for those acts or those acts are searched for this pleasure.… Epicurus himself proclaims that no one can live with pleasure unless he lives with justice, temperance, prudence, and, vice versa, one cannot live with justice, temperance, and prudence, unless he lives with pleas-
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ure. Though the schools of philosophy are three, all the philosophers seem to say without doubt the same thing, or almost the same thing, concerning the supreme good. Even those who wish to oppose or separate the active from the contemplative life should not forget that the fulcrum and the basis of all conduct is goodness; without goodness, without this harmony and interior perfection, no virtue or happiness may exist: Every egregious or praiseworthy thing that we accomplish in private or in public, every thing that we do at our own advantage, or for the fatherland, or for our dear family, all of this depends from prudence and from all the virtues that come from prudence. But if a person is not good it cannot be prudent. Prudence is the exact valuation of utility; and a true valuation is incorrupt.… The straight and free way to happiness is open to the good human being. The good human being does not deceive itself and is not mistaken. The Isagogicon is silent in regard to Christian morality, and this was a motive for someone to say that this would reveal the indifferent or rather pagan preference of its author. In the dedication to Eugenius IV of the version of Aristotle’s Politics, Bruni intentionally dealt with the problem of the rapport between classic thought and Christianity. He concluded, “The only difference between them seems to be that the Christians act for the end of another life, whereas the pagans placed the fruit of virtue as the supreme end of this life.” The ones and the others sustain the same things concerning justice, temperance, fortitude, liberality and the other virtues and vices contrary to these. He added that if one person were to try to compare accurately the ancient and the Christian philosophers, he would excite the wonder of the majority of humanity. “Not only in what regards the common ground of virtues and vices, but also in what may be considered proper to Christianity, I find philosophers who agree with us in thinking, prescribing, and teaching the same things.” Bruni takes his examples from Plato’s moral doctrine in Gorgias and love of God in Phaedrus and Aristotle’s Ethics. It was no accident that Bruni had already translated in 1403 St. Basil’s homily in defense of the reading of the Greek pagan authors for Christian students. In the ancients as well as in the moderns, the same truth speaks, and the same God. What the poet expresses in songs by ingenuity “is due to his being all agitated and moved by some interior and hidden vigor.” This was manifested in the acts of humility of the blessed Francis, who, not through “science or Scholastic discipline, but through occupation and mental abstraction, applied his spirit to God so much more than the theologians by any studying and letters could do. This numen and its language are spoken by the mouth of the ancients. Thus we must approach them with reverence; we should not suffo-
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cate them barbarously; we should allow them to speak, and we should listen to them, converse with them, and go to their school. This is what it means to translate them with faithful elegance. To translate Aristotle means to reach him “face to face, not through enigmas and deliriousness.” 3. St. Bernardino of Siena The name of St. Bernardino of Siena, though his fundamental interest was practical instead of philosophical, should be connected with the names of Bruni, who wrote to him in 1425 a letter full of admiration, and of Salutati, who greatly influenced him. When Bernardino was considering the greatest thinkers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, tended toward an accentuation of their divergences in order to reaffirm beyond the sterile discussions of the philosophers the strong unity of faith: Read all the writings that we have ever found of ancient philosophers, or heretics, or of whatever sect: you will never find that they have agreed together. Take the philosophers, for instance: one says one thing and another says a different thing. Plato disagrees with Aristotle; one sustains one thing and the other another thing. There are those who say that happiness is in the sentiment, others who affirm that it is in the soul; some place it here and some others place it there. An agreement on the same point does not exist.… Many philosophers lived during the same time and nevertheless each was trying to go ahead of the others; they had never found a point on which to agree. Why did this happen? Because they did not possess the same principle, they could not agree. The prophets and the doctors [of the church] agreed instead on every thing because they were depending on the Prince God, our Lord. Faith was here posited as the alternative to the sterility of the classic speculation. In the Latin sermons, in which Bernardino Albizzeschi mostly attends to theoretical inquiries, he remains in the ambiance of the late Franciscan Scholasticism, often using arid formulas that are repeated without any originality. Even if we could carefully search these formulas in order to obtain a system perhaps of Scotist character, still we would not grasp the original elements of San Bernardino’s thought, which surely circulates within his speeches like an inspiration not yet consolidated into a definite system. If it is true that to philosophize means to become more reflective on the problems that surround us and more conscious of the human need for values that vicissitudes cannot overturn, then we may say that in the saint of Siena we have certainly found the presence of an original word. This special word would reveal to us the possible links between Franciscanism and Renaissance, because it is a word born at the conjunction of the two and capable of showing their encounter with its recall to the value of the human being and its renewed consecration of nature. Giuseppe Saitta could properly refer to San Bernardino as to the saint
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of humanism. This was so not because Bernardino took advantage of some motives proper to the humanists, or because the texts of Petrarch and Salutati were dear to him, or he was dear to Bruni and Vegio, but because he underlined the sentiment for the dignity of the human being, which is a characteristic note of the mentality of the Renaissance. Of the being of God, san Bernardino speaks in terms in which resounds the echo of the Scotist univocity, in addition to the Franciscan inspiration: I say that the first level of being is being merely by itself, just existing. The things with this being seem base, but within they have much marrow, as in part I will show you. This kind of being is so widely present that we can barely evade it. As I say, the first kind of being [we experience] is being by itself as the stones have it. God, too, is being by itself. In every small stone and in every grain of sand of the ocean there is God merely by its complete being. Meditate on this like St. Francis did, who while embracing the stones was saying, “Here, inside this stone my God exists merely by nature of its sole being.” The second level of being is to have existence and life. This is the kind of being the herbs, the plants, the trees, and the flowers possess. They first are, and then live. Consider the winter season: the trees seem dead, the rose shrubs are only with thorns, and the earth is arid. Then look at the springtime, in May. All the trees are in flowers, the earth covers itself with herbs and flowers, and the roses open beside the thorns. Now contemplate these things and think that even in the smallest among them God is wholly present. Consider all the flowers, plants, herbs that are in the world, their differences in form and color; consider also how many teachers there are and will be in the world. Know that no one of all these learned men would be capable of producing one single violet! The third level of being is to have existence, life, and senses. This is the kind of being the animals, the beasts, the birds, the fish, and all other things with the sensitive faculty possess. In each one of these things God is present by reason of nature. One single flea is worthier than all the trees, the flowers, the gold, the silver, and the precious stones found in the world. One ant is more precious than any of these things that possess only existence or existence and life. Look from all sides at all these things in your mind and consider that God is whole in each one of these things in its beautiful order. The fourth level of being is to have existence, life, sensation, and reason. This is the human being, indeed! The nobility of the soul surpasses the beauty of the sun, the moon, the stars, the heavens, and any other thing created by God under the heavens. Consider and reflect: the soul has been created at the similitude of God.
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This motive of the dignity of the human being, who carries a divine seal, is inserted within the description of an order in which the whole universe shows its own solidarity with God. Partiality is like egoism; separation is like closing the door in the face of God: this is sin. Solidarity is like consensus; renunciation is like wealth: this is the significance of Christianity: We must accept from God and then give to our neighbor. First, we must fight in order to acquire, and then pass on to our neighbor what we have acquired. Who does not feel to have received the grace to preach, or to witness, or to counsel is a coward because God does not give a grace to a human being for it alone but so that it would share it with its neighbors? … That is the talent mentioned in the Gospel. That talent God gave to the evil servant to fructify it, but he kept it hidden in the earth. For a human being to break the communion with others means to be left out of the circle of the charitas and to bury the coins that God gave so that we spend them for the joy of those who give and those who receive. San Bernardino insists that what is meant by wealth is the richness of the interior life: “The man or the woman should retreat to a room, and there be alone with God, in secret, without admittance for anybody else. Reflect on your conscience and God alone; think and rethink only about them. Leave every other business and occupation aside because the facts concerning the conscience are the greatest facts of the world and the most important for our soul.” Naked before God, the soul can redeem itself from sin through its free will: to have limitations is not as to be condemned. The imposition of a limit is a gift of God, who “has not made you a beast, or a brute animal, or a stone, or a tree. Without any merit of yours, he created you and made you to be born in a land of Christians, in a good land.” The body is not evil or a source of evil. The human being is a living individuality, a concrete haecceity of flesh and spirit. “The soul and the body are so much interpenetrated that when the body sins the soul also sins.” As sin is born with the consent of the will, in the will it is also redeemed. “The will does it, the will must undo it. The will consents to evil, the will must hate evil. This is what is needed: tears of your will and repentance of your sins.” San Bernardino analyzes in the simplicity of his popular sermons the characteristic spiritual life of the Augustinian and Franciscan tradition that is also connected to the anti-astrological polemic, in which the dignity of the human being is defended against the positive dependence from the heavens: First, consider God as the Universal Lord and Emperor of all things that have been and will ever exist in heaven and on earth.… This Emperor has established two realms, one corporeal and another spiritual.… The corporeal realm includes the whole earth, the water, the air,
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and the fire, with everything that is in these elements, including also all the planets.… Among these planets, we include the seventy-two constellations. These constellations in the sky always move within their established course regularly influencing our bodies, having no power over our souls, just our bodies.… They have this power because they are bodies more gentle than what we are, and God has placed them above us so that they will govern us, because the more gentle ones must rule over the less gentle.… The other realm is spiritual; it is that of the soul. The soul is superior to all things corporeal, and it is gentle more than anything corporeal. This soul is for its nobility and virtue superior to the whole world, the waters, the fire, the air, and anything contained in them. The soul is above the sky of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jove, Saturn, and of all the signs existing in them. The soul is above the seventy-two constellations. This is a clear position, in which the total corporeal world is believed to be under the stellar influence, reason why the importance of the astrological medicine and the value of the horoscope in regard to the corporeal temperaments are still reaffirmed. It is in the star that conveniently we may read the future of the changes of the oceans, of the advantages of certain cultivations of the fields, and of the prescription of medicines. “Remember that when a doctor wishes to prescribe a medicine for a client, he says: ‘It is good if you take it in that day; not good in that other day’.” The soul is spiritual and it is free from the influence of bodies even more perfect than itself, otherwise “the donkey could rule over its owner.” Omnia fecit Deus propter hominem, et hominem propter se (God has done everything for humankind, but made humankind for God). The soul is free to accept or reject the corporeal suggestions; the value of the soul is precisely found in freedom. “The soul is more beautiful than the sky not a thousand times, not a thousand times thousand, not a ten thousand times thousand, but infinitely. Even if there were heavens as many as the drops in the sea, as many as the grains in the sand, as many as the stars in the sky, all the beauty of these things together would not be comparable to the excellence of the human soul.” All this is said in the Sermones, but though the value of the soul is great, great is also the misery of human beings. “Oh inexpressible human misery! All the animals are born ready for the kind of life to which they are destined; humans instead find themselves in the farthest condition from that to which destiny calls them. The human being should have occupied the place of the fallen angels, but it is instead condemned already at the moment of its birth.” Touched by sin the human being is “like a lamp exposed to whirl winds, like the foam of the waves of the sea, like a ship lost in the midst of the ocean” (sicut lucerna ad ventum, sicut spuma maris, sicut navis in medio maris). An author called the human being the rose of the dawn, the mature fruit, and the candid snow:
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Indeed the human being right away feels the temptations, falls under sin, is taken away by death, like the rose of the morning that immediately dries up at the appearance of the sun, like the ripe fruit that decays soon after the first touch of worms, and like the snow that melts at the warmer air. Is anything more miserable than man? Is there anything poorer than a human being? The bird has feathers, the fish has scales; humans by nature are naked, they cry at the instance of birth. The human being alone is born among tears, and after birth, it remains miserably inert lying down, whereas all the other animals know immediately what to do. The puppy barks, the fish swims, and the bird flies; the human being knows nothing but crying.
The human life, evolving from the nothing of its origin to the mystery of its end, is a very sad drama. “The human being is an incarnate mind, a laborious soul, a passing vessel, a phantasm of time, a search for the way, a deserter of light, a waster of life, an eternal motion, a passing stranger, an enemy in every place, and a slave of death.” (Homo est mens incarnata, laboriosa anima, parvis temporis habitaculum, phantasma temporis, speculator viae, lucis desertor, vitae consumptio, aeternus motus, transiens viator, loci hospes, mancipium mortis). This is all what humanity is. In its ancipital nature, it is a horizon between heaven and hell, between everything and nothing, between God and the rebellion to God; it consists completely in being an act of freedom, of choice, or of renunciation of one’s own freedom. Human nobility, in fact, is not due to the human nature, but to morality; it is a laborious conquest, it is work. “Gentility is not found in leisure, but in the involvement of yourself, of your family, and of your city.” To do more than to know: this is the duty and the merit of the human being. San Bernardino had been the disciple of Giovanni of Spoleto, a disciple of Salutati, and it is probable that he was inspired by some writings of the Florentine Chancellor. Most probably the source from which he drew more directly may have been the same Franciscan tradition that influenced Coluccio himself. “You know that the powers of the soul are three,” Albizzeschi wrote, “to do … to know … to choose. The will is the empress over all these three powers and all our sentiments; the will is the queen of our mind.… Good will (la volontà) is the empress of the entire universe.” In heaven, we would be able to see God; in the world, we must fight in order to conquer knowledge through love. “The vision of God is obtained in heaven, not on earth. The love of God on this earth is preferable to the knowledge of God” (In patria est visio, non in via. Amor Dei in via, melior est quam cognitio Dei). The paths from which cognitio find itself precluded given its limitations, are instead open to the comprehension of charitas. San Bernardino repeats with Hugh of St. Victor, “Love enters into that from which science is excluded” (intrat dilectio ubi scientia foris stat). “He knows more who loves more.” Duns Scotus said that charitas is wisdom and San Bernardino insists on this love (charitas)
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that transforms (amor transformativus), which is the only one that can go beyond the limitations of the human being allowing it to communicate with other human beings and enter into a relationship with God. San Bernardino differs from Salutati and Bruni in the evaluation of the classical studies. In his youth, Bernardino loved the books of poetry, but now he sees a subtle poison in Ovid and the ancients, and suggests stay away from “the books of Ovid and from the other books of the loving arts that would take you astray from the true study of the Holy Scriptures. Abandon the books of the poets, for under the flavor of honey there is venom.” Bernardino does not grasp the value of the form as the means for comprehending the value of the human activity everywhere it could be found. He remains firmly attached to the content evaluation of the works, and his judgment reflects a moralistic condemnation: In the sacred scriptures, at the outside, there is none of the refined cover that we have in the writings of the poets, but, at the inside, we have very much marrow, while there is none in the poets. I experienced this during my youth when I used to enjoy the sweet sound of the outside crust of poems, and could not find delight in the Bible and other saintly writings. Reading these books, I was falling asleep. It pleased to God that my hands one day picked up the Epistles of St. Jerome that freed me from all poetical fantasies. I returned to the sacred scriptures and I found them full of marrow and wisdom. I began afterward to rejoice in the Sacred Scripture more than in the poets. San Bernardino was not aware of that fundamental truth of which Salutati, whom he used to praise, very soon became conscious, “Messer Francesco Petrarch … and messer Coluccio Salutati … have accomplished the noblest things and they deserve to be greatly praised.” And the fundamental truth is that there is nothing that to the comprehension of that “marrow” can train better than the “philological” formation, the studia humanitatis. Under the appearance of a grammatical preoccupation, the studia humanitatis educate the mind to listen to the genuine voice of other people, training us to listen without boasting, without lying or doing violence to the word of any human being, in its purity, as to the word of the revealed books. These studies are called studies of the humanities, as Bruni said, because they form the human being. They are studies of divinity, as Salutati subjoined, because only through their mediation the word of God would be comprehended. “Go now, read their books; choose the one you like or the one of which you heard the most of praises; you will then talk to them, and they will talk to you; they will hear you and you will hear them. Great will be your delight!”
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 4. Poggio Bracciolini. Carlo Marsuppini
Poggio Bracciolini, an efficacious polemist and a scholar in love with the ancients, is usually seen as the indefatigable researcher of codices, the liberator of the ancient teachers from their imprisonment within convents and monasteries. But what is most noticeable in him is his great interest for culture, his curiosity for a world without time and space, in which all human beings of all ages converse in a dialogue without end. “You will talk to them, and they will talk to you; they will hear you and you will hear them,” as San Bernardino said. No fatherland, no city divides us, Poggio wrote to Niccoli (Epistles, bk. 1, num. 8), “I am little concerned about the fatherland (nam patria me parum movet).” What counts is the word that we exchange with those who can comprehend; books count, culture is what truly counts. The ideal bond that ties us together in knowledge is the only one that breaks the limits imposed by nature and affirms our humanity: The generative power of nature has given intellect and reason, which are nobler than anything else we can think, to human kind as guides for the achievement of a good and happy life. I doubt whether the greatest gift may not be the capacity and the use of speech, without which reason or intellect would be of no value. It is only by the speech with which we express the variations of our spirit that we differentiate from other animals. Very great should be our gratitude both to the inventors of the liberal arts and to those who with their diligent research have preserved for us the rules of the art of speaking and have established a certain norm of perfect communication (normam quondam perfecte loquendi). These individuals with their work have made us aware that by the same means with which we are superior to animals we may also excel above other human beings. We are introduced to this ideal city, above the waves of fortune, only by the study of letters: “The princes would have perished if the monuments of the learned could not have saved them from falling into oblivion. The literati are the ones who acted so that the memory of the great and famous would not die together with the body. With the splendor of their words, great deeds are illustrated; with their writings, fame is increased; their voices and their praises celebrate the glory of those among human beings who were excellent.” The principal humanistic themes, even though not properly organized into a system, found in Bracciolini their eloquent expositor. In De varietate fortunae, the motive of the fortune that blindly overthrows all greatness reaches a rare representative power: “Look at the Palatine Hill, and there you will see the blows of fortune!” (respice ad Palatinum montem, et ibi fortunam incusa). The places that once resounded with voices and works are now deserted and abandoned because of the malignity of fortune (deserti squallent malignitate fortunae). Perhaps an astrological motive insinuates itself also in the “treatise
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of the discoverer” of M. Manilius, in 658 of Rome. In De avaritia, written in 1428–1429, Antonio Loschi is introduced as the defender of the love of riches and of the fecundity of work, with polemic attacks against the parasitic hypocrisy of monks. In the prose of Poggio, we find some of the more characteristic motives of the humanism understood as the conscious adherence to the earthly life: Avarice is a natural thing. Walk through the cities, stop in the squares, visit the temples: see if you could find one who will affirm that he wishes only what is sufficient for life and nothing more, think then of having found the phoenix! And do not quote me anyone of those rude, coarse, parasitic hypocrites, who are running after food under the cover of religion. They do not work, but preach to others to seek poverty and despise earthly goods.… We will never build our cities with these pseudo-men, who in complete laziness live out of the fruits of our work.… If everyone would endeavor solely to provide for his own needs, we would all be obliged to cultivate our own garden.… Egregious virtues like compassion and charity would then disappear.… All splendor, all beauty, all charm would disappear from our cities; there would be no more temples, no more porticos; the arts would die; all our way of life and even the State would be disrupted.… The State needs money like our body needs nerve, and when there are many moneymen they must be valued like the basis and the foundation of the State.… By whom do you prefer that your city be populated? Do you prefer a population of rich men who with their means can help themselves and others, or one of poor who cannot help themselves and others? Every kind of activity, because of its tangible productivity, is contrasted to the aridity of ascetism “that naked, poor, almost fastidious, does not mark its presence in the cities, but remains alone, abandoned and in solitude” (nudam, egentem et pene molestam, / quae non ingreditur civitates, / sed deserta videtur et solitaria). To this concept corresponds the central note of the De nobilitate (1440), in which Niccoli exposes and sustains the characteristic thesis of the fifteenth century that nobility is the daughter and the autonomy of virtue: “The virtue that has in itself the sufficient means for a good and happy life has need of nothing else, because it is already a perfect thing and in itself complete. Outside of itself it desires nothing for the completion of its perfection. Nothing can be added to it that would make it more virtuous.” On the other hand, and this too is a most important observation, the theory that derives nobility from personal works and performance is truly imposing not only for its truth but, pragmatically, for its educational efficacy: “If we convince ourselves that men become noble by reason of honesty and goodness, that true nobility is what each one acquires with his own good works and not the one derived from the ability and the works of others, we would be greatly incited,
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believe me, to virtue. Then, we would not be won by leisure or remain without doing anything worthwhile, or be content for the glory of others, but we ourselves would attempt to take possession of some insignia of nobility.” Virtue has its own autonomy. Our mind thinks of the Stoics, from which Bracciolini drew his thought, not without criticizing their ascetic tendencies. If it is true that virtue is self-sufficient, we should not forget that we are speaking of a civil, an earthly virtue, that makes the human being noble and glorious. The prize of virtue is virtue, but a virtue capable of rewarding with fame and nobility. “What nobility would have a philosopher who, content with his studies, spends all time in a library, unknown even to himself? What nobility would ever have an individual who, though living with sobriety, piety, chastity, and wisdom, would spend his time in a retreat?” We are not surprised to see the anti-monastic polemic that Bracciolini made clear in Contra hypocritas, and not even to hear of his admiration for the heroism of Jerome of Prague. It was an admiration that contrasted greatly with the precaution of Bruni, from which not only the exigencies of reformation are extraneous, but also the taking of positions profoundly theoretical that essentially were a moral rebellion. Poggio confessed that for aesthetic reasons he admired extrinsically Jerome as a man of letters, because he faced death like a classic hero. In regard to religion, no matter how many his controversies and ironies concerning friars and monks, Poggio remained an orthodox believer. During his permanence in England, Poggio studied the Church Fathers and the Bible, confessing thereafter with some rhetorical artifices (Epistles, bk. 1, num. 63), “The sacred scriptures that I read and continuously read daily have distracted me from the studies of the humanities to which I dedicated myself since infancy. The principles of these studies are useless, partially false, and for ostentation. On the contrary, the principle of the Sacred Word is truth, and when this truth is lost, we would not know or do what is right.” This is a thesis that, in some ways, approaches the bitter conclusion of De miseria humanae conditionis, written in 1455. In the dialogue with Matteo Palmieri, Poggio sustains against the optimism of Cosimo de’ Medici that the history of the world is a history of sufferance. “We should escape the snares of fortune, look for and ask what is within our right to have, what all living beings should have, and what is not taken away from the dead.” In Historia tripartita of 1450, in addition to Benedetto Accolti and Niccolò of Foligno, Carlo Marsuppini is also introduced, whose thought and misbelieve are somewhat illustrated in the obituary for Piccarda de’ Medici, who died in 1433. In these pages of sympathy, the changing of events and the uncertainty of fortune are presented with much insistence. “Why wonder on the mutations of our life, when we see that all the things that are under the sky are continuously in motion?” Philosophy and faith seem the unique comfort for the uncertainty of human destiny, even though we may ask ourselves what
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kind of relief we should attribute to a rhetorical composition elaborated along modules in fashion. 5. Epicureanism. Cosma Raimondi A stronger accent, in its polemic intent, is found in the celebration of Epicureanism, which is very high and efficacious in Lorenzo Valla, against whom, as against Francesco Filelfo, Poggio Bracciolini brought his invectives. In 1418, Bracciolini had found a complete codex of Lucretius, of which he gave immediately notice to Niccoli, who will then copy that text. Ambrogio Traversari, the learned monk of Camaldoli, having already translated the Pseudo-Dionysius, turning his interest in favor of pagan writers, wrote the first Latin version of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the philosophers, dedicating it to Cosimo. Filelfo, writing about this version with some acridity to Donato Acciaiuoli in 1461, mentioned to have found a large number of errors. Even with its errors, the work made it possible for the learned the comprehension and the evaluation of the Epicureanism that would seduce with its appreciation of the earthly life those enthusiasts with the earth who were the humanists. The humanist from Cremona, Cosimo (Cosma) Raimondi, shows himself Epicurean in a moralistic letter to Ambrogio Tignosi. Raimondi, perhaps a disciple of Barzizza in Milan, deciphered the Lodi’s codex of the Orator of Cicero, was the author of an epistle de laudibus eloquentiae, lived in France in exile, and ended suicidal in 1435: “If destiny would deprive you of me, your friend, / And the atrocious storm would submerge the poor being, / You shall make me a tomb and honor it. / On the tomb write these words for me: / Hereby you lie, O Cosma, to be lamented, you / The favorite of Maro, Cicero, and all other poets!” (Quod si me casus tibi quis decerpet amicum / Obruerit miserum dira procella caput. / Defuncto tumulum et tumulo praestabis honorem, / Atque haec in tumulo carmina finge meo: / Quem Maro, quem Cicero, vatumque exercitus omnis / Foverat, hic, Cosma, flende poeta iaces). In the letter to Tignosi, Raimondi says that he writes “because Epicurus had rightly identified the highest good in pleasure, whereas the Academicians, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics have thought otherwise” (quod recte Epicurus summum bonorum in voluptate constituerit, maleque de ea re Academici, Stoici, Peripateticique senserint). In fact, Raimondi professed himself, in addition to being an astrologer, an open and convinced follower of Epicurus. “Because, I have always followed and highly approved the doctrine of Epicurus, the wisest of men, I have decided to defend his dignity that you petulantly have excessively attacked and offended.” The ancients too were used to vituperate Epicureanism, whose greatness is found precisely when peoples search for a motive of its condemnation: Epicurus has underlined that we are both soul and body and that the human end must be such to satisfy the human being in its integrity:
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY He placed the highest good in pleasure because he had looked more deeply into nature and had understood that we have emerged from nature and are formed by her. Nothing is more appropriate than to maintain all members of our body healthy and whole, preserving them in their good condition, without being affected by any evil in either our spirit or our body. O most sapient Epicurus! What else can we add to this sentence? What other happiness can there be? How could a lamenting spirit be happy? How could a body in pains be happy?
The error of the Stoics has been that of disregarding the completeness of the human being, who is a unity of soul and body, “because if we were made of pure spirit, we would call Regulus fortunate, follow the Stoics, and assume that happiness is found in the soul.” Hard and inhuman, the Stoics were like blind human beings and almost half-human, who absurdly considered happy those who are tortured and lacerated. To confute the Academicians is a vain enterprise, because they have never affirmed anything solidly. More acute are the Peripatetics, who have celebrated the happiness, though partially, of the complete human person that is not only a contemplative activity, but also a living body thirsty for enjoyment. The letters and the arts, the earthly glory, everything is wanted not for itself, but as a means to satisfy our inextinguishable thirst for pleasure. “By what norm is the condition itself of war and peace regulated? Is it not by the desire of maintaining, defending, and increasing the things that we enjoy and of which we live?” Virtue is simultaneously the law and the means for the conquest of joy: Things being the way they are, we observe that the figure and the constitution of the human being are made so that it could enjoy pleasure, because we are by nature inclined to pleasure. Many and most notable things have been generated for our pleasure. Now, all our actions are also directed to this end, that we live without harm. Everything is wanted for the enjoyment it may provide. Who can be contrary to Epicurus? Who would not embrace Epicurus’s conceptions that form a doctrine proved and sustained by an argument so true and cogent? Who would not state that the highest good is to be found in pleasure? The errors of those who criticize Epicurus, Raimondi insists, are imagining pleasure as pursuit of the fleeing moment. “But the wisest of men does not say or ask this. He is so very far from wanting us without virtue that, on the contrary, he considers virtue extremely necessary in order to observe and follow his precepts. Virtue must somehow control and guide all our corporeal senses.” Raimondi warned his readers that he was speaking as a natural philosopher, not as a theologian; that he was preoccupied with natural happiness, not with the supernatural. Though it seems strange, nothing clearly and positively irreligious exists in him. We may even say that his defense of the complete human being, the complete human being and not just a soul, could
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bepresented as more Christian than an ascetic negation, Stoic or monastic, of the body and its needs. 6. Filelfo. Alipía. Conciliation between Plato and Aristotle Raimondi was interested in the whole human being. Filelfo was also concerned with the integral human being, though in a tenuous Aristotelian vein instead of Epicurean, when in a letter of 1450 insisted in saying, “I don’t understand how anyone could forget the body” (quomodo corporis oblivisci queat non intelligo). He added, “Given that the human being is not spirit or body alone” (siquidem neque solus animus homo est, nec corpus solum). Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) was not a remarkable philosopher. He was a vain and quarrelsome man, a disciple of Gasparino Barzizza, a relationship of Chrysoloras, an enemy of Marsuppini and Niccoli, an enemy of Bracciolini, a partisan of the Albizzi against Cosimo, a servant of the Visconti and the Sforza, and, finally, a courtesan of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Filelfo translated Rhetorica ad Alexandrum and commented on Nicomachean Ethics (Oratio habita Florentie in principio Ethicorum, 1431). In the first book of Commentationes florentinae de exilio, he introduces Palla and Nofri Strozzi, Rinaldo degli Albizzi, Poggio Bracciolini, and Giannozzo Manetti as they are discussing whether the disadvantages of the exile that hit the non-philosophers would also affect the philosophers. In the second book, Filelfo discusses infamy (de infamia); in the third, poverty (de paupertate). In the third book, Bracciolini is introduced to exalt wealth meanwhile Bruni insists that the matter is truly an adiaphoron. In 1443, Filelfo composed the Convivia mediolanensia, in which some philosophical passages are found. His more notable works in the field of ethical inquiry include some orations, the five books of De morali disciplina (that, begun in 1473, remained incomplete at the time of his death), and, particularly, his most numerous epistles. On Filelfo, Gentile gave this judgment, “A pale syncretism of ideas obtained from different sources without any shade of philosophical criticism.” Against the ethical writings of Filelfo, in 1446, Bracciolini inveighed, “Let arms yield to the gown, let the ancients recognize the superiority of the moderns. We now have Filelfo! He has explained everything about infamy with that book in his hands that make all philosophers fall asleep.” And again, with ironies and bitter criticism, “This fanatic affirms that in his books he will explain in full the complex matter of moral philosophy.” In a letter on the highest good to Bartolomeo Fracanzani, Filelfo defended the rights of pleasure when pleasure moderated by reason allows the soul to enjoy a sweet tranquility, the alipía: “The one who conceives of enjoyment as something separate from reason does not differ from a filthy animal. I judge an honest pleasure to be no less than a true Christian pleasure. It consists in that security and tranquility of the spirit in which no more tumultuous stimulations and turmoil are present. The Greeks have called this condition alipía and we may call it indolentia, that is, freedom from pain.”
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Filelfo objects against those who condemn all pleasures indiscriminately that pleasure can be of the body as well as of the soul and in both case it can be equally good or bad. He adds, “It seems to me that those who accuse Epicurus of being voluptuous and lascivious are wrong because it was well known how temperate he was.… He was speaking and discussing not of the pleasures of the body but of those of the soul.” Then, in his typical manner, he would continue, “But let us disregard Epicurus and the other philosophers of antiquity since they never knew the true God. I consider praiseworthy the pleasure that should be highly desired as well, which is derived from the understanding of truth and from the conduct of a whole life of honesty.” He uses the same terms of the Nicomachean Ethics stating that the supreme end of man is contemplation, understood as “wisdom … that rules … being in itself content … completely free from the care of all these earthly and temporary cares” (sapientia … imperatrix … seque ipsa contenta … rerum istarum inferiorum et temporalium cura omni soluta). Moral virtues are the bases of pure knowledge; they are conditioned by prudence, which is the manifestation of wisdom. In the Epistles (c. 6r) Filelfo says, “All moral virtues regard prudence, which is the virtue of reason; and prudence is guided by wisdom, which is all from the intellect” (morales … virtutes omnes ad prudentiam referamus oportet, quae rationis est virtus, ac prudentiae sapientia dominatur quae tota est intellectus). This conciliatory tendency, uncertain both in its premises as in its conclusions, is more systematically formulated in De morali disciplina, where Filelfo presents the Platonic theory of ideas. The Platonic idea, he says, is not the object of divine thought as “Aristotle insinuates that Plato believed,” but it is rather a means which the divine thought uses.” Species or form, the eidos, points to “some principal reason of the things that divine intelligence contains” (principalem quamdam rationem rerum, quae divina continentur intelligentia). The ideas, being intrinsic to the divine substance, constitute the unity of the multiplicity in the cause from which the multiplicity descends. Only the malignity of his adversaries did attribute to Plato the thesis that the models (the exemplars) were exterior to God. Aristotle himself “attacked Plato for a sophistical exercise more than for a true feeling of dissent.” Aristotle hated Xenocrates, not Plato, because he considered Xenocrates unfit to be the head of the Platonic school, the school of that Plato that was the ultimate and most perfect expression of the concepts that Pythagoras already derived from Zoroaster. In De morali disciplina (vol. 1) and Epistles (ch. 150), Filelfo recognizes that “Aristotle appears in many passages to differ in words from his teacher, but in substance he is completely in agreement with him” (Verbo sane a magistro Aristoteles pluribus in locis videtur dissentire, cum re ipsa maxime omnium cum illo conveniat). It is manifest that many Ficinian motives are here present together with the magic tradition of a pia philosophia. But there is more in Filelfo. There is the
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idea of an intuitive intelligence of the divine obtained through a mystical raptus similar to the one by which Paul was elevated to the third heaven: Paul the Apostle speaks as much wisely as saintly when he refers to this intelligence with which we contemplate the divine substance. He affirms of having been transported into the third heaven in order to join that divine and ineffable intelligence with the highest part of the mind through the purest vision. No one can see God with the corporeal eyes. Man can reach God only with the light of a free mind, pure and without any earthly filth. He who wishes to obtain this condition for himself must dedicate himself with all care, with all deeds, in all studies, and finally with all effort and diligence to this goal. After having subjected and controlled all the disturbances of the soul, with his mind free and in control of itself, he would be able to unite with the divine mind from which he received creation, splendor, and all ability of reasoning and comprehending. Those who so act can hope once surrounded and enlightened by the light of supreme wisdom, to be able to grasp in full the power and nature of the ideas. Filelfo must be placed among the Platonists, Ficinian or post-Ficinian, instead of with the Aristotelian moralists, because of his appeal to illumination and ecstatic rapture. It is convenient to underline that among these moralists Filelfo is truly a minor character, imbued as he is of a literary and rhetorical eclecticism, in the negative sense of the term. 7. Lorenzo Valla Totally different are the position, the power of thought, and the capacity of expression of Lorenzo Valla, the most eminent representative of philological and critical humanism. Born in Rome in 1407, Valla’s teachers were Giovanni Aurispa and Ranuccio of Castiglion Fiorentino. Between 1429 and 1431, Valla went to Piacenza, then to Pavia, where he completed the first version of his most famous work, the dialogue De voluptate (On pleasure) that would later become the De vero bono, in which the interlocutors are no longer Bruni, Panormita, and Niccoli, and the scene is new, and perhaps different the intonation. This work, highly praised by Marsuppini, is without doubt one of the most important documents of the philosophy of the Renaissance. According to some scholars, Valla intended to reply to the De felicitate, a dialogue in three books that Francesco Zabarella, a most famous canonist, had completed in 19 October 1400 in the monastery of Praglia near Padua. In that dialogue, Zabarella and Vergerio discussed the true happiness and the reasons why pleasure should be avoided. Through a critique of the false earthly goods (honors, riches, etc.), and after a bitter condemnation of Epicurus, the conclusion showed how true joy consists in understanding, possessing, and enjoying God (in intelligendo, tenendo, fruendo Deo).
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Lorenzo Valla’s beginning point is the exaltation of nature, a nature seen as the holiest and wisest nature, because “what nature produced and fashioned can be nothing but sacred and praiseworthy.” He is bemused and moved at the consideration of the structure of the heavens and of all living beings. “Everything seems to have been made, completed, and endowed with superb rationality, beauty, and usefulness.” He mentions for us the pages of Lactantius in the De opificio dei, in which the skillfully made nature is celebrated as the faithful minister of God. Valla immediately thereafter clarifies that he does not make his own the atomistic and materialistic metaphysics of Democritus, or embrace in any way the determinism that is inserted in the absolute contingency of the Epicurean physics. “Do not be surprised,” he advises, “if I, who seems to defend Epicurus when, like him, I place the supreme good in pleasure, do not deny thereafter as he does the providence in the works of nature. And do not demand from me,” he accentuates, “the perfect and systematic coherence of a philosopher of profession. I am a rhetorician and not a philosopher, but not inferior to the philosopher; I am superior to the philosopher, whose function is not direct but intermediary in respect to oratory.” Orators can express with much more clarity, gravity, and magnificence the things that some obscure, inadequate, and dull dialecticians discuss. Cicero represents the ideal model: “In philosophical questions, he discussed what he thought and wanted, without limiting himself within the borders of any school, and he did it in an excellent manner.” No conclusive system exists, but only research in which openly and sincerely with full adherence one expresses what is most important and demanding. Having introduced the problem in these terms, the necessary consequence is the consideration of the anti-Stoic polemic seen as a battle against the attempt to divide nature into goodness on one side and evil on the other, with the intention of condemning and eliminating one of these two important parts. The whole of nature in its manifestations is good. Nature, if there is a sense to the Stoic formula of a life according to nature, has to be accepted, celebrated, loved, and obeyed in its integrity. “No reason exists for you to terrorize human kind with your tirades against nature, as if nature would cause wars, shipwrecks, famines, and all other evils to punish the wicked.” Nature in its inexhaustible womb has everything, the bad and the good weather. Nature is totally indifferent to human passions. Following its own path, nature pours on human kind what is convenient to its own laws, not what human caprice wishes. “Have you ever seen honest human beings treated better than others by nature?” (Quando vidisti honestos homines praeter ceteros in benevolentia esse naturae?). Being the minister of God, nature is like God impassible. On this point, we must immediately dissipate an equivocation on which some scholars have excessively insisted. These scholars have stated that Valla in these pages did not celebrate the minister and the work of God in nature, but God Itself. Valla had already explicitly substituted nature to God; God in nature and identical
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to nature (Deus sive natura) were to become the immanent force that would stir and agitate all things. They have claimed that without any reticence Valla himself has presented his conception in a clear passage. “Do you forget the common opinion, not only of those who think of God as inactive and separated from us, but also of those who want God always in action and involved, that God neither changes nor harms? Nature and God are the same thing, or almost the same, as Ovid proclaimed when he said ‘this contest was resolved by God and the best of nature’” (Idem est natura quod Deus, aut fere idem, ut Ovidius constituit: “Hanc Deus et melior litem natura diremit”). Similar phrases do not mean much. We find an almost identical expression in a thinker like Giannozzo Manetti, who certainly cannot be accused of an Epicurean naturalism. In De dignitate et excellentia hominis, Manetti used the sentence, “sive Deum, sive naturam … adhibuisse cognoscimus” (we know that the phrase “God or nature” was used). We should not disregard the polemic intent of Valla and the exigency that he introduced of divesting of any anthropomorphic colors God and its immortal minister. But we are somehow affected by Valla’s uncertainty. Nature reveals itself indifferent and therefore equally extraneous to pleasure and sufferance, deaf to both the lament of one and the appeal of the other. If it is correct to say that nature does not harm the wicked with its lightning, it is also right to affirm that nature does not favor those who ask for her gifts. Speaking of joy and pain as fruits at the reach of the human hand is nonsense. “The possibility of acquiring the good is all in our hands” (in nostra manu est, an bona cones-quamur), Valla exclaims in De voluptate (bk. 1, ch. 14). How then can this indifferent sensibility of nature that obeys only the eternal law of the universe be conciliated with human liberty? The intent of Valla is overall polemical. He intends to exalt the spontaneous joy of living: “Laws are not the only ones that were established for the usefulness that pleasure generates, but also the cities and the states, for whose magistrature no one was ever chosen, whether prince, lord, or king, for any expectation other than that of the greatest advantage.” Every human activity is intended for no other reason than a present or future pleasure: For what purpose should we remember, in addition to the liberal arts, the numerous disciplines that aim at the satisfaction of necessary needs or tend to the elegance and ornament in life, such as agriculture, architecture, texture, painting, dyeing, sculpture, and freight? Is anyone of these capable of producing for the love of the honest? And what about the liberal arts? Are numbers, measure, songs the ones that form moral virtues? Is it medicine then? Doctors attempt only to restore other peoples’ health and increase their own gain.… The poets, too … they wish to be of some help or delight; this they do for others, because for themselves they desire glory (De voluptate, bk. 2, ch. 39).
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Pleasure is both the immediate and the ultimate goal. Virtue is nothing but a calculation, an order established among the pleasures, and the consideration of future advantages. “Those would behave honestly who were to choose the major pleasures in preference to the minors, and the minor disadvantages in preference to the greater ones. In all this, it is necessary to possess the knowledge of which ones are major and which ones minor. Dishonest would be those who behave without any previous considerations of this kind” (De voluptate, bk. 2, ch. 4). The Christian life must also be considered from this point of view: the sacrifice of one day for the enjoyment of an eternity: “The good for those of us who are Christian is the same than the one I have above defined. It cannot be wanted for itself, because it is difficult, hard, and bitter and it cannot be wanted for earthly advantages. The Christian good is the ladder with which we can reach the beatitude that the soul would enjoy, once released from the mortal body, at the place of the father of all things, from whom it first departed” (De voluptate, bk. 3, ch. 10). This celestial glory to which we tend is also a pleasure; earthly or heavenly, beatitude is always a pleasure. To search for the celestial beatitude in a serene earthly enjoyment, is a double enjoyment that has to be viewed as the recompense for virtue. To love God means to love pleasure in its first source, in its first cause, as if pleasure could be a hypostasis and could become a person. Indeed, “God … is all these goods, somehow distinguishing itself from them. Our happiness is not God itself, but descends from God, as the joy that I feel when I see a light or hear an enchanting voice is not the light or the voice, but the light and the voice are the agents of my enjoyment” (De voluptate, bk. 3, ch. 12). The De voluptate, in its vivacious polemical tone against any form of classical (Stoicism) and Christian asceticism, intends to describe the ascension to the divina voluptas through the exaltation of nature, to God, the source of all reality. After loving pleasure as sincerity and spontaneity of true existence, we come to love God as the root and the basis of the happiness of the world. The passage from nature experienced in its immediacy, as Panormita celebrates it, to nature seen in its creator, as it appears in the words of Niccoli, implies neither contradiction nor hypocrisy. Valla, the coherent enemy of the abstract reason of the dialecticians, places in sensible terms both the rapport with things as well as with the Author of things. Voluptas is truly the vital source that descends from God but in God nourishes itself. As an anti-intellectualist, Valla in voluptas does not search for another God to be opposed to God, but rather underlines our participation to the universal life that pulsates within the whole, that flows from and back to God. Valla assigns to reason a subordinate function. Reason per se does not provide virtue or rather let say that the virtue obtained through reason is maimed and false. Referring to the philosophy of Boethius in De voluptate, Valla exclaims, “Goodbye to you! Remove yourself from this most sacred
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temple because you are like a lewd mime. Stop singing like a Siren your sweet songs; stop your garrulous talk. Let another doctor cure and benefit the sick. You are infected with despicable diseases and full of sores” (De voluptate, bk. 3, ch. 11). As his thought developed, Valla presented different versions of his most famous work. At one time, he accentuated in many ways the anti-ascetic and anti-monastic motive and the value of nature and of natural pleasure (insisting on sexual pleasure as the means for the propagation of the human species). At other times, he underlined the “religious” motive, that is, the heavenly enjoyment and the happiness of the blessed. The fact remains that he intended this heavenly beatitude in terms of pleasure, and in an extremely “sensual” form, rejecting any Manichean temptation of depreciation of the corporeal. 8. About Pleasure In De libero arbitrio, a dialogue between Valla and Antonio Glarea, completed in 1439, the attacks on one side against the claims of reason as it is developed in Boethius, and the appeal on the other to St. Paul and faith, are the expression of a radical denial that man could ever reach God by way of philosophy. “He would use compassion as he wants for some individuals and blind some others as he wants.… O man, who are you to challenge God? Would a pot ask the pot-maker why he modeled it in such and such a way? Don’t you think that the potter can fashion noble or base pots from the same clay?” The words of Paul accentuate the prose of Valla, who denies the validity of reason in probing the secrets of God and exalts faith. The same motive that creeps throughout the pages of De voluptate dominates the conclusion of De libero arbitrio: No human beings or angels know the motive why the divine will hardens an individual in evil and has pity toward another one. If the angels, though remaining ignorant of this and many other things, do not cease to love God, do not desist from their ministry, and do not retain that because of this their beatitude is lessened, would we humans, on the contrary, lose faith, hope, and love? … Would we, who believe our sages even without reason, for their own authority, not have faith in Christ, who is the Virtue and the Wisdom of God? Would we not believe in Him, who claims that He wants everyone to be saved and not the death of the sinner but that he convert and live? Would we ask Christ for a receipt, whereas we do not ask anything from the good peoples to whom we commit our money? Don’t we confide our life to friends, and would we not dare to confide it to Christ who for our salvation faced the incarnation and the death on the cross? We don’t know for what cause? And so, what does it matter? Let us be strong in faith and not in the probability of reason. Would we, by knowing more, have also a stronger faith? Humility would be preferable. The Apostle
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY says, “Not by knowing the arcaneness, but by associating with the humble.” Is the knowledge of things divine useful? More useful is love. Again, the Apostle says, “science inflates pride, love edifies.” … Let’s not search for a profound science; let’s not be like those philosophers who called themselves wise and were made fools. These philosophers wanted to know everything, and while discussing of everything, raising their faces to the heavens, attempting at ascension, and I would almost say, at a conquest, as prideful and temerarious giants, were precipitated to earth by the powerful arm of God and buried in hell, like Typhoeus in Tartarus, under the Aetna. First among them was Aristotle, whose pride and temerity God Almighty unmasked and condemned together with that of all other philosophers. In fact, as he could not investigate the nature of the Eurypus, he plunged to its bottom and was drowned.… What could there be more prideful and foolish than this? In what manner could God have punished with a manifest verdict Aristotle’s genius and that of those similar to him, if not by permitting that for his longing for knowledge he with such rage procured for himself death, a death, I would say, worse than the one of that most wicked Judas? Let’s avoid the desire of a profound knowledge; let’s join the humble. Nothing is more convenient than humility for a Christian: in that way, we would more splendidly comprehend God. It is written, “God resists the prideful and give his grace to the humble.” To obtain his grace, I will have no further questions, lest by inquiring about his divine majesty, I might be blinded by his light.
In De voluptate, the dominant point is the call against the quasi-Manichean dualism of an ethics of the abstract reason in the name of a morality of life taken as the immediacy of the senses. The immediacy of faith is affirmed against the pretenses of the Scholastic philosophy and in particular of Aristotelianism. Significant is the attack of Valla against St. Thomas in Encomium S. Thomae Aquinatis, his last work. A call for the return to nature, a call to adhere to the concrete against any crystallized abstraction of the tradition, is taking precise form in Valla. Nature, which repeatedly is presented as the primitive, the original, and the ancient, is not only a polemical motive against the old barriers that must be removed; it is, before anything else, the request for new ways of knowing, ways capable of offering a wealth of contents that rational analysis cannot offer. This is the knot of the fight against Aristotelianism, philosophy, and the dialecticians; in this stands also the value of the grammatica as an attempt to a new logic. By considering this line of thought we may say that De libero arbitrio is more significant than De voluptate because of its violent opposition between faith and rationality, its devaluation of rationality, and its exasperating exaltation of faith interpreted as the humble submitting oneself to the word of God, to the world, and to nature. In this total acceptance of the gift of reality, in this becoming open receptacle of everything, man is bound to find his meaning.
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This is where the apex is found of the need for a new experience, an experience more faithful to things because more faithful to man. The strong demolition of Aristotle in the Dialecticae disputationes that is contemporary to De libero arbitrio hinges on the human insufficiency, moral as well as theoretical, of the Stagirite. Aristotle is castigated more than for errors, for an insufficiency on the ground of actions and experimentation. “He did not distinguish himself in the fields in which egregious individuals particularly manifest themselves, in public office, in governing provinces, in the command of armies, in the peroration of important causes, in the practice of medicine, in jurisprudence, in writing history, or in composing poetry. These are the occupations in which over all other peoples engage and make themselves famous.” The value of a human being is found in what it does and not in the theories that it excogitates and systematizes. The human being is worthy for its search, experience, and work. “I am ashamed to confess that some have the custom of inducing their scholars to swear that they would never contradict Aristotle. These are superstitious and senseless men, unjust even toward themselves because they deprive themselves of the means for the research of truth.” In the old logic, Valla perceives the absence of this adherence to reality, to the effective proceedings of human thought as it is found in the language consigned to literary works and to juridical and religious texts. Beyond the Scholastic settings, it is necessary to return to textual words in contexts historically actualized. We must return to the text of the Roman laws, the written text, and understand it, search for its original intention, examine its roots, savor its flavor, without using “barbarous” violence, in the effort to find thought through its signs, within the articulation of the discourse. The new logic, the new theology, the new right must give up the interpretations that are interposed between the reader and the text; the text must be free to speak by itself and we to listen. Every act of knowledge is communication, and it is a question of signs, of language. The original meaning, the primary value must be obtained from the sign and from language through an appropriate analysis aimed at finding the genesis of the word. When in De elegantiis linguae latinae, Valla discusses against Boethius the term persona, he shows how the solution of a serious problem in the Christian theology, the unity and trinity of God, can be searched on merely linguistic grounds. Persona means quality and relation, not substance and nature: Persons are called figures and images that, from the mouth or other parts, pour out water in the fountains, representing many aspects and postures of man. For the same reason, actors on the stage wear the mask (persona), when they play the role of a slave, or of a maid, or thousand other roles that are not single characters, each essential for itself, but multiple aspects on the same theme. In the same way, in me can be found the person of the gentleman, liberal, timid, angry, foolish,
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According to different relations, we are different persons. We have many different qualities and rapports. “I place these qualities in God. I claim that they are personae, which cannot be lacking in God though they signify qualities and not substance. Boethius claimed this, too. He taught us to speak a barbarous Latin” (De elegantiis, bk. 6, ch. 34). The most widely known work of Valla, De elegantiis linguae latinae, under some aspects, is the new model of a “grammar” that could be at the same time science of thought and of language. The Latin language makes men citizens of the world of culture. This is the meaning of the beginning paragraphs (Praefatio) of the famous work: Don’t you think that this would count? … Do you believe that the fact of having diffused among the nations the Latin language—the best harvest, truly divine, a food for the spirit, not of the body—is not important? This language is the one that instituted among all nations and peoples what we call “liberal arts.” This language taught the best laws, secured all the way to wisdom, and finally accomplished that these nations could no longer be thought as barbarous. Who by judging the facts with some equity would not highly consider those culturati (cultured, learned) in the religion of letters … who became famous? … With a good reason, we could rightly call these men divine, by whom … not so much the Republic was made bigger … but (almost like gods) they provided greater safety for the whole world.… Their power was found not in armies, in blood, in wars, but in kindness, in love, and in unity. Of all these fruits, this language is the nursery. The Romans lost everything, power and splendor, but “kept for themselves like a God descended from heaven this speech more sweet than honey, more splendid than silk, more precious than gold and gems. The Latin speech is a great sacrament, really a great numen.” In the unity of language, humanity is Latin, because “as one is the law of many peoples, one is the Roman language.… Who does not know that as long as this language lives, all studies and sciences live? Who does not know that when this language dies, so do all learning and science?” To reconstruct in its significant value the Latin sermo means for Valla to seize in all its dimensions a world of culture. And since for Valla the Latin culture is the highest point reached by the human culture, the keys of the reign of the spirit are the laws of the Latin speech. In his more profound analysis of the humanistic intuition, Valla called as witnesses, defenders, and fathers, Giovanni Aurispa and Leonardo Bruni, “both of which, one by reading Greek
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and the other by writing Latin, excited my ingenuity; both took the place of parents, one as preceptor (he was reading to me alone) and the other as emendator.” As in Bruni, so in Valla, there is the preoccupation of conjoining scientia rerum and peritia litterarum (the science of things and the expertise in letters). In the introduction to the third book of De elegantiis (bk. 3, praef.), in which Valla in a significant way insists on the importance of jurisprudence and on the value of philology in order to establish the range of the laws, he clearly states that the source of all errors in the world of knowledge derived from the corruption of terms: All jurisprudence consists of the interpretation of terms … or of the distinction between right and wrong (omne ius, aut in verborum interpretatione … aut aequi pravique discrimine). What discipline that we publicly teach today is so ornate and, let us say this, so excellent as the civil jurisprudence? … Is it perhaps the discipline taught by the books of the philosophers, which are not understood by Goths or Vandals? But I have found in my book of Dialecticae disputationes that the philosophers err particularly for their incapacity of expression. I would have already published that book, if some friends did not insist that I postpone its publication. In another passage, defending the studia litterarum on religious grounds, he does not hesitate to oppose rhetoric and philosophy (ibid., bk. 4, praef.): We don’t intend right now to compare philosophy and eloquence in order to establish which of the two is more noxious. Many others have discussed this point, showing that philosophy with difficulty would agree with the Christian religion and that precisely from philosophy all heresies originated. Not so rhetoric, which is under every respect praiseworthy; it helps in the invention and in the disposition that form the bones and the nerves of speech. Eloquence provides the speech with ornaments that are like the flesh of the oration and its color, and, finally, consigns the oration to memory so that it would properly inflame the spirit and move to action. In this passage, instead of an antithesis between philosophy and rhetoric, we must see the opposition between the philosophy of the Aristotelians, closed as it was within the circle of abstract reasoning and physical experience, and a philosophy that translates, by following its rhythm, the movement of thought as it is expressed in language. Among the Aristotelians, logic on one side and reality, physical and moral, on another remain separate without any possibility of joining. The “new” logic, which adheres to the reality of the expressions into which the experiences of man (and of his activities) have been translated, finds in the literary documents (books and discourses, may they be of poets, jurists, scientists or prophets) the mediation between mind and reality, words
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and things (verba et res). This new logic truly finds that human and historical texture, which constitutes the effective unity of experience, human beings and reality together, and not only “supposed” forms that are empty and “abstract.” This is the reality of which the human being can speak, the ground on which it is convenient to rely in order to break off from the problems badly formulated that brought logicians, physicists, and theologians on the road without end of skepticism. No doubt exists that Valla prefers to speak of the historical rhythm of experience, which is, at the bottom, the human component. We are amazed to find in Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Aragonum that Valla reduces our most important knowing to historical knowledge: For as much as I can judge, the historians show more gravity, more prudence, and more civic wisdom in their orations than any philosopher in his precepts. If to say the true is no offense, we may say that from history has come the cognition of many things of nature … of many customs of nations … a great treasure of wisdom in all fields of learning.… Who can challenge the usefulness of history? We are convinced that in history more power of reasoning and authority is found than in philosophy. The knowledge capable of penetrating more deeply into the human spirit and of opening for us even the mysteries of God is Valla’s philology. His is the philology applied to the New Testament (In Latinam Novi Testamenti interpretationem), to the Donation of Constantine (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declaratio), and to the Digest, and this philology is never a show of curious erudition or a literary amusement. This philology is an instrument of inquiry that, better than the cavils of the dialecticians, dictates to human beings norms of life and frees them from error. The flavor of the treatise on the alleged donation of Constantine is clearly manifested when Valla points out in that false work the beginning of a process of corruption by which the church modified the nucleus itself of Christianity with the pretense of actualizing on earth, in this world, a counterfeit and contradictory kingdom of God. This kingdom, because partial and founded on the possession of earthly goods, instead of producing unity and tranquility, tore apart the whole Christianity. The preoccupation of the treatise was moral and religious, and equally moral and religious was the conclusion. In Valla, the Renaissance reveals with polemical fervor one of its most relevant aspects: the exigency of a return to sincerity free from every artifice and the liberation from the barriers of a culture no longer sufficient. Valla was not inclined to the idolizing of antiquity, he was a bitter critic of the Greeks, and a Christian convinced about the necessity of faith as a direct experience. To the return to antiquity, he gave a personal and original meaning and, with his philological concerns, he clearly showed the construction of a new logic interpreted as more consonant with the rhythm of the human spirit.
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9. Epicureanism of the Academy. Callimaco Esperiente. Platina The diffusion of Epicureanism in Italy was connected with some personalities and vicissitudes of the Societas Quirinalis, the Roman Academy of Pomponio Leto that was accused of propaganda and practice of a pagan Epicureanism. Agostino de’ Rossi, the ambassador of Milan to the Holy See, at the occasion of the conspiracy of 1468, wrote to Galeazzo Maria Sforza: At this court some learned young individuals lived, poets and philosophers, among which the principal ones were Callimaco the Venetian [Filippo Buonaccorsi], secretary of the Cardinal of Ravenna; Glaucho Coldelmero also from Venice; Petreo, secretary of the Cardinal of Pavia; Platano the Mantuan [Platina], secretary of the Cardinal of Mantua.… These men have founded a sect that was joined by many persons of all conditions, the larger part of which was constituted by servants or members of the single houses of the cardinals or other ecclesiastical authorities. These people held the opinion that no other world exists than this one, that as the body dies so does the soul, and that no thing is more valid than to dedicate oneself to all pleasures. Being disciples of Epicurus and Aristippus, they lived practicing all this giving however no evidence of scandals. They were fearful not of God, but of the earthly justice because in all respects the body for them was everything and the soul nothing at all. They supremely enjoyed life, ate meat during Quadragesima, missed Mass on Sundays, cared nothing at all for vigils, saints; had no consideration for pope, cardinals, and the universal Catholic Church. They used to say that St. Francis was a hypocrite who ridiculed god and the saints. They lived their own way taking pleasure with males and females: promiscue et indifferenter cum singulis similibus etc. (promiscuously and indifferently, with persons of the same sex). They felt ashamed when addressed with their Christian names, and for this reason changed their names and used the beforementioned strange ones. They affirmed that Moses with his laws has been a great deceiver; Christ, a seducer of peoples; Mohammed, a man of great ingenuity, who attracted so many peoples with his industry and malice. In their eyes all learned peoples were on the wrong in following these laws and norms. To live the way they were living was their best choice. One of the most important members of this sect was called Julius Pomponius, a very learned Roman. In this text, licentiousness and unbelief characterize the group, whose religious position parallels the attitude assumed by Gemistos Pletho, at least according to the charges of George of Trebizond. Platina would celebrate Pletho as the teacher of Bessarion. According to a curious information, which has already been found false by Francesco Fiorentino, Pomponio Leto had identified Pletho to be Pietro Calabro (in actuality Pietro Vitali, abbot of Grottafer-
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rata). In a letter to Gennadius, Leto praised Pletho as his disciple together with Ugo Benzi of Siena: “Pietro Calabro is an expert in both languages and well prepared to judge such arguments.” If we are to listen to Trapezuntios (George of Trebizond), Pletho had, at the time of the Council of Florence, openly prophesied the end of the three great religions: In Florence, I heard him to say … that in a few years the whole world with one spirit, one mind, and one doctrine would embrace a unique and same religion. When I asked whether that religion would be the Christian or the Mohammedan, he answered that none of the two would do, but one similar to that of the gentiles.… I also heard from many Greeks who came here from the Peloponnesus that three years before he died he stated that not too long after his death, Christ and Mohammed would lose their supremacy and the true truth would triumph throughout all lands. Though the neo-Platonic inspiration of Pletho largely differentiated from the one substantially materialistic of Callimaco Esperiente, the coincidence between the letter of Agostino de’ Rossi and the words of Trapezuntios is impressive. This coincidence appears to justify, through the mediation of Platina, the significant influence of Gemistos on the Florentine and Roman Academies. The name of Callimaco Esperiente used by Filippo Buonaccorsi of San Gimignano will come up again in regard to Ficino and Pico. In one quaestio addressed to Marsilio, Callimaco presented his difficulty in regard to the separation of the soul from the body by asking how could something (the soul) exists without occupying any space. “I don’t understand how something can exist and at the same time not be in some place. If it is in some place and it does not occupy space, then it seems that we say that at the same time something is and is not.” These were theoretical doubts to which on the practical level corresponded a decisive anti-Ecclesiastical attitude. In the twentysecond article of Consilium Callimachi to King Albert of the Jagellon dynasty we can read, “Be the only one Lord of your kingdom. Do not concede this prerogative to the pope, not even to him!” (Sis dominus in Regno tuo. Ne Papae quidem id concedito). Removed from Epicureanism in his writings seems to be instead Platina, contrary to what recently a worthy scholar like Bohdan Kieszkowski affirmed. Bartolomeo Sacchi, born in 1421, disciple of Ognibene of Lonigo who learned with Vittorino da Feltre, studied Greek in Florence in 1457 with Argyropoulos, and in Florence met Alamanno Rinuccini and Donato Acciaiuoli. It has been said that Platina himself taught Greek to Ficino, but this is debatable. In 1462, in Rome, Platina opposed Paul II and between 1468 and 1469 was imprisoned for his participation in a conspiracy against the pope. In prison, Platina composed or designed De falso et vero bono, dedicated in the
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published form to Sixtus IV, but in a codex (ms. “805 of the Biblioteca Trivulziana of Milan”) to the Divine Paul II (Divo Paulo II), who did not wish to accept the offer. In the preface, Christian sentiments are professed and Epicureanism is condemned. In the first book, Rodrigo Sanchez, Bishop of Calhorra, his jailer, exhorts him to accept with patience all adversities. In the second, Theodore Gaza praises poverty and Stoic virtues. In the third, the medic Marcus Valerius demonstrates that the true good “consists in the tolerance of the miseries of life with courage, in liberating the spirit from earthly cares and raising it to the contemplation of the heavenly ones, in order to enjoy after death the supreme and perfect goodness with tranquility, which means the vision of the deity.” De falso et vero bono is a work of edification, a retraction of every previous pretended impiety, and exaltation of the knowledge that makes the human being citizen of the world. It is narrated, “When Aristippus, a Socratic philosopher, was shipwrecked and thrown by the waves upon the coast of Rhodes, while he was reflecting on the serious situation with great trepidation observed some geometrical figures on the sand. Removed all worries, of good cheer he immediately shouted to his companions. ‘We have reasons to hope! Here too human vestiges are found!’” While learning makes human beings citizens of the whole world (“Only the scholar is never an alien in a foreign land”), it also defends, protects, and comforts them. Learning “is with us wherever we go; it guides us; it brings us back to heaven. When we are in danger it protects us like a shield from the blows of enemies and adversaries.” This Stoic tendency is still present even when Platina considers motives more manifestly humanistic: We are born to a life of worries, not of pleasures. We are descended to this life as into an arena in which we have to fight constantly, never failing virtue, with the desire for those prizes and glory that are prepared for us in an eternal life in heaven. Around us are enemies, thieves, and bandits, against whom we should move with such a spirit to prefer with serene courage death instead of turpitude, iniquity, laziness, cowardice, and desperation. We read about heroes, namely about Hercules and Theseus, who in life elected the hardest and most dangerous works, with which … by bringing good things for all humankind … they obtained an immortal prize from God. The person who resists the multitude of vices … the person who abandons all vain hopes, fears, and joys, for as much as possible, is similar to God. The person who surrenders itself to vices and conducts an intemperate and libidinous life, at the end is like a ruined building. In that condition, this person would then allow that even the laziest enemies could triumph with the result of an eternal and personal infamy.
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The entire treatise of De vero et falso bono is animated by this tone of retraction (recantatio). In De optimo cive (1474), we are on different grounds; the dialogue is dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and in it Cosimo portrayed the ideal citizen. The De principe, which is probably anterior to De optimo cive (1470), connects strictly with De vero et falso bono. In De principe, the central theme is that of the active life: “Let monks and ascetics be praised by others, while we believe that the world is made for those who live as human beings among human beings in a productive life, not in idleness.” Platina continues: He, who lives in solitude and contemplates the nature of the universe and of the gods, by avoiding dealing with all human affairs fails holy society. He surely is born just for himself, and not for other human beings. Yes, doubtlessly, to contemplate the gods and propitiate them for oneself and others with prayers and vows is a greatly good thing. But the greatest thing is the one to which nature, the mother of all things, drives us to do. We are not born solely for ourselves. The fatherland claims in part our birth for itself; in part, our friends have also a right to our birth, but what good can be brought to them by those who, by going into solitude separate themselves from humanity like members cut off from the unity of the body? Many Egyptians and Greeks have shown a preference for contemplation and have written much about the beauty and the wonders of creation, which is of interest to a few individuals. But I praise and admire above all the Romans who neglected the excellence of individuals and the pleasures of the mind and, writing instead about laws and morals, were always mindful of the common needs of humankind. The same tone and color dominates in De vera nobilitate. “Virtue alone makes someone noble and keeps his descendants in nobility” (Sola virtus est quae nobiles facit, quaeque posteros in nobilitate continet), is proclaimed in De optimo cive. In De vera nobilitate, we read that “nobility is ally and companion of virtue; it can be obtained only through personal effort and cannot be where vices are present.… We can be proud for having received blood and flesh from our famous ancestors, but not their nobility. Nobility depends totally from our individual spirit.” This is not a new concept in the fifteenth century, but it is here strongly reaffirmed. 10. Bartolomeo Fazio and Giannozzo Manetti Of the same kind were the discussions of Bartolomeo Fazio and Giannozzo Manetti, who were the exponents of humanism at the Aragon Court of Naples. Fazio was “a man of mediocre speculative power, but with some personal elegance of grammar and rhetoric; he could not rise to lofty views or to profound and ingenious conceptions.” He was born in La Spezia, studied with
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Guarino Veronese, perhaps in Verona before 1429, but more probably in Ferrara between 1431 and 1433. As a friend of Panormita, he was by him introduced, around 1429, to Marsuppini and Niccoli in Florence, where he perfected himself in the Greek language. Panormita also recommended Fazio to King Alphons of Aragon, where between 1445 and 1447 Fazio composed De vitae felicitate. This dialogue, intended to counteract Valla’s De voluptate, is imagined to happen in Ferrara and the interlocutors are Guarino Veronese, Panormita, and Giovanni Lamola. The work is without power and so uninspiring that Valla in a reaction against it formulated in the second of the Recriminationes (Complaints) this ferocious observation: “In my opinion, he has not given us a serious dialogue between learned people, but the gossips between a maid and two old ladies.” This script is truly an arid Scholastic exercise without originality. Yes, the human being is the highest among creatures, but it never reaches happiness on earth. This inescapable disproportion between our radical profound need and the awareness of the impossibility of its fulfillment seems to convince us that “on earth there is no true and reliable contentment” (nullam in terra veram solidamque felicitatem constare). Fazio himself, by his own, previously confessed that human forces cannot resolve a problem that not even theology could fully clarify; divine help alone could enlighten us on this matter. Guarino, in the conclusion of the dialogue, is made to express the same opinion that happiness is not of this world: “In this life, we cannot be happy” (dum in hac vita sumus, beatos esse non posse). The human structure itself, with which the insatiable desires of the body are connected, impedes the peace that is possible in God alone: “Who can doubt that the soul that is divine and celestial will return to heaven, the place suitable to the soul’s nature, when we already know that all natural things revert to their own elements?” Happiness is a heavenly thing, the contemplation of the greatness of God that will be manifest to all human beings freed from the corporeal load: Then, only then, free from this heaviness of the body, we would be, in a simple and pure form, capable of contemplating and knowing God.… The soul, freed from this earthly mass, will find, as Plato says, the science of the whole, or better will finally possess it, as Aristotle and our philosophers think. Because we will participate in the divine nature that knows everything perfectly, it is believable that our spirits also will know everything when they will return to the place from where they came. Our spirit will no longer be subject to Saturn, Jove, Mars, Mercury, Moon, and those planets of which we are now afraid and of which we observe with much anxiety and fear the rising and the setting. In the same way that we now are subject to them, they will then be subject to us and we will dominate and castigate them; they will never again bring damage to us with their corsi and ricorsi, nor the sovereigns will fear them because infaust, nor will they fear the dreadful comets.
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With its astrological determinism and exasperating dualism between flesh and spirit, the cited passage exonerates us from making any other comment. How Fazio could dissert de excellentia et praestantia hominis (on the excellence and dignity of the human being) is facile to imagine. This small work, probably composed in 1448 and dedicated to Niccolò V, identifies the dignity of the human being in the possession of an incorporeal soul through which all of the following is possible: to know all hidden things; to build cities and houses; to make clothes and formulate laws; to understand the complications of the heavenly revolutions, the movements, and the course of the stars; to discover medicine and many other arts and sciences, among which the first is philosophy, guide and mistress of the righteous life that teaches the worship of God and all virtuous actions. When the soul is not tied to the world of the elements, it is a divine power. The unmistakable sign of its divinity is its trinitarian structure and immortality that makes it similar to God. Alphons the Magnanimous, who had a long-standing acquaintance with the texts of Augustine, was rather dissatisfied with Fazio’s treatise and, on the contrary, admired greatly the analogous work of Giannozzo Manetti. Giannozzo, who was born in 1396 and died in exile in Naples in 1459, did not embrace the tendencies of the literary humanism. As an austere citizen with stamina similar to those of Salutati, Manetti represented the link between the culture of republican Florence, which joined a strong moral thought with a dignified political consciousness, and that of Medicean Florence, by now used to find refuge in the heavens of the Platonic metaphysics. A pupil of Ambrogio Traversari, Giannozzo had been present at the sessions of Santo Spirito, where he absorbed the ideas of early humanism. He had familiarity with Leonardo Bruni, at whose death he delivered the funerary eulogy. Thoroughly conversant with Greek and Latin, Manetti used to say that three were the books which he knew by heart, because of a long time acquaintance with them: the letters of St. Paul, the De civitate dei of St. Augustine, and the Ethics of Aristotle, from among pagan works. We find here, another time, the Nicomachean Ethics at the center of this culture with prevalent moral and political interest. At the meetings of Santo Spirito, Manetti formulated for himself a solid knowledge of antiquity and a profound faith. Vespasiano da Bisticci affirmed that Manetti “used to say that our faith ought not to be called ‘faith’, but ‘knowledge with certainty’” and we have documentation of his long conversations and discussions with St. Bernardino of Siena. Probably in 1434, a group of Florentine gentlemen asked Manetti, who knew Greek and had familiarity with the Nicomachean Ethics, to translate and comment the works written by Aristotle on morality. For the death of his young son, in 1438, Manetti wrote Dialogus consolatorius de morte filii, in which Agnolo Acciaiuoli and Niccolò of Cortona, the prior of the Certosa of Florence, are the interlocutors. Knowing Hebrew, Manetti produced a version of the Psalms from the original texts, a work that he later defended in an
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Apology in five books. Another apologetic work in twenty volumes, but that remained incomplete at the tenth, in defense of the Catholic faith against Jews and Gentiles—ingens quoddam viginti librorum volumen, adversus Judaeos et Gentes, pro catholica fide (preserved in ms. “Urb. lat. 154”)—is connected with his studies and his knowledge of theological and philosophical Hebrew literature. An important document of his interests for moral problems is his attempt to the writing of a series of parallel lives of philosophers, beginning the work with the narration of the lives of Socrates and Seneca. In the celebration of Socrates, the motive returns of the human being as the active constructor of cities and which finds its value in productive life and not in abstract theories: “He [Socrates] dedicated himself to moral arguments after having abandoned the researches on nature that he saw to be frivolous, obscure, and empty of value, nothing having seen in them that could bring advantage to human life.… Though he was a sublime philosopher, he lived in Athens a life like any other citizen: he conversed with them, took a wife, and covered a place of responsibility among the magistrates of the city.” None of the features of the seer in his solitude characterized Socrates because his was exactly a worldly wisdom; Socrates’s virtue was no ascetic denial, but civic virtue. The most famous of Manetti’s works, and rightly so, is De dignitate et excellentia hominis, in four books, written for King Alphons of Aragon. “This work was born,” Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote, “from a question that King Alphons one day addressed to him. After long and many disputations that they had on the dignity of the human being, the king asked him what, in his opinion, the true nature of the human being was. He replied: Agere et intelligere (to act and understand).” This work, written between 1451 and 1452, was presented by Panormita to King Alphons who valued it very much. The work deserves, though in a moderate form, a place within the literature that will culminate in Ficino and Pico, and will profit from some of its motives that will become characteristic and almost commonplace. Following Lactantius, Manetti utilized the Hermetic tradition in the praise of Adam, before the Ficinian versions that brought that tradition back into circulation and made it almost fashionable. Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis intended in part to be the confutation of De contemptu mundi of Pope Innocent III. In regard to the constructive aspect of the treatise, Manetti begins from Genesis, from the “similarity” between the human being and God. The soul, created with a special and all-powerful act of the deity, is similar to God. The words “We create,” at the plural in the sacred text, make evident “the fact that all three divine persons are expressly present only at the creation of souls, and that this was meant especially to show the special excellence of the souls themselves.” We read also that God’s breath entered into the body of clay the divine seed that will not perish but live immortally. Human excellence shows itself in those human beings that always are constructive and active in their knowledge:
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“Before everything else, we will speak of … intelligence … whose power and nobility are shown by many great deeds, by works admirably rediscovered, and again understood.… How much ability is demonstrated in the building of those great and most famous Egyptian pyramids! … How much power of ingenuity is manifest in Filippo Brunelleschi who … constructed the great, let me say it, the greatest cupola of the Florentine Duomo!” We have painters, sculptors, poets, astronomers, jurists, historians, and philosophers! What can we say about the miracle of memory or of the free will? Human industry is absolutely great: Everything, which appeared in the world after the first and still unshaped creation, has been found, produced and accomplished by us through the mediation of that singular and eminent acuity of the human mind. Ours is what is human because made by human beings, ours are all the things we see, all the houses, the villages, the cities, and at last all earthly constructions, which are so many and of such a quality that for their great excellence should with good right be considered deeds of angels instead of humans. Ours are the paintings, the sculptures, the arts, and the sciences; ours is wisdom, ours are the almost infinite inventions; our products are all the languages. The communication that happens between human beings, whether by speech or writing, is a human product: “Ours are all the admirable and almost unbelievable inventions that the power of human ingenuity, or rather divine ingenuity, decided to realize with special and eminent diligence.” The work of creation is almost reshaped, embellished, transformed by human activity. As the ground of human productivity, that of comprehension or action, the world is the platform for ascension, the palestra where human beings are tested: Great, good, and admirable are the force, the reason, and the authority of the human being for which we have shown that this whole world and everything contained in it were created. Equally so, we are of the opinion and believe that the human being’s right, immediate, and unique office is that of knowing and of being capable to govern and administer this world created for its advantage with all the things we see placed in it. 11. Matteo Palmieri In Manetti, beside the exaltation of the active, worldly, and civic life the increasing presence of Stoic and Neo-Platonic motives pointing to the value of the human spirit in its metaphysical significance is clear. To this earthly life that is always involved to the fullness of its physical capacity, the heavenly glory that can be reached by contemplating thought is consistently and mani-
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festly opposed. The valorization increasingly clear of the contemplative life begins to challenge the primacy of the active life. At this time, Plato, the poet of the ideas, begins to substitute Socrates, the exemplar citizen, the courageous soldier, and the head of a family; the philosophy seen as morality and school of civic life is replaced by the philosophy viewed as death to the world. Matteo Palmieri centered his efforts to a composition between the two tendencies. Of him, Alamanno Rinuccini wrote in the funerary eulogy, “Yes, the philosophers have proposed two kinds of happiness to which two conditions of life clearly correspond, one of which is the active participation in the civic life, whereas the other is removed from active involvement and dedicated to the achievement of the highest peaks of knowledge. Consequently, that man is most prudent who follows a mode of living that stands between the two aforementioned.” The poles of this double inspiration are concretized on one side in the dialogues Della vita civile, on another in the poem La città di vita. Palmieri had Traversari and Marsuppini as teachers. Of Marsuppini, Matteo delivered the funerary oration. In Florence, Palmieri, who was a pharmacist at the street corner called “of the swallows” (Canto alle Rondini), successively covered various civil posts. He was also a prolific historian. The four books Della vita civile, written when he was young, are meant to narrate some dialogues that happened between Franco Sacchetti, Francesco Guicciardini, and Agnolo Pandolfi who is almost the protagonist, at the Mugello, perhaps in 1430. Evident sources of this work appear to be Cicero, Quintilian, and Macrobius. The part of the book that follows the Plotinian classification of virtues should not be judged a poor work as Vittorio Rossi did; it should be rather appreciated because it contains an eloquent celebration of the cooperating unity of the human family. On this earth, the human beings are called to work in collaboration with others, to engage themselves for the common good in projects advantageous to all: The person who places all diligence and care into honest things which are worth knowing, and the knowledge of which results in private or public advantage, rightly deserves to be praised. Those instead who waste their time in the pursuit of arts that are obscure and contribute nothing to anybody’s well-being, deserve a universal condemnation because what fruit can there be from knowing how to prove to a human being that it exists or it does not, that a certain animal is like a donkey and has the horns? What truly counts is to demonstrate that the human being is born for virtue and how these virtues must be practiced. This earthly sentiment is so strong, this human family is so important, that is becoming not only the predominant, but the exclusive motive: Many different things can be encountered in this life … that nature has made pleasurable and truly dear to humans. However, no other love is
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY as strong as the one that we sense for the fatherland and for our own children. It is not too difficult to prove this because we know that every other desired pleasure ends with the end of our life, meanwhile we continue to desire even after our death that the fatherland and the children survive for a very long time and that they be most fortunate and rich of true glory.
The individual continuity in the world through the species, determined in regard to its historical groupings, translates itself into the deep desire for the inheritance of affections and glory to be perpetuated for the future: We would never be able to express it in a sufficient manner, but we certainly know from within our own spirits that there is a desire in us for future centuries. This desire brings us somehow to seek our own eternal fame, the most favorable growth for our country, and an enduring health for those who are about to descend from us.… Of all human activities none is more prestigious, greater, or honorable than the one accomplished for the growth and the safety of the fatherland, for the optimal status of a well-ordered republic, to the conservation of which supremely inclined are all virtuous human beings. Classical antiquity is presented as the immutable paradigm of this worldly conception of life, which as such is cherished and idolized: The Greek and Latin stories as well as those from the barbarous times are full of memorable examples that demonstrate with how much strength the noble citizens despised every personal advantage for the safety of their republic. For their deeds, these men were honored in this world with supreme glory and an eternal fame among the immortals. The Fabii, Torquati, Decii, Marcelli, Horatii, Portii Catoni and the Cornelii Scipioni adorned by special luster, and many other Roman families were of a true generous spirit and had such strength that nothing greater they desired in their souls than the safety of the commonwealth. It was for the growth and safety of the republic that these families multiplied their efforts, concerns, discomforts, dangers, and suffered injuries and even the cruelest of deaths. They were so highly spirited by the greatness and safety of the republic that with a ceaseless dedication overcame all hardships and labors in the army, to which they prepared and trained themselves from their tender age with a continuous practice of the same virtues. Following the tradition of Salutati, Bruni, and Manetti, Palmieri places Dante among the ancient heroes, contaminating in a strange way the myth of Er and Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. Having briefly mentioned the prevalent civic interest of the Republic, Palmieri narrates that Dante, after the battle of Cam-
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paldino, searched for a long time among the corpses the body of a friend. When he found his friend’s body, he confessed: “whether he resurrected or was not yet dead, I am uncertain to say.” Next, the friend stood up and revealed what he saw during the interval of unconsciousness and that, “without a motive … but for a special grace,” he was coming back to refer, having been sent “by a numen from the universe”: Nothing is done in this earth that is more pleasing to God than to love justice, clemency, and piety, which are things that, however great in each individual, are the greatest over anything else in the fatherland. The path is wide open for going to heaven … in those eternal places … to all those who have preserved in some ways the fatherland. There I saw the souls of all the citizens who have governed their commonwealths in this world with justice. Among them, I met Fabritius, Curius, Fabius, Scipio, Metellus, and many others who postponed themselves and their own things to the safety of the country.… No work can be more meritorious among human beings than the care for the safety of one’s country, to maintain cities, and to guarantee unity and concord among orderly multitudes. This positive valuation of the effect of every human act on the world and of the constructive fecundity of the work of man is common to all these writers, who in a true sense are moralists, historians, and politicians, rather than metaphysicians and theologians. Not by chance, Poggio had already observed about ancient writers on ethics that “The Epicureans are too lax; the Stoics too strict; the Peripatetics walk in the between the two, accept riches, and appreciate honors. I will count myself among the last ones” (Epistles, bk. 2, num. 14). In De morali disciplina, Filelfo declared, “We place good health and wealth among the things that are valued for themselves.” Lastly, Giovanni Nesi with great precision, almost concluding, affirmed in Dialogi de moribus (ms. “Laur. 77, 24”), “The external well-being of the body is necessary … because its absence would impede those virtuous activities in which happiness is found. From this we concluded that civil happiness is the totality of all accumulated goods” (Adesse igitur oportet corporis externaque bona … ut actiones virtutis, in quibus felicitas collocatur, illarum indigentia impediantur. Ex quo colligitur ut civilis felicitas sit omnium bonorum cumulata complexio). In line with this motive that we have already accentuated mentioning Bracciolini’s De avaritia, we must place the complex of observations that Palmieri made concerning the connection between the useful and the honest. He says that the two concepts have been artificially separated, when instead they are concurrent and indissolubly connected: It is not strange that we should begin by affirming that a popular division and customary deviation from the right path is the one that separates the honest from the useful. The truth is that excellent minds and
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY serious and profound philosophers with authority have not … divided the honest from the useful, but have preferred to unite them stating that what is honest is as well useful and what is useful is equally honest; the two things tolerate no separation.… The true praise of each virtue is located in its action; but actions cannot be performed unless there are faculties pertaining to them. For this reason, he, who has no money to spend, cannot be liberal or magnificent; just or strong will not be he, who would live in solitude; and the man without experience would not be called to practice things that involve the government and the interest of the majority.… From this we understand that the virtuous person must go after what is useful in order to achieve well-being in an orderly life. If it happens that it obtains good means, it should use them in virtuous works; if not, it should disdain them as things that come from fortune.
In La città di vita, the Neo-Platonic moral classifications reappear, but we find also well defined those Pythagorean or Origenist cues that brought to this poem its condemnation. On the background of the creation and of the destiny of the universe, the human scene does not lose its significance. The world is the battlefield of the souls, which are the same angels who, during the rebellion of Lucifer, did not take side for God or Lucifer. Overcome by uncertainty, they must decide their own destiny on earth in a body as in a prison. They are the spirits that at the origin constituted the halo of the light of God, and the world is their battlefield against evil; the earthly city is where they can prove their capacity for ascension. The value of the free act of election is definitively concretized and defined in this world, the intermediary reality between eternal exile and eternal glory of contemplation: The legion of angels has been gathered / In the Elysian fields into two groups / In order to be tested for the second time. / As it happened often in the flower garden, / in the mid of summer the bees / Fly all around their violets at first / And then into those chalices adorn themselves / Murmuring their pleasure in the work / To which by nature they were created. / In that same way, the human souls fly around / In this pleasurable known place until / They would elect a body into which to be. / The Father to whom they did not listen / The first time when He invited all to an answer / When they were still in their purity, / Asked them to submit to the second test / This time with their companion, the human body, / And show the confidence they have placed in it. In the original Italian, we sing: Quivi ne’ campi elisii fu raccolta La legion degli angeli intra due
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Per farne pruova la seconda volta, E come in prati molte volte fue Ape vedute in mezzo della state Risonar presso alle viole sue, Poi infiorarsi nelle bocche amate Murmorando nell’opera el delecto Al qual da la natura fur create; Cosí gli spirit in questo loco decto Vanno volando pel piacente sito Finché sarà da loro el corpo electo. El Padre che non fu da questi udito Quando da tutti domandò risposta Nella lor purità nel primo invito, A la seconda pruova vuol sia posta Lor libertà, ma sia con tal compagno Mostri la voglia ch’hanno in lor riposta In Città di vita, the poem was not great, though intentionally modeled on the Dantesque paradigm, and the philosophy was not profound, though Ficino admired it. But interesting is the history of the poem. According to Leonardo di Pietro Dati, a faithful companion of the poet and a precise commentator of his work, Palmieri in 1451, at Pescia in Valdinievole where he was praetor, in a dream had the visit of Cipriano Rucellai, who had been dead for a few years. At that occasion, Rucellai is reported to have revealed to Palmieri the nature and destiny of the souls. In 1455, in Naples, in a second vision at the dawn of the day of Pentecost, Rucellai would supposedly have ordered Palmieri to make public all what he knew. Palmieri thereafter must have told Leonardo di Pietro Dati, who wrote the document that follows (ms. “Laur. 40, 53”): The purpose of this writer is to show to all human beings that freedom of the will is innate. With the guidance of the will, human beings can select either the path at left and go to perdition or the one at right and reach eternal life, and finally encourage everybody on the path that brings to the beatitude of man.… Three are the parts of this book.… In the first part, we narrate that the souls descend from heaven into flesh and become men; in the second, humans, in the darkness of the deep night, walk on the sinistral path that brings to perdition; in the third and last, under the resplendent light of the sun, human beings are brought through the right path to eternal salvation. That is the supreme goal of human desire. The argument of the book can be explained as follows. In the beginning of the world, God simultaneously created all the spirits. A third part of these spirits, by staying fixed in God, achieved eternal salvation; another third part sided with Lucifer and obtained eternal damnation; the last part sided with no one, God or Lucifer. The spirits of this last third group stood in the middle by
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY themselves and were received in the Elysian Fields, which supposedly are located beyond all the planets in the convexity of the firmament. These spirits, whose souls are infused into bodies, are the ones that did not make their election for good or evil, when they were pure and simple spirits. Now, in the human bodies, under the influence of impetuous senses, these spirits have to show what they truly desire, and in concordance with the proper election of free will they will be saved or condemned to perdition.
And then, “He who in this war will not be lost, / Will return under the divine will, / Happy always he be in the heavenly site. / The person is deprived of the supreme good / Who delighted in passing things / Among the evil spirits forever will be in pain” (Chi in questa guerra non sarà smarrito, / O tornerà nella divina voglia / Lieto sia sempre nel celeste sito. / Qualunque sé del sommom bene spoglia / Per dilettarsi in cosa che non dura / Co’ mali spiriti arà per sempre doglia). The inspiration of the poem is clearly Platonic; not Christian, Platonic is also the title, according to the comment of Dati. Palmieri called the universe a great city in which everything lives (universum orbem civitatem magnam dixit in qua omnia vivunt): All the spirits … / Form the people of the city of God.… / This is the great city where everything / That lives, intends, feels, or breaths reside. / All over here is infinite life, / That contains and keeps all together the city / So that every part is part of others.… / If truly life is the harmony / With which heaven and earth are regulated, / Then life is the cause of every being.… / This link descends from heavens, and ties / Everything from top to bottom, / With the chain that Plato mentioned. In the original Italian verses, we read: Tutti gli spirti … El popol fanno alla città di Dio. … Questa é la gran città dove dimora Tutto quell vive, intende, sente o spira. … Vita infinita questa tutta gira, Contiella tutta, e salda unisce e lega, sí ch’ogni parte in ogni parte tira. … Vero, se vita è la proporzione Colla quale è condotto cielo e terra Segue d’ogni esser è prima cagione. … Questo nodo dal sommo cielo scende Tutto legando in fin che giunge al fondo, È la catena che Platone intende.
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With the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul came, repeated without variations, the Platonic conception of reminiscence: If we sharpen our mind and wish to search / We will find a lot of what we already knew, / Up there, we knew it before our blindness. / The mind, having no exemplar forms / Of what she wished to do, / Acted knowing not what it wanted to do. / Ingenuity in the effort of thinking through / Would not succeed without image or form / Already known or seen. / No other norm for understanding exists / Than to acknowledge what has already been learned. In addition, in the original Italian, we have: E se lo ’ngegno aguza e cercar vuole Ritrova assai di quel che già sapeva, Lassú conobbe pria venisse cieco. E come quello in mente non aveva Forma exemplar di quel che far volesse, Facendo non sapea quel far voleva. Cosí lo ’ngegno ben pensar potesse Non troverebbe imagine né forma Di cosa intesa o vista non avesse. Però non è lo ’ntendere altra norma Che riconoscer quel prima sapesti. In this Platonism, the ethical-political conception of Palmieri is resolved when justice, “the principal of all other virtues” becomes “the eternal truth that rules over the whole universe.” The poem was complete by 1465, but was never published. The little orthodox combination of Platonism and Origenism diffused around Palmieri an aureole of heresy. People gossiped about public burnings of the book and of the corpse of the author. The fact stands that Palmieri descended in his sepulcher with all the honors he deserved, and was with a public oration celebrated by a man greatly famous, Alamanno Rinuccini. If true, later on the remaining of Palmieri were removed from the consecrated ground of the Church of San Pier Maggiore. Of the much debated and supposed heresy of Palmieri, there is mention in Giovan Battista Gelli and in Morgante (ch. 24, par. 109) by the little-orthodox Luigi Pulci: “Other kinds of capricious spirits fly around / Like birds in the air, / Who were not faithful or rebellious / When the number of the elect was decided. / I do not know if my friend Palmieri erred in this. / They, too, seem to be placed in this or that body for another time” (Vanno per l’aere come uccel vagando / Altre spezie di spiriti folletti, / Che non furon fedel né rei già quando / Fu stabilito il numer degli eletti: / Non so se il mio Palmier qui venne errando, / Che par di corpo in corpo ancor gli metti).
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 12. Alamanno Rinuccini
It was impossible not to mention, in regard to Matteo Palmieri, Alamanno Rinuccini, who contributed particularly to Greek studies in Florence, and in general to the Florentine Studio. Of Rinuccini, in addition to translations from Greek, the notable dialogue De libertate survived. This dialogue is historically quite important because of its vibrant opposition to the Medici, when remembering the lost florentina libertas, so eloquently exalted by the old generation of humanists. De libertate is dedicate to Alessandro Rinuccini, brother of Alamanno, and its purpose is to provide an answer to all those who criticized Alamanno’s retirement from the city’s political life and the abandonment of the fatherland that is the object of the first earthly duty. Rinuccini places on the mouth of his critics the words that had been the gospel, political and moral, of the men of the generation of Salutati: man is born for country, friends, and others, not for himself. Civic life is man’s function, not meditation in solitude. Rinuccini replies that all this has the precondition that human beings be free and equal. The human being is born for action, but it must possess together with the courage to act the conditions for expressing this power of acting (potestas agendi), that is the same than the power of living (potestas vivendi). No body can take away the interior liberty; but civil liberty must find an exterior expression. To be translated into action, civil liberty must count on the respect of all human beings for those same laws for which the Florentines were once ready to die. Unfortunately, the capricious will of Lorenzo de’ Medici, hic Florentinus Phalaris (this Phalaris of Florence) has destroyed these laws. These were the laws in whose honor Salutati at the dawn of the century dedicated a hymn full of confidence; they are now dead in Florentine country, and Rinuccini begins a song that is a melancholic funerary eulogy: “When our country lived obediently to its own laws, it flourished in public works, majesty, and power, and became more famous than all others cities of Tuscany” (Quandiu suis legibus parens civitas vixit, tandiu opibus, dignitate, imperio aucta, prae ceteris Ethruriae civitat-ibus maxime claruit). An arbitrary power has overturned laws, equality among the citizens, and liberty. “Is there any one person who does not know that the equality of the citizens is the principal foundation on which to build liberty?” (Quis ignorat aequalitatem civium libertatis praecipuum esse fundamentum?). Where is that passionate ancient love of freedom that brought Florence the Guelphes to pick up arms also against the pope? “The love of freedom compelled our ancestors so that, though they always were faithful members of the Christian religion and also respectful of the Church of Rome, they did not hesitate to arm themselves and fight wicked pontiffs.” What will be the Italian tragedy is described already in the grief-stricken pages that Rinuccini dedicates to the Florentine tragedy: By now, I don’t know what to say any longer about the war with which Pope Sixtus and King Ferdinand are tormenting us. Both of them, in
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words and letters, are manifestly declaring that the war is not against the people of Florence. Accordingly, the motive of the war is to give back to the citizens of Florence the freedom that has been taken from them. The pope and the king are making war in favor of the Florentines against Lorenzo de’ Medici, whom they called “tyrant” every time and not “citizen” and have marked out with many Ecclesiastical censures. I really don’t know for what reason those Florentines who oppose the efforts of the pope and the king are fighting. Are they fighting for the preservation of slavery or the return to freedom? Truly, no one would be capable to redeem the Florentines; their corruption is an evil to which there is no adequate remedy. The only few good human beings must choose between exile and solitary isolation: For reason of their quotidian and bitter servitude, it can be justly said that the Florentine people have lost since a long time ago all understanding of an honest life, all strength of spirit, and love of freedom. The consequence of this is that human beings, wretch and infamous, who should not even be called citizens, have reached such an audacity that they dared to subvert, violate, confound all things at their own will, and even persecute with much hate those whom they believe to be aware of their misdeeds. From this political crisis, a desire was born for the escape from the world to the tranquility that the post-Aristotelian schools indicated as the only safe haven for the Greeks who had lost their own liberty: When I look at myself, I know that I have followed an excellent course of studies. I have not acted, as many individuals are now doing, limiting themselves to grammar or rhetoric, and spending all time in reading poets and historians. I have instead done what is well known by the learned. I found my refuge in philosophy, which we can truly consider our life’s guidance (dux vitae). I convinced myself to work hard in these studies, not just for reason of erudition and honest enjoyment of the spirit, but also for the achievement of the needed strength for an honest life. Though the concern for the supreme good of the human life is the principal controversy among the greatest philosophers who discussed the matter with many probable arguments under many aspects, they all agree on one thing. Happiness or the supreme good consists essentially in what can make the human being, as far as possible to the human being, most similar to God. All those who have brilliantly expressed something about God, whether our own theologians or the gentile philosophers, said that God is imperturbable and immobile. Consequently, they necessarily confessed happiness consists in what could affect the mind to be at peace and without any preoccupation. If we
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY want to follow Aristotle [we must know], he actually collocated happiness in this exact condition of the spirit with quietness, tranquility, and absence of worldly disturbance.… Not totally wrong, but certainly somewhat more rigid, were the Stoics when they placed happiness in virtue, in the permanent disposition of the spirit toward the right. From all these discussions, we are pleased to have deduced the conviction that the human being should above anything else search for quietude, liberty, and tranquility.
The dialogues of Rinuccini form a characteristic document of an economic and political crisis, more than of a moral or cultural one. They conclude with a bitter attack against the first kind of humanism that was so vibrant with civic life. They open in Florence the way to the Platonic flight from the world to a refuge, to a tranquil ideal world in refined and peaceful academies. 13. Leon Battista Alberti In this world of thought, Leon Battista Alberti occupied a particular place. The issues and the interests of the contemporaries were absorbed in the widest horizon of Alberti whose magnitude of preoccupations overcame every particular theme, and the author himself never attempted at an original synthesis. The Eugenio (1434), the dialogue Della tranquillità dell’anima (1442), and De iciarchia (1470) or government of the house, are not his most significant works. The most profound Alberti must be found in Momus (1443), in some Intercoenales, in the books Della familia, and in De re aedificatoria. He must be found in the width of his interests, in the expansion of life adapting itself to every kind of research: the vibrant research that becomes a life’s method. In De iciarchia, Alberti observes that the thirst for knowledge is inextinguishable, and that of all joys the loftiest and purest is the one obtained in the search for knowledge: “Our spirit nourishes itself by means of inquiry and understanding of suitable things.… We cannot describe or estimate the pleasure felt by those who asked from the learned the reasons and the causes of things, and who by so doing find themselves greatly more educated. No person could doubt that this pleasure is superior to all other felicities that human beings can obtain in this life.” On the other hand, research is as inextinguishable as the infinity of things; research is running from one problem to another, from one answer to another; but no answer would be able to satisfy the thirst of humanity. The shadows that were all along the banks of the river of life are the ones giving the philosopher advice: “Desist, O frail human being, desist from the attempt to investigate the secrets of this god of gods beyond the limits allowed to mortals! Remember that the gods have allowed you as well as every other soul incarcerated in a body the perfect knowledge of all those things that happen to fall under your eyes.” In the same dialogue in which a discomforted distrust in the power of knowledge is transparent, trust in the work of human beings is
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found. The person who jumps into the river of life, so crammed with stones and overwhelming with the impetus of the rushing water, may trust in virtue: “I have realized that fortune is hard on all of us who have jumped into the river, in which we must with a continuous effort swim against the waves that are overwhelming. We should not ignore that in human affairs what count greatly are prudence and diligent hard work.” Technical research may bring us to a melancholic discomfort, but the world opens itself to human beings as a wide and secure field for their actions: “Free yourselves from sluggishness and effeminate tardiness: let the generous virile spirit win!” The human being in the world can create its own world, splendid in the arts, productive in the civic life. The human being, after reaping the reasons of nature from its womb, can compete with nature itself, making itself like nature creator of harmonic worlds, regulated by an admirable rhythm. A harmonic composition of knowing and doing must become the reason of all our earthly life: “Let us use the power of our spirit for virtue, let us acknowledge the motive and order of things, and then let us venerate and fear God.” In Alberti, beside a polemic reference to ecclesiastical corruption, some serious astrological credence, and a sense of the divine in nature, we find the faith in a god regulator of the whole universe and fundament of its rationality and cognoscibility. It should be remarked that even though it is not the case, as someone has done, of pointing out pantheistic elements in Alberti, still remains the fact that his faith, always at the edge between an ironic saying and the awareness of the contradiction of life and reality, consists in the simple repetition of traditional formulae. Throughout Alberti’s pages there is a constant scorn of the gods, the “spaccio della bestia trionfante” (in Momus, not by chance, are found expressions analogous to those used by Giordano Bruno) and the accentuation of the absurdity of too many aspects of life and nature itself. All of this, even though constantly expressed in a Lucian mode, places many pages of Alberti’s writings besides the eulogies of madness, or the celebration of madness as the Lady of this world. It cannot be equally said that Alberti is deriving from all his considerations fideistic conclusions. On the contrary, it must be stated that he points to the source of his discomforted vision of life in the life experience, his and his own, of a Fortune that overwhelms earthly goodness and, before this, to the tragedy of the Italian cities that are in ruins. From this, we have the constant antithesis between Alberti’s exaltation of virtue and the evidence that virtue is often defeated. Surely many are the pages, especially in the books of Della famiglia, in which Alberti insists on virtue, on a constructive and fecund action: “I think that we have to believe that the human being is surely born in order not to rot away and do nothing, but to stand up and work hard.” Virtue also is, in an Aristotelian way, human completeness, in which the human being finds his own happiness: “I like very much the sentence of Aristotle where he stated that the human being is almost like a mortal happy god, capable of under-
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standing and doing with reason and virtue.” From this, we have in Alberti the exaltation of the human being as lord of destiny, solid against fortune, created free by God: “God has given strength enough to virile hearts so that they could be able to sustain every labor, adversity, and challenge of fortune.” The antithesis virtue-fortune, human cleverness and prudence against the alternating vicissitudes of things, is delineated with much evidence. “It is not in the power of fortune, nor is easy, as some foolish would believe, to vanquish those who do not want to be vanquished. Fortune can impose her yoke only on those who submit to her.” Virtue, too, is no blind gift; it is the force of the will and it is a fruit of the will; “he is without virtue who does not want it.” Only the virtuous individual, after defeating fortune, obtains glory and can face the end of his life in a serene and comfortable way among friends. Alberti outlines the conception of a world constructed by will and prudence, but ensnared and ruined by wickedness and foolishness. This world is always our world, where not the fate or blind fortune, but our conscious work and actions have to decide, at the end, our destiny. The hymn to the dignity of the human being, developed in the second book of Della famiglia, truly expresses one of the great themes of Alberti’s entire work: God has instituted in the human spirit a strong bond in order to support the human community, with justice, equity, liberality, and love. With these virtues the human being would gain grace and praise from other mortals, and forgiveness and clemency from his creator. God has given strength enough to virile hearts so that they could be able to sustain every labor, adversity, and challenge of fortune. God has given firmness, stability, constancy, force, and contempt for all transitory things so that all human beings would attain most difficult things, vanquish sufferance, and fear not death. With all these virtues, we can do what we must do, that is, honor and serve God with justice, piety, moderation, and any other perfect and praiseworthy action. May we believe that the human being was born in order not to sadden in laziness, but in order to be active in many magnificent projects, with which it could principally please and honor God, and thereafter obtain the habit of perfect virtue and happiness, its fruit?
Eleven THE GREEKS IN ITALY 1. The Greek Influence. Byzantine Culture. Gennadius In De libertate, Alamanno Rinuccini claims to have been the animator of a group of admirers who, after having met at his residence in a private accademia discussing philosophy and letters, promoted the resurgence of the Florentine Studio. The group, through the divulging activity of Donato Acciaiuoli, among other things, obtained that Johannes Argyropoulos, whose influence was going to be remarkable, be called to Florence to teach Greek. At this point, we must face the question of the learned Byzantine in Italy and of their influence on the philosophical Renaissance. Known is the Ficinian statement, in the Prologue to the version of Plotinus (1492), that the origin of the Florentine Platonic center was due to the direct impression that Pletho made on Cosimo the Elder: Cosimo the Great, by decree of the Senate known as the Father of the Country, when during the Pontificate of Eugenius the Council for the unification of the Greek with the Latin Church was held in Florence, was frequently present at the discussions on Platonic mysteries that the Greek philosopher named Gemistos, whose surname was Pletho, almost as a second Plato, was delivering. Cosimo was so much inspired by the words of Pletho that he conceived in his mind an academy that could be established as soon as an opportunity were to present itself. Then … he assigned me … to that great responsibility. If the signs of the teaching of Pletho are rare in Ficino, we should not find strange how some observations of Bessarion in the writings against Trapezuntios sound like a clear programmatic anticipation of Ficino’s Theologia platonica. It is possible that Bessarion was the man who first suggested to Ficino the road that was to lead to the docta religio: We are not denying that in Plato some elements that were illustrated with natural light and were similar to those of our religion existed. Our creator and lord, with the divine doctrine of his son, made our religion more explicit, and with his goodness made it more manifest. We think
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY that human beings can take a worthy advantage from the elements that are in Plato, and from them advance to a more perfect status in our religion. It is true that some principles of the true theology arise and almost gush from the writings of Plato (Bessarion, In calumniatorem Platonis, prol., bk. 2, ch. 5, sect. 9).
We should notice the terms with which Ficino was greeting the return of Plato in the work of Bessarion: “Yes, O Bessarion, those centuries during which Plato will rejoice and we all that form his family will give thanks, have come!” With all of this, if in a careful examination the influence of the Greeks, particularly for what concerns the knowledge of ancient sources, cannot be denied, at the same time we should not attribute too much to it. Ficino himself, outlining in a famous letter to Martino Uranio the development of his own Platonism, went from the Neo-Platonists to the Medieval Scholastics, Arabic and Latin, overlooking the Byzantines, and mentioning only Bessarion at the side of Cusanus. Pico, the most learned Pico mentioned Pletho only once and, though presented with a mass of erudite materials, did not mention any Byzantine Platonists. Giorgio Pasquali observed: The Byzantine teachers, among which we place as first and most known the venerable Gemistos Pletho, have brought the Florentine humanists in touch with the original texts of Plato, and in addition to Plato, Plotinus, Hermes Trimegistus, the Pseudo-Pythagoras, and even the “Chaldean Oracles.” But these texts were advantageous and brought fruits only within spirits already abundantly prepared to understand or misunderstand them, according to the development of western philosophy. The Middle Ages knew Plato, Proclus, Hermeticism, and multiple other aspects of Platonism. Even the last fruit of the Byzantine speculation, lost in subtle theological questions, in which among the rest often the reflections of more vital questions debated among the Latin scholars resounded, had no effective contact, no affinity with the vibrant speculation of the humanists. The question itself of the rapport between Aristotle and Plato among the Greeks developed often into a personal quarrel, whereas in Ficino and Pico and their disciples it took the form of the solemn and ancient debate between nature and spirit, world and God, and science and wisdom. Besides, it was exactly a Greek, Georgeos Skolarios, named Gennadius, the adversary of Gemistos Pletho, who wrote: Aristotle and Plato, among the Latin people, consider themselves as teachers; they are famous for their school, and enjoy the cult of these learned men, foreign men, in whose hands they could never have imag-
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ined to end. But at home, in their own country, they represent a dead weight; from a long time, they have already resigned themselves to remain silent since no one would listen to them. They are a useless treasure to us, a crystalline and most sweet spring, that lies underground, which no one cares to disinter and to let it gush out again. This is what is happening to them among their own people which they never expected would have reduced them to silence and to remain enveloped in the shade of oblivion. 2. Gemistos Pletho. Comparison between Plato and Aristotle Gemistos Pletho, born in Constantinople in 1355, was educated at the school of a learned Jew, Eliseus, from whom he may have learned the doctrines attributed to Zoroaster. In 1415, Gemistos began the planning of his politicoreligious reformation that would renew radically the moribund Byzantine Empire. In 1441, Filelfo wrote, “with the exception of Gemistos, everything else over here is an object of commiseration.” A dense group of followers was soon formed around Gemistos, who wrote for them an outline of an ideal state in The Laws (Nomothesia, a synopsis of laws). Unfortunately, the theologian Gennadius was contrary to Gemistos, ordered the book be burned, and that is the reason why only a few fragments survived. Whatever remained of the writings is sufficient enough to allow a reconstruction of this strange dream of restoration of the Platonic republic, in which a far removed echo of Emperor Julian reverberates. At the beginning of his writing on the Holy Ghost, probably in a polemic with Bessarion, Pletho outlines very precisely his own religious point of view, which was like the basis of that spiritual and political renewal that he was hoping for and that he actually promoted: Greek theology is placing above all beings a God who is unique, supreme, and indivisible in his substance. This religion attributes to God several children, who descended from him in various orders, some of which are inferior and some superior to each other, but each charged with the responsibility of presiding over one more or less important part of the whole. None of these children are believed capable of being equal to the Father or to be able to approach that equality. The Greek religion concedes that these children have an essence much inferior to that of God and are divinities of a different order. By calling them “gods” and “sons of God,” our religion still does not exclude that they are the work of God and does not think opportune to distinguish between “generation” and “creation” in relation to God’s activity, from which not even his nature can be separated. We are here completely outside the Christian experience, facing an emanatism of Neo-Platonic kind, similar to what we can find in the tradition of Proclus,
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to which evidently Pletho is connected, including also his usage of the “Chaldean Oracles.” If we glance at The Laws (Nomothesia) or at whatever remains of them, we would feel immediately the practical exigency that animates this work. Humanity is affected by diverse and contrasting conceptions; on the other hand, without a clear vision of the world, it is impossible to dictate concrete rules of life: “After having clearly illustrated these prejudicial problems, we would determine the rules for the life of the human being. In this way, the human being will know, without effort or difficulty, which conduct would be the best and the most useful.” During this inquiry it is convenient not to trust rhetoricians and poets, “who lower God to the level of the human being and raise the human being to the level of God, confusing everything and everybody.” Our only guides are the legislators who always purport the common good, and the philosophers who claim truth to be the basis of happiness and the greatest of all treasures. Gemistos considers Zoroaster, Eumolpus, Minos, Lycurgus, Iphitus, and Numa among the legislators; among the sages, he counts Brahmins, Magi, Curetes, the priests of Dodona, Tiresias, Chiron, the seven sages, Pythagoras, Plato, Parmenides, Timaeus, Plutarch, Porphyry, and Jamblicus: These individuals, since they reached agreement concerning a larger part of the fundamental questions, seem to have dictated their opinions as being the best to the wiser human beings who succeeded them. We will follow them without searching for any novelties of our own or of others concerning these great arguments. The essential difference between the wise human beings and the sophists is that the wise express always opinions in harmony with the most ancient beliefs that for their own antiquity are true doctrines superior to the false propositions that come to be gradually formulated in time. The sophists aim always to novelties, their only goal is ambition. In this passage, Pletho underlines two motives that we will find again in Ficino: the existence of a religious-philosophical tradition (pia philosophia); the value of antiquity considered as the safe depositary of truth. The theology of Gemistos is based on a multiplicity of gods. “Zeus is their king, he is the greatest, the best possible, who presides all reality, and whose divinity transcends everything. He is in everything equal to himself, completely uncreated, father, and first fabricator of the whole reality.” From Zeus, Poseidon is generated, who is the lord and fabricator of heavens, and the first among brothers. “From Hera, the producer of matter, [Zeus] generates other gods: the Gods inhabitants of heaven, a celestial stirps of the planets; and the Demons of terrestrial race, near to our race.” The many Gods provide for the many human beings either directly or through inferior divinities, according to the laws of God: “These deities act in the best possible way according to an immutable destiny that originates from Zeus.” The universe, which compre-
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hends the Gods of second and third order, of Olympus and Tartarus; of Heaven and Earth, “is eternal like Zeus, it had no beginning in time, nor will have an end; it is composed with many parts gathered into a unity. Among all things, the universe was made in the best possible way by a perfect artificer, which has omitted nothing. This universe remains always the same in its original form, immutably.” If we consider humanity, Pletho tells that “being the soul similar to the Gods, it remains always immortal and eternal in heaven like the Gods. Because the Gods keep the soul always united with this mortal body, the soul is sent now here, now there, for reason of the harmony of the whole. Because it is into us and into our form that everything converge that is mortal and immortal, the whole is connected with itself.” On the other hand, given the divine nature of the soul, “the beautiful and the good are the goal of life.… The Gods entrusted with our formation have placed our happiness in the immortal part within us, which of the essence of the human being is the loftiest part.” Contemplation, which is the supreme happiness of all divine intelligences, is also the goal that human beings have proposed for themselves, but they would be capable of reaching it only when, after overcoming their enclosure, they will be ready to collaborate with God for the unity of the totality: “We humans must be good, procuring to each human being all the goodness that it has the right to expect from us. We should never be the voluntary cause of evil to any person; never show ourselves hateful, malicious, and adverse to society. We must pursue the good of our city and family because we are part of them; we should always postpone our personal good to theirs.” By so doing, the human being will certainly follow the divine law of unity. The foundation of the social renovation intended by Gemistos was solidly rooted on this religious and moral renovation. Only by finding oneself and in oneself finding the laws of the whole, the bonding in the universe, human beings will be able to recover again order and earthly happiness. Within this frame we find the certainty which Pletho had of a reformation of the whole humanity that, beyond the existing positive religions, could recover its proper universal brotherhood in the cult of the true divine elements of the world: In Florence, (where he came with the other Greeks for the Council) I heard him to say that in a few years the whole world with one spirit, one mind, and one doctrine will embrace a unique and same religion. When I asked whether that religion would be the Christian or the Mohammedan, he answered that neither of the two would do, but one similar to that of the Gentiles. I was shocked by these remarks and began to hate him and fear him like a poisonous viper. I also heard from many Greeks who came here from the Peloponnesus that three years before he died he stated that not too long after his death Christ and
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Some historians have wrongly considered these words of George of Trebizond little reliable (Comparationes philosophorum, bk. 3, ch. 20). On the contrary they agree perfectly with what we know of the activities of Pletho, with his minute elaboration even of the rites of the new faith, “I have seen, I have truly seen myself those prayers [of the new religion] to the Sun and I read them; the hymns exalt and adore the Sun as the creator of the entire universe.” It is clear that little of this mythological restoration was channeled into the Italian Platonism, even though some cues, as we noticed, can be found in some of Ficino’s or Pico’s motives. The aspects of the work of Pletho that had an effective echo were the anti-Aristotelian polemics and the diffusion of the “Chaldean Oracles,” the doctrine that was attributed to the Magi and Zoroaster that is present in both Ficino and Pico as a constant note. The opuscule on the differences between Plato and Aristotle was written in Florence during a period of sickness “to please primarily those who were caring for him, and secondarily all the others who accepted Plato,” is a vivacious attack on Aristotle and a demonstration of the superiority of Platonism. We should doubt that this minor work had a profound effect on Latin scholars, of which Gemistos and Gennadius underline the philosophical unpreparedness. The Latins were not effectively unprepared philosophically, but the perspectives within which they were approaching the problems were by this time different from those of the Greeks. The two philosophical authorities that Pletho introduced, Pietro Calabro, probably Pietro Vitali of Pentidattilo, the abbot of Grottaferrata, and the medical doctor Ugo Benzi of Siena, were certainly not stars of first magnitude in the Italian philosophical horizon. 3. George of Trebizond. Bessarion. Johannes Argyropoulos Leonardo Bruni already referred to the question discussed by Gemistos. In Vita Aristotelis, Bruni showed his sympathy for the Stagirite, whereas in the letters he sustained the repugnance between certain Platonic positions of the Platonic Republic and Christianity. Pletho begins with reproaching the Latins for their preference for Aristotle, “persuaded by a certain Arab, Averroès.” On the contrary, he exalts Plato for having assumed a unique supreme God, of spiritual and separated nature, laughing at Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul, the supposed animation of the stars, his general insufficiency, and ignorance. In 1443, Gennadius rebuked “the blasphemies” of Gemistos and Niccolò Sekundinos attacked Aristotle. In 1455, the bitter George of Trebizond (Trapezuntios) entered the foray, and addressing himself to the Latins wrote in Latin Comparationes philosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis. As Bessarion would later accuse him of it, Trapezuntios had not been always adverse to Plato. In the dedication of his version of Pletho’s Nomothesia to Niccolò V,
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Trapezuntios exalted Platonic philosophy but also the piety and the religious rectitude of Plato. Plato is not different than Aristotle; he is almost the complement of Aristotle, who was sent to humankind with him by divine providence. “In the course of the translation, I admired to such point the ingenuity, the doctrine, and to say it in some better words, the divine stature of that man, that by my dismay I could not find adequate words to express myself.” Trapezuntios tuned his words again to the praise of Plato, when he sent his version to the Venetians and to Francesco Barbaro, who thanked him for the book. Barbaro said (Epistles, num. 109), “I am grateful to you for having shown to our fathers not only how to take advantage of human means, but also of the guidance of Plato in establishing according to God those foundations [of our Republic] that would produce so much glory and greatness in the arts of war and peace.” Equally in the preface to the translation of Parmenides addressed to Cusanus, George of Trebizond asserted, “In this book, such profundity of content, such wealth of argumentations exist that through it the ingenuity of Plato, his natural acuity, and admirable ability to discuss the two sides of a question are easily manifested. His conciseness is also such that nothing else could be expressed in fewer words.” Then Trapezuntios, with adverse feelings for Pletho, characterized him as “a man so prudent and learned, who denied Christ, adhered to Plato, and now persecutes the Christians with his writings” (Comparationes, bk. 1, ch. 7). He hurled himself with bitterness at Pletho and denounced the Platonic impiety and inconsistence, and instead greatly exalted the perfect Aristotelian orthodoxy: “I am ashamed to say how much with incoherence and levity, how much with inconsistency the Platonic doctrine has been elaborated.… I affirm instead that Aristotle has grasped even the concept of the trinity of God … all things [in Aristotle] conform finely to the catholic truth (Comparationes, bk. 2, ch. 3, sect. 13).” Defender of Pletho, his teacher, and of the Platonic philosophy stood Cardinal Bessarion, a great connoisseur of Greek thought, who translated Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Bessarion was born in Trebizond toward the end of the fourteenth century; after his acceptance of Catholicism, he was bestowed the Cardinalate, in 1439. He died in 1472, after a long period of friendship with Flavio Biondo, Francesco Filelfo, Bartolomeo Sacchi (Platina) who wrote his eulogy, and Giovan Antonio Campano of Novara. The extensive work against Trapezuntios, In calumniatorem Platonis, composed originally in Greek in three volumes, after several elaborations was published in 1469, in four volumes, in elegant Latin, with the help of Theodore al-Ghazzali (Gaza). The polemic restarted at first between Trapezuntios and Niccolò Perotti, who had offensively written Refutatio deliramentorum Georgii Trapezunzii Cretensis (1471), and thereafter between al-Ghazzali, Michele Apostoli, and Andronico Callisto. Then Bessarion published a fifth book of the major work, De natura et arte, in which he criticized minutely the version of The Laws of the adver-
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sary. The polemic continued between Bessarion, Argyropoulos, al-Ghazzali, and George of Trebizond. The In calumniatorem Platonis is something more than just an occasional dispute; it is a rich exposition of Plato’s thought, of which it are demonstrated the intimate congeniality with Christianity and the profound agreement with Aristotle. This work truly influenced the thought of the philosophical culture of the Renaissance in the Western World. Bessarion began the work by mentioning the Platonism of Cicero and Augustine, “the two most splendid stars in the Latin world” (ex Latinis … duo illa clarissima lumina), and by showing that Plato left his contribution in every single field of learning and research. If we consider the question of the rapport with Christianity, two things can be affirmed. It is certainly absurd to sustain the orthodoxy of the classic thinkers saying that Plato was a Christian, as his antagonists, for instance, affirmed of Aristotle. It is easy to show that Plato is more consonant with Christian thought, as the Fathers of the Church have already stated. By saying this, Bessarion does not intend to diminish the value of Aristotle who is the supreme benefactor of humankind especially for his Metaphysics: “We esteem both as the wisest human beings and to both we should render graces for the benefits that they bestowed on humankind” (Utrunque enim sapientissimum fuisse arbitramur et gratias utrique pro beneficiis, quae in genus humanum contulerunt, agendas existimamus, in In calumniatorem, bk. 2, ch. 3). At the same time, we should not forget to mention the distance that some Platonic doctrines have from Christian doctrines, as the pre-existence of souls, the plurality of gods, the souls of heavens and stars, and others that the church has condemned (Neque enim illam animarum praeexistentiam probo nec numerum deorum, non caeli ac siderum animas, non multa alia quibus gentiles ab ecclesia damnantur). The Platonic theory of a God that is uniquely ineffable in its unity, luminous darkness, super-essential, as Dionysius Areopagite celebrated it, is already formulated, according to Bessarion, in Parmenides, and is integrated in Phaedrus, Sophist, Timaeus, Republics, Laws, and letters. On the contrary, it is absurd to speak of any adequate conception of the trinity among pagan philosophers. Aristotle is certainly far removed from that conception, while in the sixth book of Plato’s Republics it is not difficult to find some mentions of the second person of the trinity: No one should think of praising Plato or Aristotle for having written or cultivated the doctrine of divine trinity.… There is a kind of similarity of our religion in Plato, as if illustrated by natural light.… Not the words of Christ are accommodated to those of Plato, but those of Plato are accommodated to the words of Christ (Nemo … sive Platonem sive Aristotelem ideo laudandum censeat, quod trinitatem divinam aut coluerint aut scripserint.… Speciem quondam nostrae religionis in Platone fuisse non diffitemur luce naturae illustratam.… Non enim
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Christi dicta ad Platonis sententiam accomodanda sunt, sed verba Platonis ad sententiam Christi, in In calumniatorem, bk. 2, ch. 5). Bessarion insists that this confirms that in Plato “there is a certain similitude and conformity with the Christian religion” (similitudinem quondam et conformitatem cum Christiana religione). If we consider the theme of the production of the world, we find that Bessarion is of the opinion that in Plato there is the concept of “creation from nothing” of both matter and form: “Plato stated that all forms have been created by God, the primary, the exemplary, and the secondary forms, which are suitable to the practical exigencies, no matter whether you call them separable or inseparable” (Plato a Deo formas censuit esse productas, tum primas et exemplares, tum secundas, rebus gerendi accommodatas sive eas separabiles sive inseparabiles dicere velis). We will not follow Bessarion in the minute particulars, as he speaks of the soul, man, freedom, and as he amply analyzes the thought of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity. They are now judged in relation to the Latins, in the wealth of their developments, in all their connections with ancient thought and Christianity. In this sense, the learned Nicean Cardinal was offering a precious subsidy to the rising Platonism; he was opening a path to the conciliation between Plato and Aristotle in a Plotinian mode, and to a new apologetics solidly based on Platonism. At this time, Argyropoulos was also operating in a manner not too different from that of Bessarion. Argyropoulos was auspicating an atmosphere of philosophical peace, similar to the implicit one proposed by Bessarion, of whom he was approving the complete orientation, though he came to fight him on more subtle questions of interpretation. Argyropoulos, in the comments to Nicomachean Ethics, explained and defended “Plato’s opinions, his hidden and arcane discipline.” For this, he was criticized by Niccolò Tignosi of Foligno in De ideis, but praised and supported by Donato Acciaiuoli, who wrote his own comments on the Aristotelian morality following to the letter the lessons of the Byzantine scholar: “We have followed the text of his [Argyropoulos’s] translation and commentary, but we did not employ his concise learned style. Instead, we have used a more relaxed and extended mode so to make the explanations clearer and more accessible to everyone.”
Twelve THE SCHOOL OF MARSILIO FICINO 1. Pandolfo Collenuccio. The Life of Ficino. Niccolò Tignosi. St. Antonino. Epicureanism Pandolfo Collenuccio, who received a capital sentence in 1504, was the author of moral essays and dialogues of Lucian flavor, with which he celebrated earthly action and labor, as source of life, virtue, and truth, in his writing of Filotimo and Agenoria. To Florence, where he lived and was in intimate rapports with Angelo Politian and Giovanni Pico, Collenuccio dedicated his hymn in hexameters: Some peoples are inquiring the causes of things, the hidden places of the world. They are daring the ways of the heavens to find what is prohibited to human eyes. The names of Plato and of his disciple, the one with an acute mind, are most often heard in that lofty discourse (Sunt et qui causas rerum mundique recessus Explorent caelique vias atque abdita tentent Inconcessa oculis hominum, queis personat alto Plurimus ore Plato et acutus mentis alumnus.) This person (the acutus mentis alumnus), who, greatly contributing to the studies of Platonic philosophy, impressed a profound mark on all European thought by returning to the original writings of Plato and Plotinus, was Marsilio Ficino. Marsilio was born in Figline Valdarno on 19 October 1433; his parents were Diotifeci, a medical doctor, and Alessandra di Nannocchio di Ludovico. He studied in Florence and Pisa, and his teachers in Florence were Luca of Antonio de Bernardi of San Gimignano and Comando of Simone Comandi of Pieve Santo Stefano. Once become the favorite of the Medici, Ficino recommended both teachers to his protectors. Ficino probably learned the first rudiments of Greek language from Francesco of Castiglione. The notice given by Giovanni di Bardo Corsi in the well-known Vita Ficini that Ficino was a student of Platina does not appear to have any foundation. In this
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regard, it is useful to mention that Corsi, wrongly believed a student of Ficino, was instead a student of Diacceto and a frequenter of the Orti Oricellari. Corsi never directly knew Ficino and only in 1506 composed Vita Ficini to please Diacceto, not without many inexactitudes perhaps due to the political intents of the author. Several mistakes, like the one of having denied the authenticity of the Ficinian epistolary, throw a doubt over the rest of the information provided by Corsi. Ficino’s first philosophy teacher was Niccolò Tignosi of Foligno, a doctor and a Peripatetic philosopher, who in the commentary on De anima revealed a Thomistic propensity. In the opuscule De ideis Tignosi discussed Platonic and quasi-Platonic interpretations that Argyropoulos had introduced in the courses given in Florence. An indication of Ficino’s first studies is found in a complex of writings that are merely outlines and notes instead of completed works. These notes are dedicated to Michele Mercati of San Miniato, a friend of infancy of Ficino, to whom Ficino also dedicated “the dialogue between God and the soul,” in which he refers to previous philosophical conversations on things, moral and natural (saepe de moralibus naturalibusque una philosophati sumus). The title of this complex of writings in the codex that preserves them at the Moreniana Library in Florence is Summa philosophiae. It deals with questions of logic, physics, “God, nature, and art,” and concludes “with some questions about the nature of light and many other things” (quaestiones de luce et aliae multae). Paul Oskar Kristeller has identified and restored them. “There is a great doubt whether light is a body or not” (magna est dubitatio utrum lux sit corpus necne). This material reminds us of how M. Piero Caponsacchi, in reference to the teaching of Tignosi to Ficino, would inform us that Ficino “at the age of twenty-one knew so much to be able to write to Antonio Serafico about some doubts concerning vision and the rays of the sun” (di vent’un anno seppene tanto, che poté scrivere … certi dubbi intorno alla visione e ai raggi del sole). The most frequent citations in these writings are to Aristotle, Averroès, and the Aristotelian commentators. Of Plato, the citations are to the Timaeus, with some references to the definition of the soul in Phaedrus and Phaedo: a baggage of Scholastic culture of the Peripatetic kind. In the epistle to Mercati, the character merely introductive of these studies, which are suitable to young people as Plato recommended, is underlined: I decided to send you this very brief compendium of dialectics and physics so that you would be introduced to these studies in which, according to the precepts of Plato, the people of our time should deeply involved themselves, whatever our future would be (Brevissimo stylo dialecticae simul et physicae compendiosum hunc tibi tractatum mittere decrevi ut illorum iam studiorum aliquantulum particeps efficiaris, quibus aetatem nostram, quantumcumque futura sit, Platonis nostri praecepta iubent penitus exercendam).
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In 1457, Ficino was deeply involved in the question of voluptas and in his studies of and comments on Lucretius. In a letter of 1492 to Martino Uranio, Ficino confessed of having destroyed some commentariola in Lucretium (brief comments on Lucretius) that he may have written in 1457. Of this same year is De voluptate ad Antonium Canisium (On pleasure, for Antonio Canisio). Always between 1457 and 1458 two opuscules were composed, De virtutibus moralibus (on moral virtues) and De quattuor sectis philosophorum (on the four sects of philosophers), in which of some interest is what is said about Epicurus, his conception of God, and the pretended corporeity attributed to God: “Even if it would be assumed that God is corporeal, nevertheless this divine corporeity is so lofty in its purity and majesty that, when compared to all other things corporeal, it would seem incorporeal” (Etsi corpus sit Deus, ceteris tamen corporibus tantum potestate prestat et puritate, ut ad cetera comparatus incorporeum videatur). He who from the titles of some works or from some brief references of Ficino himself in later years were to infer that Ficino in his younger age accepted an Epicureanism excessively impious and “pagan,” would fall into error. In some letters written in 1457 to Michele Mercati and Antonio Serafico concerning morality, rich with citations from Lucretius, only one light indication to the Epicurean desire for interior peace has been found. The Epicurean doctrine of voluptas in the opuscule completed during that same year and sent to Antonio Canigiani shows the same meaning of a mere desire for tranquility. Concluding this work, which is historical and expositive instead of critical and constructive, Ficino cites Lucretius (De rerum natura, bk. 2, vv. 14–19): O miserable minds of men, O blind hearts! In what darkness and in how many dangers this age lives! Don’t you see? Our nature nothing else demands than our body be free from pain, our mind enjoys tranquility, without anxiety and fear. (O miseras hominum mentes, o pectora caeca. qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis degitur hoc aevi quodcumque est! nonne videtis nihil aliud sibi naturam latrare nisi utque corpore seiunctus dolor absit, mente fruatur iocundo sensu, cura semota metuque). In a comment, Ficino mentioned the epistle of Epicurus to Metrodorus and the words the dying Epicurus addressed to Hermarcus about the detachment from the body in the peace of the soul. The work began with the Platonic distinction of gaudium (or laetitia) that is proper to the soul and opposed to the corporeal voluptas. Ficino wants to bring the two notions together by way of an examination of the Aristotelian and Stoic thought. His preoccupation is to find some coincidences and concordances instead of dissensions and contrasts
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between the two conceptions. The conclusion, which repeats the motive expressed in the dedicatory prologue, is modestly eclectic: choose yourself the opinion that appears more valid to you, “as for me, having done this exercise of memory, I am just happy to have referred the opinions of almost all philosophers” (Satius igitur esse censui ceterorum Philosophorum de voluptate sententias brevi sermone concurrere, quam meam exprimere). Ficino affirms that he does not want to follow any system, but with Plato’s help, he wishes during his youth to discuss the opinions of others, so that in the future he would not regret hasty statements. What truly strikes in these early opuscules is the constant appeal to the authority of Plato, Plato noster, already connected with the authority of the Christian tradition and St. Augustine. A year before, in 1456, relying on Latin sources, Ficino composed for the counsel of Cristoforo Landino a volume of Institutionum ad Platonicam disciplinam that has been lost. The book was dedicated to Landino, but then was put aside for the exhortation of Cosimo and Landino in order to have time “to learn first the Greek letters and absorb the Platonic doctrines from the original sources” (quoad Graecis litteris erudirer, Platonicaque tandem ex suis fontibus haurirem). As Kristeller has rightly observed, the story, often repeated on the authority of Corsi and Zanobi Acciaiuoli, of an intervention of St. Antonino in 1456 is unreliable. It was assumed that Antonino had convinced the father of Ficino to remove Marsilio from the studies of Greek and philosophy in favor of those of medicine in Bologna, in 1458–1459. The result of these new studies would likely have been the Oratio de laudibus medicinae to be identified with the lost work Physiognomia, mentioned in a letter of 1458. According to this view, when St. Antonino died, in 1459, Ficino returned to Florence to be introduced to Cosimo de’ Medici who encouraged him to become a Platonist, no longer a doctor of bodies as his father had wished, but a surgeon of souls. The testimony of Friar Zanobi Acciaiuoli, which can be read in the introduction to his version of Theodoretus, states that on the counsel of St. Antonino, Ficino was induced to abandon the Platonic heresies, and tempered his Platonism with the Thomistic Summa contra gentiles. Even if some particulars in the narration of Acciaiuoli may be fictitious, nothing forbids us from assuming that the Thomist St. Antonino was the one to persuade Ficino to study Thomas, whose doctrines we find so many times mentioned in the Theologia platonica. It is impossible to allow more than this, because Ficino already had noticeable rapports with Cosimo in 1456. We know from reliable documents that Ficino was constantly present in the area of Florence and Figline in 1457, 1458, and 1459. On the other hand, we have no documentation on the presence of Ficino in Bologna. Finally, the identification proposed by Arnaldo Della Torre that Kristeller challenged between Physiognomia and the epistle De laudibus medicinae, is both impossible and absurd. In the epistle to the unknown reader of January 1458 (1459), the reference is made to a liber de physiognomia in relation to temperaments and their somatic concomitants, to aspect as revealer of the tendencies of human character, to external
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signs from which to recognize the choleric, the sanguine, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic types. In the oration here discussed, contained in the fourth book of letters, composed at a young age, we find no presence of the matters described above. Even in the letter to Tommaso Valori, we find only a generic praise of medicine and a citation from the Timaeus that is so long to occupy one fourth of the oration itself. In 1462, both Cosimo the Elder and Amerigo Benci gave Ficino the gift of a Platonic codex. In the small villa of Careggi, a gift of Cosimo as well, the philosopher began the translation of those Platonic writings that constituted one of the most notorious moments of his activity. He had already translated in a literal manner for his own use the hymns of Orpheus, Homer, Proclus, and the Theogony of Hesiod. In April 1463, he completed his first fortunate translation, the hermetic books, which Leonardo of Pistoia had recently brought back from Macedonia. This work, which enjoyed an extraordinary diffusion and acquired an enormous influence, truly did not introduce in the western world ideas previously unknown. As Ficino himself mentioned it, the Asclepius, in a version erroneously attributed to Apuleius, was well known to the Latins and together with the extensive hermetic passages found in Lactantius had inspired the whole Platonic medieval tradition. In the late Middle Ages, Thomas Bradwardine, chaplain and confessor to Edward III, had probably known other Greek works and numerous writings from different origins and diverse traditions, full of hermetic themes. The one individual who truly brought to the attention of the European thought these suggestive documents of the Stoic-Platonic religiosity, mixed with some complex oriental influences, was Ficino. Ficino with admired astonishment was rediscovering in that ancient, to his eyes most ancient wisdom, the same accents of the Christian gnosis, the concept of a pia philosophia proper to the whole humankind, which a docta religio came to uncover within the meditation of the sages of all time. What Ficino found in Hermes Trismegistus was the idea of an eternal revelation, common to all human beings and to all nations, which culminated in an exemplary way in Christianity. In his letter of dedication to Cosimo, after having referred to the most ancient origins of Trismegistus and the Egyptian custom of choosing the priests from among the philosophers, Ficino continues by outlining the history of that priestly wisdom that Hermes supposedly consigned to his writings: First among philosophers, this one [Hermes Trismegistus] turned from physics and mathematics to the contemplation of divine things. He was the first to discuss in a wisely manner the greatness of God, the hierarchy of the spirits, and the transmigration of souls. He can be rightly called “the first theologian.” Orpheus followed him and obtained the second place of importance for his knowledge of ancient theology. Orpheus taught his knowledge of the numinous to Aglaophemus, whom Pythagoras succeeded. From Pythagoras Philolaus learned all he knew and he passed it on to our divine Plato, of which he was the teacher.
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In this way, the unique and concordant tradition of ancient theology (una priscae theologiae undique sibi consona secta) that was born with Hermes is concluded with Plato. In Pimandro, the fulcrum of Hermes’s teaching was the conversion of the soul from the mutable deceptions of the senses, from the fogs of imagination, towards the depths of the mind, till the divine mind would infuse in the human mind the light of divine truth. The mind would then be able “to contemplate the order of all things, both those existing in God and those emanating from God” (unde ordinem rerum omnium, et in Deo existentium et ex Deo manantium, contemplatur). Knowledge is nothing but a return back to oneself from the world around us, in order to go beyond ourselves. The two levels of senses and fantasy open the soul to the possibility of escaping within the mind, which by its own power cannot ascend to the truth without a light descending from above, a light that would conquer the human capacity for truth. After this ascension, the human being who has absorbed this light would return among human beings to communicate to them the truth miraculously received. “And at last, what the Supreme Numen revealed is made manifest to the rest of humanity” (demum quae divino sunt numine revelata, ceteris hominibus explicat). It was not by chance that Ficino finished the version of Hermes before applying himself to the translation of Plato. He will always come to the Platonic philosophy as to a complete and perfect revelation, as to a theology in which in a veiled way, all the Christian truths are already delineated. True philosophy, the one concerned with divine things, born from a revelation, from a gratuitous illumination, coincides with religion, or is essentially religious: “The eternal wisdom of God ordered that the divine mysteries, at least at the beginnings of Religion, be solely treated by those who are true lovers of true wisdom. For this reason, among the Ancients it happened that the same individuals researched the causes of things and administered the sacrificial rites of the One who is the supreme cause of all causes.” The Pimandro was printed in 1471, albeit already in 1463 a friend of Ficino, Tommaso Benci, had translated the Ficinian version into Italian. In that same year, between April and May, Marsilio began the translation of the Platonic dialogues, which he completed in 1468. He did not limit himself to translating the dialogues; with the translation, he also gradually composed some argumenta, planning some extensive comments for a later time. These comments constitute an important source for the comprehension of Ficinian thought. Among these commentaries, the first was on the Symposium, many times touched and retouched in the Latin version between 1469 and 1474, and translated before 1474 into Italian by the author himself, “so that this salvific manna … is common and available to many more peoples.” The paraphrasing of the Philebus and Phaedrus followed soon after, in 1474; the commentary on Timaeus, to which Ficino applied himself since his adolescent years, came in 1484; then, in 1494, appeared the commentary on Parmenides, in which
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polemic attacks against Pico are found. One could say that perhaps Ficino intended to do for Plato what Averroès did for Aristotle. Among the translations of Ficino we should mention that before 1464 he had translated Alcinous (Odyssey, bks. 6–9), Pseusippus, the symbols and verses attributed to Pythagoras (Orphica), the Axiochus that he attributed to Xenocrates. In 1474, the versions of the de secta pythagorica by Jamblichus, of the commentary on Phaedrus by Hermias, and of Theon of Smyrna were done. In 1484, on the suggestion of Pico, Ficino began the translation of Plotinus, made with comments by 1491, after long interruptions during which, between 1488 and 1489, he translated the de mysteriis attributed to Jamblichus, Proclus, Porphyry, Priscianus, Theophrastus, Sinesius, and Psellus. Between 1490 and 1491 the versions and the commentaries on the Mistical Theology and the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius were completed and, between 1492 and 1493, the fragments of Athenagoras. It is an impressive corpus platonicum, in relation to which Ficino stands not as an accurate philologist or objective historian, but as a believer in front of a revelation. These two concepts of an uninterrupted theological tradition from Hermes to Plato and of a philosophy understood as an interior light, gift of God, are at the center of the Ficinian spirit in its veneration for the Platonists. “Philosophy is the gift of God; to philosophize is to achieve similarity with God and is the loftiest imitation of God.” 2. Plato Noster We have seen the chain that joins Hermes to Plato and the Platonists. Ficino knew very well that the pia philosophia did not end with the Neo-Platonists. In a known letter of 1489 to Martino Uranio, Ficino indicated the successive stages of this “revelation”: Dionysius Areopagite, Augustine, Boethius, Apuleius, Calcidius, Macrobius, Avicebron, al-Farabi, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, Bessarion, and Cusanus. In that same letter, Ficino gave the reasons for the superiority of Platonism: The divine Jamblichus describes two ways of happiness according to the mind of the Egyptians: one way is philosophical and the other priestly. The philosophical way to happiness is wider and Peripatetics and philosophers have chosen it; the priestly way to happiness, on the contrary, is shorter and on it, the religious people walk. Our Plato has admirably fused together these two ways into one that is in every sense equally religious and philosophical, an acute disputant, a pious priest, and an eloquent orator. Consequently, if you … were to follow on the footsteps of the divine Plato, with his assistance you would find and acquire God and happiness with Him. The reason for this is that our Plato for Pythagoric and Socratic motives follows the Mosaic Law and anticipates the Christian one.
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In this passage, the priestly character of the Platonic philosophy, its distinction from the Aristotelian inquiry, its coincidence with Hebraism, and its prophetic character in regard to Christ are delineated. Ficino always insisted on the particular character of Platonic wisdom, a motion of love that ascends from the earthly existence to the immutably eternal so to rejoice for the possession of the good and live thereafter among human beings according to the law of the truth contemplated in God: Dialectics wants logic to be the one to teach those first and most minute rules of argumentation, but also that profound method of a free and swift mind in being able to comprehend the true and pure substance of each thing, primarily in its natural, and then its supernatural causes (Ma la dialettica, non solo vuole che sia quella logica la quale quelle prime e minutissime regole di argumentare ne insegna, ma ancora uno profondo artificio d’una mente libera e spedita al poter comprendere la vera e pura sostanza di ciascuna cosa, prima con naturali, poi con sopranaturali cagioni). No need of an analysis of experience or of a chain of syllogisms exists but of “uno profondo artificio.” This “profound method” consists in an interior debate, of which Plato speaks in the seventh letter, at the end of which suddenly the truth manifests itself to the mind as an unexpected light, as a gift of God (dono di Dio). This is the reason why Plato stated that philosophy is a gift of God: Philosophy is the ascension of the spirit from the lowest to the loftiest things, from darkness to light. Its origin is the instinct of the divine mind; its instruments are the faculties and the disciplines we have narrated; its goal is the possession of the supreme goodness. The fruit of philosophy, finally, is the just and honest governance of humankind (La filosofia adunque è una salita dell’animo dale cose basse a le alte, dale tenebre alla luce. Il principio suo è l’istinto della divina mente. Il suo mezzo sono le facultà e le discipline che abbiamo narrate. Il fine una possessione del sommo bene. Il frutto finalmente un giusto e buon governo degli uomini). A person arrives to the truth by way of an interior catharsis instead of through a theoretical process. Plato is a teacher in the sense that he is a kind of prophet who proclaims an irresistible message: We honor and venerate the life of Plato and his wisdom, approved by the judgment of the sages, … and voluntarily proclaim that we as part of the Platonic family have never known anything else than what is festive, joyful, celestial, and heavenly divine (E noi la vita di Platone e la sua sapienza, dal giudizio dei sapienti approvata, onoriamo e ven-
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eriamo, e … liberamente gridiamo: noi che della platonica famiglia siamo, niente mai abbiamo conosciuto che festivo, lieto, celeste, e superno non sia stato). These words conclude the opuscule on the life of Plato. Plato was a pagan prophet; but, according to the words of Numenius, he appeared to Ficino always as an Attic Moses. Even more than Mosaic, Plato appeared truly Christian to Ficino who found in Platonic works what is written in the Gospel of St. John: These are the things, which the Platonists say. You, … after having joined the Academy and learned these things and many others even more admirable than these from them … perhaps, with that same energy than Peter, will exclaim: it is a good thing for us to inhabit this place; let us build not only three tabernacles, but three thousand! (Queste cose adunque dicono gli platonici. E voi … poscia che, ne l’Accademia entrato, queste cose là dentro dai quei grandi uomini avrete intese, e molte alter maggiori … forse con quella voce che già mandò fuori Pietro griderete: gli è cosa buona lo star qui; facciamoci non tre, ma tremila tabernacoli!). Philosophy, Ficino insists, in reference to Socrates, is the interior calling of God; philosophy is an intimate transformation and a new birth, given, not acquired. When this gift is given to someone, this person becomes one who “would despise all mortal things, and after being enlightened in the intimate fineness and acuteness of his mind by divine rays, would wait and hope with strong conviction for the future beatitude.” The separation between Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, between physical inquiry and metaphysical anxiety begins here. From here, the religious interpretation of Platonism originates. Plato symbolizes a philosophizing totally different from that of Aristotle. His is the idea that the true is a light that comes from above, an opening toward God, a gift to us of God himself. Things are not the reality; truth is not in the appearances. To know does not mean to search in the world by way of analysis the truth of the world. To know is to retreat oneself from the falseness of the world in order to open up to the light of being. This light knows no setting and gives of itself only to those who work hard to obtain it, those who remove themselves from the slavery of the senses, those who converge unto themselves and as things become silent listen to the voice of God. This is the same voice, which spoke to Moses, Hermes, Pythagoras, and Plato. This voice is the Word. For this reason, truth is not a human conquest; it is an eternal revelation, variant in its language, Arabic, Persian, Syrian, but identical in itself. In his amazement, Ficino admired the harmony of the philosophy of Platonic tradition, and attempted at the translation of its monuments to show the concordance of truth
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under the different veil of languages. It is a unique truth, not so much because it is the identical one, which is transmitted to everybody, but because in all the various epochs some individuals have known the way to search for it: “To the one alone who knocks at the door of the Lord, it will be opened.” From this, we have the conventicles, and the quasi confraternities: here the character of initiation of this movement manifests itself. The truth, which is the light manifested in the interior of the tabernacle, is not explainable, it cannot be dialecticized. What reveals itself in the theologians of every time is the same experience; everywhere is possible to find an identical language. Knowledge, if we are allowed to use the Ficinian images, is like the kiss that crowns love. It is the kiss, as Pico will later say, in which life, having achieved its peak, reaches the unity of being that is the death of the existent. In the proem to the translation of Mistica teologia, Ficino likes to joke about the furors of Dionysius, when the minds, “part by native love, part instigated by God, having overcome the limits of natural intelligence, are miraculously transformed in the God, which is the object of their love.” According to Ficino, Platonism, even when reason is shrunk to its original fullness, is Word, Logos, and Christ. Plato has seen the Truth, and Christ is the Truth. Plato and the Platonic tradition, even when they are logically exposing the truth, they speak of God, not merely of concepts; the form of the treatise is logical, but the meaning is theological. The following passage is found in the introduction to the commentary on Parmenides: It was the custom of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato to occult in every case the divine mysteries under images and symbols; to dissimulate modestly their wisdom on the contrary than the sophists’ continuous bragging; to say serious things by way of a joke, and to play as if it were a demanding job. In Parmenides, under the appearance of a dialectical game, almost logical … [Plato] in many passages signified many theological theorems concerning the divinity. It became the consuetude of Pythagoreans and Plato to discuss matters opportunely by using at times natural reason and at other times reason and grace. In Phaedrus, Plato mixes successfully oratory and theology; in Timaeus, he inserts mathematics into physics. It was necessary to cite this passage to show how little Ficino was a “philologist,” how little he searched for the true Plato, how much Plato represented for him, in an exemplary form, only the itinerary of the soul to God. In the introduction to the epistles of the teacher, Ficino does not hesitate to say that the dialogues are the introduction to the mystery, “some of them serve only to a purification; some others truly … aim to a conversion” (alii quidem in purgando solum, alii vero … in convertendo). When after that, the soul would finally return from the inferior things to itself and from itself would convert to superior things, and then the words would be lacking (se ab inferioribus rece-
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perit ad seipsam, et a seipsa ad superiora converterit). The communication would happen only “from one mind to another mind” (ex mente in mentem) in the same way that the mystical truth confided by God to Moses was not consigned over any writing, “but committed to the spirit” (sed animis commendatum). Ficino repeatedly insists that God cannot be reached with the intellect; philosophy clears the soul, removes it from the world, and “disposes it to wait for the Groom” (la dispone ad attendere lo sposo). God alone, if he will come, will bring light to the soul: Those who wish to arrive to the supreme goodness have no need of science and exercise of mind, but of constancy, quietness, and tranquility. It is faith that lifts us to the supreme good and to all divine things, and for an inexpressible reason joins us to them. We should not search and desire the highest good by means of science or any other operation of the mind, but by offering and confiding us to the divine light and, after having silenced the demands of our senses, rest in the unknown and hidden unity of beings. This kind of faith is more ancient than any doctrine. This faith that precedes any science; this attitude of the soul in the silence of things; this prayer of the exiles, who pant for the fatherland; this invocation to the father of the sons who have been scattered; this continuous school of death in order to obtain life; this refusal of the light of the world that is darkness, in order to see the darkness which is light: all this, in the words of Ficino and for Ficino, is the philosophizing that is incarnate in Plato and in the Platonic tradition. It is love, awareness of deficiency, and search for the hidden treasure. It is a priesthood, which humbly serves to a God that neither possesses the human limitations nor can possess them. It is philosophy, because philosophy is anxiety; it is religion, because religion is certainty of the fatherland in the vicissitudes of the exile. There is no contrast between Plato and Christ; one is the desire for the truth, the other is the Truth; one is the love for God, the other is God, the God, which the pagan prophet announces in the Republic; the God, which humanity is still looking for, present but out of reach, revealed but still unknown. This Ficinian language, made up with images and metaphors; this complacency with a priestly and prophetic discourse, with the mark of a religious initiation, is characteristic of all the manner of Ficino’s philosophizing; it shows what Ficino meant by “to philosophize.” When, after having translated Hermes and Plato, Ficino attended to Plotinus, once more he insisted on his theses with a polemic vivacity against the Aristotelians: For a decree of divine providence, a religious philosophy (pia philosophia) was admirably born agreeing with Zoroaster among the Persians and with Hermes among the Egyptians. Orpheus and Aglaophemus among the Thracians increased this philosophy, and soon it grew even
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY more with Pythagoras among the Greeks and the Italics. At last, it reached maturity with Plato, in Athens. In order not to divulge them among the vulgar folks, the custom of the ancient theologians was to hide the divine mysteries in mathematical formulae and poetical metaphors. Plotinus succeeded to free theology from those veils and he alone, as Porphyry and Proclus attest, penetrated with the help of divine inspiration the arcane of the ancients.… We have applied ourselves to the translation and clarification of this theology in Plato and Plotinus. By the light of this theology we hope that the poets would desist from impiously considering the sacred mysteries on the level of their fables, and the majority of the Peripatetics, that is almost all the philosophers, would stop from considering the common religion as a fable for grannies. The Aristotelians, divided into the two sects of Alexandrines and Averroists, have in fact invaded the whole world: one sustains that our intellect is mortal, the other that it is one and unique in all human beings. These two sects equally destroyed all religions by denying divine providence within the world of humanity. Their members also betrayed Aristotle, whose mind very few today understand— at the exception of our Platonic colleague, the sublime Pico—with the piety showed in the days past by Theophrastus, Themistius, Porphyry, Simplicius, Avicenna, and in more recent time Pletho. If then someone were to assume that an impiety so much diffused and supported by so many powerful minds could be overcome with a simple exposition of faith, this person would be far from the truth.… Something else is needed: a direct and miraculous divine intervention or, at least among the philosophers, a philosophical religion that is acceptable and convincing. In our times, divine providence prefers to support religion with the rational authority of philosophy (ratione philosophica confirmare) and, at the established time, as it did once before, will confirm religion everywhere with miracles. We may say that we have interpreted the divine Plato and the wonderful Plotinus by inspiration of divine providence.
This text is manifestly important for an illustration of the Ficinian attitudes in regard to the faith of simple people and the sermons of the friars—was he thinking, among others, also of Savonarola?—and in regard to the Aristotelians. The construction of a rebellious philosophy is far from Ficino’s interest; he intends, by still remaining tied to the Christian tradition, to found on Platonism a new apologetics (philosophica quaedam religio). Ficino sees the culminating of the cognitive process in the opening of oneself to the truth, in listening to the word of God. These are manifestations perfectly in consonance with the last manifestations of the medieval Platonism as it expressed itself, for example, in Bonaventure’s Franciscanism. In the passage cited, the demand is heard, energetically represented by Pico, for the need of deepening the rapports between Aristotle and Plato. A
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clearer document of this exigency is the letter of 1488 to Filippo Valori, to whom Ficino dedicated the commented version of Priscian’s works. Addressing himself to Platonists and Peripatetics, Marsilio confesses: As it appeared to me that the answers each philosopher was giving were contrary to those of another, I began to lose hope.… But not too much time afterward, Themistius consolidated my hope affirming that many philosophers have discordant opinions among themselves, albeit in words alone, because the same opinion about the soul is held by Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, though it is expressed in different words. He added that Pico had finally demonstrated their universal agreement. Sending the same work of Priscian to Matthias Corvinus (King of Hungary), Ficino observed: You will find out that what Themistius states in regard to the mind is the same opinion of Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. They mean that the mind is common to all men and that the divine mind is the one alone, which illustrates all human minds, and the Peripatetics call it “agent intellect.” The proper minds of men are as many as the souls, and these souls are equally immortal. They named these souls “possible intellects,” that is, they are capable of being formed by the divine mind. Through the knowledge of these things, you will understand that Alexander and Averroès are therefore refuted, and you will fully acknowledge the divinity of our soul. 3. Translations. Platonic Philosophy. Aristotle. Plotinus The Platonic apologetics of Ficino found its expression in many opuscules, in the letters, in the eighteen books of Theologia platonica de immortalitate animorum dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and in De christiana religione. The first work, the Theologia platonica, written between 1469 and 1474, was at a time revised by the author, for reasons of a religious conversion, which, according to some scholars on the footprints of Giovanni Corsi, the author experienced. These scholars assumed that Ficino, pagan at the beginning, would have rewritten in a second time his work, after having become Christian. We saw that from his earliest works Ficino considered himself perfectly orthodox. Paul Oskar Kristeller, with his usual precision, has demonstrated that Ficino has made no important revisions in the Theologia platonica, his major opus. Kristeller also identified the elaborations made by Ficino between 1475 and 1482, the year of publication of the work. Between 1475 and 1477, Ficino applied himself to the writing of the Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum, which in some parts coincide with loci of the Theologia platonica. In 1474, at the beginning of his priestly training (cum primum sacer-
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dotii sacris initiatus sum, on the 18 December 1473), he composed and published in Italian La Religione Cristiana, which later he translated into Latin (De christiana religione). During the time of the pest of 1478–1479, Ficino published the Consiglio contro la pestilenza, printed in 1481. In 1489, paid by Filippo Valori, the three books on De vita were published. The first book was written in 1480 as a commentary on the third book of Plato’s Laws; the third, as a comment on book four (3, 11) of Plotinus’s Enneads; the second, in 1489, was inspired by a work of Arnaldo of Villanova. The diffusion of this book generated in 1490 charges of magic against Ficino, who was obliged to formulate an Apology and forced him to find some protectors, whom he found in Ermolao Barbaro, who assured him of the benevolence of the pope. Ficino’s letters were collected in twelve books and published in 1495. It is a vast collection of small philosophical treatises, often of fundamental value in order to understand the Ficinian construction. Strangely enough, Corsi has doubted the authenticity of these letters with a hypothesis that will be absurd to anyone looking at the texts. The first book of letters, containing script before 1476, includes, among others, six treatises: Dialogus inter Deum et animam theologicus (A theological dialogue between God and the soul); De furore divino (On the divine furor); De lege et iustitia (On law and justice); De felicitate (On happiness); Oratio ad Deum theologica (A theological oration to God); Laus philosophiae (In praise of philosophy). The second book contains only treatises, among which are the De raptu Pauli (On the rapture of Paul), De lumine (On illumination), and Quinque claves Platonicae sapientiae (The five keys of the Platonic wisdom). The third book contains letters of 1476 and 1477. The fourth book shows the letters of 1477 and, among the opuscules, the De vita Platonis (The life of Plato), De laudibus philosophiae (The praises of philosophy), and De laudibus medicinae (The praises of medicine). The fifth book gathers only the letters between 1477 and 1488. The sixth book shows letters between 1477 and 1481, and the Oratio Christianae gregis (The sermon of the Christian herd), Orphica comparatio Solis ad Deum (The Orphic comparison of the Sun to God, 1479). The seventh book covers the letters of the years 1481 through 1484. The eighth book collects the letters between 1484 and 1488, and Concordia Mosis et Platonis (The agreement between Moses and Plato), Confirmatio christianorum per Socratica (The confirmation of the Christian by way of Socratic themes), Oratio de Charitate (A sermon on love). The ninth book placed together the letters of 1488 and 1489. The tenth book contains letters between 1489 and 1491, and the Apologi de voluptate quattuor as a commentary to Philebus (Four arguments in defense of pleasure). The eleventh gives the letters from 1491 to 1492; the twelfth, those up to 1494. The Commento a San Paolo, which remained incomplete, was produced during the last years of Ficino’s life. On 3 October 1499, at the age of sixtysix, Ficino died in Careggi. He was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, where a
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monument was dedicated to him as to the greatest Florentine philosopher. It is difficult to characterize this man. He was a fervid and sincere believer, who at the age of forty decided to consecrate his activity to the service of the Church by taking the priestly ordination. He loved to gather in the villa of Careggi his friends and the learned from all countries, discussing, in the fervor of Platonic renaissance, of serious and light matters. His letters, his personal relationships with all the literati of Europe, princes and cardinal, kings and popes, universities and assemblies, made him a figure of first greatness whose influence on the development of the European thought is immeasurable. His works were diffused in hundreds of manuscripts, printed and reprinted, bringing everywhere the echo of the philosophical reflection of Italy. In Paris, Robert Gaguin wrote that the writings of Ficino were always received as “buona novella,” as good news. Ficino’s character was not always agreeable. He was vain because of the celebrity acquired and the conspicuous condition of his friends. He carried himself always with a manifest academic expression of superiority. He was fastidious to the minimal particulars; exasperating in adulations; insipid in his jokes; always terribly sophisticated; always without enthusiasm; always equilibrated. He was the scholastic of the Platonism of the fifteenth century, who had systematized the new culture and the new elegance in graceful and perfect formulae, often redundant and rhetorical. As a good writer and a brilliant speaker, he ambiguously went through the conjuration of the Pazzi family, remaining a friend of the Medici and their adversaries, always being ready to bow before the powerful. Around him, his most famous friends died: Ermolao Barbaro, Politian, and Pico; the great Medici as well vanish: Cosimo, Pietro, and Lorenzo. In his beautiful words, we do not sense the vibration of those emotions of which was capable even a rhetor like Barbaro. When Savonarola succeeded in the instauration of the republic, Ficino, the favorite of the Medici, applauded approvingly, ready to throw, after the tragic end, the cruelest insult to the memory of the martyr. Marsilio liked insistently to say that his personality was of a melancholic nature and influenced by Saturn. He certainly was a man with a unique culture, a thinker of no common caliber, an eloquent defenser of his religion. In great measure, Marsilio possessed the temperament of the literati, the soul of the professor, and the academic standing. He was one of the races of human beings, which illustrated from that time on for centuries an Italy in decadence, whose political crisis was the result of an intimate lack of moral faith. He was the origin of the usage of that Platonizing jargon, rhetorical and unctuous that polluted a large part of the European philosophico-religious production during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He inspired, at one time, the most delirious and foggy speculation, and some “Platonic” darings in Bruno and Vico. In a way, emblematically, Ficino seemed to have embodied many characteristics of the Italian philosophical tradition of the modern age, in all its good and bad aspects.
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 4. Theology. Avicennian and Franciscan Influences
For Ficino the Platonic tradition possessed the character of a pious revelation, a doctrine of which, though in many aspects divergent, some connections could be found in Pletho. The conception of philosophy as a mystery, which is surrounded with the sacred character of a priestly initiation, had certainly an uninterrupted influence on Ficino. Ficino cultivated such a conception in the convergence of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and the Pseudo-Hermes, who fascinated him as much as his contemporaries. A continuous exchange runs between philosophy and Christianity. The theological wisdom of the first men, gathered by Plato, is placed on the same level of the revelation of Moses and the prophets: a preparation for the advent of Christ, clarified by Christ: “Christ was nothing else but the book of morals, the living book of the divine Philosophy, sent from heaven, and the divine idea itself of all virtues manifested to human eyes” (Quid aliud Christus fuit, nisi liber quidam moralis, immo divinae Philosophiae vivens de caelo missus, et divina ipsa idea virtutum humanis oculis manifesta?). In his bizarre historical reconstructions, Ficino introduced this primitive revelation of the spirit as in an enigma, “before the coming of the Christ who was the light that illumined all things”: The ancient theology of the Gentiles, into which Zoroaster, Mercury, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, and Pythagoras converged, is completely preserved in the writings of our Plato. In his Epistles, Plato announced the mysteries that finally after many centuries were going to be revealed to men. This happened when, at the time of Philo and Numenius, for the first time the meaning of the primitive theologians began to be understood from the pages of the Platonists. This too came about after the writings and the speeches of the Apostles and their disciples. The Platonists in fact took advantage of the divine light of the Christians to understand the divine Plato. After this, Basil the Great and Augustine demonstrated that the Platonists usurped the mysteries of John the Evangelist. I as well discovered with absolute certainty that the more profound mysteries of Numenius, Philo, Plotinus, Jamblichus, and Proclus, were derived from Paul, Jerotheus, and Dionysius Areopagite. From these last ones, Numenius and the others usurped all that of an admirable splendor they wrote concerning the divine mind, the angels, and other theological arguments. As we saw, Plato too is divine and, though by way of enigmas, the divine light shines also in him. According to the ancient doctrine of Justin the Martyr, the logos has spoken to men even before Jesus, and revealed itself to all the ancient thinkers in a form more or less complete. Those who did not understand should fault their own barbarism alone, their own incapacity to listen. Without an act of complete abandon, there can be no understanding. In De christiana religione (ch. 36), Ficino writes:
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Faith, as Aristotle wants it, is the foundation of science, and the Platonists say that by faith alone it is possible to approach God. I believed, said David, and therefore I proclaimed. We too as believers should approach the fountain of truth and goodness, and obtain a wise and happy life (Fides, ut vult Aristoteles, est scientiae fundamentum; fide sola, ut Platonici probant, ad Deum accedimus. Credidi—inquit David—et propterea sum locutus. Credentes igitur, propinquantesque veritatis bonitatisque fonti, sapientem beatamque vitam hauriemus). From this paragraph, we clearly deduce that “philosophizing,” as far as it is a priestly philosophy, operates within an act of faith. St. Bonaventure wrote, “If you ask what Christian philosophy is, I will respond by saying that it is humility” (si quaeras quid est philosophia christiana, respondeo tibi: humilitas). Before the Logos, one must bow down, in order to hear the voice. The Platonic philosophy, more than anything else, is an opening of the soul to the voice of God: “As the Platonists put it, by faith alone we approach God” (Fide sola, ut Platonici probant, ad Deum accedimus). But, again, if the true philosophy is fides quaerens intellectum (faith asking for understanding), and religion is docta religio; if the Platonists understand the divine Plato by way of the light of Christ, then the Christian philosophy is Platonic philosophy. Consequently, only within the frame and the limits of Platonism, the philosophical deepening of faith is possible. This is a conception of philosophy in Platonic terms; it is a deepening of illumination. In Plato’s sense, we can conquer only what has been given to us; to know is to draw from the soul the gift already given to the soul: “The house in heaven opens its doors only to those minds which search with faith, ask with hope, and with charity knock at the door” (La casa del cielo non si apre se non a quelle menti che con fede cercano, con speranza domandano, con carità battono alla porta). In the treatise, included in the third book of the Epistles, on the rapture of Paul to the third heaven, Ficino insists on the priority of faith: not by his own forces was Paul lifted up to heaven! The Platonic theme of the return is linked to that of the lover drawn by the love of the loved one, which is true motor and first agent: You could never have wanted to be enraptured, if He did not want it before you. As the Moon does not resplend until the Sun shines, in that same way you cannot love Love Himself if by this Love that loves you, you would not first be inflamed by His act. You cannot call Him, if he first does not call you. You don’t reach Him, if He first does not take hold of you.… The image in the mirror cannot look at your face, if your face does not first look at the mirror. Even if it seems that the image in the mirror looks at your face, in reality it is the image in the mirror that is looked at by your face.… In that same way, the soul cannot turn to God, if God first does not turn to the soul, nor can the soul judge God, if God first does not judge the soul.
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As the motion toward the object of knowledge is a motion toward the Truth and is born from the Truth, from the illumination of Truth, so love is born from the love of the Goodness we loved. By excess of love, Goodness attracts the lover. In a way not much different, Bruno concluded the Eroici Furori. The Ficinian position, in its development, determines itself in a manner that excludes a clear distinction between science and faith. Ficino’s standing remains within the ambience of the Augustinianism that, in Florence, especially in Santo Spirito, obtained wide resonance, through its series of lectures and discussions. We know through the testimony of Vespasiano da Bisticci that Girolamo of Naples, in Santo Spirito, read the entire De civitate dei. In an explicit passage, Ficino attributes to Augustine (dux et magister noster Aurelius Augustinus) the idea of the identity of philosophy and religion. “God Alone is truth and wisdom. Hence follows that legitimate philosophy is nothing but true religion and that legitimate religion is nothing but true philosophy” (Veritas autem et sapientia ipsa solus est Deus; sequitur ut neque legitima philosophia quicquam aliud quam vera religio neque aliud legitima religio quam vera philosophia). With a specific intention, Marsilio liked to trace back his way to the Augustinian spirituality, while Guido Cavalcanti among his family’s members began a commentary on Augustine’s Confessions, “speaking only with God.” From Augustine, Ficino also draws the proper motive of so much part of medieval thought, of the coincidence of the knowledge of oneself and God, within a process of interiorization: Why did the wise write “know thyself” on the temple of Apollo? They wished to suggest that you should contemplate a pure mind as an eternal ray of the true Phoebus, that is, the super celestial Sun, which is surrounded by a corporeal cloud. In that way, you could recognize both that the brilliance of the cloud depends from the ray of light and the splendor of the ray from the Sun. As you praise the body in the soul … you love and venerate the spirit in God, you love and venerate God in the soul. You wonder and are stupefied in the soul. When our teacher Augustine Aurelius came to know himself and God in himself, he suddenly cried: “Too late, I began to love Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so much new. Too late I came to love Thee.” This was the cognition of oneself, and in oneself also of God, beyond any reference to the external world. This was what Bonaventure affirmed with much emphasis: “It is necessary to assume that the soul knows God and knows itself and everything that is in itself, without subsidy of the exterior senses” (Necessario enim oportet ponere quod anima novit Deum et seipsam, et quae sunt in seipsa, sine adminiculo sensuum exteriorum). In regard to this, Ficino joins Avicenna, whose famous image of the “flying man” (uomo volante) he refers in the Theologia platonica (bk. VI, ch. 3): Let us assume that at a certain moment God suddenly created a human
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being, an individual already in its adulthood, but fashioned in a manner that it would apprehend nothing by way of the senses. The mind of this kind of person would certainly be capable of thinking, being an adult in age. The body of this human being would not disturb the functions of its intellect, and the senses, which in general create obstacles to the operations of the spirit, would be no cause of diversion. Let’s now add that an object of knowledge exists because the substance itself of the soul is present to the mind of this human being. Not being disturbed by anything, this mind will think the soul’s substance that is present. Now, let me ask, “How would the mind think of it?” Would the mind think of it as colored, long, or large? Not at all! A blind person has no knowledge of such things. Would the mind apprehend it as something sonorous, scented, or possessing some other similar attributes? Not at all! The mind of this human being is incapable of attributing such natures because it never apprehended anything through the senses. Therefore nothing corporeal would be attributed to the substance of that soul. What then would that intellect affirm of the substance of the soul? Doubtlessly, that intellect would affirm what by primo intuitu would present itself to the soul. But what would present itself primo intuitu to the soul is the essence of the soul. Hence, the soul would affirm itself without placing anything corporeal in itself. This soul would not even be able to pretend of being corporeal, in the same way that some plebeian souls never succeed in thinking of themselves as incorporeal. Someone may say that this soul, though it could certainly not attribute to itself any of the characteristics of the bodies that we perceive by way of the five senses, could very well think bodies of different nature. We think that this objection is silly. If we, who until now have perceived bodies so much different among themselves, have not yet being capable of imagining anything new, that is not already contained in what we have always perceived, or formed with what we have always perceived, or derived from what we have always perceived, how then could a soul completely unaware of corporeity form the idea of a new body? Even if this soul were to imagine a certain part of its own body, in no way it would be capable of assuming that corporeal part to be a part of its own body! That soul may state its own being, but never affirm anything corporeal.… Given these considerations, the conclusion would be that the essence of this soul would be without any corporeity. The judgment given by this consideration would be true, because it was derived from the pure nature of the soul, not from images derived from external subsidies. This judgment would be natural and therefore the truest. In the hypothesis that afterward that soul would awake to our kind of life and to the senses, then it would not be like our souls, which are so inept in the pursuit for the realities of the spirit. This soul, instead, so awakened, would have an easier path [than
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Ficino cited this entire suggestive text of Avicenna to affirm once again that, though the Arabs were sincerely Platonists (Platoni satis amici), the ancient Platonists were all that was needed. Marian Heitzman, on the footsteps of Gilson, has tried to demonstrate that Ficino was part of the current of the Avicennizing Augustinianism, about the thesis of God as the agent-intellect, and sustained the argument on a dubious witness affirming that an Avicennian group existed in Florence. If on certain points, as on the doctrine of religion and prophecy, we may recognize the influence of Avicenna and al-Gazali on Ficino, in regard to the affirmation of Alexander that God is the unique active intellect, Ficino shows himself totally contrary and considers it as dangerous a doctrine as the one of Averroès in reference to the unity of the possible intellect. In the Theologia platonica (bk. 15, ch. 11), he exclaims: “We must convince Alexander of having erred, because, using violence in the interpretation of Aristotle, he has denied the divinity of humankind, by stating that in us are found the possible intellects numerically distinct, and on the contrary, placing outside of men a unique active mind, the only one divine, as the universal cause of the intelligible species.” What Ficino really wanted was the plurality of spiritual substances, the plurality of souls. From the level of the discussion on the intellect, a discussion Aristotelianly conceived and fatally destined to sacrifice, at some point, the individual to the universal, Ficino wished to return to a Pythagorical pluralism of substantial souls. Again, in Theologia platonica, at the same passage, he tells us: You must know that Aristotle has not called the agent and the possible intellects two essences, or placed them above the soul, but named them as parts of the soul and claimed that they are two different faculties of the soul. If someone would dare to call “soul” the Averroist mind, he would be forcing the meaning of the term “soul” (Scite Aristoteles mentem agentem atque capacem numquam duas essentias appellavit, neque posuit super animam, sed vocavit animae partes, dixitque eas duas esse differentes vires in anima. Si quis autem Averroicam mentem appellaverit animam, is animae vocabulo abutetur). Between Alexander and Averroès, both in different ways annihilating the individuality of a spiritual substance, unique and unitary, in the human being,
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Ficino stood re-affirming on Platonic grounds the substantiality of the soul, and was far removed and closer to St. Thomas. In the definition of the soul, because for him the soul is a separate substance, Ficino was far from Thomas; in the question of the possible intellect, in the need of individuality, and in the anti-Averroistic polemic against the unity of the possible intellect, Ficino was closer to Thomas. Removed from St. Thomas was the fundamental position of the Ficinian Platonism, similar possibly more to Bonaventure’s Augustinianism, with which there are affinities recognized by some historians, but never truly researched. Under this aspect it would be good to compare the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum with the stages of the ascension to God described by Ficino in the Rapimento di Paolo al terzo cielo (Rapture of Paul to the third heaven), to find not only the same themes but also common usage of expressions. Franciscan instead of Dominican is the constant exaltation of will and love, in contrast to the intellect; the expressions of the Victorines, of the Doctor Seraphicus, of Duns Scotus seem to return: “Oh! I see that where in some ways the intellect fails, the will prevails. Oh! I see that love can penetrate and triumph where science fails” (ecce video, ubi quodammodo deficit intellectus, sufficere voluntatem. Penetrat ecce charitas, quo non potest omnino scientia penetrare). Franciscan is the motive of the two faces of the soul. To try to trace out more precise contacts, as someone already did, outside of the classic Platonic tradition and of St. Augustine, is arduous and unsafe. Of Bessarion and Gemistos, we already spoke. The approaches to Cusanus are merely ideal encounters, and common inspirations derived from the PseudoDionysius instead of direct influences or precise parallelisms. Concerning Scotus Eriugena, so often mentioned in connection with Ficino, if we do not exclude a priori a direct knowledge, nothing justifies the thesis of precise particular dependencies. In Theologia platonica, to whose analysis we must now come, Ficino explicitly fought the pantheistic doctrines of the “amalriciani,” the Amalrician heretics. 5. The Soul. God Facing the negation of a metaphysical foundation of human individuality operated by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroès in ways ostensibly opposed, but in actuality convergent, Ficino intended to proclaim the substantial reality of the human soul. He understood the snare implicit in the concreteness of the Aristotelian synolon (completeness). Man, a body beside the mind, is a composite, and therefore subject to dissolution. Death appears as the end of this dispersion. Plato rests on the conviction of the soul as a substance, detached from the body and independent from its vicissitudes. Ficino held to the substantial solidity of the individual soul, which assumes a preeminent and almost exclusive position, because of the fear that the body would carry with its own dissolution also that of the soul. The early part of the fifteenth century spoke of the human being, of the body as well as of the spirit; it was much
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more Aristotelian than Platonic. Ficino reflected on the soul in its radical separation. Only if the soul were to stand by itself, it could be subtracted from the universal decadence of things; only if the soul were to stand by itself, the human life could have a meaning: O celestial souls desirous of the celestial haven, I pray you, let us free us as soon as possible from the chains of earthly attachments. Let us ascend with Platonic wings and God as our pilot so that more freely we arrive to the ethereal abode where we would immediately and happily contemplate the excellence of our nature (Solvamus, obsecro, caelestes animi caelestis patriae cupidi, solvamus quamprimum vincula compedum terrenarum, ut alis sublati platonicis, ac Deo duce, in sedem aetheream liberius pervolemus, ubi statim nostri generis excellentiam feliciter contemplemus). The major work of Ficino opens with this invocation and with the assertion that if the soul is not immortal, the human being would be the unhappiest being in the whole universe, because by its own nature, no earthly happiness, to which it is anxiously and ceaseless attracted, would be able to satisfy. If to this desire, which for Ficino is the seal of infinity, no adequate destiny could be found, the human being would be divided within itself by a constitutive contradiction, and would be the living image of a sorrowful tragedy. We should consider the problem of the soul, of its essence, and its value. This is not possible without understanding at the same time the structure of the whole universe. This universe, in its inferior level is constituted by formless matter, understood as the principle of pure multiplicity, total dispersion, passivity, potentiality, or, as Averroès wants, pure quantity as the principle of the extenuation and weakening of qualitative reality. Quality, on the contrary, is the formal principle, in respect to which matter is the subject or the support. “From this, we gather that matter, by its own nature, has no procreating power of forms, because what is formless cannot form itself, since it cannot act at all” (Ex his colligitur materiam non habere suapte natura vim ullam formarum procreatricem, quia formare seipsum non potest informe subiectum, cum nihil omnino agere queat). In which passage, Ficino is evidently in polemic with Avicebron and all those who considered matter “as the power or effective substance of the forms, the source of the forms instead of their subject” (virtus sive substantia effective formarum, fons formarum potius quam subiectum). Having begun the ascension, we may continue with the consideration of the various degrees of the real, following it in the process from the dispersed multiplicity to the unifying unity, which is of course superior to dispersion: For this reason, there must exist beyond all the forms of this kind, a certain incorporeal substance that is inherent in them and preexisting, capable of penetrating through the bodies and of which the corporeal
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qualities are the instrument (Quamobrem praeter omnes huiusmodi formas inesse oportet omnibus et praeesse substantiam quamdam incorporalem per corpora penetrantem, cuius instrumentum sint corporeae qualitates). It is a movement from multiplicity to unity, from uncertain fluctuation toward immobility, but through several degrees. The pure quantity, almost near nothing, nihilo proxima, determines itself in the quality, which almost dispersed itself in the Lethean River of pure matter: “The quality justly is limping because, in the same moment that it is born, it dispersed itself in the wideness and profundity of matter, and is submerged as in the Lethean River” (Merito autem qualitas claudicat, quoniam eo ipso momento quo nascitur, spargitur per materiae latitudinem profunditatemque, et quasi Letheo flumine mergitur). Life collects together all qualities and strengthens them. Life “generates sensation and life even from the non-living mud, as it happens when frogs and flies are born, or from the formless dung the most splendid flowers emerge” ([la vita] che genera il senso e la vita anche dal fango non vivente, come accade quando nascono le rane e le mosche, o dall’informe fimo spuntano splendidi fiori). The passage from the corporeal reality to the incorporeal happens, according to Ficino, because of the impossibility of a process to infinity. In order to explain the work of ordering, unifying, and vivifying, it is necessary to arrive to principles that in their own essence are pure order, pure unity, and pure life. “To be safe from a process to infinity, we must arrive to a pure form free from whatever mixture with any corporeity” (tandem ne fiat in infinitum progressio ad formam aliquam perveniendum est, quae nullis sit mixta corporibus). In his theory, Ficino is faithful to a rigorous gradual process and places above the souls, which are the principle of life for the body, the intelligible beings that stand for themselves: the angels: Above the intellects that are alongside bodies, which are the rational souls, without doubt are many minds that are in their activity free from bodies. In the way that it is the proper nature of a pure intellect to live separately from a body, it is also the proper nature of pure sense to be and stay in a body. The spirit, in which with life exists no other thing than sense, appears to be only in the body. On the contrary, the spirit, in which only the intellect exists, lives outside the body. When intellect and sense come together (which is the condition proper and suitable to human beings), this kind of spirit possesses the natural capacity of living in and outside the body. This intellect is still ambiguous and dubious because the intellect of this kind of spirit is only one specific part of the soul, which contains other parts. This intellect by way of some spiritual motion reasons from one thing to another and in this way understands. There must be above this kind of spirit a more perfect mind,
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY which is not restricted to the capacity of a soul and does not mix with the inferior parts of the soul. The operations of this mind are not prolonged in time. This mind remains in itself absolute and pure, sees everything around itself in a clear way, and concludes its operations in itself, meaning that it brings them to their end within itself, while it remains firm and stable.
In Ficino, the determination of the complex situation of the soul is much elaborated. In the commentary on the Symposium, in the attempt to define further, he showed, on the steps of the Phaedrus, the necessity of a soul autokineton that gives motion to the body: “The Soul, according to its own essence, is capable of motion; it is above the body and moves it.” Against Aristotle, Ficino underlined that the motion in the soul is not physical, but spiritual. “When we say that the soul moves by itself, we mean this not in the corporeal manner, as Aristotle proposed in opposition to the great Plato. We mean the soul to move spiritually, in an absolute manner rather than transitive. The soul moves in the same way that God exists in itself, the sun shines by itself, and the fire by its own nature is warm” (Orazioni, bk. 6, ch. 15). The soul does not move a part of itself, remaining immobile in another part; it is motion in itself and principle of motion as the sun that is principle of light and illuminates. The movement intrinsic to the soul is its “dis-coursing wits” [running from one thought to another], to which it is linked because of its finitude, that obliges it to a kind of progressive temporal decay, and to doubt in order to resolve in certainty its doubts. Exactly for this discursive nature of the intellect of the soul, so that the more perfect is above the less perfect, above the intellect of the Soul that is mobile, and partially discontinuous and dubious, we must place the angelic intellect, all stable, continuous, and most certain. As the Soul that moves itself precedes the body that is moved by others, so the Angel that is stable by nature precedes the Soul that moves itself. In our ascension, we finally arrive to God, the condition of the entire reality, to whom we are referred as to the supreme goal of truth and goodness, and from whom we conveniently would obtain the full understanding of everything. Truly, as we have seen, the movement of the Ficinian thought is circular: it is a process from sense to mind, from mind to God, in order to comprehend and esteem mind, sense, and the whole reality. The experience defers us to its root, the only place where we would be able to understand experience itself. In itself alone, nothing has meaning and truth; everything is shade, vestige, and image, whose measure can be found in the True, which is the measure of the whole. The rhythm of philosophizing is the rhythm itself of existence. The return to Unity is needed in order to find in the Unity the reason of the multiplicity. This supreme Unity, absolute Goodness, and total Truth, cannot be reduced to the act of the will that wants the good or to the act of the intellect that thinks the true: If all your body were to become an eye, at a certain moment it would
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see everything, but still the eye and the light would not be the same thing.… If all your spirit were to become an intellect, your spirit would become an angel, which would see everything clearly, and would not need any longer, in a temporal discourse, to investigate now this, then that, because it would be able to consider everything clearly and at the same time. Truth itself would still be one thing and the mind another. The mind is nothing but a spiritual eye that is capable of perceiving the light of truth and the warmth of goodness. God, the coincidence of all values, infinitely superior to the mind, truth, supreme light, is an intimately perfect connection of unity, goodness, and truth. God eternal, omnipotent, the source of every truth and every life, is absolute activity and life: Where an act infinite is, there is also an infinite life, because life is an intimate and absolute act of essence.… Where a continuous act and a continuous life persist, there is the immense light of the most absolute intelligence, because intelligence is a perfection of life and a reflection of life over itself (Dove è un atto infinito, è ancora una vita al tutto infinita, perciocchè la vita è un intimo e assoluto atto dell’esistenza…. E dove un continuo atto e una continua vita dura, quivi è un immenso lume d’una assolutissima intelligenza, perché l’intelligenza è una perfezione della vita e una riflessione di quella in se stessa). This divine light is the light of humankind. This divine light originates from God, reflects itself in all things, and going through pervades them completely: Now, the order of Ideas, which I have said to exist in God, is the divine wisdom, which is the Word of God that is with God, and it is God. Through the Word all things were made; and in all things God exists, and in God all things see themselves (Adunque quello ordine delle Idee, che in Dio essere hai inteso da me, è la divina sapienza, la quale è il Verbo di Dio appresso Dio, ed è esso Dio. E per esso tutte le cose son fatte, e però Dio si trova in tutte le cose, e tutte le cose si veggono in lui). Everything is found in the life of God, who is a wealth that always grows within itself, outside time and discursive processes. God, understanding itself, understands the whole, and gathers in the Word the vital reasons of the whole. God has no need for the contemplation of the finite mind, nor for the desire of the will, which wants God. The absolute is absolute because self-sufficient: Certainly one thing is the eye, another is the small ray (picciol raggio) of light innate in the eye, and another one the greatest light of the Sun. The small ray (picciol raggio) of light in the eye is the proper clarity of
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY the eye, but the light of the Sun is the common clearness of everything, a clarity, I would say, that has no need for the eye.… In a similar way, one thing is the mind, another thing is its proper clarity, which is only a ray of clarity placed in the mind by its principle; another thing is the greatest God, the supreme clarity of every clarity, which is a clarity that certainly has no need for the mind.
Intrinsic to the mind is the capacity of seeing itself, its clarity; intrinsic to God is the absolute clarity, total in itself and total light for the whole. Interesting is the reference to that picciol raggio which is the proper clarity of the mind, or the capacity that every mind has of understanding its own activity within the limits of its own sufficiency. It is to be contrasted with the divine clarity, which is entirely transparent to itself as far as it is fullness of light reflected upon itself and shining over the whole. “With the same light He shines in Himself … with the same ray again all things He illuminates” (Con la medesima luce in sè stesso rifulge col medesimo raggio ancora ogni cosa illustra). God, more than light, is heat; more than intellect, God is will. “Warming up things instead of illuminating them, God makes and moves things” (piuttosto riscaldando che illuminando, le cose fa e muove). The intellect is order and reason of the inexhaustible divine acting, principle that cooperates to dispose “with a reciprocal order” the results of the acting itself. All that we can say about God is never positive. Of God we may speak only in a negative manner, as of something that goes beyond infinity. We can only say that God is the beginning and the end, the truth and the life. “God is the beginning, because everything proceeds from Him. God is the end, because everything returns to Him. God is life and intelligence, because through Him the souls live and the minds understand” (Iddio è principio, perché da lui ogni cosa procede; Iddio è fine, perché a lui ogni cosa ritorna; Iddio è vita e intelligenza, perché per lui vivono l’anime, e le menti intendono). “At this point, we see that we have ascended from body to quality, from quality to soul, from soul to angel, and from angel to God, the one, true, good, author and ruler of the whole universe” (Ascendimus hactenus a corpore in qualitatem, ab hac in animam, ab anima in angelum, ab eo in Deum, unum, verum et bonum, auctorem omnium atque rectorem). 6. The Dignity of the Human Being From God, after having received the light of understanding, the human being returns to things. The order of the universe is clearly subject to the rhythm between the divine pure act and the pure material potency. In the middle are found the realities constituted by act and potency: the angels, the souls, and the material beings. The soul is never considered in Thomistic (and Aristotelian) terms as the form of the body, but as in itself, form and matter or potency, a complete reality, capable of subsisting by and in itself. Different from that of the angel, the nature of the soul is that of being the principle of life to
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matter that becomes qualified by an organizational vitality. In this, we find the superior dignity of the soul: God and the body, most diverse among themselves, are the two extremes of nature. The angel cannot connect God and bodies because, being totally attending to God, it neglects the bodies. The angel, which is the most perfect creature of God, the nearest to Him, rightly becomes all divine and joins God. Quality, too, does not connect the extremes because being disposed to bodies does not care for superior things, and by disregarding incorporeal things becomes corporeal. Up to this point, all things are extremes: the things above and those below avoid each other, since there is no suitable bond between them (Deus et corpus extrema sunt in natura, et invicem diversissima. Angelus haec non ligat; nempe in Deum totus erigitur, corpora negligit. Iure perfectissima et proxima creatura Dei fit tota divina transitque in Deum. Qualitas etiam non connectit extrema, nam declinat ad corpus, superiora relinquit, relictis incorporeis fit corporalis. Hucusque extrema sunt omnia, seque invicem superna et inferna fugiunt, competenti carentia vinculo). The world appears to be breaking for a centrifugal motion that divides it into an irreconcilable duality. The function of the soul is precisely that of incarnating itself, of being a spirit that descends into a body in order to unite body and spirit. Ficino wrote in Theologia platonica (bk. 3, ch. 2): An intermediate third essence exists, which is capable of reaching the things above without disregarding those below; the superior things and those inferior find their connection in this third essence. This essence is at the same time immobile and mobile; it has immobility with the superior things and mobility with the inferior. Being capable of communication with the things above and below, this essence desires the ones and the others. By natural instinct, it [the soul] ascends above and descends below. When it ascends above, this essence does not abandon the things below; when it descends below, it does not abandon the sublime things above. Why? Because if the soul would abandon one extreme, it would inevitably fall into the arms of the other, and then it would not be any longer the true copula, the bonding of the world (Verum essentia illa tertia interiecta talis existit ut superiora teneat, inferiora non deserat, atque ita in ea supera cum inferis colligantur. Est enim immobilis, est et mobilis. Illinc cum superioribus, hinc cum inferioribus convenit. Si cum utrisque convenit, appetit utraque. Quapropter, naturali quodam instinctu, ascendit ad supera, descendit ad infera. Et dum ascendit inferiora non deserit, et dum descendit sub-
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY limia non reliquit; nam si alterutrum deserat, ad extremum alterum declinabit, nec vera erit ulterius mundi copula).
This locus and the doctrine expressed in it are quite famous. For the doctrine, let us make these remarks. What is said in the text regards the soul, not the human being, and the unifying function of the soul is stoically presented as the juxtaposition of an unstable equilibrium of opposite elements. The effort of Ficino consists in renovating and deepening the ancient motive of the human being as a microcosm, by spiritualizing it and by interpreting the mundi copula as a dynamic re-connecting of the world with the whole of itself, and not as the world’s static recapitulation. The problem becomes precisely defined when Ficino asks himself how the soul could in-corporate a body (incorporarsi, to become corporeal, incarnate), how the soul could spread itself out (distendersi) within a body, without losing unity and centrality, because the soul, while with its shadow permeates the body, remains one in itself, dividua and individua (separate and individual). This third common essence is given a definition: [It is] life that naturally vivifies the bodies, knows discursively itself, the divine things, and the natural things. The person, who cannot see that this is the definition of the rational soul, is without rational soul. The rational soul resides in the third essence, occupies an intermediate position in nature, and connects everything in unity (Vita quae corpora per naturam vivificat. Cognoscit seipsam et divina, et naturalia per discursum. Quicumque vero non viderit eandem esse animae quoque rationalis diffinitionem, is anima caret rationali. Quapropter anima rationalis in essentia tertia habet sedem, obtinet naturae mediam regionem, et omnia connectit in unum). The rational soul is the center and the connection (nodo, link, and knot) of the whole, but there is a soul that is present in every part of the universe. The world, the spheres, the animals, everything possesses a soul from which to derive life and motion. The nature that displays itself before our own eyes in admirable forms is only the linen woven by an expert artificer, who acts from within the things themselves. Human art is the imitation of this intimate spontaneity of the whole; human art, in comparison with the inspiring breath that operates from the interiority of the world, is like the product of the clumsy hand of an external worker (ars humana nihil est aliud quam naturae imitatio … materiam tractans extrinsecus; natura est ars intrinsecus materiam temperans). Only this intrinsic presence of the artificer (usque adeo congruit et propinquat operi faciundo) causes the idea to reach its perfect actualization (ut certa opera certis consummet ideis). Ficino, in Theologia platonica (bk. 4, ch. 1), delights in pointing out the works of Daedalian nature, almost repeating with some
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commotion the Lucretian hymn, which he loved so much in his youth. Art is like “the soul of the Geometer, who handles the dust (the surface of matter) with his hands” (anima Geometrae pulverem [superficiem materiae] tractans per manum). Nature is almost “the Geometer’s mind, which while considering the reasons for the [geometric] figures also fashions them” (Geometrae mens dum figurarum rationes secum ipsa volutat et format). Art is “the mind of the artificer separate from matter” (mens artificis in materia separata); nature is “the mind of nature in conjunction with matter” (naturae mens in coniuncta materia). In this vision, the ancient intuitions are renewed: the Pythagorean numbers, which were alive in the universe; the lyre of Orpheus, who with his song gave rhythm to the movement of the heavens; the magic of Zoroaster, to whom the worlds obeyed. The heavens as well as the elements, the spheres not less than the things, the plants as much as the animals, everything has life, order, and law. Everything proceeds according to a wonderful rhythm, and he who comprehends it holds in his hands the levers of the universe: he is the magician, the thaumaturge, the sage, who, as it was written in the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy, is the Lord of the planets (stars). Beside and in addition to the single souls, as the unique regulator, there is the soul that is the sovereign of the cosmic reality: “Above all single souls, there is the unique soul of the world. / The living product of a living Fabricator must be unique. / No living thing is unique, unless it possesses a unique life. / But there is no unique life except through a unique soul” (Una … est super singulas mundi anima. / Unius enim viventis opificis unum debet esse opus vivens. / Non est unum vivens, nisi per vitam unam. / Non habet vitam unam nisi habeat unam animam). The immortality of the soul derives Platonically from the definition of the soul as autokineton or self-moving. Ficino, in Theologia platonica (bk. 5, ch. 11), proves this immortality by connecting it with self-sufficiency, substantiality, unity, and similarity to God, and by considering it like the life and principle of life. “That [third] essence is life, pure-living; and for that reason the soul will always live” (Ea essentia vita est, hoc est vivere. Semper itaque vivit). The soul will eternally live by reaching the ideas, which can be compared to rivulets of eternal life. The argument of the Phaedo is here represented in a new tone. The rationality of the soul is the continuous generation of ideas in the soul and an ascension always anew of the soul to the ideas. In Theologia platonica (bk. 5, ch. 12), we read: The life of the soul is eternal life because, in so far as it is rational, even independently from use and exercise, in virtue of its nature, the soul generates every day in itself the absolute species through which it can directly reach the eternal ideas. If the ascension to the ideas is natural for the rational soul, the resting with them must also be natural, so that finally the soul will naturally live in them as before the ascen-
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY sion it lived for them. Consequently, the soul, after having operated constantly and naturally seeking the eternal, at last, still naturally, would be able to operate in eternity the eternal things it was seeking before. Because any idea is eternal life, any human being who according to its own nature can achieve ideas in an ideal mode, is also capable of reaching eternal life by way of an eternal mode (Propria animae vita est, vita inquam perpetua, quia quantum rationalis est, etiam absque disciplina et usu, per solam eius naturae virtutem, quotidie in se parit species absolutas, per quas proxime ad aeternas itur ideas. Si naturale est animo rationali ascendere ad ideas, naturale est ipsi quiescere in ideis, ut sicut naturaliter illis vixit, naturaliter vivat in illis, et qui operabatur secundum naturam assidue ad perpetua, operetur quandoque secundum naturam perpetuo in perpetuis. Et quia idea quaeque aeterna vita est, qui secundum naturam suam ideam per ideale modum potest consequi, potest etiam per modum aeternum vitam consequi sempiternam).
And, finally, we have the definitive last proof of immortality. God creates directly the soul with his own hands (con le sue mani). He is Goodness and maintains the soul in life; all the being of the soul depends from the divine act. How could such a supreme charity destroy this product of its hands? As an immortal life and substance, the soul incarnates in a body, giving life to it, but keeping its own distinct individuality, because the body, too, is, at its own turn, a res completa, a complete thing made of form and matter (ibid., bk. 6, ch. 7). Almost as a link between the soul and the body, the one most pure (purissima) and the other most gross and earthly (crasso e terreo), to unite them, exists (ibid., bk. 7, ch. 6), “a certain corpuscle, the thinnest and most luminous, which we call ‘spirit’ and is generated by the heat of the heart from the thinnest part of the blood, from where it diffuses itself throughout the whole body” (tenuissimum quoddam lucidissimumque corpusculum, quem spiritum appellamus, a cordis calore genitum ex parte sanguinis tenuissima, diffusum inde per universum corpus). The one who acts is always the soul, which uses the body as an instrument, even when sensing. The soul with its activity governs everything that is material and corporeal. The soul with its own power re-shapes finite things and tends to infinity. The mind comprehends the limits of existence, overcomes the antithesis between being and not being, advances beyond nothingness, embraces all things, and rules over them. In Theologia platonica (bk. 9, ch. 5), Ficino concludes: [The soul] can ascend above being, and descend below it, in so far as it puts unity and goodness above being, and matter and privation below being. Since the mind embraces all things, not one kind of things can control the mind. Nothing outside the mind can limit the mind, because the mind encloses everything inside itself. We like to conclude in this
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way. If the human mind were to exist somehow because of the body, it would never act without the body as its instrument and aid. But the mind acts without the body, when it comprehends and wills.… Therefore, the mind’s being is not from the body. Then, it is from itself or from divine action. If the mind were to exist by its own, it would never fail itself; if from divine action, it would be eternal from eternal causes (Super esse ipsum ascendit, et sub esse descendit, quando ipsum unum ipsum quoque bonum statuit super esse, et materiam sive privationem rerum sub esse locat. Nulli rerum generi mens astringitur, si ambit omnia. Nihil extra se habet, a quo perimatur, quod intra se quodammodo claudit omnia. Concludamus disputationem hoc pacto: animus hominis, si per corpus esset aliquo modo, nihil ageret unquam sine corporis instrumento et auxilio. Agit autem sine corporis usu intelligendo atque volendo…. Non igitur est per corpus. Ergo est aut per se, aut per divina. Si per se, nunquam se deserit; si per divina, ergo per aeternas causas est aeternus). 7. Immortality The theme of the divinity of the mind is central in most of Ficino’s writings, but it is analyzed in Theologia platonica. The mind is capable of becoming everything; it can seize everything without losing itself; it dominates the bodies and rules over them. The infinite is truly found in the mind, in its infinite process. “The mind that knows the infinite conforms itself to the infinite. Infinite must be what can conform with the infinite” (Mens cognitae infinitati aequatur quodammodo. Infinitum vero oportet esse quod aequatur infinitati). The sign of the infinity of the mind is found in that continuous and neverending process, in that unfulfilled desire that afflicts the soul: To briefly conclude, let’s say that the presence of an infinite power in the mind is confirmed by the fact that while the hunger of the body, thirst and need for sleep are easily satisfied, the ardor of the mind may never be extinguished, whatever its object, human or divine.… Rightly so, the mind would never be satisfied, unless it seizes the infinite God, who would gratify the infinite capacity that emanated from Him to the mind (Denique, ut summatim dicam, infinitam quodammodo esse in mente virtutem illud nobis testimonio esse poterit, quod fames corporis, sitisque et somnus, cito et re paucula satiantur, mentis ardor numquam extinguitur, sive humana respiciat sive divina.… Merito quiescit numquam, nisi infinitum Deum capiat, qui capacitatem eius ab ipso manantem impleat infinitam, in Theologia. platonica, bk. 8, ch. 15). The human mind is like a dispersed ray of divine light, and would find again the reason for existence only by returning to the source. On earth, the mind
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almost competes with God in the production of its own world and things. Tied to the world through the senses, the soul through the mind transcends the world. Obliged to submit to the laws of the world because of its worldly roots the soul gets loose through its liberty and overcomes the limitations imposed by things in the processes of thought: The soul, by means of its loftiest function, the mind, joins the superior minds, whereas with its inferior power, with the eidolon by which the body governs itself, the soul insinuates itself into the corporeal nature.… In this way, the soul with the mind is free from fate (anima igitur per mentem est supra fatum), in the order of providence, imitating the superior realities and with them together governing the inferior world. The saying of Zoroaster is hereby verified: ne augeas fatum (don’t make fate stronger, by believing in it). The highest dignity of the human being is its faculty of making decisions, choices. The human being is the ideal point of encounter of two worlds. To ascend, overcome, and control conditions and situations is to seize one world and regains the freedom for the other; to descend and submit means to lose itself and the whole. No less than freedom, the autonomy of human knowledge is the manifestation of human greatness. It is not the autonomy from God, but from things. The truth is within us, it is the life of our reason, and reason is always functioning and situated in a living faculty (non enim est ratio nisi vivens, et in vivente). The ideas, or better the innate spiritual forms (formulae), put in motion by the external excitements of the senses, reside in us. We always know ourselves alone, and God in us, because to know is to endure (patire) truth, and the Truth is only one: The mind or the senses are not formed by something external when they perceive something.… In the same way that the vivifying part modifies, nourishes, develops the seeds in which it is inherent, so the interior sense and the mind through innate formulae judge of everything under an external stimulation (Nè la mente, nè i sensi sono formati dal di fuori, quando percepiscono qualche cosa. Ma a quel modo che la parte vivificatrice altera, nutre, svolge i semi in cui è insita, cosi il senso interiore e la mente attraverso formule innate di tutto giudicano sotto lo stimolo esterno, ibid., bk. 11, ch. 3). The world is a cycle that proceeds from God and returns to God. Knowledge is one essential instant of this return, when, through the mental forms, reality is brought back to its source. Ficino insists on this mediating function of the innate formulae, ideal characters that the mind uses to understand the things in God and discovers God in the things:
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As the forms of things—by way of the lowest virtue of the soul, through the seeds of the forms infused in the soul—descend from the divine mind into matter, so the corporeal forms—by way of the loftiest virtue of the soul, through the innate formulae of the ideas—from being perceived ascend to the ideas of the divine mind. In this way, the totally temporal forms of the body, mutating in both essence and affection, ascend to the forms of the divine mind that are totally eternal and suffer no change through the forms of the human mind, which are in part eternal and in part temporal.… Thus, the sublime mind that daily forms our mind through the ideas predisposes our mind through the characters of the ideas and marks the mind according to the saying of the Prophet: “upon us is the light of his countenance, so that we can see the light in his light (ibid., bk. 12, ch. 1). In the cycle of knowing, the human being is the means through which the forms return to the ideas. Knowledge is always a finding of things in God. Truth is only and always divine light, which in God is intelligence, in things is intelligibility, in the humans is intellect, and in the human being who comprehends, it is actual understanding. “The light of God, in so far as it assembles absolutely in him, is intelligence; in so far as it manifests itself in the reason of things, is intelligible; in so far as it is infused in the intellect and becomes natural to it, is intellective; and when it returns to God, is intelligent.” The cycle of truth, Ficino repeats, begins with God and ends with God, through the intellect; the eternal returns to the eternal, through the eternal. “It is certain that the means that participates of both terms is eternal” (certo è che il mezzo è eterno, il quale è dei termini partecipe). The mind is the mirror of God; sparkling for the rays of the divine Sun, the mind reflects them on the things so that they are illuminated. Ficino employs a virtuosity of “luminous” images, from which we derive that objective Truth is light that illuminates the intellects and it is the principle of visibility of things. The motion from God to God, the universal rhythm, in its ontological consistency is a luminous rhythm, a light reflecting back to itself; theologically considered, this is a cycle of love. This vision of reality, the product of a spiritualistic virtuosity brought to an exaggeration, rejected Epicurean materialism. The Theologia platonica, in one of its characteristic aspects, is a polemic against all materialists. But it faced another danger: the denial of the substantial individuality of the soul, a doctrine found in Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroès. Ficino saw the danger in the two positions. In regard to a defense of the human being as a person, the two positions are disastrous. The transcendence of Averroès and the immanence of Alexander annihilated the immortality, exactly at the moment when they were saving the eternity of the intellect. Ficino knew the danger of his own position, which depended from Plotinus and was moved by an inspiration that was not strange to his adversaries.
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Relying on Pletho, Ficino affirmed that Averroès falsified Aristotle (ibid., bk. 15, ch. 1), but the fact remains that a human eye full with the light of God, alive in the intelligible, whose consistency is that of being the mirror of God, appears to lose within the universal ocean of light every personal definitiveness. Interestingly, Ficino, after having introduced so much Platonic separation, occupied himself in finding somehow a relation between mind and sense. “Nature has established that between sense and intellect there should be as much connection as possible” (natura instituit ut tanta esset inter sensum intellectumque cognatio quanta esse possit). The fifteenth book of the Theologia platonica, in order to consolidate at the same time a position antiAverroistic and anti-Alexandrian is strangely oriented toward Thomistic positions, which are alien to the assumptions of the work. For instance, the soul is forma corporis (form of the body); and the axiom eandem esse animam quae in homine speculatur et sentit, “in man, the same soul senses and understands,” is demonstrated (ibid., bk. 15, ch. 6); and again uterque intellectus virtus in anima, “in the soul are found the two powers of the intellect” (in ibid., bk. 15, ch. 11). Ficino must acknowledge that immortality signifies separation; the Platonic concept of the moving soul (anima motrice) implies separation instead of distinction. We may ask (ibid., bk. 15, ch. 13): In what does the individuation of the separate souls consist? By using many ideas, we can take pleasure in the divine mind, investigate it following different vestiges, and move forward to this goal through various paths. Infinite goodness communicates itself in infinite manners (let us say) not only to the corporeal but also to the spiritual eyes, and thus manifestes its innumerable faces to almost innumerable eyes (Sub variis ideis frui possumus mente divina, per varia vestigia illam investigare, variis ad hunc finem callibus proficisci. Voluit sane infinita bonitas non solum corporeis sed etiam spiritalibus oculis seipsam infinitis, ut ita loquar, modis communicare, atque innumerabilibus pene oculis innumerabiles suipsius vultus ostendere). Is this Leibniz? These living mirrors, different among themselves, when ascending per varia vestigia, don’t they lose their individuality, as they all point their eyes to the supreme light and become the final vision of God? And what about the Truth as object, the Truth as the illuminating Sun, Logos, Word, don’t they seem to contract in the unity of the agent intellect? We may say that Ficino himself was aware of the difficulties he could not resolve, when he felt the need to conclude the famous fifteenth book with a general agreement: Since Themistius affirms that Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrast conceived the mind in the same way, in order to bring this Peripatetic discussion to a happy conclusion, we must gather together those Platonic
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and Aristotelian truths that are spread in many interpretations. Let us take the immortality of the possible intellect from Averroès, and the theory of the possible intellects, considered as many as the souls themselves, as powers naturally inherent in our souls, from Alexander. We may thus conclude that the souls are immortal. This is the conclusion of Christian and Arabic Platonic theologians, totally consonant with the ancient Peripateticism (ibid., bk. 15, ch. 19). 8. Light and Love We have often referred to the luminous metaphors of Ficino. He dedicated many pages to the metaphor of light, now showing in it almost the substance and the weft or warp of all things, then assimilating it to God almost to the point of identifying it with God. “O mind that rightly measures everything, tell me, I pray, whether God perhaps is the light, of which nothing is clearer and nothing more mysterious” (O mente che bene ogni cosa misuri, dimmi ti prego, se forse il lume è esso Dio, del quale ancora niente è piú chiaro e niente è piú oscuro). The ancient metaphors and the ancient antitheses, God as the lux tenebrosa (dark light, light in the darkness), everything is useful to Ficino in order to persevere on the parallelism between light and divinity. “What light is, nobody has ever defined, but what light is not is always discussed” (Quid sit lumen, nullus absolute definit, sed quid non sit semper argumentatur). And right away, he adds: “We know light as we know God, by way of negations and comparisons” (negationibus igitur comparationibusque quibusdam dumtaxat lumen cognoscimus, sicut Deum). Quality is light (light is the first form of the first body, lux quidem est forma primi corporis prima); the spirit is light; the soul is light, the angel is light; light is God. Light unifies everything; in the light, everything is diversified. God is the father of light, pater luminum, in so far as he is the source of all things, root of reality and, together, of comprehensibility. Light is the positiveness of the real, the knowability of the real in the reflection (mirror); light is the transparency of the real, and the reason of the real. “Do you wish to acquire easily the reason why of light? Search for it in the light of each reason” (Vuoi tu la ragion de la luce piú comodamente acquistare? Ricercala nella luce di ciascuna ragione). Ficino makes his the tradition of the metaphysics of light, which found its splendid expression in St. Bonaventure. He modifies the tradition with a purpose, because this light transparent to itself, presented as the unifying tissue of the cosmos, constitutes a new sign of the unity of the world and of the participation of the world in God: What is the light in God? The light in God is the immensity of his goodness and truth. What is the light in the Angels? It is a certainty of intelligence that proceeds from God, and an abundant merriment of the will. What is the light in the celestial things? It is a copy of the life that
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY comes from the Angels, and a declaration and manifestation of virtue that comes from heaven; it is a smile of heaven. What is the light in the fire? It is a certain vital vigor infused in it by the celestial things, and a vivacious propagation. In the things deprived of sense, light is an infused grace of heaven. In the things that have sensation, light is the merriment of the spirit and the vigor of the senses. In short, in all things, light is an effusion of an intimate fecundity, and in every place, is an image of the divine truth and goodness.
Light is considered something spiritual instead of corporeal, “because it extends timelessly itself everywhere,” and penetrates everything as “a divine spirit.” In the light, the bond between God and the whole is hidden and is revealed. In his Biblical and Platonic metaphors, Ficino tries to push to its limits this connection: One God exists in all things and above all things: one light in all things and surrounding all things. The light on things that God made is a certain splendor of the divine brightness, and, we may say, a God who almost exhausts itself, and adapts itself to the capability of its creatures. But this God is an immense light that consists of itself, for itself is in all things, and outside things is most immense. This most immense God is the source of life, through whose light, as David said, we see light; God is an eye that can look at all things in each thing, and truly sees all things in itself, meanwhile itself sees each thing to exist (Uno Iddio in tutte le cose e sopra tutte le cose, un lume in tutte le cose e intorno a tutte le cose. Il lume alle cose da Dio fatte è un certo splendore della divina chiarezza, e, per cosi dire, è un Dio che se stesso quasi finisce, e che alla capacità delle sue opera s’accomoda. Ma esso Dio è un lume immenso che in se stesso consiste, e per se stesso in tutte le cose e fuor di tutte le cose immensissimo. Egli è quell fonte della vita del cui lume, come disse David, vediamo lume; è un occhio che tutte le cose in ciascuna cosa riguarda, e veramente tutte le cose in se stesso vede, mentre che se stesso vede essere ogni cosa). To the rhythm light-intelligibility-life corresponds another rhythm: the warmth that derives from light is love that animates, fulfils, and ignites the cycle of reality. While the luminous unity makes us to understand the subsistence of the whole, its ontological basis, the motive of love makes us to be aware of the teleological unity. The two rhythms join and connect each other through the analogy light-heat: “Everyone can discover that heat is made by light, when he will reflect on the fact that in the spirit the clarity of the intelligence for a certain motive comes before the affection of the will for the same” (Che il caldo sia fatto dal lume ciascuno lo ritruoverà che penserà che ancora nelli spiriti la chiarezza dell’intelligenza per una certa origine va innanzi all’affetto della volontà).
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In the comment to the Symposium, the roads of the return as an amorous return are much faithfully followed. When the light returns intrinsically to itself, it is a motion toward the supreme light. The mind, finding its own light, is moved toward the primary light to which it eagerly tends. The awareness of an internal unbalance is cause for the need of the equilibrium in the peace of God. “The mind, from the inquiry on its own light, is moved and attracted to recover the divine light: such allurement is true love.… When God infused his light in the spirit, he arranged it so that human beings would be by the light guided to the beatitude, which consists in the possession of God.” As the intimate motive of the dialectic of love is the ascension from the finite to the infinite light, so the spring that promotes love in the world is the brightness of the divine countenance reflected in the world. The light of the soul, which is the sign of the participation with the divine, meeting in the world the divine light evidenced and manifested as beauty, is sent back to the root of order and harmony. The connection light-heat, which is the same as the link intelligibility-love, constantly returns, and intelligibility, the intimate art that disposes of things from within, appears sensibly as the beauty that generates desire. The splendor and the graciousness of this countenance, in the Angel or in the Soul or in any earthly matter, should be called universal Beauty; the desire for that Beauty is universal love.… One is the light of the sun appearing to the eyes, a light painted with all the colors and the figures of the things that the sun has touched. The eyes, with the help of a certain natural ray, receive the light of the Sun so painted and, once taken, they see that light and all the pictures that exist in it. The reason for this is that the whole order of the World that we see is perceived by the eyes, not in the way in which the world is found in the matter of the bodies, but in the way in which the world is in the light that is infused in the eyes. Seal of the spirit, beauty is a spiritual thing. Beauty is the visibility of the inner light, of the art intrinsic in things, of the “smile of the elements” (riso degli elementi). The theory of light and the doctrine of beauty and love coincide. In the letter to Bernardo Bembo, regarding the luminosity of spiritual creatures and the heavens, Ficino writes: “Light must by necessity be … a perfection of the form of these things, a fecundity of life, a perspicacity of the senses, the clearest certainty of the truest intelligence, and an abundance of grace.” St. Bonaventure had written, “Lux est forma perficiens.” The metaphor, most pleasing Ficino, is the one of the smile of the stars, the heavens, the world, as an expression of the inner light. The smile from heaven is a ray that penetrates everywhere, and “all things from within themselves feel moved, and appear to be resplendent in their spirit and countenance.”
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The beauty of things is the external transparency of their inner life, which is divine light. To contemplate beauty is to meet the divine beam in things, and the beam becomes the route to ascend to God. Love is the most ancient god—Ficino reminds us—because it is the spreading and the expanding itself of God. Love is the youngest god, when guiding the minds back to their origin. The return is to find the idea in the things, through the soul and the angel. The insufficiency of the world, which is revealed to the soul by a dark presence that manifests itself as a want, gives way to an amorous furor—the eroic furor of Bruno—which “raises the human being above itself and changes it into god” (innalza l’uomo sopra lo uomo, e in Dio lo converte). Love is where the true lover is the loved one, who attracts the soul with the power of its love, and through the unity of the mind draws the human being back from the dispersion of the senses. Poetry, religious mysteries, divination, diligent research, ardor of piety and devotion to God: all is love, in Ficino. The God, who in the diffusion of light fecundates the whole, in love calls the universe back to itself. 9. Astrology and Magic. Lorenzo Bonincontri The unity of the whole, this universal harmony to which every creature collaborates, this life of things, this animation of the universe had to offer to Ficino, in the renascent atmosphere of the time, an added motive for his inclination toward magic and astrology. Astrology and magic for him possessed a special significance. Magic was vision of the whole and the finding of the universal language, symbols, and instruments to dominate and direct the forces of nature. Astrology meant certainty of connections between things, dominion of the celestial bodies alive with their own souls and dominating humans and things. The classic texts from Manilius to Firmicus Maternus had been added to the complex predicting astronomy of the Arabs, whose fundamental works on the subject were already circulating in Latin translation in the Middle Ages. Lorenzo Bonincontri of San Miniato, a friend of Ficino, taught astrology in the Florentine Studio between 1475 and 1478, commented Manilius, and exchanged letters with Ficino concerning the link of fate with freedom and providence. Worthy of notice is the fact that Bonincontri, at the beginning of his exposition on Manilius, recurred to a theme typically Ficinian in order to explain subjection to fate and human freedom. Lorenzo writes: “The Platonic Jamblicus affirms that in man there are two souls, of which one, called intellective, descends from the first intelligible and represents the virtue of its creator. The other, which is distributed to the bodies according to the daily revolution of the sky, is sensitive and subject to Fate.” Elsewhere, he insists on the power of demons that act on the inclinations of the human being, suggesting future events. That these demons are like the intermediaries between the stars and humanity is an argument acceptable even to Pico.
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The Ficinian position is strangely complex, at one time favorable to astrology even in its superstitious aspects of the religion of the stars, at another decisively adverse. On 20 August 1494, having received news of the antiastrological writing of Giovanni Pico, Ficino immediately wrote a crucial letter to Politian, a letter that constitutes a clear defense of his position against any eventual attack. Ficino, admitting that Pico is correct in destroying this ancient superstition, confesses of being whole-hearted in agreement with him, “though he personally perhaps does not fight as vigorously” as Pico. The Platonists “do not reject or try to approve the celestial images or constellations described by the Astrologists.” Plotinus certainly refuted them, and Ficino in the comments to Plotinus confuted them, as well: I sneer at them, partly because I relied on his [Plotinus] authority, partly because I have no certain opinion on this matter. But in the book Della vita, in which I favorably accept medicine … I do not completely despise those images (constellations), nor I refute all those rules. The reason for this is that I, though thinking that there is no certain proof in their favor, as a serious cultivator of human medicine, wish to follow also remedies that are believed probable by many people, and not just those remedies that are certain and true to a few experts. Ficino cannot deny that in the third book of that work, in De vita caelitus comparanda, he paid great attention to bizarre astrological hypotheses. In De sole, he confessed of an analogous indulgence for the astrological fables. Then, he concludes: “In the books de vita and in those of de sole, freely and perhaps licentiously, at times, I have relapsed.” Of this Politian, too, was convinced because in his answer he observed: “I think that it is not important to know if at another time you held a different opinion or if, instead, you wrote expressing the opinion of someone else. For a philosopher who every day sees something more and new, it is not so bad to change one’s mind.” In Ficino there are no traces of a progressive refusal of astrology. The disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum, composed around 1477 and published only in our times by Kristeller, largely used in the composition of De stella magorum of 1482 in the comments on Plotinus (Enneads, bk. 2, comm.) between 1486 and 1490, is a dull miscellany whose intent is to secure free will. Of a complete astrological interest is, as we said before, the De vita caelitus comparanda of 1489, but the De sole et lumine written between 1492 and 1493 is only an astrologizing. The astrological question was double: are the stars the causes of human events? And, are they, at least, the signs of what happens in the world? To this second question, Ficino answered affirmatively. He even spoke concerning the horoscope of Jesus and the Decan of the Virgo. If the whole is unity, if the whole is the divine light received by innumerable eyes, the points of perspective may change, but it would be always the vision of the same spectacle. The
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birth of the Redemptor will be symbolized in the sky, translated by the stars in a particular smile of the stellar light. Different and more serious is the other question. Do the celestial motions determine human events? Pico will formulate the problem in terms rigidly “scientific,” through an analysis of causal relationships. Ficino remains always on vacillating grounds, hesitating between philosophy and religion. It was a dangerous ground from which it was easy to move slowly towards paganism, in the manner of Pletho. The stellar influx is not necessarily an influence of matter over spirit: if the stars, like the heavens, like the whole, are animated, then the influx can also be understood as a determination or “providential” influence of the plane of the celestial spirits, of the gods, over the human spirits, which are of an inferior dignity. This was the conception implied, and at times explicit, of all one part of the astrology, in which under a scientific appearance lived an astral polytheism of Mesopotamic and Egyptian origin. How this conception constituted a true and proper religious attitude diffused during the Renaissance can be seen from a curious letter that Pellegrino de’ Prisciani addressed to Isabella d’Este, in 1509, regarding the efficacy of prayer to the stars. Citing Pietro d’Abano, Pellegrino observed: “the stars, when we have done our proper prayers, can be placated and moved in our aid and favor” (le stelle, premise per nui debite oratione, se placano et se concitano in nostro subsidio et favore). Isabella was worrying about the captivity of her husband. The famous astrologist, professor at the Studio of Ferrara, emulous of Luca Guarico, was teaching her about “the wonderful power of the conjunction of the head of Dragon with the salutary star of Jove” (la meravigliosa possanza de la conjunctione del capo del Dracone con la salutifera stella di Jove). After having referred to the indisputable authority of Albumasar, Prisciani continued: I inform your Ladyship that with God’s pleasure and joy and consolation of your most illustrious Ladyship, that as powerful as blessed constellation, by many astrologers and sages many times and for many years expected, is coming to occurred next Saturday, which will be the eighteenth of this month of August, at the precise hour of 11:27 p.m. … Your Ladyship on that predicted Saturday, if she intends to do so, should prepare herself with an ardent devotion, and when the precise hour will be near, in a genuflected position, hands joined, and eyes directed to the sky, shall in her heart make confession, reciting the Confiteor. Then, with the most appropriate words that will come to her, she will ask the Highest Eternal God … and repeat her petition three times. In a short time, the grace asked will be effectively granted. It was a truly curious mixture of paganism and Christianity, dear to many, as we can deduce from the ardor with which in 1488 Leonora of Ferrara and
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Francesco Gonzaga contended for the possession of an astrological blue book (un libro azzurro), a work of the same Pellegrino de’ Prisciani. Ficino was not far from similar positions, though he tried to absorb them within the limits of his thought. He combined the doctrine of the horoscopes with a conception of temperaments. The stars do not force the will, but rather determine the temperaments. The human being is free and will develop his spiritual structure according to the needs of the mind, but the psychological situation within which the will operates is defined by astral influxes and is at the mercy of the constellations. Analogously, the theory of election is justified as doctrine of temporal occasions that the wise must be able to acknowledge. The influxes are connections of phenomena, and are natural laws; to know helps action, as well as to ignore them creates obstacles. To justify the power of astrological “images” carved in stone and metal that, according to Ficino, have “an astonishing power” (virtutem saepe mirificam), is a more difficult task. These “images” are evidently residues of astral cults. The image attributed to a celestial sign, inscribed in various materials, often precious, performs miraculous healings. In De vita (bk. 3, ch. 13), Marsilio exclaimed: “They are works indeed admirable for our health” (opera quidem ad salutem mira). In another part of the same work (bk. 3, ch. 18), he reminds us of the origin of these images and describes one of the most characteristic figures, that of the Virgo: Many images exist in the sky, and they are not as visible as much as they are imaginable through signs observed or excogitated in the constellations by Hindus, Egyptians, and Chaldeans. An example of this is the aspect of the constellation of the Virgin, a beautiful maiden sitting and holding in both hands some spikes of barley, while feeding an infant (Sunt in caelo formae quam plurimae, non tam visibiles quam imaginabiles per signorum facies ab Indis et Argyptiis Chaldaeisque perspectae vel saltem excogitatae, velut in prima facie Virginis virgo pulchra sedens, geminas manus spicas habens; puerumque nutriens). This was the same description given by Albumasar and Ibn Ezra. Beside the Virgin, Ficino will place the cross: “The ancient placed the cross before any other figure” (antiquiores figuram crucis cunctis anteponebant), without being aware of the mixture of sympathetic magic and pagan idolatry hidden in the conception of the decans, which, as Franz Cumont observed, were to become the tangible revenge in Christian epoch of the removed and dispossessed classic divinities. This was no longer a question of material influxes acting on bodies; these were demonic forces that operated in an invincible way, which no virtue could stop. We have no longer a factual situation in which human activity could be implanted, but the unyielding necessity that should conveniently be accepted. “The best thing is to make peace or a truce with it [fortune-fate], conforming
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ours to its will and move willingly in the direction it points to, so that it might not force us” (Optimo è fare con lei [fortuna-fato] o pace o tregua, conformando la volontà nostra colla sua et andare volentieri dove ella accenna, acciocché ella per forza non tiri). This is the conclusion of the letter concerning fortune that Ficino wrote to Giovanni Rucellai. Such a conclusion is perhaps the epigraph most suitable to indicate the limits and the equivocations of Ficino’s thought. 10. The Academy. G. Nesi and B. Colucci. Giles of Viterbo Arnaldo Della Torre has abundantly demonstrated what the Academy of Careggi was and within which limits it should be comprehended. We will now try to identify the Ficinian philosophical motives of the principal academicians. Of Lorenzo Bonincontri, whom Ficino counted among his auditors, we have already spoken. Ugolino di Vieri Verino (1438–1516) permeated with Platonic reminiscences his verses, but ended with a candid adhesion to Christianity: Now indeed the divine books of Christ Can make happy anyone with little effort. The reason is that the clear light of the Gospel Has removed all errors, teaching the way to truth. Everything is now in harmony with the Catholic truth, And one faith in the same God unites us all. (At nunc felicem divina volumina Christi Reddere vel minimo quemque labori queunt: Namque evangelii clarum iubar expulit omnes Errores, veri perdocuit viam. Omnia catholico nunc sunt conformia vero, Eiusdemque Dei est omnibus una fides). Giovanni di Francesco Nesi—tied by friendship to Donato Acciaiuoli and Bartolomeo della Fonte, who placed Acciaiuoli at the center of one of his dialogues, the De poenitentia (1472)—was a poet and a Platonic philosopher of notable importance. The De moribus (1477) of Nesi, which intended to reproduce a discussion on the Nicomachean Ethics, shows signs of the influence of the teaching of Donato, of whose work it is a kind of popularization. On the example of Dante, from which certainly the inspiration of this work came, Nesi wanted to explain the ethics of Aristotle in a plain manner to merchants and the peoples too occupied to be able to dedicate themselves to serious studying. The inspiration of this script is still like the one at the beginning of the Florentine fifteenth century, with a strong accentuation placed on Socrates and with an appeal to active life, work, and human society:
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To an ill-disposed spirit, what kind of advantage would exist in the knowledge of the reciprocal mutualism of the elements or of the structure of our bodies, or in the experience of visiting the abysmal interiors of the earth? What advantage exists for a person burning with passion or dominated by anger to have snatched away from Pythagoras the glory of both the harmony and the reason of numbers? What, if this person even succeeded in measuring the whole universe? … Can you demonstrate with solid arguments the immortality of the soul, raise yourself to the sky like an eagle to contemplate the nature of divine things and their excellence as revealed by the Delphic Apollo? Certainly not, your spirit will be as sick as if it were hit by a storm, wasted away by sicknesses, shattered by fear. Following the Socratic-Aristotelian tradition of the moralists of the first Renaissance, Nesi is adamant on the formation of the spirit, on the medicine of the mind, without which every abstract inquiry would be vain. In ms. “Laur. Lat. 77, 24, 1-3,” we find: How much usefulness can be obtained not only for single individuals but for entire cities by practicing this life discipline, it can be seen from the fact that this discipline at a certain time brought those human beings scattered and wandering throughout the fields, living a brute life, to come together in places protected by walls and form a common society. This discipline joined the human beings together first under some shelters, and then forced them into close connections almost as with definite ties, finally shaped them into a community of language and culture. This discipline established the laws, set up for them the cult of the gods, instructed them in the laws of human beings, excited them to fortitude, composed them in continence and modesty, and started them to a better life (Quantam autem utilitatem, non modo singulis hominibus sed universis civitatibus afferat haec disciplina vivendi vel ex eo perspici potest quod in agris quondam dispersos homines et victu ferino vitam propagantes compulit in una moenia et in communem societatem convocavit. Haec illos primo inter se domiciliis coniunxit, deinde coniugiis quasi vinculis quibusdam devinxit, tum sermonum litterarumque communione formavit. Haec leges sanxit; haec eos ad deorum cultum erexit, ad ius hominum erudivit, ad fortitudinem excitavit, ad continentiam modestiamque composuit, ad meliorem denique frugem convertit). The influence of Ficino, whom he exalted in the dialogue de moribus as “the greatest renewer and famous member of the Academy, which before him, languished” (summus nostris temporibus iacentis iampridem acchademiae excitator et illustrator), transformed Nesi into a Platonic fanatic. In the discourse De charitate of 1486, there is an impetuous page of praise of the Sun
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as “the solicitude of the angels, the doctrine of the archangels, and the sustenance of princes”; a fervent hymn to light, “a light that the darkness of my mind cannot comprehend”; and a thematic of the Platonic Eros in the exhortation to love. “Come, come all of you inside, with your lighted lamp and your nuptial vest! Together with the angelical choruses, full of ambrosia and nectar, divine cognition and fruition, you will happily live forever.” In the Oraculum de novo saeculo, completed in 1496, in which Pico is mentioned and Plato is counted among the Fathers of the Church, we found a vast poem in form of a vision (ms. “Riccard. 2722 and 2750”) that outlines in a third rhyme, with a poor Dantesque imitation, the Platonic thought. Benedetto Colucci da Pistoia was not a philosopher, but a rhetor, whose declamations well serve the purpose of delineating the attitude of Ficino and Ficinian circles in regard to some serious political situations, as the fight against the Turks and the Muslim religion. No philosophical works of Oliviero Arduino, a friend of Ficino of Peripatetic tendency, or Demetrio Calcondila, who followed the thought of Pletho, exist. Of Alamanno di Marchione Donati, we have Disputationes de intellectus voluntatisque excellentia ad venerandum patrem Guglielmum Caponium (Disputations on the excellence of intellect and will). Donati died in 1488 from a fall from his horse and was mourned by Ficino, whom Donati had defended against the attacks of Pulci. Donati exalts knowledge (wisdom) as the highest good of humankind, the good that makes humankind worthy of heaven and rich with serene joy: “Wisdom is an infinite treasure for humankind, since it makes us great friends and familiars of God.… Wisdom gives immortality to the human being, a mortal animal.… Wisdom fills the sad mortals with immense delight even on this earth” (Haec nos Deo familiares et amicissimos facit, quando sapientia est infinitus hominibus thesaurus…. Haec hominem, mortale animal, immortalitate donat.… Haec maestos etiam in terris mortales laetitia perfundit immensa). Publicly acknowledging of having derived his Platonic inspiration from Ficino, Giles of Viterbo, an Augustinian friar, a cardinal in 1517, who commented on the sentences of Peter Lombard, wrote works of cabalistic nature: We think that Marsilio Ficino was sent by the divine providence to clearly demonstrate that the mystical theology of Plato agrees in full with our religious institutions, of which it is even an anticipation. These are, O my Marsilio, the Saturnian kingdoms; this is the golden age so many times pre-announced by the Sibyl and the sages; this is the time of Plato, the time he foresaw for the splendid flowering of his studies (Factum est, ut divina providentia missum Marsilium Ficinum arbitremur, qui misticam Platonis theologiam nostris sacris institutis in primis consentaneam atque illorum previam declararet. Hec sunt, mi Marsili, Satunia regna, hec toties a Sibylla et vatibus etas aurea
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decantata, hec Platonis illa tempora, quibus fore praecinuit, ut sua quam optime studia nota fierent). Giles had studied in Padua, where he worked hard to try to understand Aristotle, searching anxiously the answer to the more grave questions on the soul. “I sweat to see if I could understand what Aristotle said, what the other sages thought about the life of the mortals, about divine matters, about the soul itself.” From it, Giles derived such adversion to Aristotelianism that he did not disdain to show it at every possible occasion. At every moment, in the letters, in Historia viginti saeculorum, he inveighs against Padua studium omnis impietatis et vitiis adversus religionem (the learning center of all impiety and vices against religion). In the “history of twenty centuries,” Giles tackled the “Paduan audacity,” which, “not satisfied with the Greek philosophers, has hired Barbarians and Arabs, and has published the writings of Averroès, the most impious of all teachers.” He inveighed against the Venetians, who were once the rampart of faith, but had now allowed that “for an excess of tolerance, the Paduan impious doctrines be accepted.” Plato and Ficino offered Giles new horizons. In Istria, Giles spent two years reading Plato, day and night. At Rome, he defended Platonic thought with success, which he shared with Ficino in a letter in dithyrambic terms: “I came to Rome and proposed some Platonic questions against the Aristotelians. I established the date of the battle and, at that day, many pugnacious warriors arrived. They set their camp ready for battle …” but the Platonic truth triumphed. Giles continued to proclaim such truth and preached it in Naples: “In Naples, I made known some wonderful Platonic mysteries.” In Naples, he had Pontano at his side and confirmed more clearly that truth with the cabala that, to his mind, was the only way to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of faith: “The Cabala alone treats divine things, but not by way of reason, as Dionysius did. We have been instructed in the Cabala by the oracles of God, not with those invented by human beings” (Cabala … una de divinis agit nominibus, not ut ratio demonstrat, quod fecit Dionysius, sed ut in hac, non hominum inventis, sed Dei oraculis eruditi sumus). With Giles of Viterbo apologetics was officially falling into the sphere of the Church. Perhaps it would be convenient to say that it was Ficinian Scholasticism, in terms of such Platonic enthusiasm, to justify in post-Tridentine epoch, a century later, the suspicious anti-Platonic reaction, of which the characteristic document is the chapter De caute legendo Platone (On the cautious reading of Plato) by Giovan Battista Crispo, in his De ethnicis philosophis caute legendis disputationes (Some observations on the cautious reading of gentile philosophers, Rome, 1594).
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11. Ludovico Lazzarelli The religious inspiration proper to the Ficinian movement curiously manifested itself in the hermetism of Ludovico Lazzarelli Septempedanus (from Sanseverino Marche), who lived in the second half of the fifteenth century, and was a disciple of Merula, a friend of Pontano, Paolo Marsi of Pescina, and especially of Platina. Lazzarelli composed a lot of poetry, almost completely unpublished like the Fasti Christianae religionis. The Bombyx, a short poem on the silkworm, published in 1756 at Aesii, is not without some philosophical reflections. Cabalist, alchemist, and astrologer, Lazzarelli was over all a fervent apostle of hermetism. Under the pseudo-name of Enoch, Lazzarelli published a strange Epistola de admiranda ac portendenti apparitione novi atque divini prophetae ad omne humanum genus (Announcement of the admirable and miraculous apparition of the new divine prophet to whole humankind), in which he narrated about Johannes Mercurius de Corigio (Giovanni Mercurio), who on 11 April 1484 went throughout the streets of Rome bizarrely dressed preaching the hermetic renovatio. Lazzarelli translated also the Definitiones Asclepii, and dedicated to Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Naples, a dialogue, Crater Hermetis (posthumously published in 1505), in which the doctrines of Trimegistus are presented and praised in verses and prose. The human soul is light of God; through the beam that descends from God to the human being, and from the human being can return to God. The human being can find in itself the power of becoming citizen of the heavenly city: Addressing myself to the inner and substantial human being within you who are almost son to God, I will call you with immense love, with these words of Hermes: ‘Remember, O human being, remember, God the father, from which the human being is born, is light and life. If you were to understand that you are made of light and life, you would be jumping into that light and life (Rivolgendomi in te all’uomo interiore e sostanziale, quasi figlio di Dio, ti chiameró con amore immenso con queste parole di Ermete: ricordati, uomo, ricordati, luce e vita é Dio padre da cui l’uomo é nato. Se dunque tu comprenderai che sei fatto di luce e di vita, tu balzerai alla luce e alla vita). And again: Well then, O my mind, now think / of the greatest miracles: / who did everything from nothing? / The Word alone of God the Father. / Blessed be / the Word of the father; all things say praises / to the Word. / Who made the heavens shine / with light that will govern with its eternal / motions the course of things? / The mind alone originating from God. / Blessed be Pimander. / O image of the mind, / O mind, / celebrate the mind. / Who made this sun so shining / at the image of the
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divine light / that establishes the degrees of inquisitive power? / The light alone that flows from the father. / Blessed be / the generating light of the Father, / my light, / celebrate the light that is your mother. / Who has regulated that the moon / and the other stars receive the mutual / radiance from the sun? / The God that gives light to everything else. / Blessed be / the origin of light. / Let all the stars / sing a hymn! (Eia, mens mea, cogita / nunc miracula maxima: / quis fecit nihilo omnia? / Solus sermo Dei patris. / Sit benedictus /sermo parentis, omnia laudes / dicite Verbo. / Quis caelo rutilas faces / aeternis vicibus dedit / ut rerum varient vices? / Mens sola exoriens Deo. / Ergo Pimander /sit benedictus. / Mentis imago, / mens, cane mentem. / Quis solem hunc nitidum sacrae / fecit lucis imaginem / scrutandi statuens gradus? / Lux sola ex patre defluens. / Sit benedictus / lux Patris alma, / lux mea, matrem / concine lucem. / Quis lunam et reliquas poli / stellas sumere mutuum / a sole instituit iubar? / Dans lucem reliquis Deus. / Sit benedicta / lucis origo. / Hymnica cantent / quaelibet astra). 12. Cristoforo Landino and Lorenzo de’ Medici In a note sent to Bartolomeo Scala, Marsilio Ficino wrote: “I read the Quaestiones camaldulenses of Cristoforo Landino. In these books, he is as profound as Virgil, as perfect as Cicero, and describes in the most felicitous way a happy man.… But why am I so brief, in the praise of Cristoforo, O Marsilio?” Ficino had dedicated to Landino the lost Institutiones, but Landino was the one who helped and counseled Ficino during the time of his first Platonic steps and, thereafter, was many times the faithful and clear expositor of the great Platonist. Landino lived between 1424 and 1498, was a poet of some respect, a commentator of Dante and Virgil, the Platonic poet of Marsilio, to unveil their hidden philosophical meanings. In the prologue to his commentary on Petrarch, after reviewing the history of the Florentine literature from Dante onward, he evidenced the need for the study of language and the importance of eloquence: Language, the admirable divine gift … could from the beginning unite human beings—who were at the guise of beasts without customs and laws, and lived in woods and caves—in an orderly community, and so united submit them to a just rule of life. What the poets intended to say when they narrated that Orpheus with the lyre tamed wild beasts, moved stones and silva, and stop the flow of the rivers, was nothing else than that Orpheus with his gentle speech could convert to a civil life the human beings, who were almost as stones senseless to virtue, angry and violent in the pleasures of the body ([Il linguaggio] ammirabile dono e divino … poté da principio gli uomini, i quali a guisa di fiere senza costumi, senza leggi, e che boschi e spilonche abitavano, in un ceto et congregazione raunare, e raunati al giusto vivere sottomet-
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Humanitas, as the education of human beings, possesses here again the “civil” tone of Bruni. After this, Landino would give himself to the exposition with oratorical grace of the Platonic truths as he did in the comment to Dante, where he cited his dialogues De nobilitate animae, dedicated to Ercole d’Este. These dialogues are of an expositive and historical nature, conciliating and eclectic, instead of constructive: I present my books not because I am arrogant and esteem myself better than others, but because in these books are gathered many things together that cannot be found in other books. I have brought together the Platonic with the Aristotelian and Stoic disciplines, and put all of them in a rapport with the Christian truth. In my narration of these disciplines, I have discarded all the thorny argumentations of dialectic, presenting them with an oratorical style as perspicuous and open as possible, in a form that is easily understood by laymen, even if they are not learned in letters, and not only by persons with expertise in philosophy. In the dialogues, supposedly of 1453, to which participated, a short time before his death, also Carlo Marsuppini, in addition to a historical analysis, we find the usual motives: the conversion of the soul to itself, and the ascension from spiritual inner dimension to God, the native light of the mind, through which the mind sees itself and things. The Disputationes camaldulenses are of 1475, and were supposedly held in 1468, in the presence of Landino together with Pietro and Donato Acciaiuoli, Rinuccini, Marco Parenti, Ficino, Canigiani, Alberti, and Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. In the problem discussed, on whether the superior life is the active or the contemplative, is implicit the passage from the first period of the fifteenth century to the second. This work, although it inclines in favor of the fusion of the two motives, is a manifest of Ficinian Platonism, ascetic and substantially pessimistic, in the face of the celebrations of a mundane humanity, occupied in a civic life of the kind so dear to the generation of Salutati. In the first book of the disputationes, the conclusion is eclectic: I have scrutinized everything and saw that the human being is so far removed from being a pure spirit that, on the contrary, it is so absolutely impossible for it to disregard the body. The human being is made in such a manner that it wants to have with others a bond of love and an ardent desire for knowledge. I will judge the human being that embraces both kinds of life, values them correctly, and unifies them, as
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being the true human being. A person must give to the active life as much as the mortal exigencies and the social bond require, it must give as much as the love for the country demands. It should give itself to speculation and remember that humans were born for it, allowing only as much as human fragility claims. The human being must inquire in order to obtain the supreme good; it will act to drive away troubles, its and those of its own.… Martha and Mary are sisters; they live under the same roof. They both please God, Martha because she feeds and Mary because she is fed. Martha and Mary are both good, but one is laborious, the other inactive, not in the way that labor would generate excess, or leisure and indolence. Work itself inclines toward the primacy of wisdom. The supreme goodness, in the second book of the Disputationes camaldulenses, is the ascension to God through contemplation. In the third and fourth books, Virgil is called upon as the guidance to pure vision: We will unite with Martha in order not to fail our human obligations; but even more we will unite with Mary so that our soul could be nourished with ambrosia and nectar. In this way, little by little, we will ascend to the knowledge of God. The person who ignores that in the knowledge of God is our supreme goodness ignores itself and its origin. When I consider the changing motions and the tempests in our life, so similar to a stormy sea, I judge extremely difficult to reach the ultimate good, unless we find refuge in the knowledge of the true, as in a most peaceful haven. This, though proclaimed in the profound sentences of all philosophers, at least of those deserving this name, has been described by two most wise poets, Homer and Virgil, in admirable images, at least for those who acutely would understand them. This is the special motive why the reading of Homer and Virgil delights me. In this passage, the longing for a poetic theology, which Pico will try afterward to construct on the footsteps of those Neo-Platonists so often celebrated by Ficino, is clearly presented. The De vera nobilitate imagines the portrayal of a banquet that was held after the death of Cosimo de’ Medici. At the presence of the most conspicuous exponents of the Florentine culture: we could see Ficino, Alberti, Argyropoulos, Politian, Philothymus and Aretophylus discussing another time the old theme on the origin of nobility, whether nobility comes from birth or virtue. There is a strong humane tone in the pages where Landino insists on the equality of nature, to which only virtue can add some difference: Nature, indeed, the common mother of all, produces the patricians and the plebeians, whose bodies are all constituted with the same elements, are nourished with the same aliments, and grow in the same way. Same
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From here, an interesting contraposition is discovered between the Venetians, as artificers of themselves, and the Neapolitans, old and firmly rooted in their feudal and close tradition; the exaltation of the Florentines, and the reference to Dante, who placed as well nobility in virtue. Notable is the evaluation of wealth, not for itself, but as the sign of an industrious activity that found in money the tangible indication of success, “I am of the opinion that anyone who has amassed great wealth through rare artistic abilities and virtues has duly merited the title of noble. He deserved the title of nobility, not because he has become rich, but because of the good arts through which he has become rich” (Si quis magnis egregiisque artibus atque virtutibus magnam auri vim sibi comparaverit, non quia pecunia adeptus sit, sed quia illas bonis sit artibus adeptus, nobilem appellandum censeo). The conclusion is once more Neo-Platonic; the virtue that exalts the human beings and makes them noble is not the virtue of Platina, which is found in the builders of cities, but the one that Platonically raises the human beings toward God. In ms. “Corsin. 433, ff. 71–72,” we may read this conclusion: Free first from the most serious sins by means of the civil virtues, cleansed for having washed away the minor faults of the soul by way of those virtues of purification known to the Platonists, at last having sharpened the acuity of ingenuity, which is not possible except for a mind wholly already purified, the Platonists would be able to see with their aquiline and correct intuition those things which the others, blinded by excess of splendor, cannot see. This, I dare to say, is true nobility. This is the unique generosity of that soul that nature did not derive from matter, but God omnipotent, most wise God, the God burning with love, created from nothing and not from his breath.… He created this soul at his image and similitude to such a point that, though from the beginning he included it into the darkened prison of the body; he endowed it with the force to evade from such iniquitous corporeal prison, even when still living. After recuperating the wings that Plato imagined, this soul would be able to abandon all the baseness of this inferior world. Carried by the rowing of the wings through the superior elements, the soul will arrive at the conspect of the moon, where it will take on its proper nature. The soul’s form that was partially deformed by its contact with the mortality of the body will be reformed through the enjoyment of the divine vision. The soul will at last
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recuperate the nobility that was innate. If we, during our residence in this mortal life, will keep aiming at this ideal of nobility (image, simulachrum) with all the industry that our body would allow, than we will be rightly called nobles, for this reason alone and no other. No longer have we sensed the Socratic tone, but the Plotinian classification of the virtues, made common by Macrobius, repeated by Ficino, in an atmosphere far removed from the industrious significance of the earthly life, so characteristic of Alberti and Palmieri. Ficinian Hermetism and Platonism are found throughout the poetry of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who moves from the sensual celebration of life and earthly love to the singing of the hermetic hymns, of Boethius, and of Marsilio Ficino, in a poetic vest. Ficinian is Lorenzo’s Altercazione; hermetic are the religious chapters of the work; the relation between Martha and Mary is identical to the one present in Landino and Ficino: As you can see Martha is not the one, who can quench our thirst, but the water asked from the maid of Samaria is and drink of it: let’s follow Mary, who at the sacred foot is without soliciting, but in tranquility. (Come vedete Marta non è quella, Che spegner possa nostra lunga sete, ma l’acqua chiesta dalla femminella Samaritana e di quella bevete: seguiam Maria, che presso al santo piede non sollicita stassi, ma in quiete). And again Ficinian, though much more ancient than Ficino, is the proclaimed superiority of love: We contemplate the abyss of the divine infinity almost in a fog, though the soul keeps an eye fixed, but we love with a perfect true love. Him, who knows God, God attracts to Himself, Loving we rise up to his loftiness. (Della divina infinità l’abisso quasi per una nebbia contempliamo, benché l’alma vi tenga l’occhio fisso ma d’un perfetto e vero amor l’amiamo. Quel che conosce Dio, Dio a sé tira; mando alla sua altezza c’innalziamo).
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The soul full of love breaks all barriers and dissolves itself in God: “The human being is transformed into God by love, And above the God it saw, it expands” (Però che amando si converte in Dio, / e sopra Dio veduto si dilate).
Thirteen THE ARISTOTELIANS 1. The Averroists. Urbano of Bologna. Zaccaria of Parma While a new cultural orientation was conquering the spirits and affirming itself as the victor in every field of knowledge since Petrarch’s time, the academic tradition was continuing discussions that were not always idle or completely different from those that were troubling the thinkers moving outside of the universities and the religious schools. Extremely different was instead the language, which was such that it resulted almost incomprehensible to the noninitiated. Many philosophical currents that dominated within the principal religious orders, with the exception of the Franciscans, were mostly inclined to the examination of and comment on Aristotle. Aristotle had continuously reigned as the textbook for the teaching of philosophy in the great centers of learning of Northern Italy, at Padua and Bologna, but it would be erroneous to imagine that everywhere, in the many different currents, unity of intention and interests existed. If it is true that the physicians, who educated themselves on the writings of Averroès and Avicenna, and perhaps Maimonides, were almost all inclined to a generic Aristotelianism with an Averroistic venation; if the astrologers were under the influence of al-Kindi, Albumasar, and Ibn Ezra; if on the discussions on the soul, and in general on physics, the Commentator was ideally always present; nevertheless, in the questions of logic, the learned scholars of Oxford, the Ockhamist logic, and the numerous sophists exercised the strongest influence. The classic work of Joseph-Ernest Renan on Averroism has crystallized too much the attention on a group of problems and thinkers, transforming the history of the official Italian philosophy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century into a history of the question on the intellect. One of the writings of Niccoletto Vernia, perhaps the most famous Paduan Aristotelian of the fifteenth century, the quaestio an dentur universalia realia (whether real universals exist), was printed in 1492 together with the comment on Aristotle’s Physics by Urbano of Bologna of the Religious Order of the Servites. Antonio Alabanti, the General of the Order, discovered this manuscript all dusty and worm-eaten in the library of Bologna and sent it to Vernia for a review. Alabanti understood the value of the work and wrote about it on 7 May 1492 to Vernia asking for his opinion in regard to an even-
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tual publication. Vernia approved the printing of the work, and identified also the text of the Physics as the one contained in two large codices of the library of San Giovanni in Verdara, from which a copy was made in Bologna in 1456 at the request of Giovanni Marcanova. Marcanova annotated the text so abundantly that the work was even attributed to him in the copy of the manuscript passed to the Marciana Library (“lat., 104–1815”). Friar Urbano was known as one of the major scholars responsible for the renewed interest for Averroès within academic circles, since the time when, in Bologna, being already advanced in age, he began the exposition of the opinions of the Commentator on the Physics, intending thereafter to continue with the de caelo, if his health would allow. This should not exaggeratedly impress, because the comment of Averroès in the questions merely of natural philosophy was followed without any restriction in every academic milieu, and even the most hostile to his “metaphysical” theories were recognizing in the Arab a most wise inquirer of nature. In regard to the date of the composition of the comment of Urbano, in the prologue of the edition of 1492 it is stated that the work started the first of April 1334. But the only Servite teacher in Bologna by the name of Urbano lived between the end of the fourteenth century and the first four decades of the fifteenth, so that it was decided to correct the date to 1434. A wider discourse on the development of the fourteenth century Averroism in Bologna among the masters of the arts could be quite useful. A new research after the studies of Martin Grabmann, Sofia Vanni Rovighi, Emil Ermatinger, and the quick remarks of Renan would be welcome. Renan limited himself to cite Eloquentiae latinae didascalus and De tempore et motu contra Averoym of Zaccaria of Parma, leaving out the work on rhetoric, Theorica temptativa, of the same Zaccaria. The importance of Paolo Nicoletti of Udine, of the Augustinian Friars, is different. He was commonly known as Paolo Veneto, whom in 1390 the General of the Order, Bartolomeo of Venice, sent to Oxford to study. He died in 1429, in Padua, while he was giving a course of lessons on the soul. One of his disciples, friar Matteo of Ripalta from Piacenza, gave us notice of Paolo’s death in one note of his diary. In those times, in Italy, Paolo Veneto became famous as the prince of philosophers.… While he was illustrating at the fortunate Paduan center of learning this work of a divine instead of human intelligence, as he completed the explanation of the chapter on taste, the impious death suddenly took him away, depriving this splendid world of his great light. It was the 15 June of the mentioned year, when the reddish dawn was dispelling the resplendent stars from the sky. Let his fame continue for posterity. Many of the numerous manuscripts, which together with a few printed editions preserve his works, show the traces of his fame in annotations in which
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his doctrine is praised. In a codex at the Marciana of Venice, Paolo’s Paduan disputes of 1411 with his rival Antonio of Urbino are mentioned and his attacks to his as well famous fellow-friar Giles of Rome are made public: “The teacher tries to explain the dubious passages / of Aristotle, but wherever he can he picks on Giles” (Doctor Aristotelis dubios exponere sensus / audet, et Aegidium carpit ubique potest). Elsewhere, it is noticed: “The person who wishes to commit even to a failing memory / the divine volumes of Aristotle, should read often / what the industrious Paolo has gathered all together / with a synopsis of an admirable order” (Quisquis Aristotelis divina volumina tandem / vult bene vel fragili credere memoriae, / saepius iste legat brevibus quae Paulus in unum / congessit miris sedulus ordinibus). In addition to Padua, Paolo Veneto went to Florence, Perugia, Siena, Parma, and Bologna to teach and discuss. He was a great disputant, and many extant documents have been passed on to us about one of his public discussions in Bologna, on the soul, with Niccolò Fava. Fava, in that occasion, was helped by an adversary of Paolo, a certain Ugo Benzi of Siena, who was born in 1370 and died perhaps in Ferrara in 1439. Praised by Pletho, Benzi wrote Delle passioni dell’anima and comments Super libros Techni of Galen and on the Canon of Avicenna, revealing to be directly dependent from the Avicennian psychology. As for Fava, he was celebrated “as equal to Aristotle as to Plato” (compar Aristoteli comparque Platoni), was a professor of physical and moral logic in Bologna, famous at his time for Aristotelian doctrine, and who died in 1439. We know that Filelfo, who wrote to Fava some letters, loved to discuss problems of morality with him. Paolo Veneto, in 1408, composed from the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle a Summa naturalium. Of 1409 are the comment on the Physics, and the vast comment on De anima. As far as the logic concerns, in 1496 in Padua the decision was made that logic should be the required course of studies and Paolo’s Logica parva became one of the most popular manuals used in Italy. He briefly presented it, in the following way: Looking at the length of many books so annoying for the students, and also at those of such a brevity that little learning exists, I decided to take the wise middle course between the extremes, and have prepared a compendium for the youngsters, composed with several treatises: The first treatise gives information about the summulae; the second explains the matter of the suppositions; the third shows the doctrine of consequences; the fourth examines the probative force of terms; the fifth teaches the obligatory rule of connections; the sixth offers the art and the way of resolving the insoluble; the seventh raises the question on the first premise and solution; the eighth reinforces the middle term with an argument.
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The Logica magna, his fundamental work, has been recently judged by I. M. Bochénski as “the greatest systematic work of formal logic produced by the Middle Ages,” not “a work merely literary, but a pure logic, written in a language both clear and tight.” The work is divided into two books: the first treats the “terms”; the second, the “propositions,” but including also the doctrine of the “consequences” and the syllogisms. Full of explicit references to contemporary discussions, the work of Paolo Veneto constitutes a true summa of the formal logic of the fourteenth century. To demonstrate the interest this work generated, it would be enough to analyze the significatio of the “term” and the “proposition.” The proposition has as a semantic correlate a real fact, or a psychic act, or an objective content, or, simply, what the parts of the proposition already mean. All that resulted from long discussions found in Paolo a precise systematization. In any case, if it would be unjust to reproach the radical refusals of the “new” dialecticians of humanistic formation vis-à-vis the complex and elaborated pages of Paolo Veneto, it would be also unjust not to research the meaning and the value of the condemnation and rejection of men like Valla. These new dialecticians had different intents; their attention was directed toward diverse fields: a theory of rhetorical argumentation, a “topic,” and a general doctrine of method. Touched by “moral” and “political” interests, these scholars cared for the logic of the moral world: the passions, the expression of the passions, the ways of “winning” the passions, equilibrating and tempering them. They took a different direction in the consideration of words and speech: not toward a sign, “abstract” to the extreme, but toward the soldering between the term used and the motion of the spirit that expresses itself in the term. For these thinkers, language and its articulations are real; it is the language of people whose actions are words in their speech: writers, orators, and scientists. No movement exists in these thinkers toward a typical language, an ideal form with normative value. “Logic” and “method” are researched in the discourse “historically” real: for medicine, in the discourse present in the
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work of the physician; for physics, in the discourse present in the experiments of the physicist; for writing and rhetoric, in the capture of sounds and images to be manifested in speech and written form by writers, orators, and poets. Obviously, and this was their merit and their ability, the strong point of the humanists was the moral world, the human world: that of politics, ethics, art, and general history. It was from these areas, where their proceedings functioned, that they began the battle. And they went to the bottom of this, on “real” grounds, succeeding to make manifest the limits and the insufficiencies of existing more subtle “formal” researches, defeating them even on the ground of the method of the sciences of nature. A scholar may deal ironically in this regard as much as it wishes, as Bochénski did with Valla, who was certainly inferior to Paolo Veneto as a “logician.” When we were to recognize that the critiques of Descartes are of the same kind than those of Valla and similarly “ridicule,” then it would perhaps be necessary to recognize that the fecundity of human research has not always followed the lines of development of “formal” logic. 2. Paolo Veneto, Ugo Benzi, and Niccolò Fava The comment of Paolo Veneto on the soul, De anima, opens with a characteristically Aristotelian praise of contemplative life and theoretical philosophy: “As the Sun in the eclipse, so the human intellect never retrogresses, never stops, always advances in the rays of science” (Ut Sol sub signorum eclyptica, sic humanus intellectus numquam retrogradus, numquam stationarius, sed sub scientiae radiis semper directus). Happy were the times when kings cultivated science and were inspired by philosophy, “guide of life, inquirer of virtue, inventor of laws, and teacher of customs and wisdom.” Under the pen of Paolo, the names of the Commentator and of the Holiest Trinity are combined: “With the help of divine grace, I will make my exposition in the name of the One who lives and reigns in perfect Trinity” (Divina favente gratia expositurus sum ego in nomine Illius qui in Trinitate perfecta vivit et regnat). In the course of the exposition the thesis is bitterly discussed that denies the separation of the agent intellect and claims that the agent intellect is identified with God (nec aliqua intelligentia, praeter primam quae Deus est, potuit esse intellectus agens), in a doctrine supposedly proper of Aristotle and Averroès. The Commentator and probably Siger of Brabant were accepted, attenuated, but freely discussed and professed at the University of Padua. In addition and not less than the discussions on the soul, into which doctrines of Averroistic tendencies were insinuating themselves, between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, clever discussions on logic, already become the despotic tyrant in the fields of physic and even medicine, were domineering in the universities. Philosophy and theology—was exclaiming Petrarch in De remediis utriusque fortunae—have become the palestra of garrulous dialecticians: “Professors of this science of theology once existed; … today, profane and loquacious dialecticians have denigrated this sacred name. Philosophers
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have been reduced to a verbose and empty dialectic” (Erant olim huius scientiae [theologiae] professores; hodie … sacrum nomen profani et loquaces dialectici dehonestant … Philosophi … ad verbosam nudamque dialecticam sunt redacti). Boccaccio, Salutati, and Bruni spoke no differently. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Epistles, num. 163) would not hesitate to place in the preeminence of dialectic the reason of the aridity of the official culture: “All learning is now in cataloging and vain cavilling” (omne studium in elenchis est vanisque cavillationibus). The polemic of the humanists invested not only the wide diffusion of the researches of formal logic that the English had so vivaciously alimented, but the whole problematic into which were flowing the discussions of the physicists. Between fourteenth and fifteenth century the effort of calculating quantitatively the variations of quality, and not of quality and physical forces alone, but also of the “spiritual” ones, was pivotal. The discussions were about the problem of intensio (tension) and remissio (remission) of the forms, of latitudo formarum (the extent of application of forms), words used as the titles of the small treatises that the Augustinian friar Jacopo of San Martino, called Jacopo of Naples, compiled from the major works of Nicole Oresme. These were the same problems of Gregory of Rimini, the famous calculationes suisethicae of Richard Swineshead (Suiseth), the subtleties of William Heytesbury (Entisber), in regard to which the humanists reacted with derision and sarcasm. Some peoples disregarding the reaction of the humanists succeeded in the print and diffusion in Pavia, Padua, and Venice of the Opus aureum calculationum anglici doctoris Ricardi Suiseth (Golden Book of calculation of the English Doctor Richard Suiset), the Sophismata, and other writings of Entisber. As the Parisian physicists tried to overcome the difficulties of Aristotelian physics in the sphere of the problems of motion, making manifest the aporias, to the point of crisis of the fundaments themselves, so the logicians of Oxford attempted to mathematize the processes of thought, by means of an assimilation of the “terms” of the discourse to numerical symbols and to mathematical operations. The humanists were reacting against all this, underlying the sterility instead of the abstractness of the logical framework of the English “sophists.” The humanists had often an easy game: the proceedings, born on the ground of a nascent mathematical physics, which were used for the calculation of motion, risked appearing paradoxical, if applied directly to the physiological, psychological, and medical fields. The degree of “intensity” of divine grace, or of a disease, were calculated through the hypothesis of uniform processes of increase and intensity, and of intermediate degrees that always exist between given limits. The physicians look for the point at which the disease would become health, and, vice versa, how, through the remissio of health, we arrive to the disease.
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It was, in short, all a process of disintegration by absurdity of the world of “forms” and “qualities”; but it was a complicated and subtle process, of which to get rid of it in its totality by exposing its absurdities was easier than to penetrate it in its exigency. The same problem, on the other hand, faced the humanists who ridiculed the cavillatores without always being aware that a treatment of the fallacies and antinomies of the discourse was surely licit at the side of “topic” and the art of argumentation that they extremely enjoyed. In any case, beside the humanists, who were often Aristotelian in their ways, witnesses to the complexity of the cultural situation were Biagio Pelacani of Parma, Jacopo of Forlí, Gaetano of Thiene, Bernardo Torni, Apollinare Offredi, and Giovanni Marliano. These men filled up with their presence and thought all the academic centers of the fifteenth century and influenced Niccoletto Vernia, Giovanni Pico, Agostino Nifo, Alessandro Achillini, and even Pietro Pomponazzi. 3. Biagio Pelacani and Gaetano of Thiene A contemporary of Paolo Veneto was Biagio Pelacani of Parma. A graduate of the University of Pavia, he was professor of astrology in Bologna and moved, until his death that came in 1416, between the schools of Pavia, Padua, and Bologna, being most renowned and nonetheless deserted by students. He, too, began from the latitudo formarum attributed to Oresme to arrive to determine the intensity of intermediate degrees in a uniformly progressive variation that started from zero (a non gradu). This method became characteristic in a colleague of Pelacani, Iacopo of Forlí, who was a physician famous for his comments on Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, but in these commentaries Iacopo made the arguzie (witty remarks) of Gentile of Foligno, a celebrated cavillator of the fourteenth century, more complex. We have a sample of how Iacopo applied the calculationes to Galen: “Let us assume that Socrates goes from A, which is the extreme degree of his health, to C that is the extreme degree of the nearest disease. Let us accept B as the degree equidistant from A and C. It is evident that before reaching B Socrates will reach the intermediate disposition between A and B, etc.” Having assumed the continuous graduality of forms, the processes of the logic of calculationes were applied indifferently to the motion of something heavy, to heat, to fever, or to divine grace. When the sophismata of Heytesbury became united with the calculationes suisethicae, the arguzie in the universities reached the maximum of virtuosity. A magister from Messina started to comment on the de tribus praedicamentis of Heytesbury. His work was taken over and completed by Gaetano of Thiene, from Vicenza, a disciple of Paolo Veneto, for many years professor at Padua, where he died quite famous in 1465. Gaetano’s comments on the sophisms of Heytesbury will be followed by an analogous one compiled by Simone of Lendinara. Angelo of Fossombrone, always on the tracks of the English logician, composed a Tractatus de velocitate motus (treatise on
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the speed of motion), which generated a reply from Bernardo Torni of Florence, who died in 1500. In this treatise, Iacopo of Forlí and Angelo of Fossombrone are analyzed and the notice is given of a discussion between Giovanni Marliano and Apollinare Offredi. Offredi was the same Giovan Pietro Apollinare Offredi of Cremona, dear to Eugenius IV, and author of a discussion on the soul, quaestio de anima. In 1444, Filippo Maria Visconti questioned him on how the soul could be saved (pro salute animae), to which Offredi answered, “Through our faith and a true and firm piety” (pro fidei nostre vero solidoque cultu). At about the middle of the century, the same Offredi had a discussion concerning the first and the last instant of life (de primo et ultimo instanti) with the famous logician Pietro degli Alboini of Mantua, a student of Paolo Veneto, but also friendly with Coluccio Salutati, and the author of a text in logic that dominated in the schools throughout the whole fifteenth century. As for Gaetano of Thiene we know that he found in the writings of the Calculatores a sharp essay on the reaction of qualities reciprocally opposed, of the heat on the cold, and of the dry on the humid. From this were born a treatise on the tension and remission of forms (Tractatus de intensione et remissione formarum) and another on reactions or physical responses (tractatus de reactione), which caused some critical observations of Giovanni Marliano, the physician of Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Marliano died in Milan in 1483 and authored, among other things, a very subtle question about the progression of motions within velocity (Quaestio subtilissima de proportione motuum in velocitate). These are themes that reappear in the first writings of Achillini and in the first works of Pomponazzi. It is the problem of velocity, of the law of motion uniformly accelerated and delayed, and of instantaneous motion. It is the effort for the solution of problems of physics and medicine in terms of the most “modern” researches of formal logic. When we see the large quantity of works of logic by physicians and physicists, from Bianchelli Mengo of Faenza to Oliviero of Siena, to Iacopo Ricci of Arezzo, to Alessandro Sermoneta, to Benedetto Vettori of Faenza, to Bernardino di Pietro de’ Landucci of Siena, to Stefano del Monte, professor in Pavia, to Giovanni of Casale, we find ourselves facing the extreme subtlety of a reduction of science to logical calculus, to the effort of resolving every question by way of logic, after having mutated logic into a calculus. The problems of the intensio and remissio of forms, of their latitudo, which had a precise meaning on the physic level, when they became the point of departure of an artificial casuistry extended to all the knowable, with which to understand the gradation of sin, the mortal distinction, the differences of the intelligences, deserved the diffidence, not only of the humanists, but even of Pomponazzi, who in the questions on reaction (de reactione) reproved the English logicians for having raised useless and truly insoluble questions.
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We are captivated by this attempt of reaching in a purely logical way a system capable of penetrating the whole reality. Perhaps, it was not by pure chance that Pico della Mirandola, who individuated in the cabala a divine language, suffered much time through the study of calculations of the English logicians. The humanistic accusation of a radical sterility still remained: it was addressed to this logic, a fictitious language, which possessed the artificious mechanism of Lull’s art, but whose nominalistic foundation condemned to an essential contradiction when it pretended to give a value of real knowledge to its own combinations. After this, convinced humanists came to formulate in place of a species of mathematical logic, a kind of “grammatical” logic tied to the analysis of languages historically determined, and to the study of scientific discourses (or artistical) as they can be found concretized in (actual) works of great scientists (or artists). 4. Scotists and Thomists. Giorgio Valla and Niccoletto Vernia. The Southern Culture: Pontano and Galateo This is not the place to follow the discussions that under the pressure of the logical terminists agitated the traditional schools of Scotists and Thomists. We are not going to examine the writings of Nicholaus Bonetus, professor at Venice, whose metaphysics was often discussed by William de Vaurouillon in the comments on Lombard. We are not going to consider the works of Pietro dall’Aquila, called Scotellus, or of Franciscus Lychetus of Brescia, who we opposed Nifo, or of Paulus Pergulensis (Paolo della Pergola), or of Paolo Barbo of Soncino. A special place could be assigned to the Franciscan Scotist Antonio Trombetta, who died in 1518. He is known for his opposition to the Averroistic theses on the intellect in a quaestio de animarum pluralitate contra Averroym et sequaces, in studio Patavino determinate. He started this work in 1492 in defense of the decree of Bishop Pietro Barozzi, and published it in Venice in 1498. Trombetta’s work on formalities constituted the center of the discussion between Scotists and Thomists and became a quite popular school manual. Trombetta observed, “In regard to the formalities, the discussion between Thomists and Scotists must be reduced to this standpoint: every distinction is of reality or of reason” (Circa formalitates est una propositio disputanda inter Thomistas et Scotistas, videlicet omnis distinctio est aut realis aut est rationis). The Scotist definition of formalitas as “an objective reason under which a thing whatever, by the nature of the thing itself, can be conceived or expressed with an idea” (ratio obiectiva, sub qua unaquaeque res, ex natura rei, concipi potest) brought students to the conclusion that the science of formalities was metaphysics, in so far as metaphysics alone considers the categories of being, its distinctions and identities (divisiones entis, et eiusdem distinctiones et identitates). All this complex of researches, yet to be explored, had to be mentioned in order to remind how the academic teaching, in which the representatives of the various traditional tendencies were involved beside the Nominalists, could
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not be constrained within the limits of the discussions on the soul and the intellect, nor contracted to logico-physical disputations, as Pierre Duhem tended to do. In order to understand thinkers like Pico della Mirandola, or humanists like Ermolao Barbaro, we cannot leave out of consideration scientific, physical, medical, and astrological investigations or dialectic. Gian Francesco Pico reminded us that his famous uncle was most learned in “captious phrases and cavils of the sophists and Entisber’s nonsenses, called calculations” (captiunculae cavillique sophistarum et suisethicae quisquiliae, quae calculationes vocantur). He immediately added that the calculationes, in the case of his uncle, were “mathematical considerations applied to very difficult problems of physics” (hae mathematicae commentationes sunt, subtilioribus ne dixerim an morosioribus excogitationibus naturalibus applicatae). Then, he observed that the value of these considerations was merely formal and sophistical, not at all suitable for the search of “truth.” We know that Barbaro formulated six questions on the tension and remission of forms (quaestiones de intensione et remissione formarum), and also, from two of his letters of 1488, that he too enjoyed at a certain time the suisethicae calculationes and that at Pavia these calculationes were the most debated questions. It was in that environment that Ermolao started to enjoy the subtleties of the calculationes, in that university that offered regular courses on “sophisms.” He too wrote a brief essay (lucubratiuncula) in which he boasted of having finally exposed in good Latin “some sophistical nonsenses and Entisber’s worthless sentences, commonly called cavils” (sophisticas quisquilias et suisethica inania, quae vulgo cavillationes vocantur). In this the fact can be recognized that the new grammatical and linguistic analysis could meet with the logical research, and that even an anti-Averroistic attitude (like the one of Barbaro) did not mean necessarily a limitation imposed on the academic culture. A clear example of this is Giorgio Valla, a friend of Barbaro, who was a professor at Pavia, thereafter at Milan where he met Leonardo, and finally at Venice, in 1484. In his vast encyclopedia on things to be accepted or rejected, De expetendis et fugiendis rebus, published posthumously in 1501, Valla showed himself a ferocious adversary of Averroès (barbarus … ineptissimus lurcho, putidique cerebri e luto effossus), but also a sincere estimator of the physics and logic of the Nominalists, full of scientific interests, learned and expert in Archimedes’s studies and ancient mathematicians. Averroism is a term too generic and vague to be suitable for a characterization of philosophical motives that go from Thomistic residues to Scotistic positions, from the logic of Oxford to the Parisian physics not at all Averroistic, from the reviviscent interest for Gregory of Rimini, offered in a new edition by Genazano, to Giles of Viterbo, to the always alive intervention of Siger of Brabant. Even if we were to stop at the consideration of the universities of Northern Italy and call with the generic name of Averroism the unprejudiced attitude of the major Peripatetics, beside an interest much alive for psychological problems, we should still admit an equally important movement of
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thought preoccupied with logico-physical questions, and linked to Parisian or Oxonian presuppositions. A studious admirer of Averroès was Niccoletto Vernia of Chieti, who studied in Padua with Paolo della Pergola and Gaetano of Thiene, and then taught at that university from 1465 to the end of the century. His rivals at the same school were Pietro Trapolino, disciple of the famous Thomist Francesco Securo of Nardò (called Neritone); Pietro Roccabonella, also a disciple of Gaetano of Thiene; and Sermoneta. On the witnessing of Nifo, we know that Vernia composed a treatise de intellectu of a such open Averroistic flavor that Bishop Pietro Barozzi, together with the inquisitor friar Martino of Lendinara, on 4 May 1489, emanated a decree against all those discussing the unity of the intellect (contra disputantes de unitate intellectus). reminding philosophers that they should never forget of being Christian, Barozzi and friar Martino claimed: Those who debate the issue of the unity of the intellect, they do that with the major intention of suppressing the prizes for virtue and the punishment for vices, so that they could more freely commit any sort of crimes (Eos qui de unitate intellectus disputant, ob eam potissimum causam disputare quod, sublatis ita tum premiis virtutum, tum vero suppliciis vitiorum, existimant se liberius maxima queque flagitia posse committere). Bishop and inquisitor concluded by warning not to teach Averroistic theses under the pain of excommunication, supporting their threat with the mentioning that Averroès was a known criminal who had killed Avicenna, King of Bitinia. Perhaps in consequence of this, Vernia, meeting with Politian in 1491, began the negotiations for a teaching position in Pisa. Politian without indications of sympathy wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici: Niccoletto would like to come to Pisa, at the condition of receiving a benefice, one of the canonry. He has good fame in Padua and good attendance of students. Know that, if I am not mistaken, he is one of those strange and queer teachers (Niccoletto verrebbe a starsi a Pisa, ma vorrebbe un beneficio, hoc est, un di quelli canonicati; ha buon nome in Padova, e buona scuola. Pure, ni fallor, è di questi strain fantastichi). What is certain is that the negotiations were concluded, but Vernia decided not to move to Pisa, the reason why Pisa’s authorities, to give an example, ordered expropriation and sale of the books and other things that Niccoletto had already sent ahead of himself, and even the intervention of the Venetian Senate fail to recuperate the loss. Vernia died in 1499, after having written an opuscle against the perverse doctrine of Averroès (contra perversam Averroys opinionem), in the way of recantation, dedicating it to Domenico Grimani who later also wrote on the same argument.
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Few are the writings of Vernia known to us, and rarely significant. A question on whether a moving entity can be a topic for all philosophy (an ens mobile sit totius philosophiae subiectum) is of 1480; two more questions, of which we already spoke, are of 1482, and consider the problem of the division of the sciences and of the connection between medicine and jurisprudence. An essay on heavy and light things (de gravibus et levibus) and a question of 1492 on whether real universals exist (an dentur universalia realia) are also known. Written in 1492 is also the anti-Averroistic recantation, whose premise contains a severe condemnation of the evil doctrine of Averroès as false and totally removed from the truth. Vernia used that doctrine for his lessons, trying also to show with what reasons it could be sustained. From this originated the calumny against him put in circulation by some “plebeian insignificant philosophers with a dull and coarse ingenuity” (plebei atque minuti philosophi cum hebeti ac rudi ingenio). In the preface, we can read this interesting confession: Since this is my thirty-third year teaching at the University of Padua the first course on that part of philosophy that the Greeks called physics, I have thought unbecoming not to show in the light of the day, for the advantage of my auditors, all those things that in so many years I have learned from the scrupulous reading of Greek and Latin authors. For this purpose, I am tirelessly reviewing every day the comments on all the books of Aristotle, comments that coasted me so many wakeful nights to make them fit for publication. The comments were never published, and plagiarism perpetrated by Girolamo Bagolino, in his edition of Averroès, and by Nifo, was mentioned. The nonpublication is understandable, given the incident with Bishop Barozzi who compared Niccoletto to Paul also because short of stature (Paulus es, hoc est parvus), but who reminded him, not without exaggeration, that he with his lessons induced all of Italy to err (ut totam paene Italiam errare feceris). Vernia was a Thomist in the dissertation against Averroès, but in all other writings he moved in the ambience of Averroism, in regard to the supremacy of contemplation and happiness collocated precisely on the apex of knowledge, and in connection with the intellect and intelligibility. An essay on inchoative forms (de inchoatione formarum) was lost, but an unedited opuscule (quaestio an caelum sit animatum) takes us into the middle of the question whether the heavens are animated, to which Niccoletto answers that in the heavens separate assistant intelligences exist. Interesting enough, this was an opinion that Pomponazzi still very young and inclined toward Thomism had to fight in a disciple of Vernia, Antonio Fracanziano, in the midst of discussions that became famous. Of this event, frequent references were made among the contemporaries, from M. A. Flavio Contarini to Giacomo Filippo di Pellenegra of Troja, professor at Padua, who in an opening address cele-
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brated the Averroism of Fracanziano in this way: “The barbarous Averroès … was gone into oblivion, but for the intervention [of Fracanziano] has been returned to his great splendor” (barbarous Averroes … squallens … sub ipso in lucem nitoremque est revocatus). Padua at this time was agitated with philosophical discussions; not only because of the fighting against Averroism that was at the order of the day, but also because Thomists and Scotists were fiercely contrasting each other. Pico della Mirandola, after his studies at the Paduan University, intended to bring together into agreement not only Platonists and Aristotelians, but also the litigious followers of Scotus and Thomas, whom he saw with his own eyes coming into collision in the two contrasting parties of Neritone and Trombetta. The Dominican Francesco dei Sicuri of Nardò had among his students Pomponazzi, Contarini, Da Vio, Giovanni of Monopoli (who will enter the fight against Zwingly), and Domenico Grimani, whose Thomistic doctrine and writings will be remembered by Antonio Pizzamanno, a friend of Pico, in a preface to the opuscules of St. Thomas. In the adversary party, there was Trombetta and with him a distinguished Scotist, Mauritius Hibernicus. In the conflict, De Vio also participated though he was still very young to support St. Thomas against Scotus, attacking the quaestiones quodlibetales of Trombetta, especially those on the problems of matter, individuation, and soul. Among the contestants of these philosophical encounters were the two greatest philosophers of this period, Pico and Pomponazzi; present they were and there they were formed. Elia del Medigo, who will be a major influence on Pico, was so involved in heated discussions that, according to a tradition, after the death in 1494 of his magnificent princely protector, had to leave Italy. In those years, Padua was bursting with a cultural life that was overwhelming, and humanism with its exigencies of renovation was not extraneous to it. The Averroist Vernia congratulated Ermolao Barbaro for translating Themistius and Girolamo Donato for the version of Alexander of Aphrodisias, works he used in his own lessons. Vernia’s optimal relation with Barbaro and the discussions on logic between Barbaro and Elia del Medigo are evidence of the fervor of studies not separate from fecund cultural exchanges. Even if the episode of Bishop Barozzi is almost the prelude to the condemnations of the Lateran, it is still true that within the ambient of the religious orders the liberty of philosophizing was vindicated with energy. At the Lateran Council, the Bishop of Bergamo was the one to oppose the intromission of theologians into philosophical discussions: “He said that he could not approve that theologians would impose on the philosophers discussing on the truth of the intellect, that they follow the matter as presented according to the mind of Aristotle” (dixit, quod non placebat sibi, quod theology imponerent philosophis disputantibus de veritate intellectus, tamquam de materia posita de mente Aristotelis, in ms. “Mansi, 32, c. 842”). The antithesis between traditional attitudes and new culture, between the science of nature and that of the spirit, was not always so fierce and intransi-
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gent, as it appeared to some scholars. Pico was not the only one to conciliate Florence with Padua. At less important levels, others moved under the impulse of multiple exigencies. In the same way that in the Paduan circles we saw side by side Aristotelians and Platonists, Averroists and Alexandrians, Thomists and Scotists, in Florence we saw the Ficinians of strict observance, the Pichians, and the Thomists like Savonarola. At the same time, toward the end of the century, the uninterrupted tradition of the commentaries on Aristotle continued with the comments of Gugliemo Bechi, Bishop of Fiesole since 1480 on the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Categories, the Ethics, and the Economy; with the logico-physical discussions of Bernardo Torni about motion; with the medical works of Antonio Benivieni, friend of Ficino and Pico. This is a time of full Aristotelianism intersected by terministic cues, when the works of Torni were published together with the writings of Heytesbury. An analogous intertwining of motives existed in Southern Italy, where beside Scholastic residues and Averroistic tendencies as in Prassicio, Pontano showed himself in moral essays to be a precise examiner of the human problems evinced by the studia humanitatis, whereas in his astrological treatises he energetically defended against Pico all the patrimony of the astral superstition. An original figure of writer was Antonio de Ferrariis, known as Galateo (1444–1516), defensor of the Constantine Donation against Lorenzo Valla, friend of Gioviano Pontano and Barbaro, a student of pedagogic problems, who did not hesitate to take the side of Vernia in the polemic between law and medicine, in favor of the science of nature. Within the two opposing sides the road was open. This was clearly seen in Pontano, his need of conciliating nature, Aristotelically understood and preserved, with the human world, whose value was also recognized and accepted. At last, the pedagogic, moral and social problem of inserting the virtues of humanity into the course of worldly events was open.
Fourteen GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 1. Life of Pico. G. Donato and Elia del Medigo. Conflict with Barbaro. The Defense of Philosophy Giovanni Pico of the Counts of Mirandola was born on 24 February 1463. In the early infancy, he was under the influence of his mother, Giulia Boiardo. At the age of fourteen, he went to study Canon Law at the university in Bologna, beginning those travels throughout Italian and foreign learning centers that greatly contributed to a cultural formation, in part at least, unconnected with the Italian situation. “He went to examine not only the literary centers of Italy but also those of France in order to inquire most carefully about the illustrious teachers of his time” (non tantum Italiae sed et Galliarum literaria gymnasia perlustrans, celebres doctores tempestatis illius scrupulosissime perquirebat). From the study of jurisprudence, starting with a compilation of the Decretals, he acquired a concrete sense of human rapports, but soon showed himself seriously interested in the knowledge of nature: “he was a covetous inquirer of the secrets of nature” (secretarum naturae rerum cupidus explorator). An episode that he later narrated shows that during the period at Bologna together with Pandolfo Collenuccio he cared for astrological issues. This proves how very early in life he was inclined to a variety of interests. After his mother died in 1478, Giovanni moved to Ferrara. In 1479, during a trip to Florence that has been clearly documented, Pico encountered Politian and, perhaps, Ficino. At the time of this first Florentine visitation, the young prince left with Politian some love elegies that later on he wanted to destroy or to be returned for corrections. Antonio Benivieni, in the Bucolica, published in 1482, but written between 1478 and 1480, already mentioned affectionately the one who was going to become his inseparable friend: “Only for you, O friend, the mind inflamed, / only for you it lighted up. In you finds / aliment the fire that sometime shines / blissfully reflected in me” (Per te s’infiamma sol per te s’accende, / signor, la mente, in te si nutre el foco / che talhor lieto in me reflexo splende). These first Florentine contacts should not be interpreted as meaning a preponderant initial Platonic influence; Platonism actually continued to remain extraneous to Pico. Undeniable instead is his strong propensity to write poetry. Politian saw Pico as a poet when Pico presented him with the five
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books de amoribus of 1483, which most wisely Pico thereafter threw to the fire. Many Latin verses, on the other hand, on other themes and of other periods survived. In Ferrara, Pico met Savonarola, of whom he became an intimate friend, and had frequent contacts with Battista Guarini. To conjecture, as it has been done, a precocious influence of Savonarola in a Thomistic sense is out of place. Savonarola, later on in Florence, influenced the spirit of the young prince, who at that time was involved in philosophical inquiries and juvenile experiences that colored his verses with bitterness: “No stable thing can be found under the moon. / And given that among so few and frail goods / a long life is cause to meeting with many evils, / happy then is he whose life is out at the cradle” (Cosa ferma non è sotto la luna. / E poi che fra sí pochi beni e frail / cagione è un viver lungo a tanti mali / felice chi di vita è spento in cuna). Back to Padua during the academic years of 1480 and1482, Pico audited Niccoletto Vernia, and probably made acquaintance with Nifo, in whom he felt the same efficacious energy of Elia del Medigo. These are the years of the contacts with Girolamo Donato and Girolamo Ramusio, Domenico Grimani and Antonio Pizzamanno, Antonio of Faenza, and Niccolò Leoniceno. The letters of Pico or those addressed to Pico from this time on are the mirrors of these relationships. Thomists were Grimani and Pizzamanno; an orientalist and translator of Arabic texts was Ramusio; and Donato, who had for a long time cultivated familiarity with Pico, was a remarkable politician, the translator into elegant Latin of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Donato’s version of Alexander is of great interest because Donato expressed the intention of bringing to conciliation the contrasting tendencies. After the observation that if someone were to read carefully Averroès (et suis quaeque locis singulatim singula contulerit), he would become aware that it is a kind of thought originated from the purest of sources (eius doctrinam ab optimis authoribus prodisse comperiat), Donato attacked animatedly the “titillating witticism” of the moderns, placing on the first place the Englishmen, and having in mind the logicians of Oxford: The moderns … in England, France, and Italy … have philosophized with great acuity, but on the basis of their own convictions instead of on the doctrine of Aristotle. And when they have followed Aristotle, they did it not with argumentations but with titillating witty remarks, handing down to us a philosophy that proceeds by way of cavils and irrelevant short questions (Recentiores … in Britannia, et Gallia atque Italia, … magis ex religione quam ex Aristotelis doctrina acutissime philosophati sunt, et qua parte Aristotelem secuti sunt, non tam interpretationibus, quam titillantibus argutiis, quippe qui per cavillamenta et quaestiunculas philosophiam tradidere).
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Donato attacked in a block all literati and grammarians who with their despising bad style determined the reaction of those philosophers who took pleasure in their appalling manner of writing. Other truly is the duty of the sage: “To cultivate with love and diligence the science of things whether it is found among Latins, or Greeks, or Barbarians; to remove and discard the shell from things and savor the core” (rerum scientiam, sive inter Latinos, sive inter Gaecos, sive inter Barbaros sit, amore et studio prosequi, et repudiatos abiectisque corticibus nucleos degustare). If Ermolao Barbaro, whom Donato greatly praised as Vernia did, with the translation of Themistius intended to show that every thesis of Averroès was a theft from the Greek Commentator, he on the other hand offered to the sustainers of the Arab the support of an ancient classic authority. In this ambiance tied to the Aristotelian tradition, to which no serious damage came from the irritated observations of Barbaro and Donato against those who wrote in a bad manner, Pico must have formed himself with interests more strictly philosophical. When Nifo, with his usual vanity, presented Pico as the supporter of the theses of Siger, in the spirit of Averroès, Aristotle, Themistius, and all ancient commentators of Aristotle (ad mentem Averrois et Aristotelis, Themistii et omnium antiquorum expositorum Aristotelis), Nifo offered us a precious indication on what must have been the initial orientation of Pico as a young philosopher. This young philosopher initially and without doubt must have felt the weight of that remarkable man who was the Cretan Elia del Medigo, a person of such authority in Padua that even Ermolao Barbaro came to discuss logic with him. In 1480, Elia had prepared during a stay in Venice a question on the efficiency of the world (Quaestio de efficientia mundi), in which he dealt with both the problem of creation and that of animation of the heavens, which was the question of the day in the Paduan circles. At the end of his dissertation, Elia promised that “if God were to extend his life and a favorable fortune were to help him out,” he would return to consider such noble arguments, always following the way of the philosophers and underlining the fact that “the way of the Law, in which we trust, is different from the way of Philosophy” (via Legis, cui magis creditur, alia est a via Philosophica). Knowledge was for Elia the supreme goal of man: “it is beneficial and natural for man to inquire as much as possible about things” (conveniens est homini et naturale investigare valde de rebus), and, as he loved to repeat, to knowledge he had dedicated his life. He loved to talk and discuss about this thirst for knowledge with the learned persons of Padua of whose friendship he was proud (ut dicebamus his diebus cum doctoribus dignissimis nobilibus domino Antonio Picimano et domino Domenico Grimano). Pizzimanno and Grimani, the two friends of Pico, were his friends, and with them Donato, who had magnificently discussed in Padua the thesis on the first cause (de primo motore). Because of this, Elia composed for Donato the opuscule on that argument, and not for Pico, as some individuals have assumed (olim in hoc studio Patavino quaestionem hanc publice optime disseruit, cuius quidem
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mandato quaestiones has compilare volui). For Pico, Elia, during his first period in Padua, composed the opuscules on the unity of the intellect and on the possibility of astrological conjunctions (de possibilitate coniunctionis), illustrating the position of Averroès of whom he translated also parts of the comments on meteors and metaphysics. Pizzamanno and Grimani, Donato and Elia del Medigo were the men within whose ambiance strictly Aristotelian Pico moved, hesitating between Thomism and Averroism, and within which the insistence was on the distinction between scientific research and religious faith. Elia, a faithful and sincere disciple of the credence of the Fathers, always presented himself, in every variance with it, as being merely the expositor of Aristotle. By this time, Pico had read the version of Themistius’s commentaries on Aristotle prepared by Barbaro and in a letter expressed the desire to know him better, but confessed that he had no chance to meet with him: “I was in Padua for two years, and would you believe it? I have not seen Ermolao and I came to know him only for his fame” (Patavii fui et biennium; Hermolaum tamen, quis credat, nec vidi, nec nisi, ut multo ante, fama cognovi). Pico could not, as somebody thought, come under the influence of Ermolao in the direction of a moderate approach to the positions of the grammarians. Leaving Padua in 1482 for reason of the war with Ferrara, Pico spent his time between Mirandola, Carpi, and Pavia, studying Greek with Manuele Adramitteno and Aldo Manuzio, writing to Politian about his attempts to poetry and his uncertainty in the choice between philosophy and poetry. In these letters the philosophical preoccupations alternate between the memories of student life and, as far as for what wrote Tommaso Medio, his passion for dialectics. Then he began the correspondence with Ermolao, asked Ficino for the Theologia platonica and read it, and studied also the comments of Philoponus on Aristotle’s Physics. Pico’s culture was moving beyond the limits of the Paduan Aristotelianism. In 1484, Giovanni gave a solemn good-by to his love for lyrics, without ever abandoning compositions in Latin and Italian verses, a poetical activity of which we have numerous extant documents. In the same year, we find Pico in Florence, in an ambience fervent with Platonic studies. By reading Ficino, Pico turned toward the Neo-Platonists. As Ficino remembered Pico with the usual emphasis in the preface to Plotinus, we come to know that Pico was the one to recommend him to translate the master of Neo-Platonism: In that day, and almost at the moment when I was going to publish Plato, coming to Florence, immediately after exchanging the first greetings, he [Pico] asked me about Plato … and he was the one who not only asked me but almost obliged me to translate Plotinus (Hic sane … quo die et ferme qua hora Platonem edidi, Florentiam veniens me statim post primam salutationem de Platone rogat.… Tunc ille …
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ad Plotinum interpretandum me non adduxit quidem, sed potius concitavit). Pico, writing to Barbaro, mentioned his Platonic studies but clearly stating also a reservation: he was not a deserter from the Peripatetics to the Academy, but only an explorer. He added what can be taken as a significant prelude to what would be all his successive activity: I think—and I will be sincere with you, Ermolao—that there are two aspects in Plato: the Homeric eloquence that rises to the heavens of poetry and a total theoretic concordance with Aristotle, once we get at the bottom of it. If you look at the form, nothing can be more contrasting, but if you get to the substance, nothing can be found that is more concordant (Mi sembra—sarò sincero con te, Ermolao—che in Platone vi siano due aspetti: quella omerica eloquenza che si solleva ai cieli della poesia, e un totale accordo teoretico con Aristotele, solo che si vada a fondo. Perciò, se guardi alla forma, nulla vi può essere di piú contrastante, ma se vai alla sostanza, nulla v’è di piú concorde). The idea of concordance, of peace among philosophers, was already born in the mind of Pico. In a certain way, he took upon himself the duty of being the living symbol of that agreement, alternating between the discussions with Lorenzo de’ Medici on the value of the Dantesque poetry in comparison with that of Petrarch, the colloquies with Hebrew physicians and Aristotelian philosophers (Helias et Abraam hebraei medici atque peripatetici), the Aristotelian and Averroist studies with Elia del Medigo, who explained the comments of Averroès on the Physics, the paraphrases of the Republics, the quaestiones on logic, and the de substantia orbis. His approach to Platonism was an attitude no different from the one of Donato: we must look at the res (the things) not at the shell, at the truth not at the words (verba). The virtuosity of the grammarians was repugnant to him as much as the witty remarks of the logicians, of whom also he had information. The conflict with Barbaro erupted at this time. In this way he started a controversy in which humanism under its grammatical aspect was going to achieve its highest manifestation. In an epistle of 1486, Pico confessed to Arnold de Bost that he recognized two lords, Christ and letters (duos agnosco dominos, Christum et litteras); that his own books will be castigatissimos (clearest, most orderly); and that the goal of his life would be to translate Aristotle in an elegant Latin (et quanta possum luce, proprietate, cultu, exorno). For this purpose and with this criterion, during two years in Padua, he read the moral and logical works of Aristotle, drawing from ancient Greek commentators like Jamblichus, Porphyry, Alexander, Themistius, Simplicius, and Philoponus. “After these [commentators], I read Averroès, whom I consider inferior to many who preceded him but to none of those who came after him” (post hos
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Averroi, quem ut multis ante se, ita nemine post se inferiorem fuisse comperio). He then explained: “If you compare the writings of this man with those of the Greeks, you would find that every single one of his words has been stolen from Alexander, Themistius, and Simplicius” (Si conferas eius viri scripta cum graecis, invenies singula eius verba singula esse furta ex Alexandro, Themistio, Simplicio). Barbaro judged this sentence a serious borderline; to Pico, and perhaps to Vernia, it sounded like praise and confirmation of the truth of Averroès. Presented with this renewed program of Pichian studies, Barbaro took position on April 1485: “I realize—he wrote—that, having being an Aristotelian before, you have now become also a Platonist” (Mi accorgo che tu, prima filosofo Aristoteliano, sei diventato ora anche platonico). Of this, Ermolao said that he was pleased; and even more he rejoiced about Pico’s expertise in Greek, literary studies, and love for classicism. Then he advised him: [Do] not to count among Latin authors those Germans, those Teutonics, who did not live when they were alive and should not live now that they are dead. If they live, they live in pain and shame. Commonly, they are considered sordid, rude, uncouth, and barbarous. Who would prefer to be as they are, instead of not to be at all? On the other hand, they too expressed something useful, have a strong ingenuity, and an abundance of gifts! I don’t deny it, though I could. Theirs is only a neat and elegant language … that procures glory and eternal fame to writers. In a dedication to Sixtus IV, Barbaro does not hesitate to compare the illiterates and the barbarians to beasts and bumpkins, all made into a bundle. In the letter of dedication to Galateo, the barbarous philosophers and jurists are declared fit for a whipping. Pico reacted, and in the epistle of June 1485, defended openly and with great vigor philosophy against the pretenses of the grammarians. The grammarians said, “He is not a man who is not literate”; Pico retorted, “He is not a man who is not a philosopher” (non est homo, qui sit expers philosophiae). This letter, written effortlessly all at once, is truly beautiful, a model of inspired eloquence and robust thought: We have lived, Ermolao, as famous men, and as such we will live in the future, not in the schools of the grammarians, not where children are taught, but in the academies of the philosophers and the assemblies of the wise, where the mother of Andromache, the sons of Niobe, and similar fatuous matters are not discussed, but the principles of human and divine things are. In the meditation, in the research, in the clarification of these things, we have been so sharp, acute, and penetrative to appear perhaps sometimes too agitated and scrupulous, if one could ever be too scrupulous and curious in the search for truth. And if
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someone were to reprimand us for frailty and sluggishness even in this, we ask that this individual, whoever he may be, introduce himself. He would become aware that the barbarians had Mercury not on their tongue, but in their heart; that they may have not been eloquent, but were sapient. The rhetor rejoices in embellishing the lie, in moving the spirits with tumultuous passions and vulgar enthusiasms; the philosopher searches for rooted persuasion: No, not we, but they are out of place. They are the ones who celebrate bacchanalia at the feet of Vesta and dishonor the purity and seriousness of philosophy with artifices perpetrated by histrionic charlatans.… When the vulgar herd considers us sordid, rude, and uncouth, we accept this as a glory, not as a shame. We have not written for that herd. The ancients did no differently than we did, when with enigmas and fables drove the profane vulgus away from their words. The philosopher is like the Sileni of whom Alcibiades spoke; he is like Socrates who composed divine speeches but cared nothing for his untied sandals. The Muses of philosophy sing in the soul and speaks to souls; they do not vibrate at the tip of the lips. Truth has not chosen as its own language the Ciceronian Latin. Truth speaks in Egyptian, in Arabic, and in Syriac. In any case, is language by convention or by nature? If it is by convention why should we prefer the Ciceronian style instead of that of Paris? If it is by nature why do we make arbiter of language the grammarian who only grasps the exterior form of words and not the philosopher who, fixing his eyes into the heart of things, sees in the words the emergence of the things’ expression? “Perhaps what the ear refuses to accept as being too harsh, reason will accept as being more faithful to things.” The philosophers would never know the artifices of style (i lenocini), but it is for this reason that they are and want to remain philosophers, and not to become grammarians. Pico wrote: They could not, O Ermolao, when they were reading in the heavens the rules of fate, the characters of the events and the order of the universe; when they were reading in the elements the vicissitudes of life and death, the forces of the simples, the fusion of the composite; they could not, I tell you, observe at that same time the proprieties, the laws, the characters of the Latin of Cicero, Pliny, and Apuleius. They were searching for something contrary to or conforming with nature, and not contrary to or conforming to the language of the Romans.… Let Lucretius write about nature, God, and providence, and let one of our barbarians write on the same arguments, for instance John Duns Scotus, and let even assume that Duns is incapable of poeticizing. Now,
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Lucretius will claim that principles of things are the atoms and the void, God is corporeal and ignorant of our vicissitudes, everything is happening by chance due to the fortuitous collision of the corpuscles; but he will say these things in an elegant Latin. Duns Scotus, on the other hand, will say that natural things are made of matter and form, God is a separate mind that knows everything, provides for everything, and that though he sees everything and rules everything, even the minimal events, he does not move away from his tranquility, and acts coming down without descending. All of this will be said in an unpolished, coarse style, with non Latin terms. But, please tell me, who will be able to doubt about which of the two … is a better philosopher?
Pico at the end accepted the need of connecting wisdom with eloquence, but, admitting the separation, he assigned primacy to wisdom. Barbaro showed his irritation: at first, he decided not to reply, then jotted a dry answer, and finally decided in favor of an elaborate defense, in which he reclaimed the usefulness of rhetoric for everything that is not reducible to an apodictic reasoning, or, in other words, for all the moral sciences in which persuasion has the larger part. In reality, the two points of view could not be reconciled, given the way totally extrinsic with which Barbaro looked at the linguistic form as a thing merely external, an ornament—as he puts it, “Philosophy not only tolerates embellishments, but also likes them and looks out for them” (philosophia ornari se non modo patitur sed amat et laborat). The polemic weighed heavily on the relationships between the two friends. Barbaro stopped referring to Pico the ironies of a Paduan barbarian (Nifo?); later, he insisted with Roberto Salviati in defining the “Roman disputation” to be one of the rhetorical Gorgian knots. Only after the misadventures of Pico with the Church, Barbaro again demonstrated warmer rapports that did not hide the profound doctrinal antithesis. 2. The Roman Disputation. The Works of 1486 Pico had defended the philosophers and the Parisian style (stile parigino) in the letter to Barbaro, but it was in July 1485 that he went to France, though we know almost nothing about this first residence at the great university. Were perhaps the public discussions heard there that induced him to the thought of summoning a grand assembly of learned individuals in Rome? When he returned to Florence, his mind was already fixed in the idea of this gathering, in which at the presence of the wisest individuals of the civil world, princely reunited at his own expense, he, Pico, will proclaim the philosophical peace, the concordance of all philosophers (la concordia dei filosofi) in a pia philosophia capable of bringing the thinking humanity to a communality of opinions. This idea, within which is present a large part of Ficinian notions, was alimented by a religious motive of hermetic and cabalistic inspiration, supported and consolidated, probably, by the interpretation of some concep-
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tions on the illumination of truth. It is assured that in this period the idea of a mission that would be religious and peacemaking began to mature in the spirit of the Lord of Concord, as he at times preferred to be called (referring to his title as the beneficiary of the fief of Concordia), an idea born at the doctrinal level, but that needed to open up in practical grounds. In March 1486, Pico was back in Florence from France; in May, he left in the direction of Rome. A clamorous love adventure forced him to stop at Arezzo where, with abductions, scuffles, some wounded, and one arrest, Lorenzo the Magnificent was also required to intervene. To stop the gossips perhaps (cadde piú di reputazione et di expectatione … che non fe’ Lucifero), he found refuge first at Perugia and afterward, because of the danger from an epidemic, at Fratta, where Elia del Medigo joined him. Together, they restarted the discussions about logic, physics, and metaphysics, examining the opinions of Avicenna and Averroès on existence (ens), essence (essentia), and the one (unum). These discussions came to be useful to Elia in his compilation of the opuscule of that title and to Pico in whose mind they placed the seeds for the dissertation De ente et uno. Elia wrote, “When I was in Perugia with the very learned Count Giovanni della Mirandola … we talked a lot about being, essence, and unity” (Cum essem Perusii cum doctissimo Comite … Joanne Mirandulano … multa de esse et essentia et uno diximus). By now Pico was completely oriented towards new interests, moving beyond the Peripatetic positions of Elia, ready to juxtapose with the formula of the so-called “double truth” tradition and reason. Elia wrote to Pico: Your Excellency knows very well that the sayings of Aristotle and Averroès are of the kind that in them not a single syllable is without reason and proof. And the moderns, believing to clarify, actually create obstacles. Truly, at the present, nothing or very little of value can be found in the Peripatetic science (nulla aut parva invenitur nunc scientia, saltem peripatetica). The questions are numerous and the volumes are quite big, but they contain almost nothing of value. And he continued claiming that Pico “will be great within the Peripatetic sect” (magnus in peripatetica secta). In the same letter, the new orientation of Pico is already clearly mentioned: Since I see your Lordship involved so much in this blessed Cabala, I want to underline something that I never wanted to tell you previously. And what I am going to tell you is so secret that none among our contemporaries interested in it know about it, a very few knew of it even among the ancients. It is something very small in quantity, but much rich in quality (Quia video Dominationem tuam multum laborare in isto benedicto Chabala, volo notare vobis … quod nunquam volui dicere vobis. Et hoc quod dicam vere est ita occultum quod nemo huius
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY temporis de illis qui se dant in hoc cognovit, immo forte pauci ex antiquis hoc noverunt; et est parvum in quantitate, in qualitate autem valde multum).
At this point, Elia unfolded the theory of the absolute Infinity and of its numerationes (Sephiroth), listing a brief Cabalistic bibliography, and pointing out to Pico, among other things, the Zohar and the book Yesirah. Together with this letter, Elia sent to Pico the comment on the Pentateuch of Menahem of Recanati (el Ricanato), a work derived from Zohar, which Pico eagerly began to consult. The one person who taught Pico the first elements of Hebrew and Chaldaic, who translated for him Cabalistic writings was the bizarre Flavio Mitridate, the converted Sicilian Jew Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, a favorite of Sixtus IV, whose some Cabalistic translations for the Lord of Mirandola are still seen in the Vatican Library. The Cabala, the Hebrew gnosis that Pico saw as a venerable occult hidden wisdom, revealed directly by God and transmitted orally, capable of explaining allegorically the Biblical texts, was for Pico “the greatest foundation of our faith,” so far as it was what could resolve and clear every metaphor and mystery. This was not all. The Cabala, to his own eyes, presented as word of God also the philosophical-religious tradition that he found in the philosophers of the Pythagoric-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. The pia philosophia, called upon to illuminate religion, resulted to be not only a perennial revelation of the spirit, but the true word of God. The Cabala was placing the seal of authority on the interpretation that had been invoked to clarify authority itself. In the writings of 1486, the transition from the “double truth,” of which a hint at times exists in the love song of Girolamo Benivieni, to the Cabala, which eliminates every contrast by resolving always with its allegorical interpretations every apparent contradiction in the uniqueness of an occult tradition, is complete. This for Pico did not mean a rejection of the theses of Aristotelianism and Averroism, but a reinterpretation of them in diverse terms. In the nine hundred theses, we see that the agent intellect has become the Metatron of the cabalists, the leader of the angels assigned to creation, the spirit in which, always according to Pico, the human being is transformed in the “death by a kiss” (morte di bacio). From this tumult of ideas and motives, often quite turbid and confused, in 1486, were born the Commento alla canzone d’amore of his friend Girolamo Benivieni, the nine hundred Conclusiones, and the Oratio that had to be used as an introduction to the Roman disputation. Contemporaneously with this, Pico worked on the outline of a vast commentary on the Symposium of Plato, on a theologia poetica, and on the concordance of philosophers, which are writings mentioned in the Commento alla canzone d’amore. Inspired by Ficino, Benivieni had composed his not so beautiful love song. Pico presented his comment on this canzone as a kind of prelude to a
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wider exposition of the Platonic Symposium, of which he claimed that no adequate interpretation existed. In Pico’s claim we must see a clear hint of an anti-Ficinian polemic, since Ficino had widely explained the Symposium in Latin and Italian. Attacks on Ficino are found in the work itself: some are explicit and some veiled, but they were accurately removed by the first editor in the sixteenth century. It is noteworthy that Pico rebuked Ficino for conceiving the human soul “as having been immediately produced by God, which is something repugnant to the sect of Proclus and that of Plotinus.” In the Commento, frequent were the citations to other Pichian writings that consisted of mere outlines or intentions; many were the cabalistic cues and hints, and the announcements of the programmed Roman disputation. By November 1486, the conclusiones reached the number of nine hundred and “they could very well have become one thousand, but it was agreed to stop at that number because of its mystical significance” (progrediebanturque, nisi receptui cecinissem, ad mille. Sed placuit in eo numero, utpote mystico, pedes sistere). On 7 December, the conclusiones were printed in Rome, ready to be posted in all the academies (ginnasi) of Italy; the conference was fixed for after the Epiphany. Pico promised to pay the expenses encountered by the participants. He also advertised that the authors used the Parisian style in the formulation and writing of the theses; that the authors adopted “not the splendor of the Roman language, but that of the most celebrated disputants of Paris, which in our time is what all philosophers use” (non Romanae linguae nitorem, sed celebratissimorum Parisiensium disputatorum dicendi genus … quod eo nostri temporis philosophi omnes utuntur). The conciliatory intent was at the core of the five hundred doctrinal theses, but it was transparent also in the four hundred in which was underlined, though through the scanty indication of a phrase, the position of each philosopher. The philosophers represented in the theses were: Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Meyronnes, Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome, Averroès, Avicenna, Alfarabi, Isaac of Narbonne, Abumaron of Babylon, Maimonides, Mohammed of Toledo, Avempace, Theophrastus, Ammonius, Simplicius, Alexander of Aprodisias, Themistius, Plotinus, Adelando the Arabic, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Proclus, Pythagoras, the Chaldean Theologians, Mercurius Trimegistus, and the Cabalists. A caution was preceding the theses: In all these theses I place nothing assertive or even probable, unless in so far as it is judged true or probable by the sacrosanct Roman Church and its Head the well deserving Supreme Pontiff Innocent VIII. Any person who does not submit the judgment of his mind to that of Innocent VIII is a fool! (In quibus omnibus nihil assertive vel probabiliter pono, nisi quatenus id vel verum vel probabile iudicat sacrosancta Romana Ecclesia, et caput eius bene meritum summus Pontifex Inno-
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY centius VIII, cuius iudicio qui mentis suae iudicium non submittit, mentem non habet).
As we will see, this caution came to be of little usefulness. Criticism soon surfaced and it circulated in the groups among scholars and ecclesiastics. The more benevolent criticism was summarized in the letter of Barbaro to Salviati, in which Barbaro clearly compared Pico to Gorgias. In the same letter, Barbaro expressed the opinion that kind of public discussions was condemned to be useless, vain, and not at all philosophical: “Those who so do, do it not as philosophers nor as dialecticians” (quia hoc nec tanquam philosophi, nec tanquam dialectici faciant qui faciant). He added the conflicting observations that the participants were moved by ambition, not by love of wisdom and, at the same time, that to satisfy vanity was not such a great evil: “By Hercules! If it is not a crime to go after good health, strength, beautiful complexion, and wealth, why would it be when we search for fame and honors?” This kind of comments had already reached Pico who in the prolusion to the discussions, which was later called Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the dignity of the human being), had condemned the empty caviling of sophistic discussions, introducing himself as the apostle of the pax philosophica. In a letter to Benivieni, Pico affirmed that the first inspiration of a pax philosophica came to him from the reading of the Johannine text: “Peace is what I leave with you; it is my own peace that I give you” (pacem meam do vobis, pacem relinquo vobis, John, 14: 27). Pico effortlessly created this singular oration: so rich of effective rhetoric; a manifest of the agreement of the philosophers; a hymn to peace, in which beyond the divergences and the discussions, human beings are invited to venerate a unique truth, hidden under divergent words, an eternally identical light that illumines all mortal minds. In the oration, the recurrence of thoughts more to Cusanus than to Ficino and the reference to the thematic of the pax fidei, of a religious concord, are spontaneous and well founded. The motive of this encounter, of pacification, of illumination itself, is amplified and transcribed in new terms, in which it is mentioned the progressive self-imposing of the rational light of humanity. We have the impression that what had been a knot of the “irenic” propaganda between the conciliar age and the crisis determined by the Turks’ progress was starting to be transformed in a program destined to the expression of more mature ideals, connected among them, pansophic, encyclopedic, illuminated, and “illuministic.” 3. Condemnation of the Church. In Florence: Politian and Girolamo Benivieni. Jochanan Alemanno and Savonarola Innocent VIII ordered the suspension of the conference and on 20 February 1487 ordered a commission of inquiry, which, under the presidency of Jean Monissart, Bishop of Tournai, began on 2 March the examination of the theses of Pico, who was called in for the clarification of seven of his proposi-
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tions. His answers, which were recorded and have been preserved, already contain in germs the Apologia. The attitude of Pico, at least as far as we may believe what he wrote, was not at all compliant: he attacked his judges, accusing them of ignorance. On 5 March, though he had gained the sympathy of one of the judges, Jean Cordier of the Parisian University, the seven theses were condemned. The examination was extended to six more propositions, concerning which, between the twelve or thirteen of the same month, Pico presented a written self-defense that was rejected by the commission, which condemned, no matter how moderately in its tone, also the new propositions. Pico reacted forcefully with the Apologia, written in only twenty nights (viginti tantum noctibus), dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, in which in a bitter tone he claimed the rights of reasoning, magic as the science of nature, Cabala as a licit scriptural interpretation, and a free research, given that “it is not the error of the intellect that makes of a man a heretic, but the maliciousness and perversity of the will” (non error intellectus facit hominem hereticum, sed oportet quod sit malicia et perversitas in voluntate). The first edition of the Apologia has the date of 31 May 1487, even though it is not precisely clear when and where it was printed. The book scandalized the theologians and, though Pico professed submission, Innocent VIII on 5 August 1487 condemned the total list of the theses. Was this condemnation back-dated? Why is it that, after the act of submission demanded by the commission at the presentation of the Apologia, the pope raged against Pico again? How is it, as Pico declared, and the Florentine orator Giovanni Lanfredini confirmed, that the bull was published only on 15 December 1487? Given the personality of Pico and the relations, also of interests, of his family with the Roman Court, it is certain that beyond the scene much bargaining must have happened concerning this serious incident. Prudently, Pico had found refuge in France, when the pope gave the orders of arrest. In January 1488, Filippo of Savoy, Lord of Bresse, also ordered the arrest of Pico. Locked up in the rock of Vincennes, because of the insistence of the Papal Nuntios, Lionello Chieregato and Antonio Flores, Pico was detained until March, no matter the strong pressures for his release attempted by Ludovico il Moro, the Gonzagas, and Lorenzo de’ Medici; and the open friendship of Pico with Charles VIII, King of France. Expelled from France, at first he manifested the intention to go to Germany to examine the library of Cusanus. In Turin, the warm invitation arrived from Ficino for his coming to Florence under the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici: “If every land is fatherland to the hero, be happy, be Florentine” (si omne solum forti patria est, esto felix, Florentinus esto). The new stay in Florence saw him always more pensive about religious problems; in the solitude of Fiesole or in the saloons of Florence, he was turned to thoughts of piety. The ancient ardor was not put out; the ancient ideas have not been reneged; and the problem of Christianity, in its rapports with other religions and philosophical theories, had become central. Favoring and supporting the com-
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ing of Savonarola to Florence, he was influenced by Savonarola, but he too influenced certainly Savonarola, in some way. The renewal proposed by Savonarola was a moral and political renewal, with social implications, and was collocated within a wide religious perspective. The renewal that Pico auspicated was a total renewal that invested the whole life of the single human being and of the whole humanity, though it expressed itself over all in intellectual and rather philosophical terms. When Savonarola attempted at his experiment, he limited it to Florence, although he wanted to re-create Florence as the novel Jerusalem. On the contrary, Pico visualized a universal message and interpreted it as an irenic mission among all human beings. As he did in the Roman disputation, he wanted again to speak to the whole world. Pico would not reject magic or Cabala. Magic and Cabala will provide him the means to recall the Jews and convert them, to show in full noon light the truth of Christianity. The peace of the philosophers, the peace of the spirits, was the foundation of the universal pacification. Politian, Benivieni, Jochanan Alemanno, Matteo Bossi, Battista Spagnoli, and Savonarola formed at this period the intimate circle of Pico’s best friends. He exercised a great fascination over all and each one of them; perhaps only Savonarola gave more than what he received. Politian, in the beginning, had no affection for philosophy: “I don’t take the name of philosopher, because it is frail; I don’t pretend it, because it is not due to me” (non scilicet philosophi nomen occupo, ut caducum; non arrogo, ut alienum). The argute philosophasters of our time (argutuli nostrae aetatis philosophastri) did not receive Pico’s sympathies. He loved to exalt the art of words, the omnipotent, true queen of human hearts: Is there anything greater than to be superior to other human beings exactly in the same way they are superior to the animals? What is there more admirable than, when speaking to an immense multitude, to be able of entering into their hearts, their minds, so to stir up or stifle, at our own pleasure, their will; so to dominate the affections, now exciting them, then mitigating them; so to become, in a word, lords of those souls? (Che cosa c’è di piú grande che superare gli uomini proprio in ciò in cui superano gli altri animali? Qual cosa piú mirabile che, parlando ad una multitudine immensa, irrompere in quei cuori, in quelle menti, sí da suscitarne e spegnerne, a piacere, la volontà; sí da dominarne gli affetti, ora accendendoli ora mitigandoli; sí da rendersi, insomma, signori di quelle anime?). Politian began frequenting the courses of Argyropoulos, whom he opposed concerning the Aristotelian entelechy, arriving to some conclusions singularly acute about the lost Aristotle. Pico was the one who excited him for a renewed love for philosophy, and after 1490 we see him to comment with an increasing dedication the writings of Aristotle on logic and ethics. In a very interest-
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ing prolusion, the Panepistemon, Politian tried to build a classification of the sciences. In another prolusion to a course on Prior Analytics, the Lamia, a warm praise of philosophy is heard, “It seems to me that he who does not want to philosophize also does not want to be happy” (mihi autem videtur et illud, qui philosophari nolit, etiam felix esse nolle). Philosophy alone gives the human being dignity and freedom: The human beings prisoners of darkness are the vulgar ignorant; the free human being, free from chains, enjoying the full light of the sun, that is the philosopher.… Ah, if only I could be as he is! The fear of wickedness and of the charges generated by that name would not be such that I would cease to desire of becoming myself a philosopher, if only it would be possible (Gli uomini prigionieri nelle tenebre sono il volgo ignaro; l’uomo libero, privo di catene, alla luce solare, quello è il filosofo.… Potessi esser io come lui! La paura del malvolere e delle accuse generate da tal nome non è tale che io non desideri di diventare io stesso filosofo, solo che mi sia possible). Though Politian was inclined by temperament to consider precise and concrete questions, he was a philologist in the full sense of the word, and possessed a vivid perception of the world of culture as a human product, which brought him even more effectively closer to Pico. From Pico he took a start for an attentive analysis of Aristotelianism, in its “scientific” aspects as well; and in this, he detached himself probably from the Ficinians and their Platonism, against whom he openly and repeatedly polemized. Girolamo Benivieni was Pico’s friend of the first Florentine years, and the influence of Pico on him, combining with that of Savonarola, manifested itself in a more rigid religious position that revealed itself in those preoccupations that made him hesitate for a long time before allowing the printing in 1500 of his Commento sopra a piú sue canzoni e sonetti dello amore e della bellezza divina. In this comment, Benivieni generously utilized the Pichian comment to that love song that he never wanted to be published, appearing to him as a thing too much profane, “We had in our souls a shade of doubt if for a teacher of Christ’s law wishing to treat the theme of Love, the celestial and divine, it were licit to deal with it as a Platonist and not as a Christian” (nacque nelli animi nostri qualche ombra di dubitazione se era conveniente a uno professore della legge di Cristo, volendo lui trattare di Amore, massime celeste e divino, trattarne come Platonico e non come Cristiano). Under the influx of the new philosophy of love was Jochanan Alemanno, who also came to Florence in 1488, and immediately felt the desire of knowing a human being as marvelous as Pico. Under Pico’s influence, between 1488 and 1492, Jochanan tried to complete a commentary on the Song of Songs, using again some motives present in a larger work, The Immortal, in which the itinerary is described of a man who, through virtue, is raised to the point of becoming one with God. Sources of the thought of Jochanan are the
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Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophy, and the Cabala in its richest expressions of thought. This explains Jochanan’s presence around Pico in the years when Pico, with renewed intensity and seriousness, turned to Hebrew philosophy and religious studies. Between 1488 and 1489, Pico worked on the comment to the Psalms, to the defense of the version of St. Jerome and of the Greek translation of the Psalter. Then, from Hebrew, he translated the Book of Job and the philosophical novel of Ibn Tufail. In 1489, the Heptaplus, de septiformi sex dierum Geneseos enarratione, ad Laurentium Medicem was completed. It is a cabalistic commentary on creation, into which are systematized in a unity the ideas sparsely mentioned previously in other writings. If the learned people liked the book, the pope on the contrary disliked it. With the help of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico tried to obtain with the pardon also an acknowledgment of his innocence. He did not obtain it. Innocent VIII was charging him of heresy, and the Heptaplus made the pope even more suspicious. Pico was nourishing obscure plans in his mind. Lorenzo wrote to Lanfredini that “[Pico] has being tempted by doing something that could become a great scandal” (è stato tentato di cosa che potrebbe essere di gran scandalo). Niccolò Seratico, in May 1488, had written about Pico to Roberto Salviati: “How much great monuments for our times I see this man to erect in the future! How resplendent I see him at the summit of religion, while receiving the merited honors!” This is what the veritable Etruscan priestess prophetized from the profundity of her heart. (Qualia temporis nostri monumenta daturum hunc ego conspicio, quantum fulgebit in aede religionis apex, meritos laturus honores!” Sic etrusca monens quedam non vana sacerdos admiranda sacro nuper de pectore fudit). Friends tried to calm his agitated spirit (quietare l’animo). In 1491, Pico transferred ownership of part of his possessions to his nephew Gian Francesco. Then he traveled throughout Veneto with Pietro Crinito and Politian searching for codices, and during this journey the consultations for a teaching position of Vernia in Pisa are held. In 1492, the only fragment of the extensive work on the agreement between Plato and Aristotle, the De ente et uno, is published and dedicated to Politian, as Pico began a long polemic with Antonio Cittadini of Faenza, the peripateticus miles, as Ficino called him. In the opuscule, Pico had taken again a position contrary to Ficino. In 1492, Lorenzo died; at his side was Pico, but we sensed in the letter of Politian to Antiquario the shade of a previous separation between the two princes. The philosopher had moved more and more on the side of Savon-
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arola. When Alexander VI conceded the desired pardon; Pico was planning a great apologetic work in favor of Christianity. In the moral letter to his nephew Gian Francesco—the famous letter that circulated throughout Europe, that Robert Gaguin translated into French, Thomas More into English, and Jakob Wimpfeling into German—Pico manifestly accentuated his detachment from the world. Even his language had taken the color of sacred austerity and harsh rigidity. His dedication to the comment on the Lord’s Prayer, the Pater noster, made him a voluntary hermit in his home. We come to know from Crinito of previous frequent meetings at San Marco where in front of friar Girolamo Pico was inspired to speak and unveil ancient and new mysteries. Savonarola, always so sparing of praise and so little inclined to adulation, wrote that the world will clearly come to know that Pico was not inferior to the first Fathers [of the Church] (chiaramente cognoscerà questo huomo non essere stato inferiore alli primi padri). But Savonarola was not a great philosopher; his writings are scholastic compilation of Thomistic theses, or summaries of Platonic and Aristotelian works, perhaps even taken from Pico. Was Savonarola, as Nesi wrote, the one to press Pico into his last great labor, the disputations against the astrologers? Or was Pico himself the inspirer of the anti-astrological pages of Savonarola? It has been ascertained that during these years, between 1492 and 1494, after the death of Lorenzo, the Pichian necessity of a radical renewal came to be joined with the reform of morals championed by Savonarola. Savonarola did not pardon too easily Pico for not having joined the Dominican Religious Order, even though Pico took decisively the side of the friar of San Marco. Was this perhaps why his secretary, Cristoforo di Casalmaggiore, who benefited from his liberality, poisoned Pico on 17 November 1494 (if it is true that he died of poison)? Did some instigators moved by political reasons, forced Cristoforo to this? This like many other points in Pico’s life has remained enigmatic. Leonardo Salviati, in his Dialoghi sull’amicizia, could not separate the disappearance of this remarkable personality from the wane of the Italian liberty. Charles VIII took possession of Florence on the same day that the Count of Mirandola died. 4. Sources of Pico’s Thought. The Cabala. Siger of Brabant A lot has been discussed, often off the point, about the sources of Pico’s thought and writings. The disorder of the epistolary and the uncertainty of the date of publication of some of the writings have made the search difficult, if not impossible. Today, different interested scholars have minutely analyzed the inventory of his library; part of the manuscripts that he possessed have been found at the Vatican Library; his epistolary has been suitably organized and his works have been reconstructed on the original text. For these reasons, a great part of the old problem has become irrelevant. Pico was learned in scholastic philosophy, had good knowledge of the Peripatetic tradition and of the original works of Averroès, perhaps studied Siger, and in Florence deep-
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ened his acquaintance with Platonic thought. In Padua, he was in touch with Averroists, Thomists, and Scotists; in Florence, in the midst of Platonists, he became convinced of the unity of truth, of the agreement of philosophers, of the pax philosophica, and of a Pythagorical friendship among philosophers. His life was dedicated to this goal alone, to concordia, reason why his friends joked on his title of “Lord of Concordia.” The theological tradition that Ficino searched among Platonists is individuated by Pico in the philosophers of all the schools, even of the most contrasting. Aristotle and Plato come together, and so do Thomas and Scotus. On the other hand, a historical interest did not sustain the subtle and acute Pichian reconstructions; it was the conviction of an effective unity of truth, founded on the unity and universality of one logos, one verbum, actually illuminating all the minds, to which it is present. In the theses, we see Pico taking advantage of the most diverse theories to arrive at the same result: one is the light that illumines the intelligence; unique is the truth that nourished humanity. The theses of Siger on the intellect were for him in agreement with the Ficinian Neo-Platonism; they were confirming his confidence in this unity that truly was singleness of knowledge. Pico considered the prima et vera cabala that, on his thinking, represented the Jewish witness to the truth of Christianity because it emerged as the orally transmitted twin revelation on Mount Sinai. The cabala for its exoticism and mystery exercised a great fascination, and for Pico it was an over all confirmation and method. It was a confirmation, because he found in it an extension to the Hebraic world of a complex of themes that he had already underlined within the classic thought. It was a method, because the systems of cabalistic exegesis allowed the most temerarious acrobatics with all texts, especially those of the Scriptures. It is unfortunate that Pico assimilated very little of what were the true and exact peculiarities of cabalistic thought. At the time of the Roman Disputation, his knowledge was insufficient, limited probably to the comment on the Pentateuch of Menahem of Recanati and to the writings of El’asar of Worms, limited to the texts translated for him by Mitridate and now kept at the Vatican Library. After he extended his knowledge of mysticism and cabalism, probably with the help of Jochanan Alemanno, the new teacher and a greater maturity constrained him from exaggerated enthusiasms. In the Heptaplus, and in the comment on the Psalms, the cabala is reduced quite often to a kind of patina of precious sophistication. He loved to repeat that in the cabalistic texts, venerable to his eyes for their antiquity and because “revealed,” he particularly looked for a confirmation of Pythagoras and Plato. 5. Pichian Thought: God, the Divine Circle, Being and the One. The Polemic with Antonio of Faenza For some of its aspects, Pichian thought could be called “the mind’s road to God.” Perhaps, Pico himself may have thought of Bonaventure’s booklet when he drafted the oration on the dignity of the human being. For Pico, too,
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the goal of the research is the ascension to the absolute, and charitas is the unique key that opens the access to truth: “We prefer to search continuously for what we want and never find it, instead of finding it and not loving it. When we try to find what we don’t love, it is in vain that we find it.” (malumus semper quaerendo numquam invenire quod quaerimus, quam non amando possidere. Id quod non amando quaerimus frustra etiam inveniretur). In Commento alla canzone d’amore, love was already shown as the mean to overcome the distance that separates us from the infinite goodness. In De ente et uno, the impossibility of reaching the absolute being with our thought was again underlined with the classic terms of the negative theology derived from the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius. This incapacity of knowing does not negate the infinite richness of being, in which in effect is rooted the torment of the soul, rich and poor at the same time, that feels the immensity of God as an absence. From this comes the “intellectual” love, the son, in a Platonic way, of Porus and Peneis, of a richness that is, at the same time, poverty; and also the final “conjunction” of the death by love (morte d’amore) or, using the Hebraic expression so dear to Pico, the “death by kiss” (morte di bacio, mors osculi): “Let us ascend to the Father, where the peace that unifies, the light absolutely true, and the loftiest of all pleasures are found” (Evolemus ad Patrem ubi pax unifica, ubi lux verissima, ubi voluptas optima). This is unity of origin (unità “fontale”), an “abstract” unity: “God is not the circle, but the indivisible point from which all circles originate and return.” Dynamic root of the whole, God is the end of the whole, transcendent to the whole, but present in all things. God is “the end place of all places, and this can be understood in the mysteries of the Hebrews, because among the most sacred names of God they also have Place” (ultimo luogo di tutti i luoghi, il che ne’ mysterii delli Hebrei si può comprendere, li quali fra i piú sacrati nomi di Dio pongono questo, cioè Luogo). If, for the attribute of omnipotence, God is the space in which everything moves, in its reality God is the “abstract” unity that never consolidates in a definite entity. Beyond all determinations, separate from every limited reality, God is inaccessible in every sense: If God in itself is understood as infinite, unique, and absolute, then we understand God as if nothing proceeds from God. What we understand, then, is God’s separation from things, and God’s complete closure of itself within itself. In addition, by this, we understand God’s solitary isolation within itself, hiding itself most deeply in the abyss of its own darkness. In no way we perceive God as He manifests itself in the effusion and profusion of its goodness and generating splendor (Si Deus in se ut infinitum, ut unum et secundum se intelligitur, ut sic nihil intelligimus ab eo procedere, sed separationem a rebus, et omnimodam sui in semet ipso clausionem, ac solitariam retractionem de eo intelligimus, ipso penitissime in abysso suarum tenebrarum se contegente, et
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On the other hand, God is the source of life (fons vitae), the spring from which the universal life flows ceaseless: God conserves nature in its existence and administers, in cooperation with it, all its actions and operations.… The land dries up, the sea is stormy, the air is breezy, human beings are burning [with passion], and the angelical powers are circling. How do you think that these things move? Is it by their instinctive inclinations or rather by divine impulses? (Deus naturam in esse conservat, et cooperando omnem suam actionem sive operationem illi ministrat.… Arescit terra, concutitur mare, ignoscit aër, obtenebrescit coelum, inardescunt homines, moventur angelicae virtutes; num haec suis instinctionibus et non magis divinis impulsionibus agitantur?) The four patterns of divine flowing maintain in a cycle the rhythm of universal life: first, union and stable quietude (primo unionis et stabilitate mansionis); second, progression (secundo processionis); third, return (tertio reversionis); fourth, beatific reunion (quarto beatificae reunionis). It is a circularity, in which God is always present and always absent, always within everything and always outside everything: This goodness, inhabiting the abyss of its own divinity, is in itself exalted over all things, and diffused throughout everything, it is found in everything; … hence, as the poets write, Jupiter is everything you see, and all things are full of Jove (Nam et in seipso hoc bonum est super omnia exaltatum, suae inhabitans divinitatis abyssis, et per omnia diffusum in omnibus invenitur … unde—ut scribunt poetae—Iuppiter est quodcumque vides, et Jovis omnia plena sunt). Pico never gives up repeating that God is this presence of an absence; this God is not in the world; this God is present everywhere and is not in a place; this God is not. “All things are God, and God is hidden from every side” (omnia sunt ipse, et ipse est occultatus ab omni latere). The unitas abstracta does not fall under the determination of existence. It is not. Because the “abstract unity” is the fullness of the whole, It is infinitely beyond the whole. “It is the completion of all that exists and alone stands for itself, and from It, without any intermediary, all things have come into existence. It is said to be ‘one’ because in Its ‘oneness’ It is all things” (Qui est totius esse plenitudo, qui solus a se est, et a quo solo, nullo intercedente medio, ad esse omnia processerunt, … unus dicitur quia unice est omnia).
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The discussion concerning being (ens) and oneness (unum) is inserted at the point where Pico, taking position against Ficino in regard to the interpretation of the Parmenides, subsumed ens to unum [being to oneness, existence to unity], in the sense that the unum was seen in the condition of “unity” differentiating from “otherness.” Existence (ens) gives way to distinction, multiplication [plurality], limitation, as far as it is opposed by the non-existent (non ens, nihil), matter. Unity (unum) is unification, an overcoming of multiplicity, otherness, and an overcoming of being (ens): We will deny the name of “being” not only to what “is not” and what is “nothing,” but also to what is through itself, so that its “existence” is through and from itself, and from which by participation all things derive “being.” In the same way, we not only will not call “hot” what is deprived of “heat,” but also will not call “hot” the “heat” itself. Of such a kind is God, who is the completion of all that exists (Negabimus ens, non solum quod non est, et quod est nihil, sed illud quod adeo a se est, ut sit ipsum esse quod a se et ex se est, et cuius participatione omnia sunt, sicut non id solum negabimus esse calidum quod est exspers caloris, sed etiam quod ipse calor est. Tale autem est Deus, qui est totius esse plenitudo). God by being “existence” itself (ipseitas) cannot be called ens, God is super ens, and by saying this we do not say what God is, but in what way it could be all the things it is, and in what way all things could be from it (sed quomodo sit omnia quae est, et quomodo ab ipso alia sint). God is a unitas that is not coordinata, but abstracta: “Ensoph [infinitum] should not be counted in other numerations because it is the abstract unity of those numerations, not a coordinated unity” (Ensoph non est aliis numerationibus connumeranda, quia est illarum numerationum unitas abstracta, non unitas coordinata). God is not essence and existence, or essence alone, but, we may say, God is “the pure existence itself, from which the existence of all other creatures derives” (puram ipsamque existentiam, a qua deinceps omnis alia rerum creaturarum existentia derivat). We underline the reference to existence that is common to the human being and to God. The polemic with the Peripatetic Antonio Cittadini of Faenza dealt with the notion of abstractness of God, its separation, its being an opposite pole, though connected, of total presence. Everything is present to God and God is present to everything, almost as the soul of the whole, closer to us than we are to ourselves. On the other hand, the presence is not of God, not of the God that is infinite, absolute, whose presence is the death of the finite. The God which is total existence (pura esistenza) excludes being definite, even though in the son he gives himself to the world, and calls the world to himself. “The Son … comes to unite all things in the Father, through Him all things have been made, by Him all things are brought together, and in Him the celebration
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takes place” (Filius … est qui omnia unit in Patre, et per quem omnia facta sunt, et a quo omnia convertuntur, et in quo demum sabbathizant omnia). With Greek, Hebrew, and Christian mystics, Pico spoke of God as the beginning and end of reality, and by so doing he pushed to an absolute contrast the nothingness of the human being and the incomprehensibility of God. The movement from darkness to light became the suspension between two dark abysses, because the infinite nothingness and the infinite wholeness, the null darkness and the divine darkness (the tenebrous light) vanished into an unreachable background. The free act of human existence emerged from within the contracting encounter between the finite and the infinite. 6. Revelation. Magic. Universal Life. Miracles. Astrology. True Causes. Angels and Human Beings Pico’s infatuation with the Hebraic gnosis, the cabala, and the oral tradition has been the subject of much talk; it is a complex mixture of disparate motives of interest in finding in the Bible, through complicated interpretative systems, some secret meanings. The cabala, which found its systematization in the Zohar, rich with splendid images, seemed to Pico an instrument suitable to unveil from the sacred texts a vision of religious life in tune with the ambiance within which he moved, an ambiance imbued with Hermetism and NeoPlatonism. The cabala was for him the divine confirmation of his conceptions, and a manner of reading in the Bible the theories that he was elaborating in his mind, “If we unruffle some words in their elements, take these parts of words separately, and put them again together in the right way, the new composition of words will reveal to us in their light admirable most secret truths” (vocabulis resolutis, elementa eadem divulsa si capiamus et rite coagmentemus, futurum dicunt ut elucescant nobis mira secretissima dogmata). Pico did not appropriate the characteristics proper of Zohar and other even more ancient sources, with which he came in contact. He remained satisfied with what he found that would clarify the mysteries of the Pseudo-Dionysius, the doctrines of Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus. He looked at the cabalistic literature as an apologetic tool for the purpose of evincing the profound rationality of the Scriptures, even in those parts that more evidently are repugnant to a speculative or mystical transference. The cabala, for Pico, became the key to enter the temple of God, beyond the limits fixed for the common people: There are no letters [in the words] of the whole Law [Scripture] that would not reveal the ten secrets of the numerations [Sephiroth] through their forms, conjunctions, separations, tortuousness, correctness, defect, exaggeration, diminution, importance, ornament, limitation, openness, and order (Nullae sunt litterae in tota lege, quae in formis, coniunctionibus, separationibus, tortuositate, directione, defectu, superabundantia, minoritate, maioritate, coronatione, clausura, apertura et ordine, decem numerationum [sephirot] secreta non manifestent).
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If the cabala was the means to make the Bible speaks and to find the key of the mystery of God, after having recognized the God of Israel in the Ancient of Days as incomprehensible and elusive, magic was the road to follow in order to penetrate the world of the elements. Following the Heptaplus through a complex interpretation of the Genesis, the world appeared divided into four reigns: elementary, celestial, angelical, and human. These four reigns in some ways corresponded among themselves and came to be linked together and connected in the human being. Matter, the pure tridimensional extension, as Averroès defined it, in the Biblical language was the abyss over which darkness dominated, meaning privation (abyssum vocat terram, id est materiam trino dimensu in altissimas profunditates extensam … super hanc tenebrae, id est privatio). Form did not come from matter until matter itself became qualified: “Matter humidified by the waters generated the form that at the last of moments became light” (aquis humectata materia parturit formam, quam extremo temporis momento edit in lucem). The elementary reality ascended to the reign of the soul, to the human being: “at the summit, prince over all things is the human being; once the corruptible nature of the world arrives there, it stops and celebrates” (supremus omnium et princeps homo, quo mundi corruptibilis natura progressa sistit pedem et receptui canit). In a corresponding way, the human world, at its own turn, reached its highest unitary expression in Christ: “As the human being is the absolute consummation of all things inferior, so Christ is the absolute consummation of all humanity” (Quemadmodum autem inferiorum omnium absoluta consummatio est homo, ita omnium hominum absoluta consummatio Christus). Under the divine light, life emerged from the abyss; and everything was living: “Nothing in the world is without life” (nihil est in mundo expers vitae). Life emerged where the primary indefiniteness became determined in a form. Anywhere the light of a determination emerged from the darkness of a privation, life existed. He told us to be confident: Seize life: the life in the plants, the life in the bodies! It is an imperfect life because it is just life without cognition and without excellence; it is a kind of vivification that passes from the soul to the body, always flowing, always mixed with death (Accipe vitam: vita ea quae est in plantis, imo quae in omni corpore est, non ideo solum imperfecta, quia vita est tantum et non cognitio, sed quia non pura vita; potius autem vivificatio quaedam ab anima in corpus derivata, semper fluens, semper admixta morti). This vivificatio, which the soul generates in matter, is simultaneously animation of things and infusion of a principle of rationality in things of those numeric reasons of the Pythagoreans that made the universe an animated being and an orderly and rational organism. Pico loves to repeat with the Hermetics that where is life, there is a soul, and where is soul, there is mind (ubicumque
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vita, ibi anima, ubicumque anima, ibi mens). In things, in the world, a reason exists that is immersed and confused (ratio mersa et confusa); all the world, in this sense, is a theophany; “all work of nature is a work of intelligence (omnis opus naturae opus intelligentiae). If, in its genesis, reality is presented as a gradual emergence from the potentiality of matter identified with the tridimensional space, in reality, then, the whole is a diffusion of itself in the spaciousness of the divine principle. As the cabalists used to say, it is the question of a punctual contraction of the absolute light, which explodes thereafter in an infinite diffusion: “God reflected and the word (logos) produced all things and all objects in its name” (rifletté Dio e la parola produsse tutte le cose e tutti gli oggetti col suo nome). Where the cabalists spoke of letters, Pico spoke of numbers. “It is through numbers that we find the way to the inquiry and understanding of everything knowable” (per numeros habetur via ad omnis scibilis investigationem et intellectionem). These numbers, these reasons of things, live in the rational soul of the world. The heavens move within their eternal circles; they are admirably perfect because a soul or many souls infused in them guide and rule them. Pico wrote, “He who denies that the heavens are animated and that their motor is not their form opposes Aristotle and destroys the fundaments of all philosophy” (qui negat caelum esse animatum ita ut motor eius non sit forma eius, non solum Aristoteli repugnat, sed totius philosophiae fundamenta destruit). With Averroès, Pico has no hesitation in concluding: “Each motor of the heavens is the soul of its orbit, making with it one substantial unity more so than the soul of a bull and its body” (quilibet motor caeli est anima sui orbis, faciens cum eo magis unum substantialiter quam fiat ex anima bovis et sua materia). In this vision of a universal animation, Pico inserts his conception of magic. After having excluded necromancy that proceeds by having pacts with demons (quae fit per pacta et foedera cum demonibus), Pico makes clear that magic in its proper sense is “the practical part of the natural science” (pars practica scientiae naturalis); then, he affirms that magic “in so far as it presupposes a complete and perfect knowledge of all natural things” is truly “almost the apex and the climax of all philosophy” (apice e fastigio di tutta la filosofia). Having finally grasped the meaning of all things, “the meaning of nature that Alkindi, Bacon, William of Paris, and some others, especially all the Magi proposed” (sensus naturae quem ponunt Alchindus, Bacon, Guilelmus Parisiensis et quidam alii, maxime autem omnes Magi), the Magus can at its own turn make himself understood by things and act on them (pars practica), no longer as a listener, but as their owner and lord. In the Magus, the meaning of things is gathered and clarified; the Magus who comprehends the characters of things, who reads the great book of nature, concludes in himself the process of things in order to direct it, at his own will. In the magic work, the human being unveils itself as the ideal end and living synthesis of the cosmos, which, having at last reached in the human being a clear consciousness, can be modified by it.
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Pleased with this, Pico acknowledged the perfect symmetry between Scripture and nature: God has spoken in the metaphors of words and in the living creatures. Scripture and nature are metaphors and figures; they are sensible coverings and veils of letters and numbers, of Sephirot and numerationes, of the categories of being. The Magus and the Cabalist see the spirit beyond the body, the marrow beyond the coverings; they speak to the original work of God, find again its tone, go before God face to face and operate together with God: “No work of magic can have any efficacy, unless it is connected implicitly or explicitly with the cabala” (Nulla potest esse operatio magica alicuius efficaciae, nisi annexum habeat opus Cabalae implicitum vel explicitum). The soul of the human being speaks to things, speaks to the soul of things and makes itself understood; it finds in the intimate part of things the rational and numerical root. The magic operation is natural, not miraculous: “The remarkable works of the magic art happen because of the union and actuation of things that in nature are found separate and only in seed.… To operate magic is nothing else than to marry the world” (mirabilia artis magicae non sunt nisi per unionem et actuationem eorum quae seminaliter et separate sunt in natura.… Magicam operari non est aliud quam maritare mundum). In order to marry the world, the human being must become the active link between separate forces, render them operational under its orders, arrive to its fullness, reach the apex of its possibilities, and pull its forces to the extreme limit: “The form of total magic power comes from the soul of the steady human being, not from that which is frail (forma totius magicae virtutis est ab anima hominis stante, non cadente). This is the reason why, and Pico is never tired to repeat it, magic is nature: magic is a work of nature and reason; it is not a miracle. Miracles are collocated on a different plane; they have a different meaning, value, and origin; they are supernatural, not natural. Magic is far from causing doubts on the divinity of Christ. Magic is the answer of Pico to his judges, who condemned his theses on the subject, because, by revealing to us the totality of our possibilities and our limitations, magic, on the contrary, demonstrates the divinity of Christ: There is no science that can help us more than magic in order to prove the divinity of Christ.… When we see that the works of Christ exceeded the limits … of the things that are possible through natural agents, we necessarily conclude that they were done by divine power (Nulla est scientia, quae magis nos certificet de divinitate Christi quam magia…. Videntes opera Christi excedere gradum … illorum quae possunt fieri per agentia naturalia, concludimus necessario quod fuerunt facta virtute divina). Without reducing the importance of the books of cabala and magic, another book, nobler, speaks above us about the greatness of God; caeli enarrant gloriam Dei. The vault of heaven, full of stars, incorruptible, and recurring im-
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mutably on itself, in the harmony of the spheres, speaks of God and his wisdom. No tumult, no corruption of elements, no alternation of births and deaths, are found here. Light and circular motion dominate the heavens and constitute their purest essence, “Let us turn from the elements to the heavens, from what is corruptible to the incorruptible” (Vergamus ab elementis ad caelum, a corruptibilibus ad incorrupta corpora). About the constitution of the regions above the earth, Pico accepted without variations the AristotelianTolemaic doctrine. Only once, in the comment on the Psalms, Pico mentioned the medial thesis of Ibn Ezra, who, followed afterward by Oresme, renewed the doctrine of Heraclides Ponticus. Not even the tendency to assign a preeminent place to the Sun should make us wonder. Pico like Ficino, under the impulse of Platonic celebrations, could not relegate the source of light and life, sensible image of the living God, on the same plane with the other celestial bodies. This is why he vindicated to the Sun a particular excellence: he instituted the parallel between Sun and Christ: “The sun does not dissolve the firmament but perfect it; Christ did not come to dissolve the law but to complete it” (sol firmamentum non dissolvit, sed perfecit, et Christus legem non venit ut dissolveret sed ut perficeret). In the same spirit, he translated and appropriated the oration of Emperor Julian to the Sun. Following the Neo-Platonic tradition, Pico conceived the heavens as gifted with a soul: “God added a living rational substance, participant in the intellect” (adiecit [Deus] vivam substantiam et rationalem participem intellectus), though deprived of the freedom to deviate from the prescribed course. It is in this that Pico faced one of the most tiresome problems for himself and his age: the astrological problem. In the Heptaplus, he mentioned one of the Chaldaic oracles already referred to by Ficino and commented by Pletho: “Do not submit to fate!” (ne augeas fatum). Pletho had explained that “the oracle admonishes not to surrender ourselves to the caducity of the body; only the body is subject to the fate that rains down on us from the seven planets” (l’oracolo ammonisce a non piegare giú te stesso verso la caducità del corpo; poiché infatti solo il corpo soggiace al fato che piove dai sette pianeti). Of this kind has been, after much wavering, and many manifest and hidden astrological sympathies, the final position of Ficino. Pico had to choose a different road. He took on this matter of celestial determinism the neatest position: the soul cannot be influenced by bodies. He explained: “Given that the rational soul is incorporeal, it is not under the influence of fate, but instead controls fate” (Essendo l’anima razionale incorporea, non è sottoposta al fato, anzi domina a quello). The law of the soul, if there must be a law, must be that of providence and divine goodness. The human being, created free, becomes slave when from the liberty of knowing becomes the slave of sensing and freely makes himself subject to the determinism of things: The rational soul is governed by providence and is subdued to providence, but this submission is true liberty, because if our will obeys the
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law of providence is by providence guided most wisely to the attainment of its desired goal. At the time when the soul wishes to be free from the subjection to providence, from being free the soul becomes truly the slave of fate, of whom previously it was the lord. To derail from the law of providence is nothing but to abandon reason and follow the senses, which are subject to fate since they are corporeal. Pico made an extra step in regard to astrological causality, ahead of any other thinker on the topic. He not only, as we saw, subtracted the human mind from astral determinism; he also demonstrated that the heavens, sky and stars, in their motions are not the direct cause of phenomena, but their remote and most removed cause, which uniformly determines the whole sublunary reality. These causes are incapable of giving useful indications concerning earthly particular events. Pico observed: The error of the astrologers is double: the first assertion is that many of the things, which do not depend from the heavens, are said to be under the control of the heavens; the second is that they are of the opinion that from all the things that depend from the heavens true indications or foresights can be obtained, which is an impossible thing (Duplex error astrologorum: alter quod multa coelo subiiciunt, quae inde non dependent; alter quod etiam quae efficit caelum, inde tamen ab eis, ut putant, praevideri non possunt). Pico’s intent was that of opposing the judiciary astrology, which based its prophecies from the remnants of an ancient astral religion disguised as science. He had no intention of attacking astronomy or the mathematical astrology. Savonarola, in the Treatise, summarized in this way: Speculative astrology is a true science because it tries to know the effects through the true causes, … but divinatory astrology—which consists in effects that indifferently proceed from their causes, in matters regarding human things that proceed from the free will and in those that rarely proceed from their causes—is all vain and cannot be called art or science (La astrologia dunque speculativa è vera scienza, perchè cerca di conoscere li effetti per le vere cause, … ma l’astrologia divinatrice … è tucta vana). True causes, this is the novelty of Pico: only by retracing the cause of the phenomenon, we can determine its manifestation. The heavens only provide light and heat, and distribute them in a uniform manner over the whole world; they cannot explain the single variations of terrestrial things. On the other hand, the celestial mutations to which the astrologers refer are merely mutations of position, and it cannot be seen how they can profoundly affect varia-
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tions of quality. The same argument is valid for the astrological configurations in which, from the mythological name of a star, and from the powers attributed to the divinity by whose name it is called, multiple terrestrial variations are inferred. Pico has in this an easy game in sneering at the martial characters, or the melancholies of Saturn: Mars, the bellicose, always inflames Courageous spirits to war and forces Now this now that; never satisfies the greed For dominion, but increases it continuously. Saturn produces men rude and cruel, Thieves, liars, and assassins. Jove is benign and is the planet of virtue; It produces mathematicians and physicians, Theologians and great sages.… The Sun incites man to honor and glory; It delights in loveliness, And of wisdom wears the crown And of religion produces sects. Gracious Venus of her ardor Warms up the gentle hearts.… Mercury is the splendid star of reason, It produces great fountain of eloquence.… The Moon is comfort to the mariner And also in fishing, fowling, and hunting. (Il bellicoso Marte sempre inflama Li animi alteri al guereggiare e sforza Or questo or quello, né sazia sua brama In l’acquistar, ma piú sempre rinforza … Saturno uomini tardi e rei produce Rubbaduri e buxiardi et assassini … Benigno è Giove e de virtú pianeta Produce mathematici e doctori Theologi e gran savi … Il Sole ad onor l’uomo e glori sprona E d’ogni leggiadria si dilecta, Di sapienza porta la corona E di religion produce secta. La graziosa Vener del suo ardore Accende i cuor gentili.… Mercurio di ragion lucida stella Produce d’eloquenzia gran Fontana.… La Luna al navigar molto conforta Et in pescare et uccellare e caccia).
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These pitiable verses come with a splendidly illuminated codex de sphaera, dated to the time when Pico was writing his Disputationes against the astrologers. The crude quatrains correspond exactly to those that were the current conceptions and that men like Ficino, Toscanelli, and Pontano, at least in part, used. Pico denounced the hybrid character of the astrological configurations, unveiled their mythological origins, and illustrated their contamination with the sciences. He stated: [These astrologic signs] corrupts all philosophy, adulterates medicine, reduces the power of religion, generates superstition.… They make miserable, anxious, restless human beings, and from being free change them into slaves, and almost in everything that must be done make them unfortunate (Philosophiam omnem corrumpit, medicinam adulterat, religionem infirmat, superstitionem parit … homines miseros, anxios, inquietos, et de liberis servos, et in rebus pene agendis omnibus plane facit infortunatos). Beyond the fundamental question and the determination exercised by the spheres over the mind, which would destroy liberty and spontaneity, what generated the disdain of Pico was the absurdity of willing to connect with remote phenomena, partly unknown, partly falsified, events of another order and of another nature. There was also the essential question of human liberty: the human being is not under the control of the heavens, he is the lord of heavens: “The king and the sage are above the stars. / Hence I am free from this vain law: / The good marks and the good scores / Are what a happy human being elects by itself (El re e il savio son sopra le stelle, / Onde io son fuor di questa vana legge: / E i buoni punti e le buone or son quelle / Che l’uom felice da se stesso elegge). The human soul is under no astral influence; it is part of a world that is higher, the “spiritual” world. In this spiritual world, Pico placed the angels, of which he accentuated the double aspects of multiplicity and unity. As the mirrors of God, the angels reflect God’s unity and reflect it multiplied throughout the world. From the many regions of the world, the angels look to God while orderly distributing its laws. In the Commento, Pico rejected the thesis of the Pseudo-Dionysius and of the Christian theologians who “count a number of Angels almost infinite.” In the conclusiones and in the Heptaplus, Pico insisted on the reduction of the angels to the cabalistic sephiroth, numerationes, as mirrors of God. The angels are unity in God and multiplicity in relation to things. They are numbers, a link between God and the world: The angel is not the unity itself, otherwise it would be God.… The remaining consideration is that the angel is a number. If it is a number, it would be partly a multitude … and every number is imperfect as far as it is multitude, but perfect as far as it is one.… We attribute what in the
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The angel, moving by circular motion of intrinsic intelligence from the indivisible unity, through love, which is conversion, returns again to unity (dalla indivisibile unità di Dio procedendo, per circolare moto de intrinseca intelligenzia ad quella perfettamente ritorna). The culmination of the spiritual world is not the angel; within its own perfect circularity the angel is closed within its perfection. The human being, the living knot of matter and spirit, free to ascend to God or becoming a servant to things, operates the convergence of the whole toward itself and is superior to angels because of liberty. Pico stated, “We all to whom has been given the power of becoming sons of God by the grace of which the giver is Christ, we all can reach higher dignity than the angelic one” (Sed et nos omnes, quibus data potestas filios Dei fieri per gratiam, cuius dator est Christus, super angelicam dignitatem evehi possumus). Many were doubtless the motives that influenced the Pichian vision of the human being: the tradition of the Fathers of the Church, the hermetic tradition, and the cabala. In the Zohar, Pico could read this kind of expressions on human beings: “The human being is the synthesis of all the sacred names [sephiroth]; all worlds, from the top to the bottom, are closed in the human being; the human being embraces all mysteries, even those that preexisted the creation of the world. The worlds could not subsist because the human being, whose image is the synthesis of the whole, was not yet. After the form of the human being was made, existence was assured to all beings. From the hermetic Asclepius, Pico derived the famous words about “the human being as the great miracle,” which he inserted in the Oratio de hominis dignitate, and from the hermetic literature that had already infiltrated into the Patristics and now found again in its sources, obtained many other motives and hints. It was Pico’s exalted tone of a religious message that attracted the attention on human dignity. The human being alone has no nature, but it can assume any of all natures: to the human being alone has been given for a moment an absolute liberty, through which to choose its own nature. God does not create the “human” species: God offers to the liberty of every human individual the act of election with which it may constitute itself. To every being God has assigned prescribed limits and has delineated a path constituting a definite nature for it. The human being instead is free of choosing itself: it
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truly is son of itself. To humans God has assigned this paradoxical condition: of not having any condition. The human being has this limit, of not having any limit; this closure, of being open to everything; this absurd contradiction, of being posited as self-positing. Only before God the human being inclines because in its power the human being can also rebel, as Adam did. For Pico, the essence of the whole is summarized in this dialogue between God and human beings. The human being is the unity of reality, “though in a different way … it could be God and not an image of God” (quamquam aliter … alioquin non Dei imago, sed Deus esset). For the completeness of its substance, the human being brings together and unites in itself all the natures of the entire world” (ad integritatem suae substantiae omnes totius mundi naturas colligit and counit). In the human being, the entire world falls and rises again. For this reason, God became a human being. Being an ancipital nature, the human being struggles in its election between wholeness and nothingness. The detachment, the rebellion of Adam, simultaneously makes of the human being a shipwrecked; the union, which brings the human being back to God, annihilating the human being. Pico wrote to Gian Francesco that the human life is pain and joy; and that by the end of life, happiness, the conclusion of human vicissitudes, is the goal of the human being, by way of the destruction of the human being, no matter how, even with a “death by kiss” (morte di bacio). He shouted: “Let us ascend to the Father, where the peace that unifies, the light that is absolutely true, and the loftiest of all pleasures are found” (Evolemus ad Patrem ubi pax unifica, ubi lux verissima, ubi voluptas optima). The philosophy of Pico, though incomplete, fragmentary, problematic, obtained a most vast resonance. In Italy, its effects were felt throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, in faithful disciples, dreaming of cabalistic immersions, or of always new Platonic-Aristotelian agreements, up to the time of Bruno, Campanella, and Vico. Outside of Italy, Pichian influxes and remembrances are present in many individuals from Johannes Reuchlin to Zwingly, from Robert Gaguin to Symphorien Champier, from Thomas More to the Platonists of Cambridge. More than the organic systematization of Ficino the restlessness of Pico became the symbol of an age and a civilization. Beside his disciples, friends, admirers, who followed his impulses, there were those who selected and discussed some of his most singular and particular aspects. We have already mentioned the commento on the poem of Girolamo Benivieni and to the polemic with Celso Cittadini. The work that gave way to the most open consents and most bitter dissents was the book against the astrologers, praised and summarized by Savonarola, followed and exploited by Paolo Cortese in a book De cardinalatu, minutely confuted by Lucio Bellanti, and harshly attacked by Gioviano Pontano.
Part Three THE RENAISSANCE (Chapters 15–20)
Fifteen ARISTOTELIANISM FROM POMPONAZZI TO CREMONINI 1. The Inheritance of the Fifteenth Century The greater expression of the philosophical thought of the fifteenth century was due to a group of thinkers who, gathering in Florence around the Medici, retained for themselves the task of confirming the truths of Platonism in their concord with those of Christianity, but giving often the impression of wanting instead to confirm Christianity by way of Platonism. If we were to open and read the Ficinian De religione christiana and find the same inspiration as in the Theologia platonica, we could conclude that for Ficino Christianity was nothing but Platonism presented to common folks in an easy and accessible form. Yet this opinion cannot be right, because Christian thought already seeped through the Ficinian Platonism, which is the reason why it is so easy to find in it an agreement with religion. Ficino read Plato and Plotinus in their original texts, but he read them with eyes already trained by the medieval Augustinian Platonism that transfigured in the message of Christ the ancient words of his “pagan prophet.” The interest of the Ficinians was, for the most part, dominated by ethicoreligious preoccupations, and they wished for a more sincere and intimate kind of faith. The Neo-Platonic tradition appeared to their eyes as the pia philosophia destined to renew the life of humanity. Giovanni Pico himself, in the last years of his short life, redirected his scientific interests toward a new apologetics. Pico and Ficino elaborated a conception of reality that operated throughout the whole sixteenth century in the orthodox scholars of the Florentine group, in the thinkers of other schools, and in scientists and artists. The reforming agencies of the Platonists of Florence transformed themselves in the isolated initiatives of a few heretics, while Luther and Calvin were taking their different paths. The new philosophy of Pico and Ficino instead converged on the theme of the centrality of the human being, in which the wealth of an ancient tradition had been transfused and renewed. This theme, as a position already acquired and of which it was necessary to exploit the assumptions, began to dominate deeply all the new researches. The naturalistic inquiry, at last devoid of the mystical and magic aureole
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with which the Platonism of the fifteenth century loved to adorn itself, accepted those presuppositions, and preserved for the human being the position of the “nodal point of the universe,” in the way that Pico with Ficino stressed. After the reflection on and the synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic motives that the thought of the fifteenth century had attempted, the Aristotelianism and the Platonism of the sixteenth century, as they continued to live distinct and sometimes in opposition, were becoming something other, having profoundly modified their structures and interests. The wine was new, but the pots were old. In some pages of Pomponazzi, the echo of Ficino will be heard; Nifo will combine disparate exigencies; Francesco Piccolomini with a pseudo-name will publish expositions of the purest Platonism; and, finally, Cremonini will retrace the path of Pico. The true human being that the Ficinians, on the footsteps of the NeoPlatonic commentaries on the Alcibiades, identified with the divine reason that sustains everything and exists eminently in the human being, was the human being which, celebrated with rhetorical virtuosity, discovered itself to be fully in harmony with things and nature. The reason that reaches a clear self-awareness in the human being is the same reason that pervades the universe. The human being acknowledges itself in the world as the temple of God, and studies and inquires about this world and this nature, knowing that human beings and world come from the same womb; are born from the same seed; are the manifold manifestations of the same reality. The cave of the world, which the human being bending forward tries to scrutinize with eagerness, bounces back from the womb the human being’s own image. World and nature speak to the human being with the human being’s language; show the same reason that because it is not exhausted within humanity gives the human being the certainty of an objective validity. The human being, the world, and God are becoming always more intimate, no matter what their difference may be. Science flourishes in this progressive intrinsicalness because of the certainty sustaining the inquiry that rests on the conviction of an original unity, thanks to which human beings and nature are not in opposition, but permeate each other. Human beings and nature have the same roots, but the human being elevates itself higher than nature because of its mind. In its becoming conscious of things, the human being can with its science govern things, and bend the world, whose secrets it is coming to know, to its will. Within this frame provided by the speculation of the fifteenth century, the philosophy of the sixteenth century inserted itself with motives, which were multiple in the wealth of their aspects and peaceful in their contrasts. If we were to keep in mind these central lines that were elaborated during the humanistic age, we will discover that these central lines will still nourish even beyond Vico the most significant expressions of the Italian thought. Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, Leonardo and Bruno have not forgotten that it was the Italian fifteenth century that made the affirmation of the dignity of the human being. They intended to secure and preserve the works of this true human
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being, surprising even the laws of nature and history. History and nature may perhaps show themselves as inexorable processes in which everything come to be immersed once more together after having in some ways reached a higher point, within which human beings and times have passed away as short-lived splendors. Those human beings that understood the process, that were above it with their virtues, were truly the sons of the Adam to whom, in the oration of Pico, God had given the privilege of being lords of their own destiny. Giovanni Gentile justly observed, no matter which their different aspects were, Pomponazzi and Ficino spoke the same language, while the science of Leonardo and Galileo revealed the common inspiration in the conception of a universe revived by internal mathematical reasons, and those same motives that at different planes found expression in the works of Pico reappeared in Machiavelli. Only by being aware of all this, would it be possible to go beyond the polemics between schools and comprehend the contribution given by the many currents of thought that affirmed always in a better way their own vitality, when instead the more rigid rhetorical attitudes of the fifteenth century, with their sterile grammatical plays, were becoming less important. In opposition to the last disciples of Barbaro, in contrast to Nizolio, Bruno stood up, who was, more than it has often been believed, tied to the subtle Aristotelians. We must analyze the importance that the renewed Aristotelianism of the sixteenth century has achieved by opening itself to the needs of the pondered inquiry that the new culture has refreshed in methods and interests. If someone were to continue to consider the Paduan Aristotelianism of the sixteenth and of the first years of seventeenth century only on the trail of the medieval shadow prolonging itself into the modern age, he would show a strange incomprehension of some among the most interesting motives of modern thought. In order to understand several attitudes of Telesio, Bruno, and Galileo, one must return to the consideration of Aristotelianism and no less to the renewed Platonism that, in many arguments, with the disappearance of the clamors of polemics, was not too far removed from it. 2. Alessandro Achillini and Pietro Trapolino Pietro Pomponazzi, the greatest of the Aristotelians of the sixteenth century and one of the major philosophers of the Renaissance, successor to Niccoletto Vernia, who was known as Nicoletus philosophus celeberrimus, while still very young in 1488 was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Padua. His challenging lecturer or concurrens [competitor or adversary provided by the university] was at this time Alessandro Achillini, to whose chair in Bologna Pomponazzi was destined to succeed, and where he spent the most productive years of his life, composing and publishing his major works. According to a tradition cited by Paolo Giovio, Achillini had been Pietro’s teacher; according to other information, Pietro, during the period when Achillini was his concurrens, could attract to his lectures the greater
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part of the students, who, though admiring the subtle dialectic of Achillini, preferred the clearer expositions of his younger concurrens. Achillini was not a common kind of thinker. His faith in Aristotelianism was faith in science, in pure research, without any limiting imposition, courageously proclaimed in Bologna, where he was born on 29 October 1463 and died on 2 August 1512. The verses, erroneously believed to have been prepared for the epitaph on his grave in San Martino Maggiore, rightly manifest Achillini’s dedication to reason and experience: O stranger, if you are looking for Achillini in this grave, You are wrong. He lives with his Aristotle in the Elysian Fields, where he sees with his eyes the causes of all those Things that over here he could barely know. You, too, give to the noble shadow that walks On the blessed fields your best and perpetual greetings. (Hospes, Achillinum tumulo qui quaeris in isto Falleris; ille suo iunctus Aristoteli Elysium colit, et quas rerum hic discere causas Vix potuit, plenis nunc videt ille oculis. Tu modo, per campos dum nobilis umbra beatos Errat, dic longum perpetuumque vale.) There is not a trace of prayer in these distiches. Elsewhere, in the De elementis, though declaring himself an Averroist, Achillini addressed Christ, exclaiming: “O shining Light of lights, by which every truth is illumined, guide me to you, secure from the error in the shadow of matter, with the succor of the Son of Man” (O splendente Luce della luce, onde ogni verità è illuminata, guidami a te sicuro dell’errore nell’ombra della materia col soccorso del Figlio dell’uomo).He had known the incompatibility of religion with some others of his theories; incompatibility of philosophy with faith: You asked where faith stands vis-à-vis with the doctrines of Aristotle, given that according to natural reason the intellect is one, as Averroès understood Aristotle or is multiple from its beginning, as Alexander of Aphrodisias said. These opinions do not conform to faith. I say that this is the circumstance in which it is convenient to abandon the Philosopher and elect the one of the two false opinions that is more probable. Of the two opinions, that of Averroès is (Quomodo stat opinio Aristotelis cum fide? In De elementis, bk. 2, ch. 5). This is a characteristic conclusion since both philosophical opinions are false because in contrast with faith. The philosopher as philosopher must not choose the opinion that is less offensive, but instead that which is more in conformity with the rational processes or the one more adherent to the texts
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and the given data, the interpretation of which is the task of philosophy. The interests of Achillini coincide with the usual ones of the Peripatetic School: physics, logic, and medicine. He wrote also about chiromancy. Among his most notable writings are the questions on the [subsisting] intelligences, quodlibeta de intelligentiis (Bologna, 1494), where we can find some of the most debated problems of the time. To the highest point of the hierarchy of intellects, Achillini placed God as the agent intellect, in whom the understanding is found at its greatest grade: Deus est extremum intensissimae latitudinis intellectum (quodl., num. 4). Between God and the possible intellect, the series exists of the intermediate intellects that are eternal according to Aristotle, but created according to faith. The possible intellect, the last of the series, occupies the loftiest point among all material things but the lowest one among the immaterial ones. The possible intellect contains in itself the poorest form of intelligence and the greatest perfection of corporeity: est intensissimum materialium et remisissimum abstractorum (quodl., num. 3). Placed between matter and form, the possible intellect is not material because, as far as it is pure potency, it is not given to the process of generation and corruption proper to matter, it is not a power (virtus) inherent to the elements or born from their mixing. The possible intellect is conscientiousness of itself autokineton but at the same time it is abstract, abstractum, separate, though Aristotle believed it, it is not multiplied in every human being: “The question is whether every human being possesses the possible intellect as the Philosopher believes. This opinion cannot be true” (Utrum intellectum possibilem habeat omnis homo, opinio Philosophi est quod sic. Illa opinio non est vera). If it were true, the possible intellect could be understood only as a corporeity or a corporeal function. This would be in fact the solution chosen by Pomponazzi, because of the need of evading the unexplainable transcendence of the act of understanding in respect to the human being that understands. The human intellect that mediates between the world of material nature and the world of the spirit claims for itself the praise that should be attributed to it for being the limit and the joining of all that is real: “It is evident why the human being is the end of the material world, because in the human being the material things come together with those that are immaterial, and in this guise the human being is the bond of the superior with the inferior beings.” This conclusion, affirmed in a great splendor of forms and in a wealth of developments in the Platonic currents, was very common in the schools or as Pico used to say, it was “tritum in scholis” [known by all and still repeated many times again and again]. In terms very similar to those of Pomponazzi, Pietro Trapolino exposed this same truth, and Pomponazzi in the dedication of De incantationibus remembered him as his teacher in Padua: Between the material and immaterial forms, some intermediate forms exist that are the intellective souls which give existence to human beings. These souls` are to some extent material and in need of material forms, as far as they give existence to matter as material forms. But
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Trapolino himself, in a comment on De anima Aristotelis et Averroys, considered the human soul as an intermediate form between the celestial intelligences, totally separate, and the forms “completely material,” rescuing in this way the soul’s immortal individuality and independence from the body with tones of Thomistic flavor, which Bruno Nardi attributed to the influence of the Dominican Francesco of Nardò, who was also the teacher of Pomponazzi. 3. The Influence of Siger of Brabant. Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Commentary. Pomponazzi. Philosophy and Religion Within the limits of these preoccupations and difficulties, the thought of Pomponazzi, who in Padua, where he studied philosophy and medicine, came in touch with the problems that were wearing out Aristotelianism, was formed and developed. These were problems of logic and physics the like of those formulated within Ockhamism. They were problems concerning the soul that Averroism was agitating with always new fervor, and in which the inspiration of the “great” Siger was operating, who probably was not unknown to Achillini, but was certainly known to Nifo. In Padua, the initiatives properly humanistic of Barbaro and after him, but on his footsteps, of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, could not attract wide agreements, though the Venetian Senate instituted in 1497 a university chair for Tomeo to expose Aristotle on the Greek text. The interest of the time was no longer for the graciousness of expression or for the philologically recognized fidelity to the Aristotelian text, but for the truth. Gaspare Contarini, in the response to Pomponazzi who was then his teacher, in defense of the immortality of individual souls, bragged about using the “Parisian style” that was clearly intended to contrast all humanistic refinements. This preference did not exclude the possibility of friendship, contacts, and a certain sincere admiration of the humanists for the Parisians. For example, Vernia, the most famous among the Averroists, praised the translation of the works of Themistius by Barbaro: “He [Barbaro] was the individual most erudite in every kind of discipline.… Though his name meant ‘a barbarian,’ in reality he was not barbarous, but a true glory of the Latin language.” Naturally, this praise and admiration for the artist did not diminish the philosophical dissent with the thinker. According to a famous observation of Ficino, the Paduan Aristotelianism gradually became individualized into two fundamental trends: the followers of the comment of Averroès and the supporters of Alexander of Aphrodisias, now widely known in the seventeenth century version made by Girolamo Donato, but already known much before the end of the sixteenth century. Though this distinction was an approximation, it became a common place. For in-
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stance, Contarini used it in addressing Pomponazzi and recalling the past: When I was in Padua, the university was among the most famous of Italy, the name and the doctrines of Averroès the Commentator enjoyed supreme authority. Everyone was accepting his words as if they were oracles. As you know, his position about the unity of the intellect was so much supremely praised that anyone thinking differently was not even considered fit to call himself Peripatetic or Philosopher (Opera, Venice, 1589, p. 179). Contarini added that because he was upset about the assessment and the difficulties of the Averroistic theory, he began to prefer the position of Alexander. Averroism maintained faith in the conception of the uniqueness of the possible intellect in all human beings, so that, in the act of understanding, not only is the light that reaches the eye and allows the vision of the objects unique, but is also unique for the entire humanity the faculty of vision. Therefore, unique is the agent intellect, and unique and transcendent is the possible intellect. What vary in the single individuals are the psychic functions, imagination and fantasy, which together prepare the material from which the intellect would extract the intelligible. Niccoletto Vernia, according to what Nifo narrates in his commentary on De anima, insisted on the uselessness or incomprehensibility of admitting a multiplicity of intellects or human forms, which would be nothing else than a vain duplication of the human species itself. This debate continued until Bishop Barozzi and the Inquisitor, friar Martino of Lendinara, intervened and obliged teachers and disciples to abandon the impious doctrine, with an edict affixed on the doors of the schools of Padua, on 6 May 1489. Averroism had reintroduced an exasperated Platonism that in the transcendence of a unique humanity annihilated all individuality. The doctrine of Alexander, on the other hand, by separating the unique and divine agent intellect from the material one, form of the physical organic body, could make more comprehensible the act of human understanding, but certainly not the possibility of individual immortality. Averroès could not free himself from the dilemma of the possible intellect being an intrinsic or an extrinsic form: if intrinsic, then there could be only one human being; if extrinsic, there could be no human understanding. Alexander, on the contrary, posited the eternity of the agent intellect and the caducity of the human intellect. Intellection is made possible by the encounter of the unique light with the innumerable eyes, but, in the unchanging permanence of that light, all those innumerable eyes continuously perish. If, against Averroès, Contarini could affirm that the eye could subsist without light and without the colors that it sees, it still remained true that the eye, outside the act itself of seeing, was linked to its mortal matter. Consequently, putting aside the opposing opinions, Contarini thought of finding a secure refuge in Thomism, in which other difficulties were waiting
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for him. Thomas De Vio, known as Cardinal Cajetan, in his commentary on the soul, composed in Rome in 1509 and published in Florence in 1510, had abandoned the Thomistic exegesis to move with his thought in the direction of Alexander, in some of the most characteristic points of his opinion. Cardinal Cajetan thought that the human soul could not be demonstrated as immortal with the means provided by Aristotle. By following Alexander instead, Cajetan could place the agent intellect in God and away from the human being. This opinion carries some similarities with the thought of Pomponazzi, as one of Pomponazzi’s unyielding adversaries, his associate the Dominican Bartolomeo Spina observed not without malignity, arguing a direct influence of Cajetan on Pomponazzi. Perhaps this influence cannot be completely excluded, when we realize that the work of Cardinal Cajetan had given way among the Dominicans to stern sympathies and decisive oppositions. It was a Dominican, Girolamo Natale of Ragusa, who suggested to Pomponazzi the theme from which the treatise De immortalitate took its beginnings. We would not insist on the syncretistic position embraced by another religious individual, a Thomist at the beginning, tied to Pomponazzi, Crisostomo Javelli of Casale, who, by fighting the Alexandrians in the name of Platonism, took in this regard the orientation of Nifo and considered Cajetan and “Peretto” [nickname for Pomponazzi] as holding the same position. The traditional terms of the question were undergoing a change, and nothing could be more dangerous than to be guided by the classic denominations of Alexandrians and Averroists, take these terms literally, and rigidly interpret them in the way that the people of the Middle Ages did. We have here two Dominicans who are Thomist: one takes the side of Pomponazzi, who was destined at times to be judged as Alexandrian; the other stands at the side of Nifo, who tended to being Averroist, even though his position was more fleeting than one could imagine. But we may ask, up to what point would we be able to say that Cajetan and Javelli were Thomist, Peretto was Alexandrian, and Nifo Averroist? 4. Disputations Concerning the Soul Pomponazzi would not stop in front of preoccupations of this kind and would not hesitate to renounce Thomism and Averroism in the hope of a rich and muting nature deprived of transcendence. The Dominican Crisostomo Javelli, in a most significant letter to Peretto, expressed with regret this same point, after the publication of the De immortalitate: “Many persons much devoted to you, who love you like a father, venerate you like the best philosopher and teacher, are disappointed and shocked by the fact that you have definitively admitted that, according to Aristotle, the soul in strict sense is mortal.… They are stupefied that you turned your back on Thomas, our safest guide.” It is interesting to point out that Crisostomo Javelli recognized, on the philosophical level, the legitimacy of Pomponazzi, the right, as interpreter of Aristotle, of specifying beyond any preoccupation of faith the position of natural reason. In a similar fashion, Contarini reaffirmed the distinction be-
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tween reasoning and the appeal to authority. Pomponazzi wanted his personal inquiry to be free, trying to keep as much as possible the dominion of philosophizing completely distinct. He looked at the people in religious order with suspicion and used to refer to them as “isti fratres truffaldini, dominichini, franceschini, vel diabolini” (these Dominicans and Franciscans friars are indeed rascals or little devils!). At the same time, he was recommending to his disciples: “Believe in philosophy as far as reason can guide you; believe in theology as much as theologians and prelates with the whole Roman Church wish you to believe; otherwise you will end as the chestnuts always end.” It was a remark as humorous as his temperament. It is said, “He abounded with witticism more than it was convenient to a philosopher.” But the respect or the fear for condemnation could never force him on the theoretical level to recant scientific conclusions, a thing that, on the contrary, in Padua, Vernia had to do. He celebrated the problematic anxiety of the philosophical research with that torment that is the sign of a thought that is the product of continuous vigilance and sufferance: These are the things that keep me awake at night and make me mad. They show the truth of the myth of Prometheus who, while trying unnoticed to steal the fire from Jove, was by him discovered and chained to the Scythian rock where an eagle consumed tirelessly his heart. Verily, Prometheus represents the Philosopher, who while trying to know the secrets of God is consumed by perennial worrisome cogitations, is not thirsty or hungry, cannot sleep, drink, eat, or cleanse; he is ridiculed by all, considered a sacrilegious fool, persecuted by inquisitors, a spectacle for the masses. I tell you, these are the gains of the philosophers, their reward (De fato, p. 709). The truth is that he who does not philosophize is a brute, not a human being: qui de philosophia non participat, bestia est (De incantationibus, p. 251). Only doing philosophy, which is the privilege of a small human aristocracy, humanity will realize itself, rising above the masses and turning against them. This conclusion was quite Aristotelianly or Averroisticly orthodox. Pomponazzi insisted in many places on the solitary and rebellious character of the true philosopher. The philosopher is a rebel among the common people, who are animals rather than persons, or ghosts (masks) and fictions that stand before worldly divinities: “The philosophers are like earthly gods, greatly removed from all the other human beings, as true human beings are from painted figures.” He was a rebel even in respect to philosophizing, when philosophizing became the commonplace, the trivial repetition of motives passively accepted. To philosophize is not to accept the words of the Philosopher (Aristotle) or of the Commentator (Averroès), but to search for the truth without respect for the limitations imposed by authority. In the quaestiones de remanentia elementorum in mixto (questions on the permanence of the com-
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posing elements in a mixture), he proudly answered those who reproached him for criticizing every one for a pure spirit of contradiction and for an ambitious pretense and preference of standing alone. He was inclined instead to the criticism of himself for the love of what is true: “I am not ashamed to recant, for the love of truth, what I have asserted. All those who sustain that I contradict others for the pleasure of contradicting, are lying. In philosophy, the philosopher who wishes to find the truth must face a sort of combat that likely would lead to heresy (oportet enim in Philosophia haereticum esse qui veritatem invenire cupit). This explains his contempt for the slavish adherents to Aristotle, Averroès, Thomas, who hardly give up the past, the so-called “trombetti” of the past [trumpets, mouthpieces of other people’s opinions], as Galileo will call them. This clarifies why he despised those among the literati, arrogant and superficial, who believed that the spirit of the ancient philosophers is hidden in the verbal expressions they used and thought that the philosophers can be understood by commenting on their books in the same way we understand the poets by expounding on their poems. These are the words of Sperone Speroni in Dialogo delle Lingue; they correspond to the position of Pomponazzi in which the polemics of the fifteenth century between barbarous and literate philosophers reappeared: Many are convinced that in order to become philosophers it is enough to have learned to write and read Greek, as if the spirit of Aristotle in the same guise than an elf prisoner within a crystal was to be found in the alphabet of Greece, so that through the alphabet it would enter the philosophers’ intellect and make them prophets. Hence, in these days, I myself have seen many arrogant individuals who, though deprived of all knowledge, relying solely on their knowledge of the language, had dared to lay hands on the books of Aristotle, pretending to explain them in public like any other work of literature. It was exactly Ermolao Barbaro, the one who sustained the rights of the grammarians against the philosophers, who in Padua tried to comment on Aristotle according to the canons of the new fashion. Leonico Tomeo, a contemporary and a colleague of Pomponazzi, suitably continued the same movement after Ermolao, alternating in his dialogues the inquiry on the soul and the research on the names given by the ancients to the sides of the dice. The literati shielded themselves from the despise of the philosopher, charging Pomponazzi with ignorance of languages, even of Latin and Italian, and basely ridiculing his appearance, as Matteo Bandello did in his famous thirtyeighth novel of the third volume of Novelle, “Peretto was a man of a small stature, with a face that truly had features more Judean than Christian; he dressed also in a fashion that tended to be of a Rabbi more than of a philosopher, always with the beard and the hair shaved off. He used to speak in a
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manner that seemed proper to a German Jew who wanted to learn to speak Italian.” The literati were not dangerous. For the philosopher, the incumbent necessity was that of clarifying the position concerning religion and the Church; this was necessary for fear of the fratres diabolini, or for avoiding finishing like the roasted chestnuts. It was the duty of every philosopher with such speculative seriousness as Pomponazzi to define the value of religion and its significance vis á vis the scientific inquiry. The conclusion of the De immortalitate is known; it reminds us of the final appeal to a double field, that of faith and that of the philosophical research, of the usual obligatory formulation with which even the many not too much orthodox Aristotelian treatises ended. But was this the position held also by Pomponazzi? In the De incantanionibus (p. 201), he referred to the original thesis of Averroès, as it is exposed also in the Destructio destructionis, “The word of the law is like the word of the poet. The poet creates fables, which, if taken literally, are not verisimilar, but they still contain truth within.” In the Defensorium (ch. 18), he observed that “the laws intend to make the civil society of humankind a good society instead of a learned one.” Religion and priesthood must limit themselves to this task, to this specified preoccupation. Within these limits, both religion and priesthood find meaning and justification. What must be avoided is the contamination between religion and philosophy, between what is useful to the common people and what is proper of the learned. In the Defensorium, he said, “The hidden truths of philosophy should not be spread among the common people and the idiots” (Arcana philosophorum non sunt propalanda vulgaribus et idiotis). And in the De incantationibus (p. 242) he added, “Be careful not to speak of these things with incompetent priests. The reason why is clear. Many times philosophers have been expelled from their cities, or imprisoned, or stoned, or sentenced to death” (Cavendum est etiam cum imperitis sacerdotibus de his habere sermonem. Causa patens est, quia multotiens philosophi fuerunt ex urbibus expulsi, aut incarcerati, aut lapidibus et ultimo supplicio affecti). It would seem that in all this Pomponazzi did not diverge from the Averroistic position for which philosophy and religion have different goals and tasks: theoretic for philosophy; practical for religion. For this reason, philosophy engages, with an adequate rational precision, in what religion adapts in accordance to educational needs to the coarse mentality of the common people. The true enemy of the philosophers is the theology of those theologians who, misunderstanding philosophy and corrupting religion, elevate to the level of a proven theory what exactly in religion is myth. In other writings, Pomponazzi took a position a little dissimilar; he recognized religion as a different vision for its ability of attaining at truths that pass unnoticed by pure rationalization. What he affirmed in De nutritione, one of his later writings in which he spoke about the soul, is characteristic: I take it as true that according to Aristotle not only the souls of plants and insects must be considered divisible, but also the soul that actual-
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Was Pomponazzi sincere? Was it perhaps the fear of the pyres, from which he alerted his students to stay away? Or, as in Averroès, was it the admission of a prophetic knowledge that was different from the philosophical one but still as valuable? A categorical answer in one sense or another would misrepresent the doubt of Pomponazzi, who in one of his most mature works, the De fato, was eloquently presenting his unsatisfied questioning, to which no achieved certainties could give a positive answer. The peace of a tranquil solution is not given to the human paradox, which is like the ambiguous horizon between two worlds. For the human being only the Promethean torment of the vulture is reserved. This ambiguity remained at the bottom of many affirmations of Pomponazzi. 5. Immortality and Morality The doctrines of Pomponazzi were entrusted by the author to a group of writings that he published or left ready for publishing. In addition to these works, we possess the series of his school lectures, which are still in a great part unpublished and little studied. In these lectures, commenting on Aristotle and Averroès, Pomponazzi took position concerning the questions he was treating. He was an efficacious and acute teacher, whom the scientific rigor did not stifle in the logical subtleties of the Parisian style. When he was opposed to Achillini, the difference between the two became immediately manifest especially because “Achillini studied in Paris for a period of three years and formed himself into a dialectician and a most eminent philosopher and a most subtle disputant, who almost always spoke in enthymemes.” On the contrary, Pomponazzi “was exposing at the same time Aristotle and Averroès with the most suave and clearest voice, with a speech pure and smooth when introducing the arguments, with a speech fluent and passionate when expressing criticism, and finally with a speech serious and subdued when defining and discerning so that the students at their seats could write down notes on the text that was explained.” From these words of the historian-biographer Paolo Giovio, we see outlined the living figure of the teacher, his manner of teaching, perhaps not as subtle as that of Achillini, but more substantial, though with many more jokes than “it was suitable to a philosopher.” Pomponazzi always dealt, though at
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times only with criticism, the most arduous and minute questions raised by the logic and the physics of contemporary schools. His first published work is a Quaestio de intensione et remissione formarum (on tension and remission of forms), which appeared in 1514 and discussed the problem presented by the School of Oxford, a problem examined by Nicole Oresme, and debated by Gaetano of Thiene and Giovanni Marliano. Pomponazzi recalled that his own teacher in Padua, the Dominican Francesco of Noritone (Francesco Securo di Nardò, who died in 1489), explained to him the theory attributed to Swineshead the Calculator, which in this quaestio he decided to reconsider. The problem consisted in the fact that while quantitative variations happen by way of addition of parts, the qualitative variations present a very different situation. Two bodies are warm in a different way because their form of heat is more intense (intenditur) or more attenuated (remittitur), and not because new parts of the same heat are added. In this case, the process of accrual is not by way of addition but of perfection. As Oresme did in the treatise De latitudine formarum diffused also in Italian editions of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, this is explainable by attributing various degrees (latitudines) or intensity of force (in virtute) to the forms, degrees and intensity which should be distinguished from the extension (extensio) of the form or number of individuals into which the form is actualized. In Italy, as already mentioned, the problem has been of great interest; Gaetano of Thiene, at first, and then Giovanni Marliani, later, asked themselves in what manner the intensity of qualities could be measured. Pomponazzi, referring to Swineshead (Suiseth) and to Marliani, but citing largely different other thinkers, including Ficino, reacted against the useless subtleties of the English logicians. In De reactione (1515), examining the reaction of opposite qualities (for instance, of heat on cold), he ironically addressed Gaetano of Thiene, who had written on such arguments. In De actione reali, we have a Quaestio an actio realis immediate fieri potest per species spirituales (on whether a real act can be immediately performed through spiritual species). Of the same period are the unpublished Quaestiones de remanentia elementorum in mixto (question on the permanence of the elements in the mixture), the Quaestio subtilissima in qua indagatur a quibus moveantur gravia et levia (a most refined question which is investigated by what heavy and light things are moved), and De maximo et minimo (On the greatest and smallest things). In regard to these matters, it is interesting to notice the contrast between the contempt of Pomponazzi for these too subtle logicalphysical discussions and the interest not without admiration for them manifested by the Paduan champion of philological humanism, Ermolao Barbaro, for whom the time dedicated to the calculationes suisethicae was not considered lost. With this, we arrive to the central period of the work of Pomponazzi, to the question about the soul, the interests in which are perhaps to be found in the Paduan discussions with Antonio Fracanziano of Vicenza, a disciple of
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Vernia. Contarini alluded to this controversy by observing that Pomponazzi at that time presented himself as a Thomist. The De immortalitate, dedicated to Marco Antonio Flavio Contarini, was published in Bologna on 6 November 1516. The opuscule was born out of a discussion with Girolamo Natale Raguseo, a Dominican, who, having come to visit Pomponazzi at a time when he was ill, heard him saying that the Thomist theory on the soul did not agree with the Aristotelian one. Girolamo then asked Peretto to clarify the opinion of Aristotle without appealing to revelations or miracles, but remaining within the precise limits of reason (revelationibus et miraculis remotis, persistendoque pure infra limites naturales). It was the system of medieval commentators to present their own inquiries as clarifications on the rational level of the sayings of the Philosopher [Aristotle] in whom the rational human nature had found its highest manifestation. The beginning of Pomponazzi’s opuscule is remarkable. It is almost the synopsis of the motive of the human global mediation that was characteristic of both the Platonists and the Aristotelians of the fifteenth century. This motive offered Pomponazzi the occasion of underlining in effective terms that humanity and bestiality were not gifts of nature but the products of our actions, so that among us many are the beasts in human semblance: The ancients did well when they placed the human being in the between of eternal and temporal things, so that it is not purely eternal or simply temporal, but partakes in the nature of both, and by being intermediate between them, it is allowed to choose the one it prefers. It follows that three kinds of human beings are given: some, a very few, are counted among the Gods because, having conquered the vegetating and sensitive functions, have become almost wholly rational; others, having abandoned the intellect, have gone by the senses, and seem to have transformed themselves into beasts; at last, some are true and proper human beings, who live tolerably according to moral virtues, without totally embracing the intellect or abandoning themselves to the body (De immortalitate, ch. 1). We see from this that Pomponazzi made his own the rhetorical theme of the dignity of the human being and confirmed that the human being “is clearly not of simple but of multiple, not of certain but of ambiguous nature, and he is to be placed as a mean between mortal and immortal things” (non simplicis sed multiplicis non certae sed ancipitis naturae esse, mediumque inter mortalia and immortalia collocari). And here precisely he inserted his problem: this ability of being a mean is not to be understood as an ephemeral encounter of two realities, corporeal and spiritual, complete in themselves, which after the brief worldly juxtaposition will return to separate in death in order to reach each one its own place of origin. This human intermediacy does not constitute the flaw of a unitary universe, but instead shows precisely in the human being
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its own coming to a unity. Elsewhere, Pomponazzi observed: Nature proceeds by degrees: the vegetables already possess a little bit of a soul; after the vegetables, the animals come that have touch, taste, and an indefinite imagination; then the animals come that have such a perfection to seem gifted with intelligence. These animals act a lot, construct their own abodes, and socially organize themselves, as the bees do. In comparison to these animals, an infinite number of people seem to possess an intelligence that is inferior to that of the beasts. Even the beasts know, love each other reciprocally, and cherish their progenies. He wrote in (bk. 1, ch. 30), “It is absolutely foolish and irrational to claim that animals do not know each other, when on the contrary they love themselves and their own species.” Nature is continuous and, between the different degrees, there are some links, ties, or intermediary rings, of which the human being is one. “There are intermediary animals between plants and beasts, as the sea sponges, which are attached to the ground as the plants, but sense as the animals. Among the animals, there is the monkey, of which we do not know whether it is human or brute. By analogy, the intellective soul mediates between the temporal and the eternal.” The human being is no longer, as Ficino and Pico claimed, a magnum miraculum by which the law of nature is suspended, but a phenomenon perfectly collocated within the total becoming of nature. In a certain way, the problem is already resolved in the process of its own formulation: the soul is simpliciter mortalis since it is placed within nature, though it is secundum quid immortalis because of its desire for immortality. The De immortalitate is anything but the explication of this formula. The first obstacle to Pomponazzi’s formulation was constituted by Averroism, which detached from the world not only the intellectual light or agent intellect, but also even the human faculty of understanding or possible intellect. Human intelligence was considered eternal as the intelligences of the celestial spheres, very separate from corporeal matter and individuated according to quantity. The second obstacle was Aristotle: “That the agent and possible intellect is unique in all human beings, is a doctrine derived from the Peripatetic thesis according to which the multiplication of the individuals within the same species happen only by way of the quantity of matter.” Against Averroism, Pomponazzi appealed to Thomism, as already Ficino did in Theologia platonica, but Ficino was not aware that Thomas with his critique invested the completely Platonic “separation” intended to detach the soul from the body. Pomponazzi too moved gradually away from Thomism for an opposite reason; he united the two terms to such a point that any kind of separation and therefore of immortality was made impossible. After having exalted Aquinas who “dissipates and annihilates the whole Averroès and gives the Averroists no refuge,” Pomponazzi right away added, insisting on
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his interpretation of Aristotle, that no intellection without phantasm can exist, non est intelligere absque phantasmate, “According to Aristotle, it is impossible for the human intellect to operate independently from the body.” It is absurd to speak of a total independence of the intellective soul from the body: if the soul is detached from the body as subject (tamquam subiecto), in the sense that is not completely conjoined with a corporeal organ, the soul remains tied to a body as object (tamquam obiecto), in regard to the representative content which it can never dismiss. Because the soul is unique (est una potentia numero), we cannot admit that it possesses two modes of understanding, one dependent from corporeity and another free from it, to which therefore it is indissolubly tied in its contents. In this way, the separableness of the soul is definitely excluded in any condition or moment, because otherwise it would need to enjoy a total independence from matter. “To obtain separableness, it is conjointly required [that the soul would] not depend from a corporeal organ tamquam a subiecto, or tamquam ab obiecto, in at least some of its operations.” All those, Averroists or Thomists, who have asserted the immortality of the individual soul as a doctrine sustainable on the assumptions and the theories of Aristotle, have erred. The Platonists also fell into an equal absurdity because of their conception of an autonomous individual soul that moves itself and the body; in such case, between soul and body no greater connection would exist than between the bulls and the carriage they pull (tunc anima et corpus non maiorem haberent unitatem quam boves et plaustrum). It cannot be denied that within us sensation exists in addition to intellection: sufferance, physical fatigue, and corporeal needs exist in addition to “lofty” thoughts. Then “if the essence by which I sense were different from the one by which I intend, in which manner could I who feels, be the same one who intends? We could then say that there are two men combined together who have corresponding cognitions. But this would be ridiculous.” On the contrary, if we admit that the sensitive and intellective faculties are united, the soul then in its unity would come to be sense and intellect together. Saint Thomas arrived at this point, but then he believed that he was authorized to conclude that the soul, the form of the body (forma corporis), “is truly and absolutely immortal, and only improperly mortal” (vere immortalis, improprie et secundum quid mortalis). Pomponazzi at this point objected that Saint Thomas’s assertion could be certainly accepted so far as it is founded on the Scripture, “which is preferable to any human reason or experiment because given by God” (quae cuilibet rationi et experimento humano praeferenda est, cum a Deo data sit). But it is difficult to free the mind from the doubt that “such assertions could go beyond the natural limits given that they presuppose elements of faith and revelation.” It also does not appear possible that these assertions are in accordance with those of Aristotle. First, if we were to recognize with Thomas that the soul has functions that
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are tied to the body, why not assign to these functions the preeminence since they are the most numerous, and why not turn upside down the thesis and acknowledge that the soul is truly mortal and only improperly immortal? Why, insisted Pomponazzi, should we not recognize that the human being is closer to the beasts than to pure intelligences? “If we were to examine the zones of habitable climates we would rarely find people who are rational, whenever on the contrary we could find humans more similar to a beast than to a human being.” But there is more to be said: “Even when we consider the men who are rational, we could not say that they are rational in an absolute sense, but only in relation to other men who are mainly bestial; in the same way, women are never wise except when considered in relation to others who are extremely fatuous.” Humanity is uncertain even in its sensitive cognition, and only in the rarest of cases, and almost by exception, it reaches intellective cognition, “so that its true essence is corporeal and corruptible, and barely possesses a shade of intelligence. This is the motive why among a thousand and thousand men barely one can be found who is a student dedicated to understanding.” How then could we pretend that this splendor so rarely manifested here and there could redeem the bestiality of so many? In order to obtain total separableness, which is necessary for immortality, no matter what Thomas would say, it would be necessary for the soul to have independence not only from the corporeal organ (subiectum), but also from fantasy (obiectum). But truly, we could sustain in some ways even the dependence alone from the corporeal organ. In fact, the dependence of the intelligence from fantasy, which, at its own turn, is dependent from sense, establishes an inseparable connection with corporeity. By removing this connection, as the Platonists would like to do, we would find ourselves in the impossibility of explaining any action of what is corporeal on what is spiritual, because “it seems much irrational to accept that an immaterial substance could be moved by a material thing” (videtur multum irrationale quod substantia immaterialis moveatur a re materiali). How would the numerous difficulties encountered by those who would accept this life of the soul separated from the body be explained? Incomprehensible would also be the infernal torments, since how could what is not physical feel pain? Incomprehensible would be the celestial beatitude since understanding is impossible without phantasm. This separate soul would conveniently be only in a status of complete idleness or of a perennial transmigration of the Pythagorean kind. In this way, we arrive to the conclusion reached by Pomponazzi: “What remains for us is to accept the last hypothesis of those who, placing in man the identity of the sensitive with the intellective soul, declare the soul mortal in an essential and true way and immortal only under a certain aspect” (reliquum est ut ponamus ultimum modum qui, ponens sensitivum in homine identificari intellectivo, dicit quod essentialiter et vere hoc est mortale, sed secundum quid immortale). The celestial intelligences are not souls because they are totally separate
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from matter. The senses, on the contrary, are quite corporeal. The human intellect, the act of a physical body, though enjoying a kind of independence from it, is nevertheless always chained to it like a slave because of the need of operating on a phantasm. The soul in an absolute sense (simpliciter) is material, even though secundum quid is immaterial. To this shade of immateriality corresponds a shade of immortality. In an absolute sense, the soul is mortal, inseparably tied to matter, its limitation. Its ability of mediating is found in this aspiration of reaching beyond the given limitation. “[The activity of the soul] is not totally universal or particular; it is not totally within time or totally outside time” (neque sua operatio ex toto est universalis, neque ex toto est particularis; neque ex toto subicitur tempori, neque ex toto ex tempore removetur). To free the soul from time, from limitation, from the body, would mean to deprive the soul of its own nature, excluding it from its mediating position. It is this position of being at the border between two worlds that makes the soul the noblest among all material things, and confers it as a dignity of its own the aspiration, the perfume of immortality. “The most noble among material things situated at the border with the immaterial ones diffuses some odor of immortality, but not in an absolute sense” (materialium nobilissima in confinioque immaterialium aliquid immortalitatis odorat, sed non simpliciter). The human being remains a human being in its ambiguous nature. The human being lives in this ambiguity and for this ambiguity. A pure spirit is no longer human, and has no relation to what is human. The Platonists, who have celebrated the human being for its intermediating nature, in the final awarding stage they deprive it of its prerogatives. Pomponazzi chained the human being as an eternal Prometheus to the rock of torture because in that torture the significance of humanity is found. Humanity is not immortal or spiritual in an absolute sense, it is a movement toward a fearful and suffered death, whose triumph is found in hope, a body always subjugated but always inevitably present. Practical needs satisfied in accordance with the usefulness of laws, ad utilitatem legum, have brought humankind to fabricate the myth of immortality. Is it by this means that we truly preserve morality, at least the one of the true human beings, of a few philosophers in which the human species is celebrated in its proper exemplar essence? The happiness itself of the just person—is it truly the prize to be obtained after the deed? The answers of Pomponazzi to these questions are well known and they are no different from the ones given by the ancients. The good like happiness is an internal order; it is harmony of soul. When the soul does what is convenient to itself, when it accomplishes its own task and performs according to its mission of rationality, it is at the same time just and joyful; when, on the other hand, it is in itself discordant and lacerate; it becomes almost a monstrous beast and in this finds its own condemnation. What importance should we give to immortality? “Which human being would prefer vice instead of virtue, even if the soul were mortal, unless it pre-
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ferred to be a beast or something worse than a beast, instead of being a human being?” (Quis igitur, existente etiam anima mortali, magis eligeret vitium quam virtutem, nisi mallet esse bestia seu deterior bestia quam homo?). Eternal retribution, at its most, could be an accidental prize or punishment; the “essential prize” is virtue itself that makes the human being happy in its achieved interior order, and equally the “essential punishment” is the interior conflict and the internal degradation. Having discarded all moral reasons, nothing remains on the philosophical level for a proof of immortality; “no natural reasons can be brought up capable of convincing that the soul is immortal” (nullae rationes naturales adduci possunt cogentes animam esse immortalem). Faith is the only one affirming it, and “those who walk through the ways of the faithful would remain solid and secure.” The problem remains with its ambiguity, neutrum, as in substance remained also the position of Pomponazzi concerning the relation between faith and reason, no matter what has been said on the contrary. He was neutrum only about faith and reason, because at the rational level his conclusion was clear: the human being is a ring in the unique chain of the natural world, and though it is the extreme ring, it follows inexorably the destiny of the world to which it is indissolubly bound. 6. The Polemic with Contarini and Nifo The cautious conclusion did not protect the book of Pomponazzi from a vast reaction. In Venice, for the initiative of the Minor Friars of the Observance, the book was condemned and publicly burned. Friar Bartolomeo di Spina, a Pisan, of the Order of the Dominicans (1478–1546), wrote an accurate confutation that followed the opuscule point by point. The Augustinian Ambrogio Fiandino (Flandinus) of Naples, a commentator of Plato, the future Suffragan Bishop of Mantua, attacked Pomponazzi from the pulpit. Fiandino even met for this purpose with Agostino Nifo and asked that he too confute Pomponazzi. Not yet satisfied, Fiandino wrote some “disputations against the one who asserted the mortality of the soul according to the natural light of reason” (Disputationes contra assertorem mortalitatis animae secundum naturale lumen rationis) that were published in 1519. The first criticism, and the most amicable, came from Gaspare Contarini, the future Cardinal, who had been Pomponazzi’s student. He was better known for his participation to the Lutheran polemic, was learned in Aristotelian philosophy, as it is manifest from his writings, De elementis, the syllogisms of the fourth figure, and Compendio della Metafisica (Synopsis of Metaphysics), in the second book of which he discussed ens and unum, renewing the question already debated by Ficino, Pico, and Cittadini. Later, the religious concerns inspired his treatises on justification, free will, and predestination. Contarini, as Pomponazzi wrote, had already exhorted him by letter not to publish the De immortalitate. After the publication of the opuscle, he read it and sent his answer to Pomponazzi, anonymously and indirectly, by
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way of the Bishop of Bergamo, Pietro Lippomanno. It was a friendly refutation, written in a few days or better in a few hours (paucis diebus vel paucis potius horis) and not intended for publication. When Pomponazzi published it with the Apologia, Contarini returned to a counterattack by adding to the first book a second one in which he examined also the replies of Pomponazzi. In the criticism of Pomponazzi, Contarini started from a Thomistic position to which he confessed of having arrived after a period in which, against Averroism, he had accepted the interpretation of Aristotelianism given by Alexander. Against Pomponazzi, Contarini affirmed the reality of the soul as an act in act (“un atto in atto”), as a separable substance. Pomponazzi had previously asserted that the soul could have one type alone of knowledge, a cognition that requires always a phantasm and for this purpose is tied to a corporeal sense. Contarini, on the other hand, put this exact point in doubt: the fact that the intellect understands through a sensible phantasm does not imply the necessity of the cognition of this kind in every case. The human being lived and knew in the maternal womb in a manner different from the actual condition. Why then to exclude that earthly life is a preparation for a different life? Is Pomponazzi himself not admitting the existence of separable intelligences, forms that are act in act, when he recognizes that the celestial spheres are not actuated by forms, but simply moved by the intelligences? This was an acute reference to an emergent Platonic position. Pomponazzi had denied that the intellect could know in any other manner than through some phantasms. According to Aristotle, knowledge could be of the first principles, or the universals in themselves, or the forms abstracted from all matter. According to the doctrines supported by both Alexander and Averroès, the human intellect, or possible intellect, in order to understand, should not be a thing in act; because what is already actuated by one form cannot be capable of receiving any other form. The intellect cannot be something material, extended and divisible, if it must understand the material forms; it knows itself and reflects upon itself. Contarini at this point appealed to Avicenna’s famous argument of the “flying man,” repeated also by Ficino in the exact same words, with which they could support the spirituality and the separableness of the soul. When the body’s organ is the mean between the potency and the object, and not between organ and organ, the intellect can take hold of itself and its own operations. In the second book of his treatise, written in answer to Apologia of Pomponazzi, Contarini concluded in this way the motives of their divergences: We totally agree on what concerns the manner of separation (modum abstractionis) of the intellect from matter. We both admit one intellect indivisible in its essence and undefined in regard to place and time. Also, we claim that intellection happens only in the intellect as its subject, and not in the body as its subject. But in my own opinion, he who admits these things about the intellect, must by necessity agree also
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that the intellect is a form that is not just an act (esse formam quae non sit actus tantum), but an act that is self-subsistent and exists in actuality (sed sit actus qui per se est, et est in actu). I believe that this conclusion is inevitable. But every such a form is by necessity incorruptible. I truly do not understand how your Lordship, though admitting the separation of the intellect, would claim that it is mortal (Nescio quonam pacto, quamvis eam abstractionem concedat in intellectu, ponit eum esse mortalem). This is what I truly cannot understand (in De immortalitate animae, ch. 2, p. 231). On 3 February 1518, the printers completed the printing of Apologia, of which the first book was a response to Contarini, while in the other two books Pomponazzi replied respectively to the Dominican Vincenzo Colzade from Vicenza and to the Augustinian Hermit Ambrogio Fiandino. In these pages, Pomponazzi insisted on the concept of naturalness of the human soul. For him, the human intellect, too, is nature indissolubly dependent from the senses; the impulse toward the divine is reduced to a simple aspiration. One must have with Averroists and Platonists the courage of admitting the complete separation, analogous to that of the celestial intelligences, or, in the contrary, must bind indissolubly the soul to the body. Contarini succeeded only by pointing out an equivocation, when he remained perplexed in front of Pomponazzi’s concession of an immortality secundum quid. This concession was mainly indicating a human aspiration, which Pomponazzi was inclined to reduce to limits extremely modest. The critique of Contarini was acute and subtle, but, being derived from an intermediate position between the absolute Platonic-Averroist transcendence and the immanence of naturalism, it remained feeble in its presuppositions. Averroism and Platonism presented themselves as positions rich with difficulties and more dangerous in the polemic because more radical and more rigid. Of this Contarini was aware since he was presenting his critique as a simple prelude to that prepared by Agostino Nifo, who equivocally united the two positions in his thought. The position taken by Nifo, a disciple of Vernia, is not very linear or too simple, and it is rendered complicate because of the prudence and ambition of its author, who not only wished to avoid criticism, but gain wealth, fame, and honors as well. Urged by Contarini and Fiandino, Nifo took up the gauntlet against Pomponazzi, challenging him not with confutations but with a list of contrary positions, against which at his own turn Pomponazzi in Defensorium restated his own theses. All of this was expressed in terms extremely spirited. According to Nifo, the intellect attains the universal and the universal is abstract, which means separate. The soul is similar to the idea, Plato would have said; it cannot be bound to matter. Nifo observed that Pomponazzi himself admitted the separation of the celestial intelligences from the spheres; from which comes that the intellect is a separate motor, not a form-giving form. The Florentine was loosing patience at this continuous reference to the
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stars, but the reference was important, because Pomponazzi and Aristotelianism in general conceded a separation of the intelligence in respect to the body. This was a serious concession because to admit a self-subsistent act, an act in act, it meant to undermine the theory of an act always bound to a matter or potency. Nifo, coherently, repeated all the Platonic argumentations found in Phaedrus concerning the soul: the soul is autokineton, self-powered, an always active principle of motion, immortal, autonomous, and a life by its own essence. Nifo’s Aristotelianism was a return to what there was of Platonic in Aristotle himself; Nifo’s Platonism was wavering between Neo-Platonism and Averroism. He admitted the soul as a separate substance, but could not decide between the unity of the human intellect of the Averroists or the plurality of the souls of the Platonists of Florence. Because of the profound antithesis of the two positions, Pomponazzi and Nifo could not understand each other nor could they have a meaningful discussion. The Libellus de immortalitate of Nifo and the Defensorium of Pomponazzi were useful merely for a clarification of the positions taken by the two philosophers instead of bringing effective contributions to any of the two positions. The Defensorium was published in 1519, the same year in which the writings of Fiandino and Bartolomeo di Spina appeared. Pomponazzi returned to the question of the soul in that of his “courses” of lessons on De anima, which was published in the nineteenth century by Luigi Ferri. He lectured on it again in De nutritione et augmentatione that, in 1521, he dedicated to Domenico Grimani, a philosopher who occupied himself in problems on the intellect. Do we find in the thought of Pomponazzi a development in a materialistic sense, as Francesco Fiorentino did? Fiorentino asserted that Pomponazzi became increasingly radical in his opinions to the point of claiming in De nutritione that the human soul is totally material and divisible, no different from the soul of the other animals. His interpretation was based on some of Pomponazzi’s expressions of this kind: I think that according to Aristotle not only we must admit the divisibility of the souls of plants and insects, but also of any soul that brings to perfection an inferior matter, though according to that truth that Aristotle could not know, we must proclaim that the human soul is absolutely indivisible. But I believe that this is only to be accepted as a truth of faith, not as a truth supported by a natural argument (Credo secundum Aristotelem non tantum animas plantarum et enthomorum ponendas esse divisibiles, verum et unamquamque animam perficientem materiam inferiorem esse divisibilem, quamquam secundum veritatem, quam Aristoteles non cognovit, anima humana absolute praenuncianda sit indivisibilis. Sed hoc tantum ex fide existimo esse tenendum, non autem propter rationem aliquam naturalem). Statements of this kind may support the interpretation of Francesco Fiorentino
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and refuse those of Luigi Ferri, Lèopold Mabilleau, and Andrew H. Douglas. This trio of scholars found in Pomponazzi a substantial unity of positions. They agreed that Pomponazzi’s statements raised the question about the significance that he attributed to the comments on the Aristotelian texts in rapport with revealed truth. 7. The Two Treatises: De incantationibus and De fato The wide circle of discussions originating from the publication of De immortalitate animae obscured consequently two other works of Pomponazzi, in which his speculative power manifested itself to be extremely energetic: De naturalium effectuum admirandorum causis, sive de incantationibus (on the causes of the admirable effects of nature) and De fato, libero arbitrio et praedestinatione (on fate, free will and predestination). These two works were completed in 1520, but it was only between 1556 and 1567 that they were published in Basel by Guglielmo Gratarol, a medical doctor from Bergamo, editor of William of Conches, who was probably the compiler of the true encyclopedia of natural sciences, titled Prognostica naturalia (1552). Gratarol had embraced the Reformation and it was in Basel that he met with Sebastian Castellion, Caelius Secondus Curio, and Laelius Socinus. The religious problem is at the center of these two works or, better, in them the open exigency is found of clearly determining the field within which the scientific research must proceed according to its own principle, iuxta propria principia. Up to this point, we generally saw a Pomponazzi who presented his inquiry over all as an Aristotelian exegesis by means of natural reason. We saw how the definitive solution of the problem of the connection between science and faith was contained and postponed. In the De incantationibus, the value of historic religions is at last examined with audacity, and at the same time, the celestial causes of their becoming and waning are determined. The miracles and the portentous events of each religion are compared with those of the others, and the cause of each one is recognized in the process of astral motions. The boldness of the thought of Machiavelli finds here its counterpart and Aristotelianism faces Platonism as a rigorously scientific inquiry, free from any concession and compromise. This does not mean an irreducible opposition. As in the problem of the human being, it is not difficult in the divergences to encounter parallel themes; here as well, we find a subtle religious preoccupation equally directed to fight the superstition of the masses and the pretenses of the theologians. The difference is that in the Platonists the most manifest aspect is the appeal to an interior faith, while in Pomponazzi we find the fight against the theologizing contamination between rational inquiry and faith, and, together, the critique of those beliefs toward which the Platonists were much favorably inclined. In the pages of these works, in which the theses directly antithetic to those of the anti-astrological disputations of Pico are developed, the same preoccupation that animated Mirandola’s polemic is noticeable: the reduction
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of the phenomena to their true causes, and the elimination of all fantastic and mythic connections. To that purpose, Pomponazzi thought necessary to destroy the astrology that Pico, for the same reason, adopted. In this manifest antithesis, it would not be difficult to identify the point of convergence between the two men. The occasion for the writing of the De incantationibus was given by the Mantuan physician Ludovico Panizza who during the summer of 1520 asked Pomponazzi whether one could admit supernatural causes of natural events, an admission that seemed to be in contrast with the Aristotelian conceptions of nature, but necessary when one would consider the manifestations of positive religions. This admission seemed inevitably needed in order to explain the phenomena themselves, “It is absolutely necessary to admit the existence of demons not only because of the decree of the Church, but also so that we can explain many experienced phenomena.” Pomponazzi answered in a way that shows his complete adhesion to the conception of a nature that rigidly proceeds according to its own laws, a nature in which everything is ordered and connected without the intervention of elements derived from diverse plains: “We can explain these experiences by way of natural causes. There is not a reason that could force us to admit the intervention of demons to explain such phenomena. The introduction of demons is useless. It is a ridiculous and fatuous thing to abandon what is evident and that could be proven by way of natural reason and instead to search for what is not evident and cannot convince with any kind of verisimilitude” (De incantationibus, p. 19). A fundamental impossibility forbids the admission of a direct influence of spiritual agents: if the sensibilia act on the intellect only through the senses how could a purely spiritual entity execute any action on what is material? It is easy to respond by saying that spirits and demons could very well use material means. But then we could reply that the knowledge of what is particular is only of the senses. The contact with this world, corporeal and particular, is precluded to the world of pure spirits.The truth is another. In the world, there are various forces that are variously distributed, forces capable of producing admirable effects. The human being, “by common consent, between the eternal and the generable or corruptible, is placed in the middle in so far as it participates in both extremes.” All the forces are gathered in the human being as in a microcosm, and it can do everything with the help of suitable equipments and instruments: Some individuals have produced many effects by means of the natural and astronomic science, and it was believed that they performed them because of sanctity or necromancy, when truly they were not saints or necromancers. Many individuals have been considered sorcerers and necromancers as Pietro d’Abano and Cecco d’Ascoli, but they had no communication with foul spirits, and perhaps believed with Aristotle that demons absolutely do not exist. Others equally have been thought
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as having rapports with the angels because of their works, whereas perhaps they were wicked persons. If people were to say that of all these individuals the first group showed good signs and the second bad signs, the first made the sign of the cross and recited the prayers of the saints, while the other did the contrary, I would say that they did all this to deceive their neighbors (De incantationibus, pp. 41–43). The antithesis so dear to Pomponazzi between an ignorant and almost bestial mass of human beings and the sages considered quasi Dii terrestres (almost as earthly gods) remains central and always sharper. It is the mass of human beings that attributes desire, joy, and suffering to certain immaterial beings. But “how is it possible that immaterial and eternal things … can understand and desire? How can they speak to us, hear our voices, see our works, and do all other things of the same kind? To admit all of this isn’t pure delirium?” (De incantationibus, 313). Fantasy, ignorance, and imposture alone nourish this foolish credence. The admirable events that are not reducible to these factors, and that were the initial cause of this research, still remain unexplainable. For the ultimate answer, Pomponazzi searched among the stars and their influences. He looked for natural causes, which for their own specific powers could give the reason of all phenomena, “It is completely absurd that the heavenly bodies that with their intelligence rule and conserve the entire universe … could not but produce effects that are nothing when compared to the universe itself.” Pomponazzi criticized Pico, but Pico had criticized the astral influxes in the name of the same natural reason by which Pomponazzi admitted their causal exigency. Pomponazzi, went beyond that and, accepting an astrological determinism, claimed that even the mutation of religions was dependent from such determinism and that to the changing of credence followed also the needed changing of all those phenomena and miraculous manifestations connected with the mutation of religions: The cross in itself can do nothing, except in so far as it is the sign of that Legislator, that now only the stars mind.… In fact, at the time of the idols, there was nothing more shameful than the cross, and in the following age, nothing was more honorable than the cross. During the age of the idols, nothing was honored more than Jove, and, during the time of the new Law, nothing was more detested. Nothing strange can be found in the fact that now with the sign of the cross and in the name of Jesus, we defeat pains, when that was not possible before. His hour has not yet come, quoniam nondum venerat Eius hora (in De incantationibus, pp. 285–286). Every religion comes with its own miracles because it is natural that such great events would have repercussions within the whole of reality: “Let us consider the law of Moses, the law of the peoples, the law of Mohammed; in
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each one, there were miracles like the ones that we can read and are recorded in the law of Christ. This makes sense, because it is impossible to have such profound transformations without great miracles and prodigies” (De incantationibus, pp. 293–294). The miracle, the prodigious event remains, but it is deprived of any supernatural characteristic. The fact that the caw of the crows is a foreseer of evil may remain unexplainable, unless we grasp the connection between that sound and misfortune. We should not forget that many remedies succeed in curing diseases without our knowing why, in the same way that we do not know by way of which nature samarium clears the liver (sicut ignoramus per quam naturam sciammonium purget bilem). Prayer itself maintains its function because it is believed based on experience—hoc scimus ex multis experimentis—that in the chain of the causes in some cases a sincere prayer must also be placed. Moving in this direction, Pomponazzi, at a certain point, had to face the most serious question of human liberty. How can this natural rhythm, within which everything proceeds according to the order of the first causes, be reconciled with human freedom? How is the freedom of choice that seems proved by experience reconcilable with the necessary structure of the whole? From this we understand that Pomponazzi wrote the De fato not “ut apud bibliopolas libri nomen meum celebrantes haberentur” (so that there are books making my name famous among librarians), but in order to respond to an interior need, to a continuous emerging within himself of the most serious objections “of my conscience lamenting about my own ignorance” (adversus ignorantiam meam murmurantis conscientiae). This problem was not new within the speculation of the Renaissance, and Valla as well had put it to himself. Pomponazzi, who was facing the critique of Stoicism elaborated by Alexander of Aphrodisias, constructed his inquiry as a polemic against Alexander, without hiding his sympathies for the Stoics, who apparently avoided difficulties much better than Christianity. While knowledge of things and their causation coincide in God and for that reason God is truly free, the human being instead faces an already determined reality. The human being possesses of its own only the act of the will, but not the objective modifications, which derive from the act of the will. The modifications or changes are situated within the totality of things, within which even the human act of will is posited as the adequate cause of the phenomenon. Once the act of will is listed in the order of the causes, the problem of the link of free will with providence emerges. Boethius observed that the acceptance of free will and providence looks like an irreconcilable contrast. The elimination of liberty can happen in a rapport with a God equally free or in a universe ruled by a rigid order, in which God may appear to us precisely as the unbending order itself. In the first case, which is the case of Christianity, nothing seems to be able to excuse God from the accusation of cruelty whenever in the world we find sins, whenever we hear arguments for the punishment of the guilty. In De fato, ch. 2, sect. 7, we read, “If the human soul is to be con-
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ceived as immortal according to the Christian conception, it is difficult that God could save himself from the charge of cruelty, because according to the Christians themselves God knows that almost no one would be saved. We have the impression that God rejoices in the treatment of penalties.” According to Pomponazzi, the attempt of saving human liberty through the theory of the contingent future is invalid. This theory assumes that God knows things that are at first merely possible and then become real after an act of the will, which makes them real by choosing them. Pomponazzi asks whether God makes things become real or we are. If we are the culprits, the effective divine omnipotence is destroyed. In practice, it is absurd to speak of contingent future events concerning God. The divine cognition is outside time; in the divine cognition there is no “before and after.” God does not predetermine; God, as the first cause, produces the human will that is a secondary cause. We may ask again: have we really overcome the difficulty by attributing freedom to the human being and omnipotence to God? Pomponazzi replies in De fato, ch. 3, sect. 4: “As I previously affirmed, the argument is truly most difficult. The Stoics avoid this difficulty by attributing a dependency of the act of the will from God. It is for this reason that the opinion of the Stoics appears more probable.” In favor of Stoicism and against Christianity, the usual observations on the charges of cruelty against God are repeatedly reappearing. In De fato, ch. 5, sect. 6, is written: [The cruelty of God] places the human beings in a status of supreme desperation and pushes them, with or without predestination, to vices and sins. From this derives a great excuse for the truly wicked, because if God hates the sinners from eternity and condemns them, then it is impossible for God not to hate them and condemn them. At their own turn, by being the object of hate and rejection, the human beings cannot avoid sinning and perdition. What should we deduce from all this? Nothing comes from this but the awareness of a supreme cruelty and divine injustice, together with an inclination for blasphemy and hate of God. This is certainly worse than the position of the Stoics. The Stoics state that God acts in such a way because necessity and nature demand that. In Christianity fate depends from the meanness of God, who could act otherwise but does not, while for the Stoics God cannot act in any other way (Perciò secondo il Cristianesimo il fato dipende dalla cattiveria di Dio, che potrebbe fare diversamente e non vuole, mentre secondo gli Stoici non può). Pomponazzi will not accept Stoicism or submit to the appeal of the inscrutable divine will. He found the extreme contingentism of Alexander to be repugnant and in contrast with his own conception of nature, and, as he did not incline toward Stoicism, so equally he did not favor a solution of the Calvinis-
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tic kind. Pomponazzi’s world maintains its own orderly structure within which everything is located in its right place: few are the chosen, many the reprobates; the first are destined to salvation, the others are free to follow or not to follow the natural law; all are punished according to their choices; and the suffering or the evil of the single individuals is absorbed in the wholeness of being (mentre nel tutto si resolve il male del singolo). In the face of these conclusions of Pomponazzi, it may be correct “to speak of an expedient in order to avoid scruples and ethical religious responsibilities,” and it is certainly not improper to underline “an excessive docility to the Catholic orthodoxy.” After so many vigorous and subtle observations, our dissatisfaction persists with that of Girolamo Cardano, almost as if Pomponazzi had not fully completed his own research. 8. Agostino Nifo and His Averroism Pomponazzi died on the 18 May 1525. According to the testimony of the disciple, Antonio Brocardo unveiled by Marin Sanudo, Pomponazzi freely chose a total fasting when the suffering could no longer be endured. Ercole Strozzi, a beloved disciple, knew of the suicide, but said nothing in order to avoid malevolent comments. On the 19 May, the Reformers of Bologna Studium wrote to Nifo inviting him to assume the difficult succession, “With the hope of consoling ourselves … we would be certainly and extremely perplexed if Your Excellency would not come to our help.” Nifo did not comply with their desire for the reason of an unsatisfactory compensation. He was a man who loved glory and money. To the majority of people, Nifo appeared chaotic, contradictory, in his many peregrinations throughout the Italian Universities, where he taught from the time when, as a very young disciple of Vernia, he banished Averroism from the Paduan Chair of Philosophy. We will not follow him in his teaching from Padua to Salerno where he remained for a long time under the protection of Prince Sanseverino. Galeazzo Florimonte, Bishop of Sessa, intimate of Contarini and disciple of Nifo, in his dialogues on Nicomachean Ethics described Nifo at the Sanseverino’s court. Florimonte was the person who inspired Giovanni della Casa to write Galateo, which della Casa dedicated to Florimonte. Sanseverino is remembered saying to Nifo, “A teacher better than you, the Emperor himself would not be able to find within his many kingdoms.” He valued the fortune of having Nifo at his court more than that of being the Prince of Salerno. To Nifo, Torquato Tasso dedicated, not without significance, a dialogue on pleasure, but Giovio, who spoke of rudest et incondita ubertas (uncouth and unflavored abundance), adding thereafter crassis et plane barbaris auribus accommodate (adjusted to base and absolutely barbarous ears), did not judge too favorably Nifo’s writings. Nifo’s excessive production concerning every argument in logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, politics, and economy did not benefit him. He wrote long commentaries on many works of Averroès, of almost all of those of Aristotle, without clarifying ever
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exactly his personal thought, which remained almost suffocated by his immense erudition. If Nifo’s works would be accurately studied—a thing that would not always be pleasurable—they could become a useful source for the knowledge of many aspects of Renaissance thought and of the medieval material from which it withdrew. One of the typical tendencies of the age was characteristic in Nifo: the need of connecting and fusing the various currents of thought in an atmosphere vaguely Platonizing. Nifo was a disciple of Vernia, drew largely from the Florentine school of Ficino and Pico, and used them in order to justify his own kind of syncretism into which flowed together, beside Aristotle and Averroès, Hermes Trimegistus, Plato, and Plotinus. In the dialogues of Florimonte, Nifo is said to have established for himself the goal in his studies of proceeding “by way of plain and speedy paths, according to the mind of Aristotle and Plato” (per vie piane e ispedite, secondo la mente d’Aristotile e di Platone). In Padua, on the footsteps of Vernia, Nifo followed the comment on De anima of Averroès. We come to know from him that Vernia had at the beginning professed a thesis in which Aristotelianism and Platonism were somehow in agreement concerning the theory of the transmigration of souls. In the comment on De anima (edition of 1520, pp. 645–646), Nifo observed: “I do not want you to ignore that some of those who sustain the immortality of the soul according to the understanding of Aristotle have excluded the infinite multitude of souls. These individuals claim that at the extinction of each individual another individual begins who would have as his formative principle the soul of the previous person. Of this opinion was my own teacher, who asserted that even Aristotle did not deviate from the teaching of his teacher, Plato.” To his initial Averroism, Nifo alluded many times, mentioning his writings of the juvenile period, when he accepted it in full. In a comment to De substantia orbis, which later he wished to recast, Nifo said, “Notice that in my youth at Padua I made other editions of my juvenile works. But because these editions were composed during my youth, many things have been said in them that I would not say now. Fearing that some malicious person would try to publish them, I declare to accept only this last edition as mine.” In the notes to De anima, he mentioned the juvenile Collectanea that someone else had unjustly made widely known: “How poisonous Alexander Calcidonius was is manifested by his having published my Collectanea without permission. I had no intention of publishing them” (quantum igitur inique Alexander Calcidonius collectanea nostra publicaverit, quantum venenose, ex hisce patet. Ego enim publicare illa non destinaveram). After Pietro Barozzi, the Bishop of Padua, condemned the theory of Averroès in 1489, Vernia, an already old man, made an act of submission by writing an opuscule against the theory of the unity of the intellect. Nifo instead in 1492 completed the six books De intellectu and in the dedication to Sebastian Badoer, confessed that in order to avoid the charges of heresy he had “to remove something, change something else, and add many more
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things” (quaedam tollere, mutare alia, addere plurima). He continued saying, “I have not deleted anything that was against the Catholic faith” (nihil delevi quod sit contra fidem catholicam). In completing this work, on the other hand, Nifo, besides praising Barozzi, explicitly confessed to having made previous long studies on Averroism (longo tempore Averroi vacavi). If De intellectu remains one of the most interesting writings of Nifo, this is due to the wide information that it contains—for instance, remarkable references to De felicitate and De intellectu of Siger—and to the vibrant polemic against the naturalism of Alexander of Aphrodisias, whom later in the discussion with Pomponazzi he harshly had to attack. In his juvenile writings, Nifo already referred to the most acute minds among the Latins, who declared problema neutrum the problem of immortality. In De intellectu, ch. 1, pp. 6– 7, he is harsh against the nefarious Alexandrists because their “position makes the human being similar to the beast and the brute, destroys every law and every morality, debases humanity in the human person, and denies its characteristic life’s goal. We must be ready to criticize this doctrine because human beings do not want to hear that all of them they are beasts.” Not all human beings are beasts—Pomponazzi would remark—but a good majority of them! Against naturalism, Nifo appealed to Plato and the Platonists who admit a spiritual principle in the human being and consider it free and superior to the stars, “the wise would control the stars” (sapiens dominabitur astris). He appealed to Hermes, who conceived of the human being as the center of the universe and a great miracle. Of Hermes, Nifo observed that he, like the Peripatetics, maintained the plurality of the souls and the conception that happiness consists in the union with the superior intelligences. No lack of uncertainties was missing! What mostly surprises is that in Nifo, besides a singular historical acumen, an indefinite apprehension is sensed that does not impede to show how he is prone to smooth the dangerous points of his Averroism with the restored Platonism of Ficino. 9. The Conflict with Pomponazzi Given Nifo’s position, the conflict with Pomponazzi was inevitable, and he spoke of it already in his juvenile writings. Nifo claims that Pomponazzi had not taken into account the Platonists. In the place of Averroès, Pomponazzi has fought John of Jandun, whom Pico had already violently criticized as the corruptor of Averroism, and it is probable that both Pico and Nifo paid more attention to Siger. On the other hand, what meaning can we assign to human mediateness? If the soul were completely natural, it would not be clear how it would participate in what is eternal; if it were to possess something divine in itself, it would be completely separable. In other words, if the intellect were indissolubly linked to imagination, it would be corruptible and gradually die. To Pomponazzi’s vision of virtue, Nifo opposed the Platonic-Averroistic conception of happiness:
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Happiness is nothing but cognition of God. This makes clear what Averroès intended when he affirmed that happiness consists of the copulation of the agent intellect with the possible. I think that in his opinion the possible intellect stands for the soul, while the agent intellect stands for God, who has a double relationship with us, and with our soul. In the initial relationship, God is the agent; in the final relationship, he is the form, after the achievement of the speculative intellect. The Catholics, too, agree with this understanding of happiness. Contrary to Fiorentino’s opinion, Nifo’s last polemic remark against the ethics of Pomponazzi was not at all out of place. Beautiful and heroic, Nifo said, are the human actions for the general welfare, without asking or desiring accidental prizes, but this human sublimation—is it not perhaps the proof that there is in the human being something that transcends nature is present? When we consider the problem of moral value, one thing is to state that doubtlessly virtue consists in willing the good in itself and for itself, and another is to consider the metaphysical question about virtue and ask whether the impulse beyond the limits of nature in a being that is completely of nature, a neighbor to the beasts, is conceivable. Nifo in De immortalitate animae (p. 41) said: O my dear Pomponazzi, how can a force that is not at all superior to the body long so purely for what is spiritual, venerate, and accomplish it? If you read Plato’s De pulchro, you would have easily learned that God—as Pythagoras justly says—making the human being elevated it from the ground so that it could discover sublime, holy, and pious things that would turn it to the contemplation of its maker. This is what an acute poet [Ovid] has finely sung: while all other animals bend and look down to the ground, to the human being alone God gave a far above the ground face and ordered it to look up to the sky and turn its sight to the stars. In these words, an essential motive of the humanistic culture was nobly reaffirmed. It is the soul that gives motion to the body as its instrument; the soul is joined to the body “like the steersman to the ship, like the craftsman to the tool”; this soul is in various ways diffused throughout the entire universe. Celestial forms exist, which move the stars, forms “that fluctuate within matter,” images, shadows, and seals of such forms destined to inform, guide, and rule the material world. In these thoughts multiple cues are found that connect Nifo to the Pythagorical-Platonic currents and are worthy of mention, independently from his chaotic production. They would reaffirm themselves with new force in the process of thought, but we would in vain search for them in the confutations of Nifo’s most known adversaries, the Scotist Francesco Lichitto and the Averroist Luca Prassicio.
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 10. M. A. Zimara. The Simplicians. Simone Porzio and G. B. Gelli. T. Bacilieri and A. Bernardi della Mirandola. J. A. Marta. The Castellanis. F. Pendasio
Averroism was under a process of modifications and was manifesting itself in various new ways. Marco Antonio Zimara, an Averroist of strict observance, was maintaining the Averroistic tradition, and it was perhaps for this reason that Pietro Bembo called him “barbarous Averroist.” Zimara was truly supreme among the Averroists, who thought “if Averroès in his exposition of Aristotle could be said to be a new Aristotle, Zimara in his commentary on Averroès was worthy to be named a new Averroès.” Zimara’s Tabulae dilucidationum; theoremata seu memorabilium propositionum; solutiones contradictionum constitutes still today a valuable instrument for the orientation in the midst of that mass of Averroist texts that the Giunta Publishing dynasty continued to offer together with Aristotle’s works to Paduan students of philosophy and medicine. The magical-medical writings that several persons have attributed to Zimara are not of Zimara, or at least they are not of “this” Zimara. These curious writings appeared between 1625 and 1626 in Frankfurt, and in them, Jean Bodin is merely mentioned while Girolamo Cardano is extensively named; an appendix contains Cabalistic, Hermetic, and Zoroaster’s principles. These scripts seem to evolve in line with the teachings of Pico and Johannes Reuchlin. The teaching of Zimara, “so full of that scum of doctrine that now is avoided as misfortune,” was “so much hated by all scholars from one place to another that they despitefully made a fool of him.” If the number of the Averroists who remained confessedly Averroist concerning the problem of the human soul was diminishing, no lack existed of those who differently appealed to Themistius or Simplicius. Simone Porzio and Guido Castellani often mentioned the existence of a group of followers of Simplicius in Padua, and that they criticized them. Castellani also confessed of having drawn from this movement a lot of information and almost a complete exposition of the doctrines of Simplicius. A vein of Siger of Brabant’s position that subtly permeated the thought of Achillini and revealed itself at times in Nifo was present in the dry Scholastic, but not unworthy writings of Tiberio Bacilieri of Bologna, professor in Padua and, from 1503 to 1511, in Pavia. Interesting ideas are found also in Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, a student of Ludovico Boccadiferro and Pomponazzi, well known for his book Dell’honore, which was plagiarized by the young Mantuan Giambattista Possevino. Possevino was known for having written some Disputationes against duel (Monomachia), in which he spoke about almost everything. Against Simplicius, even more than against Averroès, are the writings of Simone Porzio, whose vicissitudes and teaching, between Pisa and Naples, have been the object of study of Fiorentino, who learnedly gave minute information of the published and of the less known works, which Porzio himself mentioned, such as De fato, De arbitrio, De animi motibus, and De partibus
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animi. Many of the opuscules of Porzio were translated by that bizarre man who was Giovan Battista Gelli, a Florentine “shoemaker,” who had the consuetude in his refined dialogues of alternating conceptions of hermetic philosophy with the rigid Peripateticism of the professor of Pisa. Porzio was a subtle and audacious commentator of the Aristotelian text. He knew Greek well and also the Greek commentators in general, though he was rather adverse to Latin and the barbarian commentators. Facing theological concerns, Porzio sustained, no differently than Pomponazzi, the distinction of philosophy from theology. In the Disputatio de humana mente, lately published in Florence in 1551, which Gelli had previously translated but had no courage to publish, the conclusions of Porzio are not far removed from those of Pomponazzi. What differentiated Porzio was his greater refinement in the use of the Greek texts, his acute subtlety as interpreter, ability as translator, and manifest scientific interests. Gelli’s reluctance in publishing Porzio’s work was due to his squabble with the inquisitor for having listed Capricci del Bottaio in the index of prohibited books. Porzio rejected the Platonic residue that was still within Aristotelianism with its theory of the separation of the agent intellect. In Porzio’s opinion, Alexander of Aphrodisias was wrong because of his insistence on the transcendence of the intellect, identifying the agent intellect with God, without ever explaining the direct action by means of which the intellect could unite itself to us, corruptible beings. Against the followers of Simplicius and Averroès, Porzio claimed the absurdity of the separation of the whole intellect and affirmed its unity. People are aware that as thinking ceased, they will return to the stage of the brute. On the other hand, if the same phantasm could coincide in different subjects, we would have identity of thought. Nothing is more alien to Aristotle than this science purely given, in which one cannot truly speak of “having learned.” Porzio wrote that in this situation, The intellect would become united with other successive individuals in a specific condition of completeness with all the universals. Then the intellect would not be like a tablet without signs, but rather like one all written and delineated by the universals. And again, there would be no acquisition of new sciences, but only the reminiscence of the previous ones. Who cannot see that all this is what Aristotle rejected? (Intellectus igitur unietur postmodum cum aliis hominibus posteris habituatus quidem, et absolutus universalibus omnibus; eritque non ut tabella agrapha, sed potius ut scripta, ac universalibus depicta. Adhuc nulla erit scientiarum novarum acquisitio, sed praeteritarum solum reminiscentia, quot quantum ab Aristotele abhorreat, non est qui ignoret). All this would clearly mean a pure Platonism. If the possible intellect were separate, what intermediate nature would be capable of explaining its union with the sensible things? Certainly, this intermediary cannot be the agent intellect, unless we speak by metaphor, because it too a fortiori is incorruptible
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and unique. All the difficulties of the Platonic “participation” will come back in full. The solution can only be found in the way indicated by Alexander, but through a position completely naturalistic, without compromises, a solution capable of making fully intrinsic to each other form and matter, act and potency. The human intellect, or possible intellect, far from being something extrinsic to nature is a work of nature, “We must confess that the mind itself is a work of nature” (mentem ipsam opus esse naturae fatendum est). It is separable only through abstraction, but in reality it is only a moment of the evolving of forms from matter. The intellect is nothing but the instrument of the soul, its guide, in the same way that the hand is instrument and guide for the body; in respect to the various psychic functions, the intellect stands in the same connection that the hand has with the body. It is the intellect in act that diffuses over things a virtue, which through the human mind becomes the understanding in act, “The intellect in act, using the intelligible materials as instruments with which to influence the potency in the intellect, scattered around a certain energy (virtue) by which the potency of the intellect reaches its fulfillment so that what was merely understandable (intelligible) becomes understood” (Intellectus actu materialibus intelligibilibus quasi instrumentis, quibus in intellectum potentia operatur dispergit vim quandam, qua intellectus potentia perficitur et illa fiunt intellecta). This capability (virtue, energy) is diffused by God; it is like the light of the sun (vis illa est ipse Deus, quae illo presente disseminatur in formis materialibus). The capability of knowing is in us, the knowability (intelligibility) is in things. The ability of knowing is a cognitive virtue and does not depend from an organ or is determined like this or that object; it can be said impassible, but of an impassibility that means nothing concerning its immortality. The faculty of knowing is functional immutability, which the intellect never uses without the phantasm and cannot subsist in an abstract mode. Under some of its aspects, the position of Porzio is analogous to that of Pomponazzi, though Porzio never referred to Pomponazzi. Porzio’s position gave way to the reaction of all those who expected from Aristotelianism a support for religion. Iacopo Antonio Marta was among these individuals. Marta was a student of Nifo and became a violent critic of Telesio in 1587; in 1578, Marta published together with a collection of Porzio’s opuscules Apologia of immortality, in which nothing notable is found except the ardentness of tone. Considering that Marta will bring us to Telesio, it is worthy to mention that Porzio in De rerum naturalium principii, published in two books in Naples in 1553, tried to examine more deeply the Aristotelian concepts of form and matter, attempting at a clarification of the function of matter. At the end of the second book, while discussing the efficient and final causes, Porzio faced the problem born necessarily from his naturalistic tendencies, which were clearly becoming most relevant: the problem of liberty and fate. He had already discussed these two subject matters in two lost opuscules and in An homo bonus vel malus volens fiat (Whether the human being can be good or
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bad by will), in which full liberty is denied to the human being because only the person who subsists in itself, gratia sui, can have total liberty. While Porzio’s Aristotelianism was oriented toward an always more naturalistic vision, Guido Castellani instead, who often claimed to admire Porzio, with an adhesion many times unconditionally reaffirmed to the doctrine of Alexander of Aphrodisias, showed aspirations and cues quite different from orthodox Aristotelianism. Castellani was born in Faenza in 1528 and studied in Ferrara with Vincenzo Maggi, an orthodox Peripatetic, whom he warmly eulogized in De humano intellectu (1561), which he said to have derived from a commentary of Maggi on the third book of De anima. Castellani had various contacts with the Paduan cultural circles, kept rapports with Benedetto Manzoli of Modena, was a friend of the Mantuan Federigo Pendasio, a professor at Pavia and Bologna, of whom a published comment on Aristotle’s Physics is extant. Pendasio’s lessons on the soul were examined by Joseph-Ernest Renan and Fiorentino. Pendasio was interested in and supported the doctrines of Alexander of Aphrodisias by recommending the study of anatomy in order to unveil the actual process of understanding rising from the organism. He claimed, “It is not absurd that this identical commixture could be brought to such a perfection that this power would emerge, which is called the power of intellect of the soul, so that all the objects would appear” (Ita ergo non est absurdum, quin haec eadem temperies reddatur ad tantam excellentiam ut emergat haec virtus, quae dicitur intellectus animae potentia, ut appareant omnia obiecta). In another unpublished writing on immortality, Pendasio assumed a less clearly cut position, accepting some Platonic argumentations. Castellani was open to multiple influences and we saw him praising Ficino as the restorer of Plato, but without following the opinions of his uncle, Pier Niccolò Castellani, a colleague of Nifo. Pier Niccolò popularized Plotinus’s Theologia Aristotelis and used a Plotinian text to offer to Clement VII a treaty on immortality, De immortalitate, “in which Plotinus demonstrated that in Aristotle’s thought the souls of individual human beings are immortal and would sometime return to this world to link up again with bodies” (in quo singulorum hominum immortales esse animos atque aliquando in hunc mundum reverti rursusque iungi corporibus ex Aristotelis sententia demonstravit). Guido Castellani too shows himself a good expert of Plato or at least of the Ficinian Platonism, from which he took the cue for the lauds of beauty and poetry, which constitute the premise of the Stanze in lodi delle gentili donne di Faenza (Stanzas in praise of the gentle ladies of Faenza). The critics of poetry “are not aware that when they criticize the poetic art they equally despise poetry, because the two of them are different only in name. They both teach the virtuous and honest life, though one does it under the veil of the fables and with suavity and ornate speech, the other with demonstrations, direct and naked words that intend to achieve the same goal.” In Adversus M. Tullii Ciceronis Academicas Quaestiones Disputatio, qua
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omnium paene philosophorum opinio de percipienda veritate comprehenditur, et Aristotelis prae omnium celebratur Philosophia (On the opinion of the philosophers concerning the perception of truth and the greatness of Aristotle‘s philosophy, Bononiae, 1558), written against Skeptic Academism, Castellani announced his book on the senses, Liber de sensibus. This book never appeared in printing and, while showing widely Platonic influences, sustained against Skeptic assumptions the fundamental agreement of all ancient philosophy with Aristotle. He, too, came to face the thesis of Gian Francesco Pico, who in the discordance of all philosophers found instead the basis for the destruction of the ancient philosophy. This was the same Gian Francesco Pico “whom Pier Niccolò Castellani, a man expert in Greek and Latin, medicine and any branch of philosophy, very much admired for the acumen of ingenuity, and whom he would have named ‘supreme philosopher’ if he [G. F. Pico] would not have attacked in various ways the greatest Aristotle, the teacher of all those who learn.” The work of Castellani is constructed with little originality, but the ending observation that in order to reach the verisimilar one must know the truth is not at all a light observation. Even more notable are some particular remarks as those, for instance, addressed to Porzio for his essay De dolore. Porzio attributed the perception of pain to the common sense, but Castellani placed it in the particular sense itself that encounters an object that goes beyond its measure and provokes a process of dissolution. In that same work, Castellani stated the concept of soul that three years afterward he formulated in De humano intellectu and that in a letter to Manzoli he introduced as his adhesion to the utmost famous and consulted commentary of Alexander. In Epistolarum Libri IV, orationes tres (Bologna, 1575), Castellani wrote: Our intellect at first is so far from being in act that it could instead be called pure potency, and it is not attached to any corporeal instrument. In a second moment, the intellect turns to common and universal forms as to its own peculiar objects, which fantasy, after being enlightened by the agent intellect, provided (Intellectus autem noster tantum abest ut aliquis sit actus, ut pura potestas esse dicatur, nullique corporeo instrumento affixus est; postea in universalem et communem formam, quam ei phantasia, prius tamen ab intellectu agente collustratam, obiicit, tamquam in peculiare obiectum fertur). Reviewing the history of the question, he declared to have relied on the works of Pomponazzi and Porzio, wishing to complete them. He moved with an insistent polemic against the supporters of the commentary of Simplicius, in which, in his opinion, the transcendence of the Averroists is renewed. For the Simplicians the human intellect is unique, and it is the motor of the last of the celestial spheres, from which it descends and comes into the body like a pilot in the ship, bringing the intelligible notions as potencies that aspire to actua-
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tion through the phantasms. When the understanding is actuated, science is generated in the human being and this is the habitual condition of the intellect. The agent or efficient cause of this event is the intellect in so far as it carries in itself the ideas in their actuality and not confused with the world, allowing in this way the explication of the ideas’ significance. This, according to Castellani, was the theory that the Paduan followers of Simplicius presented, and that was in accordance with Theologia Aristotelis that Pier Niccolò illustrated and published. In this work the rational soul or second agent intellect, directly produced by the true and proper agent intellect, constitutes the unique soul of the whole humanity. This soul, in its need of explication, descends into the world, and in joining the world becomes impure, maintaining only an attitude (inclination, tendency) for the reconnection with the ideal forms. The ascent happens through the sensible forms that are necessary so that the possible intellect or human intellect would receive the action of the agent intellect, which would surround the possible intellect with all its light, so that the essence [of things] would be released in all its purity. Against Averroists and Simplicians, Castellani repeated the now common objections, in order to preserve on one hand the natural formation of the possible intellect, and on the other to identify the agent intellect with God. In De humano intellectu (bk. 3, sect. 13), we read: Up to this point we have seen in what way Aristotle, relying on the principles of Nature, thought that the human being has the same end and the same reason of other animals, though he elevated human being to the point of making it of a double nature between the eternal and the temporal. The soul in the thought of Aristotle derives as it is from the potency of matter and perishes at once with the destruction of that matter following the destiny of all fleeting and mortal things. The human being is provided, in addition to sensation and vegetative soul, of a double intellect. The one called agent intellect is separate from every materiality and potency—it is perpetual, without beginning or end; the other is called possible intellect and it is not the act [perfection] of any specific body. The possible intellect is capable of knowing the immaterial forms of things and is individually similar to the immortal and blessed minds, though it remains very much below the level of their nobility, because as an intellect in potency it cannot grasp anything without a corporeal object or phantasm. The possible intellect apprehends the universal form in the particular object, but cannot ever equal in function and form the other intellect, the one named agent (Nos hucusque perspeximus quemadmodum Aristoteles, persistens Naturae principiis eundem finem hominis atque rationem cum reliquis animalibus esse censuit, tametsi ita extulit hominem ut ancipitem et naturam quandam mediam inter aeterna et caduca eum obtinere voluerit. Siquidem cum istius anima e potentia materiae educatur eademque dum illius destruitur subiectum intereat, eandem prorsus aliarum ca-
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Alexander’s thesis is preserved with a stronger affirmation of the agent intellect as God, a thing that in Pomponazzi has remained in the shadow. The mortality of the soul is sustained with the crudity that forced Pomponazzi to state that the person who dared to accept immortality on the basis of reason was worthy of condemnation and anathema. In the conflict necessarily renewed with religion, Castellani underlined again the right of co-existence of faith and reason. Natural reason would always arrive to heretical affirmations, but they must be maintained without hesitation and without fear, as all things said while philosophizing. The precious advices of faith would be accepted in another forum, piously, and devotedly. 11. Other Minor Aristotelians If we were to reconstruct minutely all the variations of the many professors of philosophy who in one way or another were within the orbit of Aristotelianism it would have required more time and space. We have occasionally mentioned at least the names of these scholars, from Francesco Vimercati to Antonio Montecatini, to Gian Francesco Burana, who was a student of Girolamo Bagolino and collaborated with Bagolino for the publication of Aristotle’s works with the commentary of Averroès. This list could include F. Accoramboni, the Simplician Marcantonio Passero, Arcangelo Mercenario, Friar Vito Pizza, who was also involved in the polemics on the soul and intellect, Gian Paolo Pernumia, Giovanni Cottunio, and a host of minor, less well-known characters. The lectures of these individuals were printed or left behind as manuscripts. It would be more rewarding to consider Jacopo Zabarella, Professor at Padua between 1564 and 1589, a robust and lucid thinker, the only one perhaps worthy of being placed alongside Achillini and Pomponazzi. Zabarella’s theory on the soul is contained in several dissertations, in De rebus naturalibus, De mente humana, and De mente agente. The theory is found also in the commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, published in Venice in 1601 by Francesco Zabarella, his son. All Zabarella’s writings are endowed with lucidity
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and an extreme clarity. He too faced Averroism and remembered the followers of Simplicius, among which Marcantonio Passero or de’ Passeri, who was known as Genua (or Genova) because from a Genoese family, or Janua as Fiorentino called him. Zabarella taught at the university of Padua beginning in 1517, and Francesco Patrizi remembered him without any sympathy, but as the person who opposed to Averroism the followers of Alexander who, according to him, presented the true Aristotle. In the eyes of Zabarella the historic antithesis is transformed in a clearly theoretical antithesis: should the soul be considered a “forma assistens” (Averroism) or “forma formans” (Alexander, Aristotle)? The assisting form (forma assistens) is an act in act; it is in itself a perfected reality not only separable but also separate, just as the pilot in respect to the ship or the celestial intelligence in respect to the sky to which it gives motion: “The assisting form is a form which is to be found associated with an object in order to guide it. It is a form not only separable, but separate and divided from matter, to which it does not give being, as the seaman on the ship is separate from the ship, because he is alien to the essence of the ship.” The forming form (forma formans), on the contrary, is the one that gives being and reality to the thing itself, “it is a form forming a matter that has the possibility of being, for instance, what in the human being constitutes the human nature so that through it the human being is truly human, and without it the human being ceases from being human.” In other words, to repeat the example of the ship, the “forma assistens” is the pilot, while the “forma formans” is the form itself of the ship. We see from this that, on the one hand, the difficulties of the Platonic transcendence return with Averroism; on the other hand, the need for the Aristotelian doctrine becomes clear and understandable. Zabarella is perfectly right in considering the first position as wholly alien to the spirit of Aristotle, and by accepting it, a person had to face the problems of the separation of the agent intellect. Zabarella raised a series of objections against the theory of the soul as forma assistens, deriving them in part from what St. Thomas wrote. If the human intelligence (the possible intellect) is separate from the human individual, as the pilot of the ship is separate from the ship, the human individual is not intelligent, in the same way that the ship cannot be capable of vision simply because the pilot on the ship is capable of vision. The objection that the possible intellect is united with man is invalid. How is it possible that two complete things (res completae) can make an effective unity? At most, it could be a unity according to their activity (secundum operationem), not according to their being (secundum esse). The human person would have to offer hospitality to the intellect, and new questions would necessarily follow. According to Averroism, the act of understanding in the human being is considered accidental (transiens), not immanent or essential (immanens), precisely as the pilot of the ship and the act of navigating are accidental to the ship. From this derives that the essential characteristic of the human being,
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which is that of being able to think, becomes an accidental characteristic. The reply was given that the intellect is tied to the human being in an objective way (objective), because the human being through the phantasms (possible intellect) allows the specific actualization of the intellections. To this Zabarella objected that if the pilot sees and guides the ship, the ship is not only seen, but it is seeing, too. To insist on a pretended unity is like saying that the unity is the coming together of the pilot and the ship that the pilot sees and guides, so that the “seeing” and the “guiding” are performed by both. In the last analysis, we do not comprehend how the human being in its individuality, separate and independent from the universal intellect, could differ from the brutes, because it simply remains only with the imaginative function. The truth and Aristotle, on the other hand, bring us to the acceptance of the soul as a “forma formans,” an act, which is inseparable from the organs that it actuates. The objection to this is that even in this opinion a separation exists, if it is true that the intellect understands the universals, which are detached from matter. Yes, “detached,” Zabarella accentuates: they are abstract, but of an abstraction that implies a separation of activity (secundum operationem), not a separation of essence (secundum esse). This means that the separation consists in a distinct activity, possible beyond the organic modifications, but not disjoined from them. By similarity, may we say that the soul is the pilot of the body, but not in the sense that it is detached from the body, but only in the sense that it dominates the organs, coordinates them, and directs them? The soul is the perfection of the organism, the immanent unity that makes the organism the organism it should be. Zabarella advises that we should not mistake the possible intellect for the agent intellect. It would be an error not to accept—and this is what Porzio and even the cautious and subtle Pomponazzi did—that the separation of which Aristotle speaks is always and merely a relation, which is something indicating a link that comes to be established among many functions of the soul, or between soul and corporeity. When we speak of the speculative intellect, “we intend nothing else than the supreme act of the intellect that reaches in act the essences of things.” Zabarella added: The object of the intellect can be considered in two ways, according to whether we refer to what moves the intellect or to what the intellect could receive and understand. Not every entity moves the intellect; only the phantasm is what moves the intellect; it comes by way of the senses and can refer only to what is material. On the other hand, the intellect by observing the phantasm is capable of grasping the things that become resplendent in the phantasm itself when it is illumined by the agent intellect. These things are the essences and the quiddities that the phantasms represented. By reason of this motion initiated by the phantasm the intellect come to know also what is immaterial (Può essere considerato in due modi, secondo che ci riferiamo a ciò da cui
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l’intelletto è mosso o a ciò che l’intelletto può accogliere e intendere. Ciò da cui è mosso non è ogni ente, ma solo il fantasma che, venendo per il tramite del senso, non può riferirsi che a cosa materiale. Ma poiché l’intelletto è capace, osservando il fantasma, di cogliere anche le cose che possono risplendere nel fantasma stesso in quanto illuminato dall’intelletto agente, le essenze cioè e le quiddità, rappresentate dai fantasmi, perciò riesce anche ad afferrare ciò che è immateriale, in seguito al moto iniziato dal fantasma stesso). The result of this reasoning forced Zabarella to deal with the problem of the world of the intelligibles, to which he dedicated a separate treatise, De speciebus intelligibilium, in which he mainly considered the notion of the intellect in habitus. In the medieval tradition the concept of a collection of cognitions gradually elaborated and connected through intellective activity came to be gradually formulated so to form the human science. To this complex of acquired progressive intellections corresponded the Aristotelian habitus (disposition toward a specific order), which in its tendency to create new entities (entificare), which was a characteristic of the Arabic commentaries, formed an independent gradation or order in the hierarchy of the intelligences. Zabarella, after having excluded the Platonic innatism that prefers to suppress the question instead of resolving it, placed as first possibility the thesis of those who sustain that the intellective act is a passivity in relation to the species impressed (specie impressa) in the intellect itself. This means that the intellection is determined by the fact that the intellect is aware of the presence of the species, while the habitus “would be nothing but the assemblage of the intelligible species that have remained in the intellect, after the intellective act” (abito non sarebbe altro che l’insieme delle specie intelligibili rimaste nell’intelletto dopo l’atto intellettivo). The opposite thesis sustains that the intellect is nothing in act of the things, which it comprehends, before or after the intellection, because in order to comprehend everything it must remain pure capability. The admission of the presence of species would entail from one side the knowledge without phantasms and from another the existence of an intellective memory. The species, in this case, would preexist and subsist in the intellect independently from the act of the intellect, without a concrete connection with the phantasm. In addition, it must be remembered that in Aristotle it is not admissible that a form (the intellect) could be the subject of an accident (species). Zabarella accepts this criticism without excluding the necessary species from the act of understanding. This species neither preexists nor remains after the act is perfected; the species is indeed the act itself of understanding, under one of its aspects, “because I believe that the species is received in the intellect and is intellection itself” (quia puto speciem in intellectu receptam et intellectionem reipsa idem esse). The precise problem of the intellect in habitus or problem of science as acquisition, possession, and order still remains. Zabarella says,
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY It is necessary to clarify what these habits that are usually attributed to the intellect as fixed and permanent are, and why we speak of an intellect in habitus. If we are excluding the permanence of species after the act of intellection is completed, what is there that could be called a “habit”? (Bisogna chiarire che mai siano queste abitudini che si sogliono attribuire all’intelletto come fisse e permanenti, per cui si parla di un intelletto in abito; esclusa infatti la permanenza di specie oltre l’intellezione, non si vede che cosa possa dirsi abito).
The answer is again formulated as an appeal to pure Aristotelianism. It is only a question of “aptitudes, abilities of understanding the same things” (aptitudines, habilitates ad easdem res intelligendas). In the same way that, by writing, the generic potency of writing is transformed into a specific capability that remains as such even after the moment in which the writing is completed, so by understanding certain things, some particular mental habits are constituted. The most difficult problem, which is kept often in the shade instead of resolved, challenges us: the problem of the agent intellect (De mente agente). The problem is duplex: what is the mens agens? How does the mens agens explicate its function in the process of the understanding? First, let us see how the mens agens operates. According to Zabarella, the activity of the agent intellect can be explained only in one way, it cannot act by itself, detached from the phantasms, but it can act with them as the form, which makes them objects capable of moving the passive intellect. To admit an action of the agent intellect independently from the phantasm, it would be like admitting in the human being cognition without phantasm, against which Pomponazzi had already abundantly fought. The human being for Zabarella can certainly reach the universals, but only by basing the cognitive process on the empirical data. What does it mean to say that the agent intellect operates uniquely if conjoined with the phantasm? The true and proper agent intellect is only one: the phantasm, in respect to which the intellectual light is “the perfection of the phantasm itself, the perfection that makes of the phantasm a perfect object capable of moving the passive intellect” (la luce intellettuale non è che “la perfezione del fantasma stesso che ne fa un oggetto perfetto capace di muovere l’intelletto passivo”). The intelligibility of reality is necessary in order to understand; the agent intellect is this intelligibility. Zabarella observes that “the opinion of those who sustain that the agent intellect is agent more as an intelligible than as an intelligent intellect, is correct” (è giusta l’opinione di quanti sostengono che l’intelletto agente è agente piuttosto come intelligibile che non come intelligente). The agent intellect is “the reason for the intelligibility of all other things; it is the act and the perfection by means of which all other things are made intelligible; it is the form by which an object becomes actually the object of the intellect” (est ratio intelligibilitatis aliorum; idest actus et perfectio qua cetera redduntur intelligibilia, forma qua
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objectum fit actu obiectum). The phantasm without the agent intellect would be able to give only the confused species of the single individual object. Zabarella stated that we should not believe that the agent intellect, which is an object, would produce in the possible intellect the act of comprehension: “It is the passive intellect that produces this act when it judges the species that he has received” (sed ipsemet patibilis intellectus hunc actum producit, dum receptam speciem iudicat). The sense in the sensitive knowledge is the one that, having suffered the sensation, performs a judgment because it is an organ of the body and a function of the soul. At the intelligible level, the human intellect is the one that gets hold of the intelligibility of the universe, while the agent intellect is not at all an intermediate intelligence, but the action of God who, through motion, organizes the whole universe. In this interpretation, the cognitive process begins to become a human activity, free from the interplay of separate intelligences that generated the idea of an agent sense in the plane of sensibility. Nifo, in order to explain the parallelism between sense and intellect as Aristotle thought of them, observed that the sensible by being a quality would produce only something similar to itself (heat, for instance, would produce warmth). He felt the need of considering sensation an instrumentum Dei and only for this reason capable of determining a species. For the same reason, Ludovico Boccadiferro felt the need of admitting the intervention of celestial intelligences. Zabarella, on the contrary, traced the process of knowledge as coming not from an extrinsic intervention, but solely as a reconstruction of a human activity that gradually spells itself out. In a remarkable treatise, De ordine intelligendi, he finally defined precisely the distinction between what he calls the natural order, by which the mind arrives to concepts, and the artificial order by which the mind orders the concepts in a logical manner. With this, the problem of logic that assumed for Zabarella preeminent importance is introduced. 12. Jacopo Zabarella Jacopo, the disciple of Bernardino Tomitano, a professor so famous that his lectures were crowded with hundreds of standing auditors, also taught logic for various years and sustained long and ardent polemics concerning problems of logic. Logic was, with psychology and the questions on nature or physics, one of the more characteristic aspects of the activities of the Paduan University. We should recall the judgment of Pietro Ragnisco, “Aristotle will never command again in the sciences. Padua will! What accelerated the catastrophe was not the a priori physics of Telesio or Bruno, but the relenting and tenacious work of scientific interpretation of the Hellenic Aristotle, who clearly delineated the necessity of observation, so that the method could be proficuous to the research. This was due to the work at the University of Padua.” Ragnisco’s judgment is only partially valid, but no doubt exists that the analysis and the discussions of the most conscious Aristotelians contributed to in-
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ternal the dissolution of the Peripatetic thematic. In the sixteenth century, the Paduan logicians applied their power to the effort of defining the processes that bring us from the effect to the cause and, again, from the cause to the effect, in order to clarify, in this apparent circle, of what the effective conquest of knowledge consists. We found this preoccupation in Nifo and Zimara. Tomitano, grammarian and rhetor, examined methodical problems, clarifying how physics could proceed from effects to causes, and how the process from the universal to the particular was the characteristic in the systematism of a learning already acquired. Regression or inductive process was the strength of research (inquisitio). The various inquiries found their clear systematism in Zabarella. For him, logic is not a science; it is a human art, an instrument, the technique that is needed for the construction of scientific knowledge. Science deals with concepts founded on reality: “Logic is concerned with secondary notions or terms that are of our invention and can either be or not be. These notions are not necessary things, but contingent, and they do not constitute a science, because science is only about necessary things.” Philosophers have created logic through second notions (notiones secundae) in order to distinguish the true from the false. This is why logic goes with grammar, with the difference that logic can be applied to reality, becoming a methodic process that coordinates all notions. In this way, logic comes to a convergence with science. On this issue, Zabarella, or a student of his, Ascanio Persio of Matera, brother of the most famous Telesian Antonio Persio, strongly argued with the old professor of logic in Padua, Bernardino Petrella, and his student Giulio Marziale, who may very well have been the same Petrella under a pseudonym. Petrella, “the most excellent logician who has taught and defended for decades the rules of logic,” assigned with much tenacity the character of science to logic, meaning that logic has real concepts as its object, first notions, and not only terms or second notions. In this regard, it is interesting to notice what to Ragnisco appeared as a contradiction: Petrella, who saw logic as the science dealing with reality, struggled with the difficulty of not being able to arrive at things that are physical. Petrella remained trapped within processes in which there was no effective passage from the known of real conceptual essences to the unknown of the experience. On the contrary, Zabarella, who considered logic a technique at the service of the sciences, attempted at a construction of a true and proper inventive logic. If a person were to assign to logic and its terms a reality in itself, each term would become a thing, and the inquiry would be only a resolution of the notion into the elements present already in the notion, and their composition. Regression and progression, analysis and synthesis, reduce themselves to a vicious circle, to an abstract debate concerning ideal separate forms. But if the logical process were to be seen as the instrument that looks beyond the terms at the things signified and aims at them, we would have a logic or method that supervises and guides the cogitative processes like those in the researches in physics, in which the in-
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quiry is from the known to the unknown. It is no longer a matter of the process of resolution and composition of abstract notions, but the passage from the facts to the causes and from the causes to the facts. We do not find ourselves, in this case, facing an exercise exclusively a priori, analytical, where the predicate is already contained in the subject of the judgment, so that the judgment is purely tautological. Here instead we are handling a research, hunting, chase or venatio of concepts in which logic is the tool, in the sense that logic clarifies the guises, and almost let us say the tricks of the venatio, the chase itself, “The instrument is the dividing or composing method itself with which, as Aristotle taught, we must go hunting for the predicates; the chase for the predicates is the chase for the unknown definition itself” (Instrumentum est ipsa via divisiva vel compositiva per quam docet Aristoteles quomodo eiusmodi praedicata venari debeamus; et horum venatio est venatio ipsius definitionis ignotae). For this reason, Zabarella’s method becomes the fundamental aspect of the art of logic, which consists in learning the technique of the chase of the unknown: “The method does not consist in ordering the parts of science, but in guiding us from the known to the cognition of the unknown” (methodus vero non disponit scientiae partes, sed a noto ducit nos in cognitionem ignoti). This venatic or inventive method alternates between the two moments that Galileo would clearly enunciate: a resolving regression by which from the effect we pass to the cause; and a composing process through which we produce from the cause the effect. Zabarella wrote, “The resolving order is the logical instrument which establishes how from the notion of the given effect … we may progress to find the principles from which thereafter we could begin to produce and generate that same given effect” (Ordo autem resolutivus est instrumentum logicum disponens quo a notione finis … progrediamur ad invenienda principia ex quibus operationem postea inchoantes producere et generare finem illum possimus). The methodological process or order is seen with much clarity. On one hand, we have the necessity of an accurate analysis of what is given in order to ascend to its principles, in order to discover the structure implicit in the observed effects; on the other, we have the deduction of the facts from the principles, “The common condition of every order is that it should bring to the knowledge of something, but to a knowledge that afterward would bring to an activity, as its end” (Est quidem omnium ordinum communis conditio ut ad cognoscendum aliquid conferant, sed ad cognitionem conducere quae postea in operationem tamquam finem ducitur). The most notable thing is that the resolutive process must be scientifically guided. In Zabarella’s De Methodis (bk. 3, ch. 19), it is written: The inductive process does not prove a thing by mediation of another thing; in a way, induction reveals the thing through the thing itself. And given that the thing is better known as particular than as universal,
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY because it is sensible as a particular and not as a universal, induction is a process that goes from the thing to the thing itself, from the thing in its most evident aspect to the thing in its most obscure and hidden aspect. Through induction not only the principles of things are known, but also the principles of the scientific learning itself, principles that are said to be indemonstrable.
Galileo spoke of the resolutive and compositive methods and that at his own times they were an already recognized conquest and almost the common practice in the Aristotelian most conscious exegesis. In Cremonini’s lectio sixtysix, we find the normally accepted definitions of these methods. The compositive order begins from the principles and progresses through the principles to the cognition of things. The resolutive order instead begins from what is given and having based itself on the knowledge of it progresses to the consideration of the principles that made possible what was given, from which such a given thing can be posited again (ordo compositivus incipit a principiis et progreditur per ipsa ad rerum cognitionem; ordo vero resolutivus incipit a fine et ipsius habita praecognitione progreditur ad ea consideranda per quae talis finis haberi posit). By being aware of these inquiries of Zabarella it is possible to understand the eulogy that, after his death, the Telesian Antonio Persio wrote in the dedication for the edition of the opuscules of Telesio. The inquiry of nature iuxta propria principia owed very much to the logical acquisitions of the Paduans as the Quaestiones naturales of Zabarella demonstrated. These questions, with their doubts and their discussions, under the excuse of comments, were effectively undermining the structure of the old Aristotelian sciences. 13. Cesare Cremonini When Zabarella died, Francesco Piccolomini obtained the chair (or professorship) of logic at the University, though he was a man who openly professed Aristotelianism, but secretly loved Platonism. To Piccolomini succeeded Cesare Cremonini of Cento, who had studied with Pendasio in Ferrara, was a friend of Torquato Tasso and Francesco Patrizi, and taught in Padua starting in February 1591 for a long time. In Padua, Cremonini had the good chance of having Galileo as a colleague and friend. The personal relationship between the two was simply cordial, but their divergence of opinions in the field of physics consolidated the tradition of a Cremonini supporter of the dark ages in front of the light of modern thought. Cremonini as a Paduan professor was a serious thinker and a man of strong character. On 3 July 1619, to the inquisitor who reproached and threatened him, he answered in this fashion: “In regard to your suggestion that I change my way of speaking, I do not know how I could promise to change. One person may speak in one way and another may speak in another way. Nor do I desire to recant the expositions of Aristotle because that is the way I understand Aristotle, and I am paid to explain
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him in the way I understand him. If I didn’t do this, I would be obliged to the restitution of the payment I have received.” It would be impossible to speak adequately of the thought of Cremonini until the large quantity of manuscript material that lies in various libraries, especially in Padua and Venice, would be carefully studied. Only then we could better define his standing on Platonism, to the influences of which he certainly was not extraneous, since he repeated in Epitome metaphysices Platonizing themes, delighted himself in the deepening of Pythagorical cues, Platonic theories, and Neo-Platonic motives. Cremonini conceived reality in an Aristotelian fashion as an entity extending itself between the passive prime matter and God seen as the ultimate end. Prime matter and God are the two extreme edges that contain the whole reality because “ascending or descending cannot continue infinitely” (nec ascendendo nec descendendo possumus progredi sine termino). God, completely separate from reality, is immobile truth. Deus est veritas immobilis. In God, there is no will, if the will means action and action is born out of a need in order to fulfill a lack of something. Of what could God lack? What could God ever wish for? Difficult is also to affirm that God is truly infinite. Inspired by John of Jandun, Cremonini remarked that “an infinite force cannot be exercised within a finite dimension. But God acts within time, which is not an actual infinity; therefore God’s power is not infinite, because in order to be infinite it should be exercised outside time.” On the other hand, there is another limitation that circumscribes God: the plane of the universe is what it is. If we can speak of perfection in God as of the perfection that is completeness in itself, the notions of infinity or finiteness cannot be adequately predicated of God, because “An abstract power cannot be said to be finite or infinite” (virtus abstracta non potest dici nec finita nec infinita). If from the consideration of God we descend to that of the heavens, we would see that Cremonini denied the Averroist thesis of an extrinsic soul or forma assistens. The celestial intelligence as such does not act; it only knows. The celestial soul is a spiritual force that animates and aims to an intelligible goal, to an ideal end, to the ideas that shine in the intelligences. The heavens, at their own turn, act on the world as efficient causes, through light and heat, and as final causes, by presenting in the constellations some kinds of types that are ideal for the development of the world. In Cremonini, Pico’s influence is present in the conception of the partition of the worlds, of the universal animation, and also in the position taken in regard to astrology. In the lessons Contro li Astrologhi giudiciarii, Cremonini refers directly to the writing of Pico: “People can read the many things ingeniously proffered by Pico della Mirandola in the special book against the astrologists” (si ponno vedere molte cose ingegnosamente proferite da Pico Mirandolano nel libro apartato contro li Astrologhi). Cremonini, following the traditional astrological opinions, maintained a correspondence between heaven’s constellations and humankind’s temperaments. Concerning fate, Cremonini, after having separated the Stoic position that
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is rigidly deterministic from the Aristotelian one, confessed that he derived from the Aristotelian the vision of a certain propensity in those determinate directions that all things have presupposedly received from nature. He explained: “Fate is another name for a particular nature, and subject to fate are Socrates and Plato, not the human being taken in abstract or as a universal.” We can will or not will and thus modify our nature! With this clarification, we can say that fate does not destroy free will because by way of election we can divert from that natural propensity that is called fatal.… In the human beings, some seeds of life are born that dispose them to vices or virtues.… The condition of fate is posited in these dispositions or natural inclinations because by following them we may say that we live a life in conformity with our fate [destiny]. But if an individual, knowing its particular nature, were to understand that its [particular nature] is predominantly disposed to what it will subsequently be, that individual will then easily achieve what it desired (Con sí fatta dilucidazione abbiamo che il fato non distrugge il libero arbitrio perché potiamo col mezzo dell’elezione divertire da quella propensione naturale che si chiama fatale…. Nascono nelli uomini semi di vita, che dispongono alla virtú ovvero al vizio … in queste disposizioni o propensioni naturali è riposta la condizione del fato, perché proseguendole, diciamo di vivere una vita uniforme col nostro fato…. Ma se alcuno, conoscendo questa sua particolare natura, intenda ch’ella sia fatta dal predominio di quello che la segue, facilmente conseguirà ciò che brama). The celestial action [influence] can explicate its own activity upon the human being, acting particularly on the innate heat (calidum innatum) that mediates between soul and body and that corresponds in its function and activity to Ficino’s and Pico’s spiritus, which intermediated between the pure spirituality and the true and proper corporeity. We have arrived at the theory of the soul and intellect, about which Cremonini, on the point of beginning his lectures, alerted his auditors that what he would be saying would regard exclusively Aristotle and not theology. Immediately afterward he would add, “Be aware that the things in which Aristotle moves away from [revealed] Truth are not too many, and that even these few ones are not clearly demonstrated” (Sappiate tuttavia che le cose in cui Aristotele si allontana dal Vero [rivelato] non sono molte, ed anche quelle non sono chiaramente dimostrate). Philosophy is not pretentious. Philosophy wishes to be a modest rural mansion, one of those where the sovereigns go searching for peace and rest, far from the rumors of the royal court, which stands for theology with all its greatness and all its discussions. The rational soul, according to Aristotle, is not “the abstract assistant form, but the form informing the body, constituting together the body” (forma
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astratta assistente, ma forma informante il corpo, costituente con esso il corpo). The Averroistic thesis must be discarded. Cremonini is insistently condemning Averroism, “To speak of an assistant form that could subsist without that of which it is an act, as the ship pilot in the ship, is a nonsense” (è un sogno parlare di una forma assistente che possa sussistere senza ciò di cui è atto, come un nocchiero nella nave). In his conclusions, Cremonini reminds us of the uncertainties of Nifo, who defined the soul as a form that makes use of the body as of an instrument (utens corpore pro instrumento ad varias operationes). The true and proper intellective power or agent intellect “is inorganic, it is not individual and material, except in relation to the soul from which it derives (ratione scilicet animae a qua fluit); in itself, the agent intellect is omnipotent and indefinite, incorporeal and indivisible.” A minute analysis of the works of Cremonini will certainly help to illustrate the last stages of Aristotelianism in Padua, in its arduous achievements and in its subtleties, but also in its frailties, especially in its insistence on old themes that have already lost relevance and actuality. What remains evident is the critical work through which the philosophy and the science of the seventeenth century were making their own way throughout. Though this philosophy and this science were not the logical consequence of the efforts of inquiry of the sixteenth century—as a historiography almost mechanically developed according to the rhythm of progress would have loved to affirm—they certainly took advantage of the accumulated precious material of the inquiry and of the conscious and subtle clarification of the concepts achieved. Cremonini, as a colleague of Galileo, was strong in sustaining the rights of inquiry and in determining methodical rules and logical principles. A bizarre historian once liked to represent Cremonini in a colloquy with Descartes, who was in the act of comforting Cremonini’s proposals so strongly revolutionary, though he was surely not a revolutionary but a scholar tied to an already consumed tradition and disposed, for its defense, to refuse not only the testimony of experience, but also to unite himself, this time not in a heroic guise, to those who denounced the work of Telesio to the Inquisition. No matter what, his figure emerges among those of many other Paduan professors, the like of his ruthless adversary Giorgio Raguseo, or even Fortunio Liceti, whose many intricate ideas showed no equal ingenuity. Liceti was the typical representative of the academic mentality of the time. The presentation of his own work—the Selbst-darstellung that in 1634 he dedicated from Padua to Gabriel Naudé (De propriorum operum historia libri duo)—remains truly tasteful as the perfect symbol of his boastful attitude. Born in Rapallo, in Liguria, Liceti studied with Pendasio, “a man no less excellent in conduct than in doctrine” (probitate non minus quam doctrina spectatissimus). In 1602, he began to publish the long series of his works in Genoa: an essay of physiology, De ortu animae humanae, which received the approval of the other monument of Aristotelian orthodoxy, Francesco Buonamici, professor at the University of Pisa; always in Genoa, La nobiltà de’ Principali Membri dell’Huomo appeared in 1606 and
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it was the work that to Cremonini appeared to have been plagiarized from two lectures of Pendasio. Liceti, as an observant Aristotelian and in secret polemic with Cremonini, attacked the Alexandrians: I have always tried to illustrate Aristotle through the works and words of Aristotle himself.… My reason for this was the intention of destroying all the machinations concocted by the Alexandrines against the monument of Immortality. I wanted to unveil the tricks of the Aphrodisians, so that they would no longer disturb my meditations. All these were topics that demanded much acuteness and attention and should not have been propagated in tumults and noises (Semper Aristotelem ex ipsomet Aristotele declarare studui … quo diruerem omnes Alexandraeorum machinas aedificio Immortalitatis infensas, et omnia Aphrodisaeorum subterfugia, ne meas interrumperent meditationes; quae magnam ob subtilitatem attentionis indigae non debebant obstrepentibus auribus et animis excipi). The five books De intellectu agente were published in Padua in 1627 and the four books De rationalis animae immortalitate in 1629, and against them Cremonini intended to take action. In the inexhaustible mass of Liceti’s writings and commentaries, we must notice his defense of the pietas of Aristotle in the work of 1645, De pietate Aristotelis erga deum et homines. (On the piety of Aristotle toward god and human beings). The most Platonizing Capuchin Valeriano Magni, some few years later, vibrantly challenged Aristotle’s pietas by labeling the system of the Stagirite as atheistic. Liceti disserted concerning the grades of the piety of Aristotle toward god and human beings (de gradu pietatis Aristotelis erga Deum et homines), and in his work “many affirmations of the Philosopher that are hard to the understanding of the faithful, are sweetened with healthy explanations and accommodated for pious ears, while the genuine meaning of Aristotle is preserved” (Philosophi sententiae plurimae, fidelium auditui durae, salubribus explicationibus emollitae, ad pias aures accommodantur, illaeso genuino sensu Aristotelis). As an epigraphy of all his work, Liceti delighted in this distich, “The vulgar charges Aristotle with impiety, / but Liceti cleanses the Teacher’s reputation. / Aren’t they both pious?” (Vulgus Aristotelem gravat impietate, / LicetusDoctorem purgat. / Numquid uterque pius?). Under the weight of the dissertations of Liceti, the last light of the Paduan tradition, which still flashed in some aspects with Cremonini, appears to die hard, extinguished by a sterile erudition.
Sixteen PLATONIC-ARISTOTELIAN SYNCRETISM AND PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE In the thought of Ficino love performs a fundamental task. Love is the bond through which the human joins the divine. While on the ontological plane light is the unitary basis of the entire universe, in the teleological universal process love is the power that keeps the whole universe interconnected. The way of return of the whole reality is truly a process of love. 1. Francesco Cattani of Diacceto It is not difficult to comprehend why Francesco Cattani of Diacceto, the most faithful disciple of Ficino and his successor in the teaching of Platonic doctrines, turned all his attention to the philosophy of love. In the elegant biography of Benedetto Varchi, Cattani is presented as the man who in himself characterized the thinkers of the first fifteenth century in their ability of joining extraneous moral and theoretical virtues. What Rinuccini said to greatly honor Matteo Palmieri can be literally repeated for Cattani: [he was] “mirror not only of civic but also of all speculative virtues.” Cattani joined Ficino after an intense literary preparation and “learned from him with such an avidity … that, in a short time, not only he became Platonist, but the most excellent among Platonists.” At times, Ficino, the teacher, would say of Cattani that he was like his co-author in the writing of the commentary on the Parmenides, while Cattani, the disciple, later on would say referring to his own works, “All what we are worthy, if we are worthy of something, it is because of Marsilio Ficino” (noi tutto quello che siamo, se siamo cosa alcuna, [siamo] da Marsilio Ficino). Ficino was like Cattani’s familiar demon that continued to speak through him (Marsilius igitur quasi familiaris noster daemon … nostro ore loquetur). Besides Ficino, Pico exercised a strong influence on Cattani, especially because of Pico’s effort to build an agreement between Platonism and Aristotelianism in a Christian synthesis. In the frontispiece of the edition of his works published in Basel in 1564, Cattani told the erudite reader that he would find the full consent, many times promised and never actuated, between Academy and Peripatetic Schools, “and the accord of many of their
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dogmas with the Christian religion” (utrorumque cum Christiana religione convenientiam in plerisque dogmatibus). In an epistle to Germano di Ganai concerning the rapport between Platonism and Christianity, Cattani refers to the Pseudo-Dionysius, “Is it not true that the splendor of our theology, the great Dionysius, admired and followed Plato so much that he came to explain Christian mysteries in Platonic terms?” (Forse che lo splendore della nostra teologia, il grande Dionigi, non ammira e segue Platone, tanto da osar di esporre i misteri cristiani in termini platonici?). Cattani enriched his sincere Ficinian position with an inspiration from Pico, whom he does not mention, but from whom he often depends. We see him professing for Aristotelianism an inclination stronger than the one of Ficino. Of Aristotle, Cattani commented not only the works on morality, in which it was easier to identify Platonic cues, but also the works on nature. In the prologue to a course on Nicomachean Ethic, he does not hesitate to declare: Our capable guide is Aristotle who in the moral books for Nicomachus with exquisite abundance prepared for us the way whereby we can achieve the greatest virtue. Who enters the temple of true happiness encounters in the vestibule the civic virtues, which constitute the subject matter of these books. The liberating virtues and those of the spirit already liberated, which are the crown of an entire life, will follow after the civic virtues have been acquired (Nostra guida valente è Aristotele che nei libri morali a Nicomaco con squisita ricchezza ci prepara la via onde possiamo raggiungere la somma virtú. Chi entra infatti nel tempio della vera felicità trova subito nel vestibolo le virtú civili, di cui tratta quel libro. Poiché le virtù liberatrici e dell’animo ormai affrancato, fastigio della vita intera, seguiranno dopo). This not only is an Aristotelian preamble but also a profound agreement. In the Paraphrasis in libros IV de Coelo, Diacceto openly sustains, “the opinion of both philosophers on the unity of the world is the same.” When he begins to describe reality in its gradation he shows of especially depending from the Heptaplus of Pico. From both Pico and Ficino he takes his vision of the universe that proceeds from God and returns to God in a circle of love, as he wrote in Libri d’amore (p. 37): We say that God is the beginning, the middle, and the end. By “beginning,” we mean that all things proceed from It; by “the middle,” that through It alone they can convert; by “the end,” that It alone would crown them with the ultimate perfection, their union with It. This is what the ancient Pythagoreans signified when they said that Trinity was the measure of all things. This is what Orpheus signified when he said that Jove is the beginning, the middle, and the end. In this man-
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ner—as Dionysius Areopagite says—God is the splendor of the enlightened, the perfection of those who are perfect, the deity of the Deific ones, the unity of those who share the one, the life of the living, the simplicity of the innocent, the essence of all things that are. God is the cause of all essence, of all life It is principle and cause. Every created thing, whether eternal, mortal, rational, or angelic, can exclaim together with the Prophet, “O Lord, the splendor of your countenance is established over us” (Libri d’amore, p. 37). In the description of God, we cannot use positive attributes; of Him we can only say what He is not. Diacceto with the other Florentine Platonists, with Pico and Politian, repeats that the unique praise of God consists of silence, “Silence is the praise for You!” (Tibi silentium laus!). He exclaimed, “The divine Plato said in Parmenides that God has no name, no definition, no science, no meaning, and no opinion.” Reality descends by gradation from God, the absolute unity and the ineffable: angels, souls, and bodies. The angels, “fountains of all intelligible light,” sustain and guide the soul in the same way that the soul sustains and guides the body. The multiplicity of the real does not crack in any way the unity of the whole in the same way that the thought that thinks many things remains unique in the face of the multiplicity: “It is as if you were by an interior action thinking of geometry in separation from geometrical theorems. Geometry is one in all the geometric theorems because each one of them is geometry, and nonetheless geometry is also a multitude in so far that the theorems are distinguishable.” The human soul at the center of the whole is the knot of the universe, its synthesis, and the earthly image of divinity. When you look at it in its essence, you will find that the soul possesses the same divine majesty of God (ipsam numinis maiestatem), “Admirable is the beauty manifested by the earthly body because of the union that amicably brings together things of the world which are much diverse and contrary, and that come to constitute something like a great animal. If it were licit to compare great with small things, the world is like the human being.” The human being is not only a microcosm; it is the universal knot which can turn back to its celestial origin or lament in its corporeal misery: The soul degenerating from the Angel from whom it proceeds is inclined toward the nature of the body, which it produced. The soul does not degenerate from the Angel in such a way of not maintaining some dubious conditions, but does not incline so much toward the body to be completely absorbed in its sordid activities. For this reason, placed in the middle between two natures, the soul does not dismiss the Angel or minister to the body, but enjoys the delights of the intelligible world. Thus, the soul is properly called the knot of the universe.
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The nature of love is like the anceps or demonic nature of the soul. Love is anguish for beauty; it is awareness of possession or abandonment. As the human being is as it gradually makes itself, so love tends to a goal and actuates itself in the motion toward the goal. In the universal rhythm of one and many, human beings and love are the knot between the two terms, which cannot be understood in an absolute multiplicity or subsist in an absolute unity. The human being and love live within a limit, but they placed themselves as borders; they make possible the life of the two bordering realities. Love, we said, is desire of beauty, and beauty is the light of eternity reflecting on things; it is the unifying harmony of multiplicity. No beauty exists in God who is the supreme super-essential unity, but celestial beauty exists in the angelic world, where divine unity multiplies itself in an orderly multitude, so that clearly the One shines in it. Beauty exists in nature where the ideal light becomes the seed of life by diffusing in the corporeal multiplicity the last glimmer of the supreme One. The angelic nature descends into the soul; the soul produces the corporeal world through nature seen as a secondary soul and as “the great seed-bed, gravid with the seeds of all things” (gran seminario, gravido de’ semi di tutte le cose). Heavenly beauty, which is beauty that results from the first harmony, resides in the ideal order. Earthly beauty manifests itself in the great seed-bed in which something of the ideal kingdom is transfused. Unity, harmony, and order of the whole are the root of beauty. “Beauty is grace, splendor of goodness, which at first appears to us almost as color on the surface, object of our visual power … in an accidental way” (La bellezza è una grazia, uno splendore della bontà, che su la prima giunta apparisce all’aspetto, quasi il colore nella superficie, obietto della potenza visuale … per modo d’accidente). The celebration of unity, the unifying or ascending motion is in itself a conquest of goodness. The essence of the beautiful is goodness since the beautiful is nothing but the vision of the unifying motion. The celebration of unity is goodness, and it appears extrinsically as an achievement of harmonization or beauty. Diacceto insists on the visual character of beauty (obbietto visivo) and on its extrinsicalness (per modo d’accidente), when instead interiority is goodness. Beauty—he insists again—is “the flower of goodness” (fiore della bontà). In Panegirico all’amore, he will say, “beauty [is] the door-keeper of the most secret residence of divine goodness” (bellezza [è] portinaria alla abitazione secretissima della divina bontà). 2. The School of Cattani of Diacceto. The “Verini” Crisostomo Javelli of Casale The universe is beautiful because it is the process in which God reveals Itself in the descension and is celebrated in Its return. Beauty is the seal of God and the vest under which the divinization of things progress. Love is the ardent motion toward this vestige, the celebration of this transfiguration within the process of ascension and descension.
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The School of Francesco Cattani of Diacceto formed all the participants who met in Florence at the Oricellari Gardens. We know the names of several individuals: Palla and Giovanni Rucellai; Alessandro de’ Pazzi, the translator of the Poetics of Aristotle; Giovanni Corsi, the biographer of Ficino; Donato Giannotti; Antonio Brucioli, vulgarizer and illustrator of Aristotle, one of the few Italians who embraced the Reformation; and Francesco de’ Vieri, known as the first Verino, continuator of the official tradition of Ficinian Platonism. Antonio Lapini of San Giovanni taught the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle at the University of Pisa using the method of the first Verino, but with an increased competency in philology and mathematics. At his turn, he inspired his nephew Francesco de’ Vieri the second, known as the second Verino, who dreamed the restoration of the Platonic Academy and wanted to preserve Platonism and Aristotelianism from any interior contradiction and reciprocal contrast. Giovanni Pico had firmly established this conciliatory tendency that remained alive in all the Platonists who believed that Aristotle had been the first great Platonist. These Platonists were all seeking the expansion of the ideal plan that Pico projected and initiated, but that had not yet succeeded, “The Harmony Between Plato and Aristotle” (Concordia fra Platone e Aristotele). This was the work about which Francesco of Diacceto announced the wish of composing and publishing. This open desire of the Platonists for Concordia was not without significance and the Aristotelians were not estranged to it. One of the most characteristic representatives of this tendency during the sixteenth century was Crisostomo Javelli of Casale. Javelli was a confessed Thomist, a writer of logic and politics, a subtle disputant of moral questions, and a dreamer of social utopias. So complex is the personality of this individual that some ancient biographer began to speak of a Cristoforo of Casalmaggiore in distinction from Crisostomo Javelli, who never ended one of his writings without adding that it had been thought out and written “according to the Thomistic doctrine” (iuxta thomisticum dogma). We have mentioned Javelli in relation to Pomponazzi and showed how Javelli established a link between Pomponazzi and Cardinal Cajetanus [De Vio]: “Thomas Cajetanus took the way of Hervé de Nédellec and Duns Scotus and was followed by Pietro Pomponazzi of Mantua, who said nothing that had not already been taught by Thomas Cajetanus” (Ad viam Hervei et Scoti declinavit Thomas Caetanus, quem secutus est Petrus Pomponatius Mantuanus … [qui] nihil novi dixit quod non fuerit factum a Thomas Caetanus in III de an. quaest., 3). It would be interesting to retrace among Javelli’s writings the numerous references to the teaching of Pomponazzi, whose lectures on physics and critiques of St. Thomas were minutely presented and confuted, for instance, in Super octo libros Aristotelis de Physico Auditu (1533). Quite important is Javelli’s basic thesis that, if Aristotelianism were to be valid on the plane of the sciences of nature, Plato would be more useful in the moral and religious planes “because of his powerful speech and paternal kind
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of exhortation” (ex vi dicendi atque paterna adhortatione). The eulogy to the “prophet” is lofty and complete: Plato in all his teachings seems to prefer the prophetic style to the philosophical one. Like the most pious father, a divine sage, and a priest, he tries to direct us to the rapture of divine things, beyond the enticements of the body. Rightly so, therefore, I decided to propose to all those who desire a honest and good life as an example of the most moral and pure doctrine, after the Peripatetic doctrine, the religious and pious doctrine of the divine Plato like the most beautiful maiden captivating the eyes of us all (Plato in omni disciplina sua non tam philosophicum quam propheticum stilum servare videtur; more enim piissimi patris, divini vatis ac sacerdotis, a corporis illecebris expiatos ad divina nos rapere contendit. Merito igitur, ut cunctis bene recteque vivere cupientibus moralissimae et purgatissimae doctrinae speculum proponerem, post doctrinalem Peripateticam, religiosam ac piam divi Platonis ante omnium oculos velut ornatissimam virginem statuendam decrevi). Continuing on the theme of Concordia, we may state that Antonio Montecatini as a stern Aristotelian was not too far removed from the positions just examined. He even downrightly used repeatedly Pythagorical-cabalistic expressions like the ones found in a letter of preface to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini: “The mystery of the quaternary number has much impressed me. It is from its own parts that it has created the denary and having assumed on the outside the binary of infinity, will show the duodenary perfection of the universe” (movit autem me plurimum … quaternartii numeri mysterium, qui denarium suis e partibus collectum procreavit, assumpto extrinsecus infinitatis binarium, duodenariam universi perfectionem ostendet). Verino, the second, had attempted in Pisa quadrennial lectures on Plato to be opposed to the Aristotelian ones, but “because of the insolence … of some individuals who thought of themselves as the leaders among the Philosophers of this time … I was obliged to abandon such honorable and worthy enterprise.” In 1584, he expressed himself in this way in Vere conclusioni di Platone conformi alla dottrina Christiana et a quella di Aristotele (True conclusions of Plato in accord with Christian and Aristotelian doctrines) in polemic with his colleague and adversary Girolamo Borri from Arezzo, whose Peripatetic doctrine was chiefly consigned to De peripatetica discendi et docendi methodo (On the Peripatetic method of teaching and learning). Verino, who in 1568 had published a Discorso of moral nature on human activities, insisted on the importance that the teaching of Platonic morality and politics would have. The plan of studies, which he tried to establish in Florence, comprised in the first year the conformity of Plato with Christianity; in the second, Plato’s agreement with Aristotle; in the third, Plato’s agreement with Hippo-
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crates and, on the fourth, he ended with an ethical-political exposition. In logic, Verino easily connected the inspiration of Aristotle’s Organon with many Platonic motives. Sebastiano Erizzo, translator and commentator of Plato, and principally of Timaeus, since 1554 had been preoccupied with moral problems and in Trattato dell’instrumento et via inventrice degli antichi (A treatise on the instrumental and inventive method of the ancients) applied again the Platonic method of division as it is articulated in the second part of Phaedrus. Love for conciliation constantly dominated the efforts of Platonists who had accepted the Christian philosophy that Javelli delineated and in which the fifteenth century pax philosophica could be realized. If this pax philosophica were to be realized it would be a philosophical peace without contrasts, in a peaceful and serene vision in which religion itself could find its place as the crown and the splendor of the “Platonic perennial philosophy.” These were the words that Agostino Steuco of Gubbio used in his work of 1540, a work more known for its title than for its content. 3. Gian Francesco Pico’s Skepticism. Adriano of Corneto Agostino Steuco is the typical expression of the above tendency but opposite to him we have a thinker quite notable but not of a first magnitude, Gian Francesco Pico, the nephew of the great Giovanni, who presented a rigid antithesis, an overturn of that thesis. Gian Francesco’s figure stands out between the pyre of Savonarola and the massacre of his followers. He, too, was the victim of internecine family fights for the possession of the Dukedom of Mirandola. Most dear to the uncle whose biography with moving affection he wrote and whose writings he printed, Gian Francesco was totally taken in the disdainful weariness of those who, disheartened by inquiry, searched in the faith what human forces could not give. His skepticism was nourished from reading Sextus Empiricus, from whom he generously drew. His doctrine was not inferior to that of his uncle. When drawing from the Eastern philosophers, his was a doctrine less turbid, and he did not abandon himself to the mystical enthusiasms of the Cabalists, but in Luce del Signore (The light of the Lord) of Hasdaj Crescas he searched the motives for a critique of the Aristotelian theories on time and space. Gian Francesco continued the work of Giovanni Pico only in regard to the defense of faith. When the death of his uncle interrupted the confutation of the astrologers, Gian Francesco recovered, in part completed, and in part corrected the treatise against them. His uncle had brought that treatise to light with the subsidy of Giovanni Mainardi, with great satisfaction, and perhaps because of the suggestion of Savonarola, if we would accept the affirmation of Lucio Bellanti, an astrologist from Siena. In De rerum praenotione (On the foreknowledge of events) the important note underlined the supreme foolishness (stultitia) of the false prophets and daydreamers, who believed that the human being through the study of nature (natura et studio) would reach the vision of the future that only God can give.
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Francesco believed the foresight could be obtained from malign spirits, though he did not believe in the different species of false prophets, as Strega (The witch) or Tractatus de justificatione daemonum shows, Many are those who presume to possess foresight not with help from divine or human light, but with the assistance of demons and the dark forces of superstition. The magi pronounce insanities; necromants nonsense; astrologists, in the guise of seers, fables and deceptions; geomants tittle-tattles; and chiromants ravings (Ceterum et praenoscere multi praesumunt, nec divini, nec naturalis luminis adiumento, sed ope daemonis et tenebris superstitionis. Hinc Magi insaniunt, Necromantici infuriunt, Astrologi divinatores fabulantur et decipiunt, Geomantici nugantur, Chiromantici delirunt). These observations do not touch true prophecy. The battle against the false prophets is actually conducted in favor of those truly inspired by supernatural agencies. True prophecy is divine light flashing in the human soul, whose intellect struggles in darkness and in the extensive and insidious peregrinations of the discourse. The reason for this is that “our intellect is the last of the intelligences and moves from possibility to actuality. In so doing, the intellect errs in reasoning and discursive processes, is impeded, and is almost held back from knowing the true cause of accidents that hide the substances. There are also the unknown differences between things” (De rerum praenotione, bk. 2, ch. 3). In the midst of these uncertainties at times there is light: I imagine that prophetic things happen in a similar way like when an individual is lying in the darkness and suddenly at the approaching of a light is illumined and see things, but falls back into darkness again as the lamp is removed. It is for the coming and going of light that his intellect is equally enlightened or darkened (Imaginor ego ita evenire sicuti, cum in obscuro quis iacet, accedente lampade illuminatur, recedente ea caecutit in tenebris, redeunte iterum collustratur, vicissimque pro accessu et recessu intellectum eius illuminari et tenebrescere). Following the Arabic-Hebrew tradition, Gian Francesco proposed again the problem of prophecy as the problem of the joining of fantasy with intellect. This problem was always present and always discussed from Avicenna (who admitted that in its purity the soul by some divine power joins the intellect in such a way that foresight becomes possible) to Al-Ghazzali, Averroès, Maimonides, and Moses of Narbona. Pico believed that to the apex of vision one could arrive not through the achievement of science, but by God’s divine gift. On the example of Savonarola, Pico did not hesitate to admit the prophetic powers of the young Pietro Bernardino of Florence. Learned in Aristotelian thought, Gian Francesco went against the theory of
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the unity of the intellect and especially contested the idea quite dear to Giovanni of an agreement of Aristotle with Plato and of a concord of all philosophers. The concept of a “pia philosophia” as a perennial philosophy ran the risk of fatally effecting an attenuation of the value of Christianity. From that point of view, there was no fracture between classic antiquity and Christianity in which it was impossible then to recognize any effective conquest. Plato and Aristotle said what every thinker says when he listens to the voice of truth that reveals itself to everybody in the light of the mind. Holy is Socrates, holy are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and, especially, the Platonists who have experienced the divine. The foolishness of the Cross has a very reasonable basis and an importance much inferior to the one announced, given that reason or a perennial inspiration have found with their own means the same mystery that Christ has revealed. In Pythagoras and in Plato, or perhaps in the Hebrew mystics— Giovanni Pico used to say—you can find the same truths that you can read in Paul, Dionysius, and Augustine. But if things are this way, then of what use is the Christian religion? Does the apologetics that Ficino began translate into a confutation? Gian Francesco cries out, “It came to my mind that it would be more proper and more advantageous to make the doctrines of the philosophers contrastive instead of conciliatory, as my uncle wanted” (Mihi autem venit in mentem consentaneum magis esse et utile magis, incerta reddere philosophorum dogmata, quam conciliare, ut patruus volebat). Far from finding agreement in an admirable symphony of truth, human reason finds itself in an eternal contrast, falls in perennial contradictions, characteristic expression of an essential impotence. It is beginning to appear in a clear way that the philosophy of all nations is unreliable. The manner of philosophizing is different, the sects of philosophers are different, and different are the doctrines of the philosophers.… The philosophers themselves may not contrast and fight each other on particular theories, but they certainly do in regard to the first, greatest, and most important principles. Then what else could we do if not to condemn these doctrines themselves as totally vain and uncertain? (Apparere sane incipit, et liquido quidem, incertam esse omnium gentium philosophiam; nam cum varium sit philosophandi genus, variae philosophantium sectae, varia dogmata philosophorum … cum ipsi inter sese de rebus, si non singulis, certe et primis et maximis et cognitu dignioribus altercentur et pugnent, quid restat praeterea ut non ipsa gentium doctrina et vana et incerta prorsus iudicetur?). No agreement has been found, but an irremediable dissension of thought with itself. Faith in reason ended in complete distrust. The antiquity that until this time seemed the perfect paradigm changed into a foolish succession of contrasts. Faith alone would bring to secure harbors, and where dissensions in the field of religion are found, we must realize that they are philosophical dissen-
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sions, dissensions of the philosophy of theologians, not contradictions of faith. We must not look for ratiocinations or syllogisms, but for the unity without flaws of the divine word consigned to scriptural texts. The Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium et veritatis disciplinae Christianae assumed in this light the value of a systematic critique of the philosophical thought of all times. Giovanni Pico wanted to write a history of philosophy seen through the linear development of only one thought. Gian Francesco, on the other hand, outlined a history of the eternal contradictions of philosophical sects. As we declared before, a grand part of his arguments is derived from Sextus Empiricus, “From Sextus we have derived and will derive many arguments because he is like the philosopher who argues against philosophers” (ex eo igitur Sexto multa tamquam a Philosopho contra Philosophos et attulimus et afferemus). These arguments invested the method of philosophizing, the criterion of truth, and the logical proceedings. Gian Francesco Pico’s critique attacked the whole world that the Renaissance admired: letters, arts, grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and mathematics. With Gian Francesco, we see the return of the aporias of point, line, continuum, and divisibility. He uses Cusanus and Giovanni Pico as his sources. Against geometry, and in general against the mathematical sciences, he found support in some fragments among the uncle’s documents (in eius fragmentis inveni nonnulla in illas ipsas argumenta), documents that argued against the knowledge of geometry. Giovanni Pico would have contested the merely imaginative, hypothetic character of mathematical cognition, as it is directed to accidents and their variations and not to substances (sunt accidentia non substantiae, quorum affectionibus dignoscendis Geometrae invigilant). For this reason, the mathematical sciences would not profit from the cognition of nature or moral formation (Examen vanitatis, bk. 3, ch. 6). After the sciences of mathematics, Gian Francesco brought his attacks against astrology, with which he already battled in the book De rerum praenotione, in the Quaestio de triplici astrologia (Three kinds of astrology) written in the “Parisian mode” and partially inserted in De veris calamitatibus nostrorum temporum (On the true disastrous events of our times). One of the most interesting parts of the Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium et veritatis disciplinae Christianae is found in book four and is intended for the destruction of Aristotelianism as the one that was believed most consonant with Christian faith. Beside the corruption introduced by Averroism, the falsifying comments, and the perfidious barbaric translations, the doctrine itself of Aristotle cannot stand because it is rooted on what is most uncertain in human structure, that is, sensation (Aristotelis demonstrandi ars incerta, quia fundatur in indicio iudicioque sensus, in Examen, bk. 5). The Aristotelian empiricism on which the apologetics after Thomas preferred to found itself became with Gian Francesco Pico the source of every doubt and was despisingly rejected. The younger Pico did not stop at this. He began to discuss, in its difficul-
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ties, the Aristotelian theory of space and time in relation to the concept of creation. It is known that Aristotle, while admitting infinity in the succession excluded it in the coexistence. By doing this, he also excluded the concepts of void and infinite space, but remained firm on the idea of an indefinite addition of parts. During the late medieval period, Hasdaj Crescas fought more profoundly than anybody else did about this aspect of Aristotelianism. Rabbi Hasdaj, “the great challenger of Aristotelianism” (Rabbi Hasdaj Aristotelicae doctrinae acerrimus impugnator) sustained an absolute, infinite, and continuous space that was the same as the expansion of God. Gian Francesco faithfully repeated the subtle argumentations of the Hebrew doctor with the intention of uprooting the Aristotelian conception of the world from its foundations. After having tracked down errors and dissensions throughout the whole development of thought, Gian Francesco could conclude that the work of his uncle had been in vain. The human being, far from being capable of elevating itself to the heavens with the strength of its thought, has been found to be a feeble and uncertain creature, to which Revelation alone can offer a heaven of peace, without contrasts, without disturbing and tormenting discussions (sine lite, sine dissensione, sine vago et anxio discursu). Even the negative theology of Cusanus to Gian Francesco’s eyes was but a skeptic appeal to the certainty of faith. Because of this attitude, we understand how he could support the tendency that triumphed in the Lateran Council with the condemnation on 19 December 1517 of philosophical irreligious doctrines. This reactionary spirit was the one that permeated the book of the Cardinal Adriano of Corneto, De vera philosophia ex quattuor doctoribus ecclesiae (Bologna, 1506), in which the sufficiency of the Scripture was affirmed (sufficere orbi terrarum authoritatem sacrae scripturae). Antonio Corsano observed that we can understand how Gian Francesco with this spirit “dogmatic and austerely or rather painfully serious” (dogmatico, austeramente, anzi dolorosamente serio) could reject the value of the humanistic literary form in the famous polemic with Bembo concerning imitation. We can also comprehend how he could condemn together with the joking and laughing of the poets even the humanity of the Socratic dialogues “from which, one can never derive anything firm and stable” (de’ quali non si può cavar mai un certo che di fermo e stabile). Gian Francesco was simply not a pedantic individual affected by bigotry. As Corsano demonstrated, while in Gian Francesco humanism also lived, though deprived of any boldness, the need was present in his spirit for a religion felt more deeply than in the way it was felt in the beautiful universal credence of the Platonists, credence that could have easily become a deistic illuminism. He felt that Christianity had brought something new in the world, a radical discovery not available to the classic world, the discovery of a creative spirit, in regard to which the name of Vico was rightly mentioned. Gian Francesco had no power of synthesis, but he illumined with clarity an attitude that
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was going to be engrafted on the humanistic revival and that reminded all human beings, after the period of elation, of their restricted and sorrowful humanity. 4. Francesco Giorgio Veneto. Leone Ebreo. Minor Writers of Treatises on Love In the rigidity of Gian Francesco the Renaissance was going astray in attitudes that were almost Tridentine, but the way opened by Giovanni Pico was still inspiring the great and the less great followers who were seduced by the “pia philosophia” he wanted to reconstruct. Gian Francesco denied that Giovanni assigned any value to mathematics, but Francesco Giorgio Veneto, a Minorite, opened his book with the citation of one of Giovanni Pico’s thesis: “Rightly knows everything, the person that knows how to count well” (ille omnia rite novit, qui bene scit numerare). Veneto’s book of 1525, De harmonia mundi totius, cantica tria (Three hymns on the harmony of the whole world), is a massive and curious book, all Hermetic, Platonic, Cabalistic, and Pichian. The author, who for what we know was a superintendent of architecture, wanted to interpret the world as a harmony of music. The universe governed by numerical laws and seen as the living image of God rises as a concert offered to the glory of the Lord. The work of Veneto, in its structure, intends to follow the constitution of things, and it is subdivided into canticles, tones, modules, and melodies. Musical rhythms bring to light the hidden depth of things. Philosophers do nothing else than transcribe the arcane music that spells out the rhythm of becoming. “Everything is ordered according to numbers.… The number—as Proclus says—is always equal to itself, and is different in the terms and in the things [to which the terms refer], in the mind and the soul, and even in things divine” (Numeris nam omnia disposita sunt…. Numerus autem—ut Proculus ait—semper idem existit, alius tamen est in voce, alius in rerum proportione, alius in anima et ratione, et alius in divinis). As the laws of numbers rule all things, so the wise knowledge of numbers is knowledge of the whole: If some person would remove the numbers from the knowledge of humanity, it would remove prudence and science from humankind. The soul perceives everything through reason, but reason cannot give justification of anything without knowledge of numbers. Even in the arts, if we remove numbers there would be no art. And this is the most important thing: it is said that number always is the cause of good, never of evil. Hereby the human being that is destined to happiness and wants to inquire about divine and celestial things, must not ignore numbers (Si quis ab hominum natura numerum auferre velit nullatenus prudentes eos aut scientificos relinquit; nam anima nihil percipiet sine ratione; nec rationem de rebus reddere quispiam poterit, qui numeros ignorat. Artes quoque, sublato numero, penitus evanescent; et, quod maximum
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est, bonorum quidem omnium, mali autem nullius, numerum esse causam asseretur. Hinc qui beatus futurus est, qui caelestia et divina rimari cupit, numerum ignorare non debet). Harmony, beauty, and goodness are all fused together in this aesthetic intuition of reality. This justifies the mathematical knowledge of things and itself in the Hermetic-Pythagorean-Platonic tradition that Ficino and Pico have brought to be the cultural mode of an age. Within this tradition, in 1536, Veneto wrote his Cabalistic interpretation of the Bible, In scripturam sacram problemata (Problems in the sacred scriptures). Against this work abundantly intervened Marin Mersenne at the same time that in France, translated together with the Heptaplus, the De harmonia mundi totius was published. If the connection of this curious musical interpretation of the world with Pico is evident, no less evident is the derivation from Ficino and Pico of the vast sixteenth century systematization of this vision of the universe as beauty and love in Dialoghi d’Amore (Dialogues about love) of Leone Ebreo. Jehudah Abarbanel, born in Lisboa between 1461 and 1465, died before 1535. He, too, had composed a treatise in Scholastic style (scholastico stilo) concerning the celestial harmony, De coeli harmonia. According to the information of Amato Lusitano, Leone wrote it on the request of Pico della Mirandola (divini Mirandulensis Pici precibus). That this Pico della Mirandola was Giovanni and not Gian Francesco is the common agreement between many scholars. Unfortunately, this work was lost, but an idea of its content can be derived from Dialoghi d’Amore, composed between 1501 and 1506. These dialogues, edited by an otherwise unknown Mariano Lenzi, were printed in Rome in 1535 by Antonio Blado. The second dialogue in Dialoghi d’Amore exalts celestial love and finds its motives and manifestations in the harmony of motions of the spheres: Though between the celestial beings willful and mutual generation is missing, perfect and reciprocal love among them exists. The principal cause that shows love in them is their friendship and harmonic concordance that is perpetually found in them. You know that every concordance proceeds from true friendship or from true love. O Sophia, if you were to contemplate the correspondence and the concordance of the celestial motions and bodies … and if you were to come to know the number of the heavenly orbits for which the different motions are necessary … you would see such an admirable correspondence and concordance of diverse bodies and dissimilar motions in such a harmonic union that you would remain stupefied at the wisdom of the ordinator (Se ben fra li celesti manca la recidiva e mutual generazione, non però manca fra lor il perfetto e reciproco amore. La causa principal che ne mostra in lor amore è la lor amicizia e armonica concordanzia, che perpetuamente si truova in loro; ché tu sai che ogni concordanzia pro-
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY cede da vera amicizia o da ver amore. Se tu contemplassi, o Sofia, la correspondenzia e la concordanzia de li moti de’ corpi celesti … e se tu conoscessi il numero degli orbi celesti per li quali son necessari li diversi moti … vedresti una sí mirabil corrispondenzia e concordia di diversi corpi e di difformi moti in una armonia unione che tu resteresti stupefatta de l’avedimento de l’ordenatore).
Love for Leone Ebreo is not the human love alone. Love for him is the universal bond that ties together and gives life to the whole universe without any distinction. When stupefied Sophia asks Philo how could insensible things possess love, if love always implies will, appetency, and sentiment, Philo answers by distinguishing three kinds of knowledge and appetency: natural, sensitive, and rational voluntary. Again in Dialoghi d’Amore: Natural knowledge, appetite, or love is what is also found in insensible bodies as are the elements and the bodies mixed with insensible elements like metals and different species of stones and even plants, herbs, and bushes. All these things have a natural knowledge of their own end and incline to it like what is heavy that tends to the lower place and what is light that tends to the loftier places as to their own known and desired location (Il natural conoscimento, appetito o amore, è quel che si trova ne li corpi non sensitivi, come son gli elementi e li corpi misti degli elementi insensibili, come li metalli e spezie di pietre e ancor le piante, erbe o ver arbori; che tutti questi hanno conoscimento natural del suo fine e inclinazion natural a quello: la qual inclinazione li muove a quel fine, come li corpi gravi di discendere al basso e i lievi d’ascendere a l’alto come a proprio luogo conosciuto e desiato). The universal circularity, the perennial life, which already in the commentaries on Symposium of Ficino and Pico was animating the universal rhythm, becomes a circulation of love. Love is the uniting bond, the intimate force by which the whole originates from first matter or “chaos that in Greek means confusion because all things are potentially or in germs all together in prime matter, that is, in confusion.” Leone Ebreo retraces this pulsation of life in things, this sympathy and friendship of the cosmos that imaginatively transmutes heaven and earth in living beings that marry to fulfill their perfect love. The sun is the heart of the heavens, its brain is the moon, and the planets are all its members with which it embraces, possesses, and seeds the earth that is under the heaven waiting as its spouse in love. “The whole corporeal universe united by this reciprocal love adorns and sustains the world. The earth or matter loves the sky as its most beloved husband, or lover and benefactor. The things that are generated love the sky as their pious father and optimal curator” (Con questo reciproco amore s’unisce l’universo corporeo, e s’adorna e
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sostiene il mondo. E la terra o materia ha amore al cielo come a dilettissimo marito, o amante, e benefattore; e le cose generate amano il cielo come patre pio ed ottimo curatore). The astrological fables cover with mythical representations this poetic philosophy of nature, which at its own turn would explain the hidden significations of the classical myths at whose root is contained the vision of the mutable interplay of the forces of nature. The centrality of the human person that in Pico represented the infinite value of liberty takes here its completely naturalistic flavor. The human being is a microcosm, a perfect animal that encloses in a brief image what in a wider form is represented in the grandiose scene of the universe. The inflamed spiritualism of Giovanni Pico was founded on human centrality in order to reach the exaltation of liberty, a thing superior to stellar motions. Universal sympathy in Leone Ebreo provides the basis for the astrological correspondences. Except that the aesthetic vision of Leone, though it immerges the human person into nature, in reality afterward raises human being and nature into a rhythm of a creative energy that celebrates the good and the beautiful, shapes the power of the artist, and is the expression of the supreme artist that is God. The parallel between artistic creation and spontaneous becoming of nature found a powerful expression in Leonardo, after Ficino, but did not manifest itself in a less fortunate manner in Leone Ebreo. He is not a ratiocinating philosopher; he asks not for the syllogisms or the sensate experiences for the secret of things. His is an intuitive vision that seizes the substance of things in the agreement between the love that agitates the human being and the One living in the wholeness of things. His is an aesthetic intuition that gives him impulse to understand the whole as the manifestation of love directed toward a deity that is love, “The heavens narrate the glory of God” (Coeli enarrant gloria, Dei). It is love of contraries that harmonizes the contraries. It is love whose understanding is a long moment, a passage. Beyond the understanding that is distinction, there is unity, the becoming one thing with the unity of the whole. In Dialoghi d’Amore: End of the whole is the united perfection of the entire universe. … Given that in the universe this law is always observed, is then intelligence more satisfied when it can move the celestial orbs than when intrinsically and essentially it considers itself in its proper act? This is what Aristotle meant when he said that intelligence always tends to a loftier and more excellent end, which is God, reaching thus its proper place in the universe. By loving and moving its orbs, the intelligence reaches the union with the universe through which it properly obtains love, union, and the divine grace that unites the world. This is the intelligence’s ultimate goal and desired happiness (Il fine del tutto è l’unita perfezione di tutto l’universo…. Essendo dunque questa legge sempre osservata ne l’universo, l’intelligenzia si felicita piú nel muovere l’orbe celeste … che ne la intrinseca intelligenzia sua essenziale, che è
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY il proprio atto: e questo intende Aristotele dicendo che l’intelligenzia muove per fine piú alto ed eccellente, che è Dio, conseguendo l’ordine suo ne l’universo; sí che amando e movendo il suo orbe collega l’unione de l’universo, con la qual propriamente consegue l’amore, l’unione e la grazia divina unificatrice del mondo, la quale è il suo ultimo fine e desiderata felicità).
Supreme wisdom is not meditation; it is rapture (raptus), aesthetic vision, and “divine kiss” (bacio divino) until the human being reaches the ultimate unity and die: “This has been the death of our blessed ones, who, contemplating with immense desire divine beauty, transformed all their soul into that beauty and abandoned the body” (Tale è stata la morte de’ nostri beati, che, contemplando con sommo desiderio la bellezza divina, convertendo tutta l’anima in quella, abbandonano il corpo). Pico speaking in Cantico dei Cantici about the death happening in the kiss of God, which Leone Ebreo places as the goal of every knowing and every loving, had already repeated “Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth” (Baciami coi baci della bocca tua). Essence of the world, animating motor of things, power that maintains everything alive and unites the whole, this is life-giving love, not geometrizing formula. Reason is not the one opening the doors of the temple of being that is the temple of God. Love joins the individual with the universal and does it not by comprehension but by immersion in the rhythm of things: “God Supreme with love produces, rules, and guides the world to one unity. Being God the one in its simplest unity, everything that proceeds from It must also be one in complete unity. The reason is that from one can derive one, and from pure unity perfect union.” Love unites the spiritual world with matter, the soul with the body, and the sky with the earth, “the corruptible with the eternal, and the whole universe with its creator.” But not only is God the object of love, It is the suscitation of love. It is the lover with the loftiest love that is born not from the desire of providing for a deficiency, but out of a wealth that wants to be shared. God is like the father who loves his son not in order to derive pleasure from his presence, but to share with his creature the joy of perfection. It is Love that gives and asks only for the acceptance of the gift: God desires not Its union with the creatures as other lovers do with the ones they love, but desires the union of the creatures with Its divinity so that they through that union could have their perfection always perfect, and the creator’s operation toward his creatures could remain immaculate (Dio non desidera la sua unione con le creature, come fanno gli altri amanti con le persone amate, ma desidera l’unione delle creature con sua divinità, acciò pur la loro perfezione con tale unione sia sempre perfetta, e immaculata l’operazione di esso creatore relata alle sue creature).
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The outward appearance of this world whose essence is love is beauty: “Beauty is grace that while delighting the spirit with its knowledge moves it to loving” (Bellezza è grazia, che, dilettando l’animo col suo conoscimento, il muove ad amare). Without grace, it is still possible to have goodness, but without grace and goodness, the creature falls into the kingdom of the ugly and evil, the no-being. Beauty, as the Ficinians were used to say, is the flower of goodness: it is what makes goodness loveable and that awakes love. Love does not grow where deficiency and imperfection exist. Love grows with perfection because if the desire is stronger where greater imperfection exists, greater would be the love of perfection where greater perfection is present. Love is far from being a blind striving for possession; true love does not precede reason, it is born from reason: “Love is of two kinds. One kind generates desire.… But the other love is the one generated by desire.… The perfect and true love … is father of desire and son of reason.” True love gives, does not ask; is ready to die for the loved one, from which it asks the same perfection. For the loved one, true love wishes the highest possible perfection. As “ordinary reason” wants the maintenance of the individual with a rhythm of life that follows prudence, so “extraordinary reason” wants the perfection of the lover with a rhythm of life that follows love. The person that lives with “ordinary reason” is like the tree with many leaves but no fruits. The person that gives itself to love will live in the process that pulls the universe “beginning from the first cause that produces each thing to the last thing created,” and agrees with the infinite love of God who infinitely loves Itself). Within the frame of this theory of love, Leone develops a complete system in which to place the theory of light, the conception of the active (the sun) and possible (the moon) intellects, magic and Cabalistic motives and, finally, the whole complex of cues that are sparsely found in Ficinian commentaries and, especially, in those of Pico with whom the strictest relationship could be punctually retraced. 5. Pietro Bembo and the “Asolani.” Castiglione. Mario Equicola and Betussi. Tullia d’Aragona. Flaminio Nobili In no other work has the doctrine of love reached such altitude as in Dialoghi d’Amore of Leone Ebreo. Writing on love became a fashion and it reached artistic efficacy as in Bembo and Castiglione, but as an argument it was fatally and gradually excluded from academic disputes. At the Academy of Ferrara, during the last part of the year 1588, as we know from the distributed printed programs, the argument of discussion was the love of God for Its creatures, what it is, how it is distributed throughout the various orders of beings, how God rather loves “more the Angel than the human being, more an innocent than a penitent, more a virgin than a corrupt.”. They even discussed “how God loves and how, while loving, It also hates” (Iddio ama, et amando odia). The power of the Platonic-Ficinian inspiration was by this time extinguished. This process of trivialization had not yet started when, with literary effi-
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cacy in the last years of the fifteenth and the first ones of the sixteenth century, Pietro Bembo composed Asolani (Venice, 1505). In this book, though there is no novelty of concepts, it is possible to find clarity of expression for concepts that are not new, as for the goodness of love, which in itself is always good, though at times, if wrongly used, it is bad. All human kindness should be attributed to love. The human beings without love are like without any concern for their person, without esteem of their countenance, and do not cure their person as if they had no one to whom to please. They go around without grace or manner, not having cared for their hair, beard, teeth, hands, and feet as if these things were not their own (Niuna vaghezza tenendo di se medesimi, siccome coloro che non hanno a cui piacere, di niuna cortese maniera cercano d’addestrar la loro persona, ma cosí abbandonatamente la portano le piú volte, né capello, né barba, né dente ordinandosi, né mano, né piede, come se ella non fosse la loro). These peoples have no friends, no company; they do not act for the good of others or receive well from others; “as they physically live always full of insanities and foolishness, so in the same manner they spiritually live” (ed in brieve, siccome essi di fuori vivono pieni sempre di mentecattaggine e di stordigione cosí vive l’anima in loro). That of Bembo was a timid rendition of the vision of love as universal principle of life and bond between beings. It was a vision that could inspire appealing images when in the joys of the world human beings would see a reflection and an analogy of human love: Gardens, fields, woods, hills, valleys, mountains, rivers, lakes, everything one sees is attractive when springtime comes. The earth is laughing with joy and laughing are the sea, the air, and the sky. Every part and everything are full with lights, music, scent, sweetness, and warmth (Nella primavera, prati, campi, selve, poggi, valli, monti, fiumi, laghi, ogni cosa che si vede è vaga; ride la terra, ride il mare, ride l’aria, ride il cielo; di lumi, di canti, d’odori, di dolcezze, di tiepidezze, ogni parte ogni cosa è piena). In the fourth book of the Cortegiano, a work that is almost a refined compendium of the vision of Renaissance life, Castiglione exalts in a remarkable manner beauty and universal love. Beauty, seal of spirituality, expression of goodness, is born from God and reveals itself everywhere. Beauty is the external manifestation that allows us to tune ourselves to the intimate rhythm of things: “Beauty is like the circle of which goodness is the center” (la bellezza è come il circulo, di cui la bontà è il centro). Love is the bond that ties us to God: You, O most beautiful, good, and wise, you derive from the union of
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beauty, goodness, and divine wisdom. You are within beauty and to beauty through beauty as in a circle you return. You are the sweetest bond of the world tying together celestial and earthly things. You, with benign kindness incline the powers of above to the government of those below. You turn the minds of the mortals to their principle and unite them to it (Tu bellissimo, bonissimo, sapientissimo, dalla unione della bellezza e bontà e sapienza divina derivi, ed in quella stai, ed a quella per quella come in circulo ritorni. Tu dolcissimo vinculo del mondo, mezzo tra le cose celesti e terrene, con benigno temperamento inclini le virtú superne al governo delle inferiori, e, rivolgendo le menti de’ mortali al suo principio, con quello le congiungi). The Libro de natura de Amore of Mario Equicola (1525) is interesting for the history of the topic amply reexamined, beginning from Guido Cavalcanti, and punctualized in Ficino, Pico, Diacceto, up to Aura, the book of Gian Giacomo Calandra of Mantua. In Raverta, a dialogue of Giuseppe Betussi (1544), “the topic is concerning Love and Its effects” (nel quale si ragione d’Amore e degli effetti suoi); in it the nature of God is defined as “beauty that beautifies” (bello bellificante) in regard to the world that is “beauty beautified” (bello bellificato) and the circle of love is shown in the Trinity as well as in the mundane reality. In La Leonora, “a reasoning concerning true beauty” (ragionamento sopra la vera bellezza), the rapport between the perfection that the soul obtained in learning and the beautiful as its extrinsic reflection is given a particular attention: “Let us look at a horse and let assume that in its parts and proportions it has been formed in the best way nature could do. Then, let us say that it has been badly broken in, it is hard and difficult to control. Who, knowing this horse, will reasonably say that it is beautiful?” (Veggiamo il cavallo, e togliamolo di membri e di proporzioni benissimo formato quanto la natura possa fare; ma sia poi male ammaestrato, grave e di cattiva domatura, chi sarà poi quello che ragionevolmente il potrà dir bello?). Beauty is therefore always the visible expression of an interior perfection. The dialogue accentuates the question on the process of becoming perfect; a process that completely happens outside the body, even better independently from the body, but that afterward is reflected in a visible nature. Tullia of Aragon in the dialogue Della infinità d’amore (1547), to which it is said that Benedetto Varchi contributed, searched the answer to the fact that love is not always constant, why at times it ceases, concluding that love is an infinite virtue that resides now in one, now in another person. It would be frivolous to follow all the variations on this topic of the single treatises on love and beauty of Sperone Speroni, Anton Francesco Doni, Niccolò Franco, Agnolo Firenzuola, Varchi, Francesco Sansovino, Bartolomeo Gottifredi, Marco Vida, and Antonio Minturno. The same would be for the works on the subject written by philosophers by profession, such as Nifo, Verino, and Patrizi, who enriched the aesthetic-metaphysical tractates on love with some
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new cues, without truly being able to renew the original basis given to the problem by the Platonists of the fifteenth century or by Leone Ebreo. Literati, poets, and novelists collaborated with the writers of treatises by theorizing about the beauty of the human body, or about the various incarnations and guises of love, but without breaking out of consuetudinary observations. Tasso, for example, following the suggestion of Antonio Montecatini, “the most valuable person among Peripatetic and Platonic philosophers,” went for inspiration to Trattato dell’amore of Flaminio Nobili (Lucca, 1567), in which the connection between love (eros) and vision (orasis) was again mentioned and it was insisted with some elegance that beauty is only grasped through the intuition. This intuition is duplex: corporeal when it grabs physical beauty with the eyes, spiritual when it reaches the soul: “As those who are dedicated to the mysteries of philosophy know, our mind is in many things similar to the vision of our eyes—which is the reason why the ancient sages called it ‘eye of the soul’ (occhio dell’anima).” Here, too, the observations of Ficino on the intuitive nature, always spiritual, of every beauty can be read when Nobili insists on saying that the beautiful is interior light that transpires in corporeal vest. Beauty, he says, “is the perfect composition of the parts of the human body and possesses these parts in the proportion that is proper to each one and suitable to the whole. The parts are charming in their colors and graceful in their countenance. This gracefulness of countenance is the light that comes from the spirit and is especially resplendent through the eyes. This light could be called color, as the major philosophers also sustained” (È attillata composizione delle parti del corpo umano, e ha convenevole proporzione delle dette parti verso di sé e verso il tutto, con vaghezza di colore e gentilezza d’aria; la qual gentilezza essendo una certa luce trasfusa dall’animo nel volto, e massimamente negli occhi, puossi abbracciare sotto il nome del colore, peroché dai maggiori Philosophi anchora la luce è suta nominata colore). 6. Agostino Steuco of Gubbio and Perennial Philosophy. Iacopo Mazzoni. Minor Platonists In academic discussions and in mannered tractates, the positions of the Platonists were gradually consolidating themselves by crystallizing in the first delineations of the idealist aesthetics. The poetics of the Aristotelians instead was developing in specific ways with different flavor, orienting itself toward more definite problems. Platonism, while extenuating itself in the latest fashion and in the rhetoric of love, on another side was also involved in the fifteenth century Cusanian and Pichian theme of Concordia, agreement, harmony of all philosophies, exhausting in different ways its possibilities. Agostino Steuco of Gubbio moved in that direction. In the ten books on the perennial philosophy, De perenni philosophia (Lugduni, 1540), Steuco systematized with the widest erudition the idea of an eternal Platonic philosophy. We are at the antipodes of the
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Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, though Steuco no less than the pious Gian Francesco was moved by profound religious preoccupations. Gian Francesco saw in the effort of justifying religion with philosophy the selfextenuation of the distinction between humankind and God, the reason why Platonism seemed to him the vestibule of indifference. Only the antithesis between religion and faith, divine madness and mundane foolishness, would change to the complete dedication to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Agostino Steuco, on the other hand, had the Reformation before him, Reformation that he attacked in some of his polemic writings. For him the separation between heaven and earth, the proclaimed human impotence before the divine omnipotence, are exactly the elements that present a disappointing conception of the human being as a nullity in thought and action, of a human being that can be only an impulse of faith, with God’s permission. Given the spreading of actual Lutheran and Calvinist motives, the solution of the Ficinian Platonism seemed to Steuco the only human way whenever it would be possible to establish the profound link between priestly and philosophical traditions, between love for God and enlightened reason. In this way, the last contrasts that still survived in Ficino and Pico could be composed in a Christian philosophy, in which it would be possible to solve all the exigencies of the pia philosophia of the Platonists. Steuco introduced the idea of the perennial light present in the soul of all human beings, a light that is completely shining in the first Adam, thereafter made almost opaque because of sin, and finally transmitted throughout humanity with an always greater precision and received with a more profound awareness. The concept of a perfect original knowledge that was soon lost was becoming united with the idea of a transmission, in which the true is progressively revealed until reaching new confirmation in the second Adam. Though the effective idea of a process is missing, the exigency is felt of a continuity founded on an original unity of the human thought and of its orientation. Adam possessed all knowledge; he was present at the creation and saw God in the act of making things and human beings: “In the process of being born, they saw God creating them” (dum nascerentur a Deo, se creari cernerent). It is not the conjecture that intends to rise up to the creator from the creatures; it is the immediate consciousness of being the object of the operation of the creating act. Steuco is very precise in this. The knowing of the first human beings was the awareness of their being made, the consciousness they had of the creative act being felt as operating within them. After that, the loss came, the confusion of tongues, and the darkening of consciousness in those who adventured into the unexplored regions of the new earth. The original truth was maintained for a longer time among those peoples that remained attached to the places of their first primeval beginnings: Hereby the nations that originated first, and in whose lands was born and developed the history of the ancients, preserved more than other
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It is the Pichian idea and, even before that, Ficinian, of a prisca theologia that felt the need of becoming aware of the darkening of the first patrimony and its successive reconquest. It is the affirmation of a unique rhythm of thought in the people of all nations and of all times, “It is a praiseworthy duty to show that always all peoples have believed and accepted the identical things that are now believed and accepted” (dignissimum autem est ostendere idem semper omnes gentes credidisse quod nunc credunt retinent que omnes). Human unity is still now unity in intellect or, better, in a content of the intellect. The vision of a fundamental, unique root of the beliefs of “the world of nations” is becoming more and more accentuated and determined. For Steuco, the tradition of a pia philosophia follows the same course already presented by Ficino. As for Ficino, so also for Steuco, ancient and new theologies come perfectly together: For the intervention of philosophers, old and new theologies are coming together and embrace after having been separated for centuries. The philosophers, too, are coming mutually together and bringing truth to its sacred place. This true and veracious abode is the newest advent of the One to Whom all things appeal. Oh happy times those in which this truth, this most evident theology, was revealed! Philosophers saw it and did not see it (Coniunguntur igitur dexteram, seseque exosculantur, vetus et nova theologia et seculorum intervallis disiunctae redeunt, ipsis philosophis auctoribus, ad exemplum, mutuoque copulantur, et per manus philosophorum ducitur in sacrarium domiciliumque suum veritas, cuius certum verumque domicilium est novissimus is adventus eius ad quem omnia respondent. O beata palam tempora quibus veritas haec, haec theologia manifestissima de caelo refulsit, quam philosophi videbant et non videbant). Plotinus said the truest things (verissima dixit), bringing to perfect completion the ancient Platonic inspiration. It was “the newest theology” (novissima theologia) that brought the full light, “broke the veil and revealed all the hidden
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things, clearing away all darkness” (rescidit velum omniaque quae laterent patefecit, omnem caliginem distulit, in De perenni philosophia, bk. 1, ch. 31). All human beings, by nature’s impulse, instinct, obligation, guidance, and teaching (impetus naturae, instinctu naturae, cogente natura, natura duce ac magistra rapidoque veritatis aestu) have always acknowledged “one individual God” (semper unum singularemque Deum). The work of Steuco is all involved in the systematic and constant exposition of this philosophicaltheological “concordia”: All human beings by natural consent and instinctive impulse of reason that separates them from the brutes have always agreed to accept that nothing exists better than piety and religion. All philosophy by the impulse of reason itself has decreed that true goodness comes from the promises of this faith. Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers have seen this end so clearly that it is almost a miracle that they could through reason reach what thereafter the heavenly messenger revealed. I called this philosophy perennial because since the origin of humankind all mortals, as great theologians have explained, before the flood, have concordantly acknowledged and worshipped one individual God (Tutti gli uomini per naturale consenso, naturali consensus, e per impulso, instinctu, di quella ragione che li separa dai bruti, si sono sempre accordati nell’ammettere che non c’e nulla di meglio della pietà e della religione; tutta la filosofia, quasi per impulso della ragione stessa, ha decretato che il vero bene è quello promesso da questa fede…. Platone, Aristotele, ed altri filosofi hanno visto cosí chiaramente questo fine, che è quasi un miracolo che essi abbiano raggiunto attraverso la ragione quello che dopo ha rivelato il messo celeste. Quamquam, ut dixi, perennis haec fuit usque ab exordio generis humani Philosophia, cum mortales omnes, ut summi theologorum perhibent, ante diluvium concorditer unicum singularemque Deum noscerent eumque solum colerent, in ibid., bk. 10, ch. 1). This idea of a concordance or harmony among philosophers centered in the synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism, which was the preoccupation of Pico, returned as a clumsy imitation in its external form in the five-thousandone-hundred-ninety-seven theses of Iacopo Mazzoni of Cesena, published in 1577 and proposed for a public disputation in Bologna: Three methods are useful for the three kinds of human life: active, contemplative, and religious. These methods are discussed in the fivethousand-one-hundred-ninety-seven theses in which all the disagreements between Plato, Aristotle, and many Greek, Arabic, and Latin thinkers from the entire world are together brought to an accord. These theses will be publicly discussed in Bologna in the year 1577 of
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In this work, the most evident imitation of Pico is joined in these theses with the influence of Veneto in a chaotic mass of uncontrolled erudition. Mazzoni, a disciple of Pendasio, always embraced eclecticism even since in Pisa he was the ordinary professor of Aristotelian philosophy and the extraordinary of Platonic philosophy. Mazzoni systematized his convictions in the work of 1597, In universam Platonis et Aristotelis Philosophiam praeludia, sive the Comparatione Platonis et Aristotelis (An introduction to the complete philosophy of Plato and Aristotle: A comparison between the two philosophers), in which he opposed the idea of Concordia and clearly professes eclecticism: “If there is something useful and suitable in Plato, that we would take … if something better is sold by Aristotle, I would buy that, too” (si quid in Platone commodum et utile nobis sit, accipiamus; si quid melius Aristoteles vendat … assumam). He repudiated his juvenile enthusiasms, “wishing that he should have remained silent,” like when he followed on the footsteps of Simphorien Champier, Diacceto, and others who sustained the idea of Concordia. Mazzoni was undeniably quite learned, a required presence among the literati, ready to move from metaphysics to logic, rhetoric, and comments on Tacitus. His name is tied to his polemics with Patrizi on problems of aesthetics, to the defense of Dante and Galileo. In favor of Dante he wrote Discorso in difesa della Commedia del divino poeta Dante (1573) and Difesa di Dante (1587). He knew Galileo in Pisa, studied, and discussed with him. To Galileo at the time of the publication of In universam Platonis et Aristotelis Philosophiam he addressed a famous letter in defense of the Copernican positions. Given that the ancient fervency of the Platonic inspiration was by now declining to a sluggish eclecticism, Plato’s doctrine was becoming a matter of school repetition, losing completely the revolutionary tone it previously possessed. Little of the Pichian inspiration is found in Alessandro Farra, though something of the robust thought of Scotus Eriugena seemed to Vincenzo Di Giovanni to permeate the work of the Sicilian Pietro Calanna, who wrote in 1599 the Philosophia seniorum sacerdotia et Platonica ab junioribus et laicis neglecta philosophis de mundo animarum et corporum (Philosophy of the world of souls and bodies according to the priestly-Platonic philosophy of senior philosophers that has been neglected by junior and laic philosophers). In the most known Sicilian thinker, Giovanni Antonio Viperano, who wrote De summo bono (Naples, 1575) and De divina providentia (Rome, 1588), little can be found that is stimulating. No loftier tone can be found in the professor of Ferrara, Tommaso Gianini, who in 1614 in De mentis humanae statu
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post hominis obitum (On the condition of the human mind after the death of the human being) peripatetically discussed, strongly fought against the patricide of the soul, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and his incautious modern disciples from Pomponazzi to Zabarella. Gianini did not even save his criticism of Steuco, who pretended to save the theses of Alexander, though afterward from Steuco he took the exaltation of Aristotelian Platonism of the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Gianini dedicated to the theories of Plato a work that was published in Padua in 1588, De providentia ex sententia Platonis liber ubi etiam de Ideis et Daemonibus accurate disputatur (On providence according to Plato, a book in which are also discussed ideas and demons. Gianini’s fame as a man of science, open mind, and effective teacher was so grand that it was said that to hear his lectures, mixed with groups of students, also came Fortunio Liceti, a pretentious Aristotelian, who was the professor of logic, medicine, and philosophy at Pisa, thereafter transferred to Padua, Bologna, and who returned again to Padua to teach medicine. Gianini has the merit of having encouraged Galileo to write in 1640 that clear and famous precise statement on his Aristotelianism: I am in spirit a true admirer of such a great man as Aristotle. To be a true Peripatetic, or Aristotelian philosopher, it means first of all to philosophize in conformity with the Aristotelian teaching, to proceed with those methods, with those precise suppositions and principles on which the scientific discourse is based (Io internamente sono ammiratore di un tanto uomo, quale è Aristotele … l’esser veramente peripatetico, ovvero filosofo Aristotelico, consiste principalissimamente nel filosofare conforme alli aristotelici insegnamenti, procedendo con quei metodi, e con quelle vere supposizioni e principi sui quali si fonda lo scientifico discorso). There is no advantage in knowing infinite things and innumerable books, if we do not know how to question and look at Nature the great book of the Lord. Hereby Liceti himself felt obliged to answer: If … in my works I cite the authority of an infinite number of writers in order to confirm my own opinions, or if I make reference to fundamental conceptions derived from the nature of things and from the authority of Aristotle, and occasionally of Plato, I rely on those individuals that can see things by themselves with their own eyes and describe their impressions on their own (Se … nelle mie opere io faccio parola dell’autorità d’infiniti scrittori per confermare le mie opinioni, o pure di fondamenti dedotti dalla natura delle cose, e dalla autorità di un solo Aristotele, e talora di Platone, me ne rimetto a chi con occhi propri le vede, e con propria mano scrive li suoi sentimenti).
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What the habit of commenting, comparing, according had by now become would become evident if we were to glance at the books of Gabriello Buratelli, who promised once more the Aristotelian-Platonic conciliation: “This is a work that was desired and promised by the ancients and the moderns, but has not yet been completed (opus desideratum et a veteribus et recentioribus pollicitum, non tamen absolutum); to the decades of Paolo Beni, who, commenting on Timaeus brought together the divine philosophy of Plato and the natural one of Aristotle; or to the many times reprinted and truly monumental Seminarium totius philosophiae of Giambattista Bernardi, which is at least a dictionary and an alphabetic repertoire of classic and scholastic thought. Galileo Galilei ironically asked himself how, after having speculated so subtly on thousands of authors, a person could still be capable of thinking something truly by itself with its mind. In reality, beyond Plato and Aristotle, though in part at their school, the major philosophical Italian thought was already born, robust and vital, with Bernardino Telesio, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella.
Seventeen BETWEEN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY At the root of a great part of the new science, from Leonardo to Galileo, beside the Renaissance desire of willing to test all possible ways, the certainty was alive that learning is capable of accessing a solidly based knowledge. If we were to return to the consideration of Theologia platonica, we would find at its center this precise thesis, widely and minutely discussed in the second book. All essences of things are present in the mind of God. The divine will, which could also have not created, manifested its generosity with giving concrete and mundane realization to the eternal ideas, making them alive. The fecundity of the concept of creation is revealed in the gift of life that God has given, but could also not have given. The will does not touch the rational world that constitutes the eternal divine reason, the divine word, to which this world conforms and makes itself adequate. This world Platonically reflects the ideal rationality by mediation of mathematical entities, “number, weight, and measure” (numero, pondere et mensura). 1. Luca Pacioli. Leonardo da Vinci Numbers became the expression of this fundamental consensus between human beings, world, and God. Human science articulates and makes itself precise in numbers. In numbers, human science finds its stability and the foundation of the immutability of God, of divine reason because it is on divine reason that the structure of things depend, and not on the creative will. Friar Luca Pacioli in Divina proportione (1509) observed, “God can never change” (Iddio mai non se pò mutare), in which he also proclaimed, “all that is manifest throughout the inferior and superior universe, all of it must be by necessity subjected to number, weight, and measure” (tutto ciò che per lo universo inferiore e superiore si squaterna, quello de necessità al numero, peso e mesura fia sottoposto). Pythagorean and Cabalist motives permeated the conceptions of the Florentine Neo-Platonism, while Plato was owing to mathematics the function of mediator between idea and matter. But later Neo-Platonism attributed to numbers the virtues assigned to them by the gnosis of the Cabalists. Numbers were seen as immanent words: they were considered the thread with which the whole is weaved. The position taken by the individuals that saw in Pico’s criticism of mathematics an antithesis to Leonardo was proved wrong.
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The mathematics criticized by Pico was a pure abstraction to which we must substitute his ars numerandi that reveals with Pythagorean keys the doors of nature’s mystery. Because of this, the mathematical reasons that Leonardo wanted to discover had Platonic flavor. All the conceptions of a nature alive with a rational soul, which could explain its order and symmetry, could also justify our knowledge. Mathematical certainty, in which Ficino saw the resemblance between the human being and God, was certain for the object on which it rested, for that mathematical small core that is immanent to all the cosmos. The scholars that denied like Salutati the validity of the sciences of nature, based themselves on a voluntaristic conception for reason of which God’s will was inscrutable. Platonism instead insisted on internalizing the ideal world in God and on objectivizing God’s reflections in the things. At the same time, the grammatical current of the humanism was remaining stable, though unaware of the premises, on an opposition between science of spirit and science of nature, disregarding or rather despising the science of nature. For this reason, Leonardo da Vinci, “the person without letters” (lui sanza lettere), despised the literati. What he wanted was the cognition of reality, to thrust the eyes—the eyes created by God and able to accept the light that is in all things because life-giving light and heat rain down from the sun over everything—in the caverns of the world: “God’s light illumines all the celestial bodies that are placed in the universe. All the souls descend from It because the heat which is in the living animals comes from the souls and there is no other heat or light in the universe” (el suo lume allumina tutti li corpi celesti, che per l’universo si compartano, tutte l’anime discendan da lui, perché il caldo, ch’è in nelli animali vivi, vien dall’anime, e nessun altro caldo né lume è nell’universo). When before us we have the open book of God and we have eyes for reading it and mind for understanding it, why should we lose ourselves in books that interpose themselves like a diaphragm between reality and thought? “Now, don’t they know that all my things are for the most part derived from experience instead of from the words of other people? Experience was teacher to those who well wrote and thus as teacher I take experience” (Or non sanno questi che le mie cose son piú da esser tratte dalla sperienzia, che d’altrui parola, la quale fu maestra di chi bene scrisse, e cosí per maestra la piglio, in ms. “Atl., 119 v a”). In those people that study books, in the literati, Leonardo saw only “reciters and trumpeters of works of others” and to them he opposed “sperienzia.” Experience is an appeal to researchers for empirical data and signifies the polemic appeal to natural principles in a manner contrary to that of those researchers that stop themselves at accidental cover. “The greatest and most honorable thing is to read after having acquired experience, which is the teacher of teachers” (Molto maggiore e piú degna cosa è leggere allegando la sperienzia, maestra ai loro maestri, in ms. “Atl., 117 r b”). Knowledge is possible only by clearing the ground and returning to the authentic reality of things: “Wisdom is daughter to experience. Persons that dispute with proofs of authority do not use their ingenuity but memory.
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Run away from the precepts of those individuals that speculate in that way because their reasons are not confirmed by experience” (La sapienza è figliola della sperienzia. Chi disputa allegando l’autorità, non adopera lo ingegno, ma piuttosto la memoria. Fuggi i precetti di quelli speculatori che le loro ragioni non sono confermate dalla isperienzia). This is the inexhaustible polemic motive of every renovating science that would always have to fight against the past, the usually accepted, the tradition, the data that are accepted not because valid in themselves but because commonly acceptable. In Leonardo the appeal to experience is largely a polemic point against the men of letters. A century before, the books of the ancients had been the weapons of innovators, when a return to the classics against the medieval tradition meant a return to the origins, to the untouched authenticity. Years after Leonardo, Galileo will consolidate his position in the opposition to Aristotelianism, not because of hate for the essence of Aristotelian learning, but because he wished to free himself from its empty repeaters. The historian must be on its guard against not falling into the easy error of transforming in absolute rapports some, let us say, relationships of position. When we wish to understand Leonardo’s conception of learning, his appeal to experience, if it maintains its full significance in the antithesis to the literati, must be integrated with the full acknowledgment of the value of an explanatory reason: “No effect exists in nature without a reason. If you understand that reason, you have no need for experience” (Nessuno effetto è in natura sanza ragione; intendi la ragione e non ti bisogna sperienzia, in “Atl., 147 v a”). Experience opens the way, allows us to grab reality, but reason is the one that alone can find the reason of why things are (ragione delle cose), their necessity: “Nature is constrained by reason of its own law, in which it is infused and lives” (La natura è costretta dalla ragione della sua legge, che in lei infusamente vive). Experience brings us in touch with the world, presents the phenomena to us, helps us to go beyond the surface of things, and makes us certain of the reality of things. The sum of the verified cases gives us no law. The rational necessity, intimate to things, is reached by reason, which finds the rational essence of the world. The supreme rationality is fully expressed in mathematics. Pacioli has said: “The mathematicians are the foundation and the ladder used to reach the essence of every other science, because they are operating at the first grade of certainty” (mathematici sienno fondamento e scala de pervenire a la notitia de ciascun altra scientia, per esser loro nel primo grado de la certeza). And Leonardo proclaimed, “No human research can be called real science unless it passes through mathematical demonstrations” (Nessuna umana investigazione si può dimandare vera scienzia, s’essa non passa per le matematiche dimostrazioni). It is useful to repeat that in the same way that experience is invalid without mathematics, so mathematics is useless without experience. “If you say that the sciences that begin and end in the mind have truth, I would deny it for many reasons, of which the first is that in such mental discourses there is no experience. Without experimentation nothing can
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give certainty of itself” (E se tu dirai che le scienzie, che principiano e finiscono nella mente, abbiano verità, questo non si concede, ma si niega, per molte raggioni; e prima, che in tali discorsi mentali non accade esperienzia, senza la quale nulla dà di sé certezza, in ms. “Lu., i”). Experience alone is testimony of the reality of rational constructions, even though the rational constructions proceed by their own ways in an autonomous guise. It has been said that the rational mathematical order is sovereign everywhere, is the seal of God in things. This order dominates artistic harmonies and natural processes because in both a creative process is unveiled, the same creative process. God creates Its concepts when the divine mind opens up and cuts into the scenes of the world: “The divinity that the science of the painter possesses transmutes into a similitude of the divine mind, since with free power the painter moves to generate diverse essences of various animals, plants, fruits, countries, farms, ruins of mountains, fearful and dreadful lakes” (La deità ch’ha la scienza del pittore si trasmuta in una similitudine di mente divina, imperoché con libera potestà discorre alla generazione di diverse essenzie di vari animali, piante, frutti, paesi, campagne, ruine di monti, laghi paurosi e spaventevoli, in Trattato della pittura, p. 68). The same motion that is at the root of things is found within us, according to the parallel already posited by Ficino and by Ficino confirmed and founded in divinity. God is free creating activity, but the creation is ordered according to numero, pondere et mensura. This is the mensura that the scientists see when they, surprising nature in its nakedness, penetrate with their eyes into its recesses. This is the mensura that the artists sense when their “science” brings them to gather the secret of creation, free but controlled, that would blossom into a tormented and most subtle construction. This secret “Platonic” inspiration was present in Leonardo’s science and reflection, and it manifested itself in the recollections of Hermetic motives, or in exaltations of the light in its cosmic value. But could this inspiration be found also in other inquirers of the “mystery” of nature? Among these, we would consider Girolamo Cardano and his complex speculation. 2. Girolamo Cardano The writings of Cardano have been said to be nothing but “accumulations of common loci, copied from one place or another, without any organic connection” (centoni di luoghi comuni, rubacchiati qua e là, senza nessun nesso organico), in which “only rarely some original idea emerges” (solo rare volte emerge qualche idea originale). In its rigor this judgment is exaggeratedly unjust. Cardano—in the introduction (epistola nuncupatoria) to De rerum varietate, which is a true encyclopedia of all known things and even of some others—expressed in a few words the supreme passion of his life, knowledge, in respect to which even immortality assumed a secondary place: “To learn and know secrets of heavens, hidden truths of nature, divine minds, and the order of this universe is certainly a greater happiness and joy than anything
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else our mind can achieve or mortal can hope for” (Arcana caeli, naturae secreta atque recondita, divinas mentes, ordinem hunc universi noscere atque scire, maioris certe est felicitatis atque dulcedinis quam vel cogitatione ipsa quis assequi potest, aut mortalis sperare). The human being can reach full beatitude and complete fulfillment in a life spent searching for knowledge: “I call the supernal beings as testimony that it is not only a Christian belief but also something approved by natural reason that the human condition would not be depreciated even if there would be nothing after death” (Superos obtestor, non tam Christianum esse, quam etiam naturali ratione comprobatum, si nihil a morte supesset, nullam deteriorem futuram conditionem humanam). In knowledge, the human being frees itself from its mortal weight (a mortalitate ipsa seiungitur), goes beyond heavens, beyond light, happy in having reached the truth. This love of the whole ennobled the bitter and anxious life of Cardano, opened to all interests, all doctrines, and all follies. In the autobiography, he describes himself with efficacy as bizarre, impetuous, strange, but also as a person in which the need of knowing everything is manifestly and joyfully revealed. The root of his encyclopedic tendency must be found in this insatiable desire. For this reason, he wanted to see everything, expose everything, write about each thing, and inquire about what to him was most mysterious. He was ideally closer to all the restless souls of that restless age, souls that from the occult sciences and from the most vain superstitions were demanding an answer to the most disturbing doubts.Of having provided a complete body of knowledge, he was highly proud: In the seven books of On the arcane things of Eternity, we have treated all those sublime and divine things that no person at the exception of Plotinus has touched, the beginning and the end of all mortal things. In the four books of On Fate, we exposed the order of the universe and of everything contained in it. In the twenty-one books On Acuteness, we have listed the principles of natural and artificial things (Sublimia illa atque divina quae nemo praeter Plotinum attigit, ortumque mortalium rerum omnium ac finem, septem libris de Aeternitatis arcanis amplexi sumus. Ordinem vero universi ac singulorum quae in eo continentur quattuor libris De Fato. Principia autem rerum naturalium ac artificialium … in XXI libris De subtilitate tractavimus). To crown all these works he finally wrote De rerum varietate (On the diversity of things) that explains “the whole universe and its parts” (de toto universo partibusque eius) as complement to De subtilitate. His ideal was a universal wisdom that did not consist in an erudition made out from the reading of the ancients, but in a doctrine overall obtained from tireless examination of reality. Cardano praised those among his contemporaries who removed from the sepulchers the corpses in order to dissect them, those who went up into the wilderness of the high mountains to surprise the secrets of nature in plants.
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Cardano was well aware of the limitations of a knowledge based on the senses, which is the foundation of the natural sciences, and because of its certainty placed ahead of the natural sciences mathematics in which the mind is the cause of what is stated. This was a theory already present in Platonism, but that Cardano ably underlined. In the De aeternitatis arcanis (bk. 3), Cardano affirms that three are the original sources of our knowledge: first, from principles originally infused in our soul (a principiis animae ab initio inditis); second, from senses and reason; third, from divine inspiration that guides us (aut afflatus, cum manifeste cognoscimus nos admoneri divinitus). Unfortunately, our ties with the body and the feebleness of our reason prevent us from knowing essences and incorporeal realities. Metaphysics as a supreme wisdom faces two obstacles. The first is the indissoluble tie of the soul with the organs of the body that forbids us from the knowledge of the incorporeal, which is the principle of the corporeal (cumque animus hic noster totus corpori sit immersus, rerum incorporearum, quae etiam corporum sunt principia, ignarus necessario erit, in ibid., bk. 4). The second difficulty is the realization that science is science of causes, and the causes reduce themselves to unity. Only if we were able to grasp that fundamental unity and deduce the whole from it, we would obtain certainty, and then “our uncertain knowledge would be free of confusion, being capable of moving from the one to the many” (inde incerta nostra cognitio, quae si ab uno ad multa descendere posset, confusionem vitaret). This unitary exigency was never translated by Cardano into a justifiable construction because in vain he tried to put order into the vast mass of material he gathered from everywhere in the world.The need in Cardano of a knowledge that could proceed synthetically and was capable of reaching not the surface but the essence of the whole was truly powerful. This need was forcefully expressed in a wellknown page that to some individuals appears as having Vichian flavor: The human soul in the body cannot know the substances of things, but moves with the help of the senses on their surface, inquiring about measures, operations, similitudes and opinions. The science of the mind, which is the one that makes things, is almost the thing itself, in the same way that the human knowledge of the triangle as the thing that has three angles whose sum is equal to two right angles is the truth itself. It is evident from this that the science of nature is of a different kind than the true science that is in us (Anima humana in corpore posita substantias rerum attingere non potest, sed in illarum superficie vagatur sensuum auxilio, scrutando mensuras, actiones, similitudines ac doctrinas. Scientia vero mentis, quae res facit, est quasi ipsa res, velut etiam in humanis scientia trigoni, quod habeat tres angulos, duobus rectis aequales, eadem ferme est ipsi veritati; unde patet naturalem scientiam alterius generis esse a vera scientia in nobis).
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Though he was interested in metaphysics and mathematics, Cardano paid attention especially to the science of nature, to the immediate causes, sternly criticizing those peoples who, disregarding the precise examination of concrete phenomena, jump to obscure principles or even to God’s intervention. The true cause to be found is the direct cause of the events, of their order, on their plane. In one of the censured passages of the De rerum varietate (bk. 2, ch. 13), Cardano effectively observed: Some individuals opine that God is the direct cause of all things, some others the demons.… On my part, I wonder about all these persons who when they see the great order of the universe and the great power and dimension of the celestial bodies and in some of them many evident effects as in the sun and the moon, they look for causes that are absurd, useless, and unknown while disregarding those that come to be under their nose.… I ask myself if those who say that God is the cause of these things, aren’t they aware that it is like saying that Kings are like servants, cup-bearers, soldiers, and secretaries because they rule over them? (Quidam enim primo Deum cunctorum causam propriam arbitrantur: alii vero daemonas…. Ego … satir demiror hos omnes, qui cum videant tantum rerum ordinem in caelo, tantam potestatem ac magnitudinem corporum, et in quibusdam, puta sole ac luna, tam evidentes effectus, relictis his quae sunt sub oculis ac tam manifestis, per absurdas, inanes et incognitas causas quarerere…. Igitur qui dicunt Deum horum esse causam, nonne illos pudet, quasi si Regem dicant esse et calonem et lixam et militem et scribam, quod omnibus his imperet?). Reality should be explained “according to its own principles” (iuxta propria principia), if we would not fall in the error of making God the immediate cause of every defect and misdeed. This reality, guided in its totality by a unique rule that connects, gathers, and orders all of it (omnia ita connexa sunt atque in unum deducta), perennially moves itself within an always recurring circularity into which everything falls and fatally returns following a rhythm necessarily and irrevocably defined: Not only would natural things return but also our opinions and the opinions connected with natural events. When the human being vanishes and ashes return evidently to ashes, water to water, air to air, who can doubt that their vehicle and what in it is contained would return to its place? The souls remain the same, equal in number, as before birth. Infinite times the same opinions would return, the true opinions during ages that are civil, while those absurd beliefs would return when human beings live irrationally and the ignorant plebs govern themselves in the guise of beasts (Ritornano non solamente le cose naturali ma
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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY anche le nostre opinioni e le opinioni congiunte agli eventi naturali. E quando l’uomo si dissolve e la terra torna manifestamente alla terra, l’acqua all’acqua, l’aria all’aria, chi può dubitare che anche il loro veicolo e ciò che è in esso torni al suo luogo? Rimangono dunque le stesse le anime, uguali di numero, come prima di nascere … infinite volte ritornano le stesse opinioni, quelle vere nelle età civili, quelle assurde quando gli uomini vivono irrazionalmente e la plebe ignorante si governa a guisa di belva, in Paralip., bk. 1, ch. 17).
It is a cyclic eternal vicissitude through which everything goes and nothing dies, where everything returns because of necessary motion, even thoughts, doctrines, and religions. Cardano makes his own the theory of the great conjunctions as responsible for determining religious faiths, accepting the doctrine of Albumasar, a doctrine already renewed by Roger Bacon and Pierre d’Ailly. Above this mundane vicissitude that moves in time in an eternal succession (aeterna successione in tempore) that is interiorly stimulated by the soul motor of the world, the grades of being are found that intermediate between God and things, between simple eternal infinity and eternal succession: The first nature is of what is simply infinite that is of God, since It is absolutely eternal. The infinite that is the soul of everything and of life exists, and solves unity into the many things. Then, we have the soul of the world that is one from the many and is eternal by gift of God. This soul is the one that moves the world and it is finite but eternal in its recurring manifestations (Prima [natura] est simpliciter infiniti seu Dei, quoniam per se aeternus est; est postmodum infinitum anima cunctorum seu vitarum, quae unitatem dissolvit, et anima mundi, quae una iam est ex pluribus et aeterna alieno munere, et anima quae mundum movet, iam explicata aeternitate finita, in De aeternitatis arcanis, part 2, ch. 3). Within this universal economy the human being has a special central place between the orders into which the world continuously recurs. The human being excels every mortal thing and possesses the three different characters of nobility: mens that makes it equal to deities (superis aequale); ratio that raises it higher than all mortal things; and “hands” that as the noblest instrument give power over the world. Cardano does not limit himself to the enumeration of the traditional customary titles of humanity’s greatness. He wishes to add characteristics of physical nature as well, curiously enumerating them: Human beings alone have the point of the heart on the left instead of in the middle; they alone are ambidextrous while all other animals have more vigor on the right; only their eyelids have eyelashes on the lower side; no one else can laugh as they do, speak as they do—jays, crows,
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and parrots only possess a semblance of speech. Human beings alone have an umbilicus that is visible, greater abundance of hair on their frontal side than on the back, beard growing from their chin, and a continuous disposition to make love. They alone have toes shorter than the fingers of their hands (solus habet cordis cuspidem non in medio, sed in sinistra parte; solus ambidexter est cum coetera animalia dextra parte sint validiora; solus in inferiore palpebra supercilia; solus ridet; solus loquitur—picae, corvi, psittaci, imaginem solam sermonis habent; soli patet umbilicus; soli pars anterior pilis magis abundant; solique ex mento barba; solus in venerem ferme omni tempore pronus; solum pedum digitos breviores longe quam manuum, in De rerum varietate, bk. 8, ch. 40). As we said, something more is present in human beings; in addition to animality and sensation, we have in the human being the mind, an “eternal substance, image of the true reality that is separate from matter” (eterna sostanza, imagine di quella vera realtà che è separata dalla materia). This mind comes to the human being from beyond, from outside of it (extrinsecus homini adveniens, in ibid., ch. 42). This mind cannot unite directly with the body; it needs an intermediary, a spiritual vehicle (vehiculum), a thin matter that easily bridges the passage to corporeity. This mind is receptive like matter, capable of everything like the heavens, and suitable to being everything like God. Mens is eternal like God, matter, and heaven. (Ex propria igitur substantia, quae vel omnia est ut Deus, vel omnia recipit ut materia prima, vel omnia agit ut caelum, constat mentem aeternam esse, seu sit omnia, seu posit, seu recipiat. Horum enim singulum aeternum est, Deus, hyle, et caelum). At this point, we fall back to the old problem. How can this unique mens, eternal more than immortal, be distinguished in the single individuals, given that it diversifies almost to the point of vanishing in the ignorant and then shining more splendidly in the wise? Cardano’s answer is not clear enough; he speaks of a co-extension of mind and multiple corporeities: “the mind and the whole intellect are extensive and almost immense … almost coextensive to all things” (mens quidem et intellectus omnis extensus est et quasi immensus … et quasi coextenditur omnibus). And he adds, “[Mind] contracts and expands, can be bright and obscure, silent and active.” In some cases the mind is perfect and full of numbers as in the wise; in some others it is eclipsed as in the ignorant. But how can anyone speak of many minds? Should we not compare the mind to the mirror that receives in itself the many images? Cardano multiplies his questions about the cognition of the universals, about the rapport between mind, intellect, vehicle, and senses, but he is incapable of giving answers that are adequate and organic. He insists, in conjunction with this, that it is possible for the mens to transcend itself and unite with God in such a manner to become capable of performing miracles: “When in its ardor the mind reaches God, then our nature transcends itself and miracles happen. You
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would see the timid become courageous, the unhappy happy, the ignorant wise, and the feeble robust” (quando nel suo ardore la mente giunge a Dio, allora la nostra natura trascende se stessa ed avvengono miracoli; puoi cosí vedere i timidi divenuti coraggiosi, gl’infelici beati, gl’ignoranti sapienti, i deboli robusti). Oblivious of everything else, the human being moves beyond its human nature without ever being capable of reaching the nature of God, since God is not an intellect “but something much better than an intellect, something happier, nobler, and more powerful. Are you asking what is it? If I knew, I would be God” (sed aliquid intellectu longe melius, beatius, potentius, digniusque. Quaeris quid ergo sit? Si scirem, Deum essem, in De subtilitate, ch. 21). God is the thinnest substance always in peace, the light most splendid that no one can tolerate except God Itself, but light that illumines the whole universe. God is the origin, source and principle of the whole, and It is eternally contemplating Itself. Bruno with his usual vivacity speaking of Cardano defined him, in De Immenso, an uncouth and mad great talker (rudis et amens fabulator). Whoever tries to go through Cardano’s lucubrations may become impatient, but would not refuse to admire this solicitous researcher who found no rest, who was always ready for a new adventure in which to seize the secrets of things. It is difficult to affirm that in his mind he succeeded in bringing together naturalistic tendencies and Neo-Platonic inspirations, scientific exigencies and speculative dreams, but it is possible to say that he doubtless lived contributing to the sharpening of the problem that would be equally imposed upon Bruno and Campanella. Unfortunately, obeying a common motive of the philosophy of the Renaissance, the curiosity of what is rare, strange, and uncommon brought Cardano to lose himself in what is the exception, which he considered revealing, losing however the view of the constant multiple aspects of experience. 3. Girolamo Fracastoro The same exigency so alive in Cardano of explaining things according to their principles is clearly expressed in De sympathia et antipathia rerum (On the sympathy and antipathy of things) of that fine writer of subtle intelligence who was Girolamo Fracastoro of Verona. Inquiring the why of the admirable consent that ties all things and brings them into unity from the multiplicity of parts, Fracastoro exclaims: “We are not searching here for the first and universal cause, but for a particular and proper one that cannot be one of the immaterial causes” (hic non universalem et primam causam quaerimus, sed particularem et propriam, quale esse non potest eorum ullum, quae immaterialia sunt). Which force, then, unites all the particles of the body and binds the entire universe? Which root can we find for “the first, common to all things, admirable consensus of the whole universe?” (primus autem communis rebus omnibus et admirandus universi consensus). Here, too, more than considering the conclusion that places in the sympathy between parts the origin of the
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cohesion, it is interesting the attitude of the writer who intends to do research as scientist, reducing sympathy to the level of natural forces to be naturalistically studied. It is the same sympathy of the parts toward the whole, of the fragment toward the mass, which also explains the tendency of the elements towards their proper natural places. Sympathy is posited as a physical force, free from any mysterious or spiritual element. This does not exclude the conscience of an internal rhythm, according to which the things, the phenomena, the livings hiddenly come to manifest themselves. The Nature that disposes of the whole is nearer to the divine nature of the Stoics than to that of modern scientists: At the beginning, each thing that Nature brings to life on earth, in the sky, and in the great sea, Each one of them derives not from a unique destiny Nor from the same laws. Those things that are primordial In their constitution are created often and everywhere. Other things appear rarely and only in specific periods and places, with violent birth and mediate causes. Few come to exist after a thousand years of preparation almost like prisoners in the darkness of a prison; these are the things needing centuries in order to gather enough strength to conjoin the generative seeds together. (Principio quaeque in terris, quaeque aethere in alto, Atque mari in magno Natura educit in auras, Cuncta quidem nec sorte una, nec legibus iisdem Proveniunt, sed enim quorum primordia constant E paucis, crebro ac passim pars magna creantur: Raro est alia apparent, et non nisi certis Temporibusque locisve, quibus violentius ortus Et longe sita principia: ac nonnulla prius quam Erumpant tenebris et opaco carcere noctis Mille trahunt annos, spatiosaque secula poscunt, Tanta vi coeunt genitalia semina in unum). In an analogous manner examining knowledge in Turrius sive de intellectione, Fracastoro does not want to evince the essence of the mind or of the intellect, but rather the functions, the conduct of human cognition, on whose processes the enlightening mind would afterward shine: High over them stands divine mind, great and shining. When its splendor is reflected on things that were previously obscure shadows, suddenly these things, too, are in clear light and appear thus before the soul. It is as when things in the darkness of night, if they receive a ray of the Sun they all become brilliant and beautiful
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As Giuseppe Saitta has observed, though the work of Fracastoro has been most often negative, it had “a function very important in the development of Renaissance culture in sense merely naturalistic.” The appeal to experience as the teacher, magistra experientia, induced him to purify science from the vague and the turbid that Platonizing mysticism continued to intertwine with scientific inquiry. His polemics against the theory of “critical days,” which medical astrologists had accepted with enthusiasm from Galen, reintroduced a kind of sharp Pichian discussion, but with an even bitter audacity. His vision of nature as a whole that with its own powers constantly renews itself is clothed in verses that are effectively representative and in which a religious sense of the cosmos continues to be incarnated. Perhaps the time would come allowed by God to the needs of Nature and Fate, when not only the earth today inhabited would be covered by ocean or desert, but the Sun (who would believe it?) would have a new course. Then the year would have different seasons, and unusual heat, unusual cold would be in the world. At a certain time animal life would be seen again and domestic animals and wild beasts would be born spontaneously, taking on souls from the first Source. (Forsitan et tempus veniet, poscentibus olim Natura fatisque Deum, cum non modo tellus Nunc culta, aut obducta mari, aut deserta iacebit, Verum etiam Sol ipse novum (quis credere possit?) Curret iter, sua nec per tempora diffluet annus, Aut insueti aestus insuetaque frigora mundo Insurgent, et certa dies animalia terris Monstrabit, nascentque pecudesque feraeque Sponte sua, primaque animas ab origine sument. 4. Giambattista Della Porta The same inclination to a natural consideration of the works of nature is encountered in Giambattista Della Porta, who was all involved in clarifying the character purely scientific of magic and in rigorously establishing in the hu-
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man entity a perfect correspondence between body and soul. Della Porta confessed that at the age of fifteen he started the writing of Magia naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium (Natural magic, or the miracles of natural things). Thereafter, the book continued to grow, from the first edition in four books published in Naples in 1558 to the second edition in twenty books in 1589. Magic was for him, truly, according to the old definition, “the practical part of natural science,” knowledge intended for practice, knowing for doing, knowing for the control of phenomena. Aspicit et inspicit (Look and scrutinize!) is the motto of the definitive edition of his work: “One must watch the phenomena with the eyes of a lynx so that, when the observation is complete, one can begin to manipulate them” (osservare con occhi di lince i fenomeni, onde, compiuta l’osservazione, tosto si possa operare). Della Porta’s concern was for what in nature is obscure and marvelous: “Nature has made me always interested in these things, so that I would bring to light whatever there is of arcane and hidden” (ita me semper ad haec propensum natura tulit, ut arcane quid et abditi inde depromerem). On the other hand, he sustains that, if the things occult are those whose reason has not yet been found, not everything can be rationally explained: “Who seeks a cause for everything destroys both science and reason. And who has no faith in the miracles of nature, tries somehow to destroy philosophy” (Chi cerca una ragione di tutto, distrugge insieme scienza e ragione; chi non ha fede nei miracoli della natura, questi in qualche modo cerca di distruggere la filosofia). Nature in its original productivity is not studied from the point of view of its order, but as a free impulse and almost capricious action. Nature is not expressed in terms of mathematics, as in Galileo, but as an internal vitality without any control, which arbitrarily promotes portentous works. Della Porta would not offer a theory, but a catalogue of extraordinary things that have been breathlessly searched everywhere. The nature conceived by magicians operates as a poet disenfranchised from any logical control: it does no miracles; it is itself an eternal miracle. But from secret to secret, Della Porta wishes to arrive at the key of the mystery, to the “philosopher’s stone,” to truth: [Nature’s] secret and its way of operating is the loftiest and most praiseworthy; it is better than all those secrets and ways that my ears have heard until now. For the experience that I have of other things, I can tell you that I value this not just as true but as the truth itself, and I am all day long intent with my thought on it, so much so that I become almost mad (Il secreto e lo modo d’oprare è molto alto e degnissimo, e meglio di quanti abbino inteso fino adesso le orecchie mie, e per l’esperienzia ch’ho d’altre cose, lo stimo non solo vero, ma l’istessa verità, e sto tutto il giorno ratto col pensiero in lui, che quasi son divenuto matto). With these words, in 1538, Della Porta was communicating with Cardinal
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d’Este, believing in having found the supreme secret. His was a naturalism mixed with faith in a divine fountain of all natural forms. His was a nature operating with an infinite vital potency that would escape the inquirer unable to reach its mysterious core, leaving it only with a disorderly and incoherent enumeration of its operations, all equally miraculous because all equally irreducible to uniform rational explanations. People said that this perspective was the wrong one as far as it closed the way to science, which is all about the uniform, because it observed not the regular process of things, but the exception. It was a perspective linked, though merely unconsciously, to a dynamic, vital vision of nature, and rebellious to the very hard restrictions imposed by rules. Only the miraculous intuition of the secret of secrets, by bringing human beings to penetrate the soul of the whole, will reveal the mysterious expanding of the universal spontaneity. In 1583, Della Porta had already composed the De humana physiognonomia that was published in Naples in 1586. In 1588 were published: Eight books on Physiognomy, in which a new most facile method is offered by which anyone after a first inspection of the exterior of plants, animals, metals, and whatever other thing, would be able to take advantage of their hidden powers. In confirmation of this an almost infinite number of special secrets, fruit of hard investigations, precious time, and personal expenses, is added (Physiognonomica octo libris contenta, in quibus nova facillimaque affertur methodus, qua plantarum, animalium, metallorum, rerum denique omnium, ex prima extimae faciei inspectione quivis abditas vires assequatur. Accedunt ad haec confirmanda infinita propemodum selectiora secreta, summo labore, temporis dispendio et impensarum iactura vestigata explorataque). The theory of a perfect correspondence between internal and external form, already established for human beings, is now extended to all reality. In reality, the correspondence appears even more precise as long as the free will does not intervene by imposing an artificial hiatus between extrinsic corporeity and internal life. In the human being, too, “experience easily shows that the spirit is not impassible to the motions of the body, and that the body is easily altered by the passions of the soul” (l’esperienza ci fa scorgere con facilità che l’animo non è impassibile rispetto ai moti del corpo, cosí come il corpo si corrompe per le passioni dell’anima). Nature in all its grades has its own unity; no nut and shell are in it, it is all tied together by “a mutual agreement” (mutuo foedere), whereby every one of its aspects is a manifestation of the more internal processes. Della Porta, instead of exposing a theory, limits himself to the enumeration and cataloging of particular cases, always interested in the specific singular case more than in the examination of principles. In the Coelestis physiognonomia he reduces to his physiognomic rules the astrologi-
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cal previsions that, according to him, depend from the elements by which they are composed and not from the influx of the aspects of the stars. But we should not be brought into error by his prejudicial observation, “astrology is a fictional and imaginary science” (astrologiam non nisi fictam et imaginariam esse scientiam). Why? Because Della Porta accepts the judiciary astrology, in which celestial aspects reveal elementary structures that influence human lives. It is a conception not limited to a few particular applications, but that tends to present the whole universe as expressing, almost with a visual language, in its external aspect its interior structure. For Della Porta the world is a book. Who reads this world does not receive the impression of having before his eyes the mathematical work of the eternal reason, but the eternally diversified trick of an always-changing fantasy. The vein of irreducible Platonism that, by penetrating them, circulates within these attempted scientific constructions does not succeed in binding together the empirical observation of the world with the need for a unitary vision that would unite at its hidden roots the visible expressions of the universe. The equilibrium between instances of Platonic preference and experimental exigencies of the Aristotelians is not yet attainable. The extreme appeal to an intimate unity is decided in terms of Platonic Eros, the animator of the supreme magic, the magic of love, to which even Fracastoro dedicated a hymn in eloquent Lucretian verses: I picture you in the act of traversing vast territories, of flying over high clouds, and of cruising the oceans, imposing your rule on everything, on human beings and beasts, on birds of various colors and on monsters of the ocean. Not even the gods are free from it. (Hic ego te latas terras atque alta volatu Nubila tranantem fingo, et maria unda secantem, Cuncta tibi imperio subdentem, hominesque ferasque Et pictas volucres et, quae nant aequore, monstra. Diis quoque nec parcis). At the end of the century, in 1592, Guido Casoni of Serravalle was precisely writing a dialogue on this topic, “the magic of love” (Della magia d’amore). In that dialogue, it is demonstrated how love is metaphysician, physicist, astrologist, musician, geometrician, arithmetician, grammarian, dialectician, rhetorician, poet, historiographer, jurisconsult, politician, ethicist, economist, medic, commander, ship-pilot, agriculturist, wool-maker, hunter, architect, painter, sculptor, smith, glass-maker, natural magician, necromancer, geomancer, hydromancer, airman, pyromaniac, chiromancer, physiognomist, augur, haruspex, ariolus, mountaineer, and genitor.
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The scientific interests proper to Renaissance Aristotelianism found a typical representative in Andrea Cesalpino, known more as a scientist than as a philosopher, even though his Quaestiones peripateticae, dedicated to Francesco dei Medici and published in Venice in 1571 and again in 1593, constituted a complete vision of reality characterized by a robust naturalism. Andrea was a famous botanist; in Pisa, he had been a disciple of Luca Ghini and became his successor. In the sixteen books on De Plantis (1593) he compiled an organic classification so that every tree could be grouped “according to an identity of nature” (secondo la comunanza di natura). In view of such a classification he tried to understand the functions of the vegetables in relation to animal life: “It is of the nature of the veins to channel the nourishment from the stomach to the other parts of the total body. This corresponds in a way to the function of the roots of the plants because it is of the roots to derive nourishment from the earth as from a great stomach on which they are implanted.” He was also famous as a doctor so much so that Clement VIII invited him in 1590 to come to the Pontiff’s Court. In his manual Kátopron sive Speculum artis medicae Hippocraticum that had in a short period many editions, Andrea wrote concerning the necessity of connecting experience and reason: There are common folks who bring to the sick medications of which they have learned the powers and they do that often very advantageously, perhaps with a profit greater than that obtained with a science that is profound but without experience. The knowledge of remedies derives first of all from experience. It matters little if the individual who uses them has often tried them itself or if it received them from someone who did so. The knowledge of a remedy in the hands of a misinformed person is like a sword in the hands of one taken by madness. To use a remedy with temerity may kill many and by chance cure a few others. The true doctor is that who knows how to join experience with reason. Experience brings knowledge of remedies; reason selects the opportunity for their application (Si vedono dei popolani dare ai malati dei medicamenti di cui hanno appreso le virtú e spesso molto utilmente, forse con una utilità maggiore di quella che si ha con una scienza profonda, ma senza esperienza. La conoscenza dei rimedi deriva innanzi tutto dall’esperienza; poco importa se colui che li adopera li abbia provati spesso o li abbia ricevuti da chi ciò ha fatto. Tuttavia la conoscenza di un rimedio è, nell’uomo male informato, come una spada nelle mani di un pazzo. L’uso temerario che se ne fa uccide molti ed altri guarisce per caso. Il vero medico è l’uomo che unisce esperienza e ragione. L’esperienza dà la conoscenza dei rimedi, la ragione l’opportunità del loro uso). Aristotelianism becomes the principle of a new scientific investigation.
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Cesalpino, in the preface to Quaestiones peripateticae, celebrates Aristotle whose philosophy alone has given flavor and value to the researches of all predecessors, “Without Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and finally Plato, there would have been no Aristotle. He is the one who seems to have elevated philosophy to its supreme level because after almost two thousand years every effort is still directed toward the comprehension of Aristotle alone” (Senza Democrito, Empedocle, Anassagora, e infine Platone, non vi sarebbe stato Aristotele, questo capo che sembra avere innalzato la filosofia al suo grado sommo, poiché dopo quasi due mila anni ogni fatica è volta a comprendere il solo Aristotele). Focusing on method, in the first question, Cesalpino immediately asserted the importance of the inductive process, the value of observation: “If we receive information without errors from natural phenomena, why should we have more faith in reason? It is a frailty of intelligence to abandon perception and invoke reason” (Se dai corpi naturali noi riceviamo un insegnamento senza errori, perché dunque avere maggior fede nella ragione? È una debolezza dell’intelligenza abbandonare la percezione per invocare la ragione). Nature does not lie; reason is the one to fall into error, “Would we believe a lie of nature, when it points to the poles with the magnetic needle or to Zenith with the direction taken by weighty bodies? Should we not rather attribute a lie to reason when it moves away from nature?” (Crederemo dunque a una menzogna della natura, quando ci indica i poli con la calamita o lo Zenith con la direzione dei corpi pesanti? O non dobbiamo attribuire la menzogna piuttosto alla ragione che si allontana dalla natura?). Too often, perhaps for love of his Aristotle, Cesalpino relied on easy analogies or on incomplete experiences. But his scientific constructions for the most part are to be located at the level of the mature thought of the seventeenth century. When referring to Aristotle, Cesalpino intended to justify him instead of to use him in his own support. The reality of nature for Cesalpino is oriented to an end and it is determined by this end in so far as it always obeys an exigency of actualization. It is the finality intrinsic to every being, so that consequently what is the germ of the human being intends the realization of humanity. It is a finality that signifies the intrinsic value of every moment of the whole, of all nature in its many different grades. Speaking about the sexual organs in Kátopron, he exclaims, “Nothing is as much irrational as to call them shameful, while they reveal the most perfect art, by translating in actuality all the divine wisdom. Nothing in nature is shameful or indecent; even the most abject things partake in the divine” (Nulla è tanto irragionevole quanto il chiamarli vergognosi, mentre svelano l’arte piú perfetta, traducendo tutta la saggezza dello spirito divino. Nella Natura non c’è nulla di vergognoso, nulla di turpe; anche le cose piú vili hanno la loro parte di divino). We come now to the two most interesting points of Cesalpino’s inquiry: on one hand, the vision of the concrete participation of the whole reality with the divine; on another hand, a cautious undeniable development of the con-
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cept of matter. These two elements, let us call them concurrent, imply the same process toward a naturalistic monism. For this reason, Pierre Bayle spoke with emphasis of Cesalpino as being a pre-Spinoza thinker, restating what had been the principal accusation against Cesalpino brought forward by Taurellus (Nikolaus Öchslein), a philosopher of Altdorf, in his Alpes Caesae, published in Frankfurt in 1597. Afterward, Samuel Parker formulated the same accusation against Cesalpino as a condemnation of atheism. Cesalpino, besides establishing the teleological order, introduced a consideration of causality through which he admitted matter as the primary substance: “in a certain mode matter is first and everything else is affection [a modification of matter] … if we consider the order of causes, matter can be said to be substance” (in un certo modo la materia è prima e tutto il resto non è che affezione … se si considera l’ordine delle cause, si dice che la materia è sostanza). This originary matter, basis of all mutations, and unique in the various transformations is corporeity, understood Averroisticly, as tridimensional space. The conclusion should be in the direction of a mechanicism, in the abandonment of a physics of quality in favor of a geometric vision. In Cesalpino this is never happening in a conclusive way, although many of his observations are deserving attention. In the third book’s second question concerning light and heavy bodies, he considered the rapport between space and motion. Place, distinguished from space, assumes significance in relation to movement, as far as it becomes the point toward which the body moves. Consequently, motion can be defined only in relation to a point in a resting position, the movement of the spheres in relation to the immobile earth. After admitting this, the result could only be one: there is movement so long as there is mutation of relationships. If all bodies would move equally, motion would disappear. But Cesalpino does not reach this conclusion. On the contrary, in order to avoid this conclusion, he posited as necessary the immobility of the earth. Given that there is motion, the earth ought to be at rest, thus permitting the contrast and annihilating relativity. The difficulties of the positions of Cesalpino return as ambiguity in the theory of the soul (Quaestiones peripateticae, bk. 2, chs. 6–8), in which he tries to avoid Averroès and Alexander, absolute transcendence and full immanence. Against Averroès he raised the objection of the inconceivability of the connection between the unique intellect and the individuals in the performance of the act of understanding. He affirms, “It is irrational not to posit an eternal unique substance, one in number, without its function” (È infatti irrazionale voler porre come eterna una sostanza una di numero, e non insieme la sua funzione) and this for the Averroists comes to depend from the phantasma, “If such an intellect needs images that come and go, it would also come and go, be born and perish” (Se tale intelletto ha bisogno di immagini che nascono e periscono, potrà esso pure nascere e perire). But if we free it from the need of images, how would we link the intellect to the human being? When, on the other hand, the followers of Alexander detach the agent in-
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tellect and place it in God, why do not they assign intellection to all beings, given that all beings partake in intelligibility, and the intellect is for them nothing but an intelligible? The truth is that the whole intellect is in the human being. Using again the Aristotelian similitude that assimilates intellection to vision, we may say that if the colors are the intelligibles, the intellect is at the same time the visual organ and the light that shines over them: If the colors constitute the reality, the light would mean the intellect. The rational soul is like an eye in fire that sees even at night. With its fire the soul illumines the colors so that they would determine the visual faculty to the performance of the act of vision. In this same way, the soul with its own light, and not with one coming from elsewhere, judges the intelligibles that are implicit in the phantasms (Se i colori costituiscono la realtà, la luce significa l’intelletto. L’anima razionale è come un occhio igneo, che vede di notte; col suo fuoco illumina i colori facendo sí che determino all’atto la potenza visiva. Cosí l’anima con la luce propria, e non sopraggiunta, giudica gli intelligibili impliciti nei fantasmi). This theory of Cesalpino rests on the concept of participation, which is minutely presented in the sixth question of the second book, dedicated to the explanation of the rapport between the unique divine intellect and the multiplicity of reality. He remarked that the multiplicity of the material forms does not imply the multiplication of the intelligences: The multiplicity of material forms does not imply at all the multiplication of intelligences. … As the sensitive soul in the eye is called vision and in the ear audibility, in that same way it is the same intelligence that in so far as it moves the Moon is assigned to the Moon and to Saturn in as much as it moves Saturn, and so on. To ask if an intelligence can think of another is a non-existent problem, because they are the same and only one intelligence.… In the way that when the soul is present all the organs perform their proper function, in that same way when the intelligence thinks of itself, each of its parts—if we could call them this way—thinks only of itself. These intelligences then are all included in one alone, as the parts in the whole, the smaller number in the bigger, the triangle in the quadrilateral or, better, as what is in function of another in what subsists per se. They are, finally, like rays united in their origin at the center (La molteplicità delle forme materiali non implica affatto la moltiplicazione delle intelligenze…. Come la stessa anima sensitiva nell’occhio si chiama vista e udito nell’orecchio, cosí è la stessa intelligenza che in quanto muove la luna è assegnata alla luna, ed a Saturno in quanto muove Saturno e cosí via. È perciò un problema insussistente il domandarsi delle intelligenze se l’una pensi
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Given this point of view, it is no longer clear how it would be possible to speak of an individual immortality. This is even truer since Cesalpino insists on this universal participation in the divine. Repeating the paragon proper to Aristotelianism about the rapport between sense and intellect, in Quaestiones Peripateticae (bk. 2, ch. 8) he declares: If sensitivity is included in the intellect as the triangle in the rectangle, the binary in the ternary, or, in one word, the part in the whole, because there is one intellective function for the intellect, an impassible substance, then it is necessary that the sense be real in so far as it partakes, in a lower grade, in the same substance.… And the same conclusions are valid for the vegetative function, as far as it partakes of the sensitive.… Every soul, every part of the soul of mortals, partakes in the divine, but, in so far as it partakes in a body, it is destroyed when it loses the organ. How is it possible then to differentiate the human soul from that of other mortals? (Se la sensibilità è inclusa nell’intelletto come il triangolo nel rettangolo, il binario nel ternario, o, in una parola, la parte nel tutto poiché vi è una funzione intellettiva per l’intelletto, sostanza impassibile, è necessario che il senso sia reale in quanto participa, in grado minore, alla stessa sostanza…. E le medesime conclusioni valgono per la funzione vegetativa, in quanto parte della sensitive…. Ogni anima, ogni parte dell’anima dei mortali partecipa al divino; e si distrugge per la perdita dell’organo, cioè in quanto partecipa a un corpo. Come dunque differenziare le anime degli uomini da quelle degli altri mortali?). Cesalpino truly developed the intelligible from the sensible in the sense that the sensible is the original element of the intelligible so far as in all this process the same principle exists, which “judges, as the unique universal measure, the sensible and the intelligible.” In order to avoid difficulties, to justify the permanence of the soul, to convince of human dignity, he placed in the human being the act of participation and the thing participated: “What is truly human in the human being is the spirit itself, which is the object of the participation that is always subject to the cycle of generation and corruption” (L’uomo in sé, ciò che è veramente uomo, è lo spirito stesso, l’oggetto della partecipazi-
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one, che è sempre soggetta a generazione e corruzione). But a more serious objection is presented: “In what way is the human being different from God? How are the human beings numerically distinct?” (In che l’uomo è diverso da Dio? Come gli uomini sono numericamente distinti?). The thing that is participated—is it not perhaps the unique divine understanding, which, as the organ is destroyed, returns into the unity? Cesalpino at this point appeal to the theory of the celestial intelligences, previously exposed: The primary substance is the absolute unity from which “being” universally depends, and it is God, supreme goodness and greatness. In so far as in It the participation of a plurality exists, then [the primary substance] takes the form of a multiplicity and under one aspect is called Saturn, under another Jove, and under another human being (La sostanza prima è unità assoluta da cui dipende l’essere universalmente, ed è Dio, bene e grandezza suprema; ma in quanto v’è partecipazione in essa di una pluralità, prende la forma di una molteplicità e sotto un certo aspetto si chiama Saturno, sotto un altro Giove, sotto un altro uomo). The same difficulty of Averroism has here returned. In the case of the celestial intelligences, the eternal participation is found in the sphere; in the case of human beings, given their mutation by birth and death, we find at best the permanence of the species not of the single, of the unity and not of the multiplicity. The logic of the system induced Cesalpino to think of the multiple as the gathering of all points of view of a unique understanding in a unique understanding: a multiplicity derived from the objects instead of from the subject, from the intelligibles more than from the intellect. The solution that he pretended to offer was attacked by his adversaries of all schools as an expedient that could deform Averroism. But he intended to present such a solution not as a conclusion from reasoning but as a straightforward affirmation: The immortal souls of human beings, as far as they are immaterial, are in an absolute sense a unity. From this point of view we cannot speak of number, because the number is linked to matter. But as far as they are attributed to the plurality of human individuals, they are numerically multiple because many are the human beings that exist (Le anime immortali degli uomini, in quanto immateriali, sono in senso assoluto un’unità; e da questo punto di vista non si può parlare di numero, perché il numero è legato alla materia. Ma in quanto attribuite alla pluralità degli uomini, esse sono numericamente molteplici, poiché gli uomini sono molti). But the ambiguity of this pretended solution did not escape Cesalpino, who formulated a new objection to himself. If before Socrates no soul of Socrates
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existed because no participation is possible for what does not yet subsist, how then is it possible that Socrates’s soul would subsist after he died? We must admit his soul as having been always existent, even when Socrates was not yet born, or we must deny that it may subsist after Socrates’s death. Again, this solution resolves very little. Cesalpino continued on the topic: the eternity of the souls would require the existence of an infinite act, given that the souls’ number in the progress of time presents itself as potentially almost infinite. But an infinite act has results that are inconceivable. Consequently, “immaterial substance certainly contains in itself the multiplicity of souls, but it is successively multiplied according to the number of the human individuals” (la sostanza immateriale contiene certo in sé la molteplicità delle anime, ma si moltiplica successivamente secondo il numero degli uomini). From this analysis, we can see the indecision of Cesalpino, who was continuously hindered by his adhesion to the principles of traditional Aristotelianism that returned as dogmatic impositions, instead of from theological or practical preoccupations, as someone perhaps could have supposed. The same situation can be noticed when in the fifth book of the Quaestiones Peripateticae, while lucidly explaining the “small circulation,” Cesalpino does not succeed in clarifying the “grand circulation.” After affirming that the heart is the principle of the organization of living beings (quaestio, num. 3), he exploits his concept only to erroneously sustain, against Galen, the Aristotelian thesis that affirms the nerves to originate from the heart no less than the arteries. Aristotelianism showed itself of being capable of extremes subtleties and exceptional audacity in trying difficult things; but its inquiry was not yet free from the impediments of tradition, though it enriched itself with fecund inputs from a multitude of experiences. The same master-pieces of Telesio will often develop in the fashion of an Aristotelian commentary. By isolating Telesio from this complex critical process, Telesio’s importance would not be understood, and by placing him outside this movement his relevance would also be lost.
Eighteen THE NEW THOUGHT FROM TELESIO TO BRUNO 1. Bernardino Telesio. His Works. Relationship with Vincenzo Maggi. The De rerum natura. Objections of Francesco Patrizi Renaissance naturalism found in Bernardino Telesio its most organic and coherent expositor. Telesio was born in Cosenza in 1509, and received his primary education from his scholarly uncle, Antonio Telesio. Antonio was a literate, a poet, and a teacher; he brought Bernardino with him to Milan where he was teaching. Of the tastes and tendencies of Antonio some traces are found especially in those verses dedicated to nature that manifest a Lucretian inspiration: “O nature, mother of all and creator of things and human beings, / severe and benign, constant and mutable, / you are of no precise kind, but indefatigable and productive. / In beauty you compete only with yourself, / and always you win even when you wane” (Omniparens natura hominum rerumque creatrix, / Difficilis, facilis, similis tibi dissimilisque, / Nulligena, indefessa, ferax, te pulchrior ipsa, / solaque quae tecum certas, te et victa revincis). Bernardino followed his uncle to Rome, where, in 1527, he was taken prisoner during the sack of Rome by the Spanish and German mercenaries of Charles V and kept hostage for a period of two months. Further studies of philosophy and mathematics followed at Padua, but then he decided to retire to a Benedictine monastery, possibly at Seminara, wishing intensely to dedicate to reflection. In 1565, he went to Naples to give some speeches on his studies and there also completed the first two books of De Natura iuxta propria principia, liber primus et secundus that were published by Antonio Blado (apud Antonium Bladum). These two books were published again in 1570 as De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (On the nature of things according to their proper principles) by G. Cacchio in Naples with the addition of three opuscules: De his quae in aere fiunt et de terremotis (On what happens in the air and on earthquakes), De colorum generatione (On the origin of colors), De Mari (Concerning the Sea). The De rerum natura was completed, restructured in nine books, and republished in 1586. Antonio Persio, of all the disciples the nearest one to Bernardino, published in Venice in 1590 a collection of another
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nine Telesian opuscules that are subdivided in two groups. The first group, the one dedicated to Francesco Patrizi of Cherso, deals with meteorology (metereologica): De cometis et lacteo circulo (On comets and the Milky Way); De his quae in aere fiunt (On what happens in the air); De iride (On the rainbow); De mari (About the sea). The second group, the one dedicated to Federigo Pendasio, concerns small natural phenomena (parva naturalia): Quod animal universum ab unica animae substantia gubernatur contra Galenum (All animals are governed by a unique substance of the soul, against Galen); De usu respirationis (On respiration); De coloribus (On colors); De saporibus (On flavors); De somno (On dreams). In the dedication to the Platonic Patrizi, Persio mentioned the discussions he had with him concerning the new philosophy of Telesio, which Patrizi at last valued to the point of confessing to prefer Telesio to the ancient philosophers and promising to write some questions or objections. To these objections of Patrizi, Telesio answered with Solutiones that was published only in the modern times by Francesco Fiorentino together with Telesio’s other opuscules titled De fulmine (On lightning) and Quae et quomodo febres faciunt (What fevers are and how they affect the body). In the affectionate dedication to Pendasio, “the new Aristotle” (novus Aristoteles), friend and teacher of his brother Ascanio, Persio, while remembering Zabarella, “another light of Italy” (alterum Italiae numen), with sorrow, confessed that his comfort would be to meet again with Pendasio, and expressed the certainty that the great Aristotelian would certainly appreciate the new Telesian philosophy. Telesio after having composed the first two books of his work, before publication asked for the opinion of another famous Aristotelian, Vincenzo Maggi of Brescia, professor at the University of Padua and Ferrara, known commentator on Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics. According to Maggi’s disciple, Giambattista Giraldi Cintio, Maggi was excellent in what pertains to a philosopher and in everything else. In the proem to the first edition of the two books of his work, Telesio, after having spoken of his studies in full solitude and his reading of the classic philosophers, narrated how, having established his principles for the work, felt the need of questioning a great Aristotelian. Let us refer to Telesio’s own words that demonstrate the existence among thinkers of the collaboration quite different from the one it is customary to speak of: I decided to visit Maggi in Brescia and consult him since I knew he was an excellent philosopher and a very kind person. If that prestigious personality would approve my theories, I would never give them up. In a contrary case, I would recognize my errors and continue to admire and respect Aristotle. Once I arrived at Brescia, I explained to Maggi the reason for my visit. Contrary to what many others did and told me he would have done, Maggi listened to me with great diligence during many meetings. With great patience and relaxation, Maggi listened and
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pondered all things I discussed with him. Finally, he approved the fundamental assumptions of my theory and the conclusions I derived from them (Madium Brixianum adire et consulere visum est, quem et in philosophia excellere videbamus, et cuius mihi iamdiu animi ingenuitas innotuerat; ut, si a praestantissimo viro cogitationes meae non improbatae forent, nequaquam supprimentur illae; sin minus, errores intuitus meos, quod reliquum vitae esset, et ipse Aristotelem suspicerem venerarerque. Brixiam itaque ad Madium profectus, et itineris mei exposita ratione, nequaquam ille, quod multi fecerant, et quod facturum et illum minitati fuerant, inauditum reiecit; at summa diligentia plures dies, quibus apud illum fui, et summa cum animi tranquillitate et audit et perpendit omnia. Principia non improbavit, et quod non e principiis flueret videre nihilo potuit). The title De rerum natura iuxta propria principia stands as a polemic affirmation that is soon clarified in the beginning pages of the work. The inquiry must humbly proceed following the process of nature in its own most intimate developments. An investigation of nature should not construct systems in which imagination and reason are joined together. Previous researchers, according to Telesio, have sinned with presumption because they made themselves the rule of the universe. They [past researchers] were too confident in their own powers. These researchers did not observe natural things, as it was needed, for what they really were and in their true characteristics, but projected into them greatness, intelligence, and faculties as they assumed from their point of view. These researchers competed with God in searching with reason the principles and the causes of the world, believing and wishing to have to invent what they could not find, easily building an imaginary world of their choice. These previous researchers have pretended for themselves divine wisdom and power, a knowledge that was creative, when on the contrary human science must be content with the reaching of things in the sensitive intuition: “We … who are lovers and researchers of human wisdom … we are proposing to investigate the world in itself and its individual parts, and the parts of all things contained in it, of passions, actions, operations and species” (Nos … humanae omnino sapientiae amatores et cultores … mundum ipsum et singulas eius partes, et partium rerumque in eo contentarum passiones, actiones, operationes et species intueri proposuimus). In this way reality will speak with a language that is simple but precise and appropriate, revealing its own truer character that operates uniformly and universally: “We have followed exclusively our senses and nature, which is always coherent to itself, always does the same things in the same manner and always equally operates” (Sensum videli-
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cet nos et naturam, aliud praeterea nihil, secuti sumus, quae, perpetuo sibi ipsi concors, idem semper et eodem agit modo atque idem semper operatur, in De rerum natura, bk. 1, proem). Two principles were assumed that require demonstration: uniformity of nature and value of sensible cognition. Concerning the point that is first and fundamental to his doctrine, Telesio appealed to God the Creator that has constructed the world in a certain rational manner, which is inscrutable to human beings: “If a person would dare to inquire with reason the way in which the world has been constructed, this person would certainly be arrogant and impious, but also a fool and a condemnable individual” (Ibid., bk. 2, ch. 9). God is the basis of natural law and the foundation for us of our belief in the uniformity of things. The value and the possibility itself of a sensitive cognition based on the senses (the sense perception) find their justification in the universal sensibility of things. These are the two concepts by which the Telesian theory strictly connects itself with Renaissance philosophy in general, and especially with some of the intuitions of the Platonists. The Telesian universe is constituted by two agencies: first, by some principal active natures capable of determining mutations and of being “perceivable”; second, by a corporeal passive mass, because an action is never sensed as warm or cold unless it is inherent in a body. It is necessary to admit three principles: two active natures, cold and heat, and a corporeal passive mass, which is proper and congruent to both. This mass must be capable of expansion and distension as well as of condensation and contraction, and of assuming any whatsoever disposition (Bisogna dunque porre tre principi: due nature agenti, il caldo e il freddo, e una massa corporea, la quale sia rispetto ad entrambe propria e congruente ed atta ad espandersi e ad estendersi così come a condensarsi e a restringersi, ed ad assumere qualsiasi disposizione). This corporeal mass possesses its unique sameness because otherwise it would be impossible to explain how it could be common to all beings and be inert. In the De rerum natura (bk. 1, ch. 4) Telesio writes that this corporeal mass “is inert, unaware, almost dead, opaque and impotent. The corporeal mass was created by God, the Best and the Greatest, so that the active and operating natures could assume it and subsist in it. Each of these acting natures would give to mass its proper form and the disposition suitable to the character and function of each nature. In this way, these natures would constitute with the corporeal mass the heavens, the earth, and all the other things.” Matter or corporeal mass is not a substance; it does not subsist by itself, neither the active natures (primary forces) would subsist by themselves. The active natures in order to exist must join the corporeal mass in which they could live and operate. Matter at its own turn was created by God not in order
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to act or to be a being subsistent by its own power, but only in order “to receive the active and operating natures and to be transformed by them into beings that result from their union” (ibid., bk. 1, ch. 5). In De rerum natura (bk. 1, ch. 2) the principles are never in a situation of being separate because reality is always constituted by their unity: If it is true that, as it has been more clearly said before, the active and operative natures, heat and cold, are to assume the corporeal mass and become one with it, then we will find no part of any being that would only be mass or active nature. On the contrary, every little particle of whatever entity, take even a point, will result to be composed of both in such a way that each is deeply mixed with the other and out of them we will have the unity (Nam si, ut suo clarius factum est loco, agents operantesque naturae, calor nimirum frigusque, moli, cui sese indunt, unum prorsus fiunt, itaque nullam entis ullius partem invenias, quae vel moles sola, vel sola agens natura sit, sed quantulavis entis cuiusvis particula, quin punctum quodvis, ex utraque, penitus alteri commixta altera et unum utraque alteri facta, constat, in ibid., ch. 2). Even a point contains in itself the three elements constitutive of reality, essential aspects of the whole reality, because “reality, which is an act, is not three but one, and this one—being this the unity or actual synthesis of the three principles that are only abstractly distinguishable—is matter that is hot and not hot because cold and at the same time not cold; it is what it is and what it is not at the same time; this is genesis, the Aristotelian becoming, restituted to the logic of its immanent process.” These are the words of Giovanni Gentile, who asserted that Telesio is “a metaphysician; a materialistic metaphysician,” as in antiquity was Democritus. The denomination of “metaphysical” assigned to these principles has been rejected because the term “metaphysical” is often strictly connected with the idea of transcendence, which Telesio denied and rejected. The Telesian inquiry has been interpreted to be merely scientific. Both these points have given way to an interpretation that sees the essence of Telesio’s position in the autonomy of nature physically considered, that is, a nature no longer seen, as Aristotle wanted, as dependent from metaphysics. Consequently, this means that for Telesio every first principle is made intrinsic to nature, in which case physics in its roots is properly metaphysics, or it means that Telesio, having distinguished the physical science from metaphysics, has in De rerum natura worked as a scientist. In the first of these cases we might say that there is truth, although this truth is in a radical antithesis to Aristotle and, perhaps, to Aristotelianism. In the second case, we would move away from truth because Telesio in De rerum natura precisely intended to seize the ideal moments, the first causes, which he understood as immanent and internal to nature itself. Galileo, to whom Telesio has been compared, determining the laws of motion without looking out for essences, declared not
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to know or to care for Telesio and, in general, for the pettiness of philosophers. Telesio wanted to know what heat and cold were. He did not establish the rapport of motion and position of the Sun in respect to different bodies, but he was concerned with the relationships of the Sun with the vital and lifegiving warmth that is the true substance of the universe. It is right to claim that Telesio has vindicated the autonomy of nature only if this means that he tried to explain nature iuxta propria principia, searching for nature within nature and not without, avoiding the danger of making the principles that explicate nature realities subsistent by themselves: “Searching for the God that is in the internal to all things” (Dio ricercando a tutte cose interno). When Telesio makes suddenly an appeal to a God Creator “from outside” (ab externo) and to Its designs, we become aware that his discourse is then false and unjustifiable. False or contradictory is his affirmation that “the sky is not the work of heat and of an acting element deprived of reason, but it is the work of God.” Even worse is the justification for such an affirmation: “Reason does not allow that we attribute to heat or to another being a work that has been constructed with so much art, wisdom, and power.” Though it is strange, Telesio was not contrasting Aristotle but a certain Platonism that was alive in Aristotelianism and that was already in principle present in Aristotle. We are speaking of the tendency to isolate and make transcendental the essences and the explicative principles of things, transferring them to a plane separate from the natural one, rendering them extrinsic to the things that they are supposed to explain, and of which they constitute the essence. When the Aristotelian form stops being essential nature, intrinsic to the individual, acting within the individual as the seed in the plant, and becomes a specific form as a second essence by itself subsistent, and again, at least in a certain sense, a Platonic or universal idea, then we find ourselves not before a system of the concrete individual in its becoming but before a static system, a system of immobility. This is exactly the criticism that Telesio moved against Aristotle: in Aristotle’s doctrine the living and the mutation of the forms and their becoming is inconceivable. If matter is inert and passive, if the forms are static and, as some Peripatetics want, they are latent and almost dormant in matter, then “the arising of the forms would not be their production, but their resuscitation and recall from slumber because they would then remain always the same in the identical matter and could be differentiated only as they sometimes are vigilant and operating, and at some other times dormant and fading away” (De rerum natura, bk. 2, ch. 1). This was also the opinion of those thinkers who, like Nifo, felt the strong influence of Platonism. The static condition and abstractism of Aristotelianism, to which Telesio opposed a robust re-thinking of Pre-Socratic naturalism, was at the bottom a characteristic residue that the worse kind of Platonism had deposited in Aristotle. Consequently, it is not at all rare to see the curious spectacle of Plato-
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nists who fight such kind of Platonism in Aristotle by appealing to the greater dynamism of Plotinus and medieval Neo-Platonism. This “discordant concordance” (concordia discors) with Aristotle, by means of which Aristotle is continuously attacked while at the same time the attacker continuously returns to Aristotelian cues and processes, has rightly brought Gentile to conclude that the difference between Aristotle and Telesio is more often “in the words rather than in the concepts” (piú nella parola che nel concetto). Guido De Ruggiero, from his part, observed that “the mental habit of thinking in the ways of Aristotelianism is stronger than any intention of detaching oneself from Aristotle” (l’abitudine mentale a pensare nelle forme dell’aristotelismo è piú forte di qualunque proposito di staccarsi da Aristotele). The principles of reality are not matter as mere potentiality, static and immobile form, privation as pure negation, but the active natures, like heat and cold, and the mass that they agitate and urge. As we have seen, these are ideal moments of the concrete reality that consists of life and death. It is a living that is always a dying and vice versa, a dying that is always a living because of the common presence of all three principles in every particle of reality, none of which is substance because substance is their synthesis alone. Telesio was not always clearly faithful to this affirmation; at times, he gave pre-eminence to heat and declared each of the three principles to be a substance: “We can admit that not only the mass of which all beings are construed but also the natures by which they are constituted and preserved are their substances” (siquidem non molem modo, e qua entia constant, sed naturas etiam, a quibus illa constituta sunt servanturque … illorum substantias esse statuere licet, in ibid., bk. 1, ch. 8). Telesio even pointed out that “if nature is something that subsists per se,” we can properly apply the name of substance also for matter, which per se is nothing (ibid., bk. 2, ch. 20). His is a curious oscillation in which the three principles, instead of being consolidated in the natural unity that Telesio wanted humbly to respect, are in reality made to subsist per se, three substances within which it is hard to identify the rapport initially posited between a passive mass and some natures acting upon or influencing that mass. Because of this oscillation, we sense an uncertainty that, in a great part, derives from the position itself of Telesio’s inquiry, in which physics is posited as metaphysics, but without maintaining coherently the research within a scientific consideration or decisively within a philosophical vision. Patrizi immediately saw this contradiction and in his objections with great ingenuity observed: “Your total system of philosophy is the most beautiful contemplation of all things that it comprehends, but it seems to be metaphysics more than physics” (contemplatio omnium pulcherrima, quaeque universam tuam philosophiam comprehendit; sed magis metaphysica videtur quam physica). Patrizi began to press hard and in regard to matter he told Telesio that the way he conceived it was incomprehensible and unjustifiable: “What you affirm
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about matter (mass) remaining unchanged under the process of mutation of things does not seem to correspond to what we experience in sensation” (quae vero de mole remanente sub rerum immutatione affers, non videtur sensui respondere). If it is apprehended, as it must be, through the senses and if it is of a physical nature, matter must also be determined. Patrizi insists: “None of the senses that at the beginning you have decided to use as your guide in all things has ever given evidence of any matter” (certe sensus nullus, quo solo duce te in omnibus usurum initio es professus, materiam ulli unquam indicavit). A matter subjected to everything neither is nor can be perceived through the senses: “With what sense ever has it been known that the human being is made of iron and that stone is made of human nature?” (Quo enim sensu unquam cognitum est ex ferro hominem constitui, vel ex homine lapidem?). Continuing with his objection, Patrizi insisted that Telesio’s system would suppress species, forms, and ideas, and that we could deduce that in this vision of reality, it would be necessary that the same heat in the same matter would produce the same things. Why is it then that the same heat of the sun brings out of the same mire frogs and herbs, frogs and mice? And in the frogs a smooth skin, while in the mice skin with hairs? Why is it that it produced from the same matter in the same mouse textures, skin, flesh, nerves, bones, blood, intestines, brain, which are things all different in form and matter? From where is this diversity coming if these things are all originated from the similar source? But similarity should here be understood as a substance not as an external character. Substance is the heat or the soul. If it is heat, then how can the identical produce herb, frog, mouse, and other animals? If it is soul, then how can it be different in frog, mouse, and grass, given that it comes from the same heat? (Idem calor in eadem materia, eadem facere necesse est. Cur ergo idem solis calor ex eodem limo ranas et herbas educit? Ranas et mures? In ranas, glabra cute, in mures pilosa? Idem calor in eodem mure filos, cutim, carnes, nervos, ossa, sanguinem, intestina, cerebrum, res et forma et materia differentes ex eadem materia efficit? Unde haec diversitas, si a simili omnia fiunt? Substantia dicenda est similis, non externa species: substantia autem est calor vel anima. Si calor, cur idem herbam, ranam, murem, alia quoque animalia, facit? Si anima, cur diversa in rana, in mure, in herba, ab eodem calore fit?). These objections of Patrizi were pressing. Telesio recognized the merit of Aristotle who promised to rely on the senses, but afterward he accused him of incoherence for determining the causes outside the experience of the senses. Then, Patrizi asked, is it possible to determine causes by way of the senses? How can the same acting nature, in the same inert material nature, conceived as homogeneous and static matter, generate diversity? Telesio in his Solutio-
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nes (the responses to Patrizi) or Persio, who continued to work on them, could not truly avoid and resolve the difficulties raised by Patrizi, who focused on and underlined the internal limitations of Telesio’s naturalism, which remained incapable of producing a new metaphysics as Bruno did or a new physics as Galilei invented. The other point on which Patrizi brought his attacks concerned “sensibility.” For Telesio, the whole of reality is, at every moment, in possession of the power of sensation. If we would not admit universal sensibility, we would not explain how heat could avoid cold; we would not explain the contrast between the two active natural forces nor the infinite actions and reactions of the world. Sensation is an exercise in contacts, which in living beings is actuated through the organs that are the pathways that provide an easy and open entry to the forces of external things and to those things themselves so that they would arrive to modify the spirit. The spirit is a corporeal substance, a “thin matter produced by the seed or semen.” This “thinner matter” comes in contact with matter, “thicker matter” and rules over it, commands it, and dominates it. This “subtle matter” is the soul, not conceived as an Aristotelian form, but as a physical reality, capable of sensation, action, and passion. The soul is “the perception of passion,” in which the act of perceiving, the consciousness of perceiving goes beyond Telesio’s process of reduction of everything to sensibility. For Telesio, all spiritual life is reduced to sensibility; the intelligence is sensibility, or an imperfect and attenuated sensibility, given that its function is found merely in memory and in the analogical passage from the known to the unknown. Consequently, between human and animal beings only a difference in grades or clarity exists, though Telesio admits that in the human being another soul exists that had been divinely superimposed to the natural soul (ibid., bk. 8, ch. 15). This explains the double practical orientation of the human being toward the earthly world and that of eternal things: The ancients, too, have posited in the human being a double power of the appetite. The first is the power that can be attributed to the spirit, which desires sensitive things that appear good, even if they are not truly good and wishes to conserve the present condition. This is why this “appetite” is called “sensitive.” The second power of appetite desires things that are immortal and wishes a future and eternal conservation of itself. This I call by the name of “will” (Et duplex quidem homini appetendi vis antiquioribus etiam indita est: et altera, eaque omnino quae spiritui attribui potest, sensiles res et quae bona apparent, vel si vere bona non sint, praesentemque modo appetit conservationem proptereaque sensitivus appetitus appellatus est; altera divina immortaliaque et futuram aeternamque sui ipsius appetit conservationem, et voluntas nuncupata est, in ibid., bk. 8, ch. 15).
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This super-added soul brings us through the inquiry beyond every limit reached, and through the action beyond every good that can satisfy the spirit: “Undoubtedly human beings show the ability of being active, passive, and of desiring differently than the other animals, and this should be attributed totally to a more sublime substance than the one of the spirit derived from the semen” (Quaedam nimirum seorsum a reliquis animalibus operari patique et appetere homines videntur, quae sublimiori omnino substantiae, quam qualis spiritus e semine eductus videri potest, assignanda sunt, in ibid., bk. 5, ch. 2). Added to the natural moral life, which is realized for the human beings as they are beings of nature, one with nature, another higher morality is possible to them to which their souls as forms super-added from the outside can raise themselves. The old idea of the double nature, dear to Platonists and Aristotelians, was here returning in a previous format, connecting itself with many traditional motives of the Renaissance thought, from the theory of universal animation of things to that of God as warrantor of uniformity and rationality in nature. The characteristic proper to Telesio was that of having accentuated the rigor in the research and precise identification of the “true causes” of phenomena. He made the effort of understanding nature per se, in its selfmanifestation, in its becoming, using the experience of the senses and not the mathematical proceedings so much appreciated by Platonists. Persio, answering to Patrizi, justly underlined Telesio’s characteristic in his essential faithfulness to Aristotelianism. O Patrizi, I wish I could persuade you completely that Telesio is not against reason, but he wants reason to follow the senses, act on the sensations, and feel together with them. We have given as much weight to the law of Aristotle as a legislator would…. I told you that Telesio understood the “active natures” to be what the Peripatetics have called “forms” (Et illud omnino tibi persuadeas velim, Patritii, Telesium non aversari rationem, at eam velle sequi sensum et super sensatis vires sumere, eisque consentire. Quinimo Aristotelis legi magis nos quam ipsemet legislator dedimus…. Iam dum in colloquio familiari haec discuteremus, dixi per naturas agentes Telesium intelligere id, quod Peripatetici formas vocant). We do not need to speak of how much Aristotelianism can truly be found in the De rerum natura of Telesio which is like a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, or of the incongruity of taking as metaphysical principles the data of experience and, vice versa, of assuming as experimental data metaphysical principles. Though the work of Telesio maintains some polemical moments in their freshness, for the most part it respects the problematics of his contemporaries without rising much higher than they did. In the many pages Telesio wrote, we would in vain search for the speculative power of Pomponazzi or
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the logical rigor and lucidity of Zabarella. This explains the limited fortune that Telesio’s thought encountered in the Paduan cultural circles and, on the contrary, the enthusiasm that some of his polemical cues generated in the critics of Aristotelianism, from Patrizi to Campanella. These enthusiasms were bitterly but not effectively retorted by Iacopo Antonio Marta. We already saw Marta in a polemic against the naturalism of Porzio, but in 1587 with Propugnaculum Aristotelis adversus principia Bernardini Telesii (Defense of Aristotle against the principles of Bernardino Telesio), he attacked in eight disputations the first two books of the adversary of Telesio combining logical arguments and theological motives. What is most interesting in the work of Marta is the information that he gives about the public discussions held in Southern Italy, especially by elements of the religious orders, concerning the theories of Telesio. Evident documents of this interest for Telesio, beside the writings of Campanella or the work of Doni (De natura hominis, Basel, 1581), are Ristretto (Synopsis of Telesio’s philosophy) or La philosophia di Bernardino Telesio ristretta in brevità, et scritta in lingua Toscana dal Montano Accademico Cosentino (Naples, 1589) of Sertorio Quattromani and the translation of De rerum natura (Delle cose naturali libri due, 1573) by Francesco Martelli. 2. Francesco Piccolomini. His Polemic with Zabarella. Pietro Duodo and Stefano Tiepolo According to Pietro Ragnisco, the expert in the history of Aristotelianism in Padua, Persio had relied on Zabarella in order to introduce the teaching of Telesio’s thought in Padua. Opposed to this movement was Francesco Piccolomini of Siena, a longtime professor at the Paduan University and adversary of Zabarella, whom he treated rather badly even after Zabarella’s premature death. The controversy began, as the other with Petrella, because of logics. Zabarella in De methodis had distinguished between “order” and “method.” Order is essentially division and definition; it is of help not in finding the unknown, but only in rendering clear what is already known. Order is not hunting (venazione) for concepts, it is concerned with their disposition. On the contrary, method “does not organize parts of knowledge, but brings us from the known to the unknown, inferring this from that,” proceeding essentially by induction. If we accept this, then we understand how for Zabarella method, or inductive procedure, possessed greater importance, and demonstrative order was somewhat a simple justification for it. For Zabarella logics had simply the instrumental function of aiming at the knowledge of nature. The position of Piccolomini, “a Platonist under the mask of Aristotle” (platonico sotto la maschera d’Aristotele), as Ragnisco referred to him, was otherwise. In 1583, publishing Universa philosophia de moribus (Universal philosophy concerning moral customs) in chapters 14–24 of the introductive part, Piccolomini, without mentioning him, bitterly attacked Zabarella, who
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answered in 1584 with Apologia. Ten years later, about when Zabarella died, Piccolomini without any gallantry published a second edition of the Universa philosophia de moribus with a reply to the Apologia, the Comes politicus, which was in many passages quite audacious. For Piccolomini order is something objective and corresponds to what in nature is the mark of God: “Order is a certain divine structure in relation to one first source and rule” (ordo est constitutio quaedam divina ad unum primum caput et ducem relata). The cognitive process, which must retrace the divine path from the many to the one, is in reality, as in Plato, mostly a deduction of the many from the one, or the cognition, perhaps implicit, of the one that would give satisfaction of the many. The model for knowledge is not, as in Zabarella, physics that proceeds inductively, but mathematics and metaphysics, the process of which is but of rendering explicit what is implicit. The contrast of Zabarella and Piccolomini was not, as Ragnisco suggested, between Plato and Aristotle, theology and science, but between a naturalistic, scientific vision and a metaphysical intuition. Zabarella looked at metaphysics as physics, Piccolomini changed physics into metaphysics. This was the same question that Telesio obscurely agitated, becoming entangled in it, but that now was brought to the level of a methodical discussion with a remarkable clarity. A student at the school of Zimara, professor of logic in Siena, of philosophy in Macerata and Perugia, Piccolomini taught until 1601 in Padua. Invited to teach Aristotle, Piccolomini “amalgamated Aristotle with Plato” (lo amalgamò con Platone)—said Ragnisco—rightly observing that Piccolomini had always been essentially a Platonist. In two chapters of Universa philosophia de moribus (grade III, 20; grade V, 27), he wanted to determine the clear rapports between two thinkers, the greatest that humanity ever had, even though, he added right away, their teaching should be integrated with that of Christ. His position was no different than the one already assumed by Ficino. Piccolomini criticized those who, like Simplicius, Boethius, and Pico in recent times, intended to conciliate Platonism and Aristotelianism. Conciliation meant, in reality, to bring together the Aristotelian world of nature with the ideal world exalted by Plato: at the end of the road opened by this tendency was Giordano Bruno. Piccolomini was alien to all this. Monism, the one of naturalistic tendency of Zabarella, or the pantheism that insinuated itself in Neo-Platonism, found in him an adversary. Aristotelian nature must be kept distinct from the ideal Platonic republic. Aristotle is the teacher of the natural plane, guides us to the divine, whereas Plato is the revealer of supreme mysteries, and accompanies us to those ideal fields where the supreme truth is found. Though it is true that these motives are not lacking in Universa philosophia de moribus and analogous positions can be met elsewhere, especially in some parts of the work of 1596, Libri ad scientiam de natura attinentes (Books pertaining to the sciences of nature), it is not under his own name that
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Piccolomini professed Platonism. His contemporaries attributed to him the ten books of Academicarum contemplationum in quibus Plato explicatur et Peripatetici repelluntur (Academic considerations in which Plato is explained and the Aristotelians are confuted) printed in Basel in 1590 under the author’s name of Stephanus Theupolus (Stefano Tiepolo, a Venetian patrician). In the dedication of the work, the author thanks Piccolomini, whose “lectures and private conversations he confessed to have used” (non solum publicis lectionibus, verum domesticis sermonibus familiarissime usus sum). Was this the product of lessons and conversations that a disciple had transcribed, showing them afterward to Piccolomini, or was this a simple expedient to introduce in the citadel of Aristotelianism a profession of Platonic faith? Given the concordant witnesses on this, we may very well incline in favor of the second hypothesis, which is strengthened by another writing published in 1575 in Venice, Peripateticarum de anima disputationum libri VII (Peripatetic disputes concerning the soul) under the name of another Venetian patrician, Pietro Duodo, and whose dedication is almost identical to the one above mentioned. In this work Piccolomini is exalted “as a man learned in all kinds of sciences and a philosopher deserving all commendations” (vir omni scientiarum genere ornatissimus, philosophusque omni laude cumulatissimus). Also in this case the contemporaries attributed the work to Piccolomini, even though Duodo, learned not only in philosophy and law, but also in mathematics and astronomy, founder of the Delia Academy, was a conspicuous personality—well-known to scholars on Galileo—many times Venice’s ambassador and all given to the affairs of State. Piccolomini was a convinced Platonist, if not in his lectures, certainly in his conversations. In general, he was an elegant and efficacious expositor, but not a profound thinker. Extremely erudite, in 1600 he composed in Venice a repertory and dictionary of philosophy, De rerum definitionibus liber unus (On the definitions of things), in which the different terms are defined and discussed through an exhaustive historical examination. It is like a summa of which the constructive idea is lacking, and in which the author’s fastidious exhibition of a vast culture suppressed the efficacy of his teaching. In the five tomes of questions on nature, the Libri ad scientiam naturae attinentes, Piccolomini returns among other things to the discussion on the human mind, De humana mente. Being equally against the Averroists and Pomponazzi, Porzio, and Zabarella, against whom he is polemical without ever naming him, Piccolomini strongly denied the separation of the possible and agent intellects. He wrote, “The agent mind … is not divine, but human and placed in our power … it is not God, angel or separate intelligence, but a faculty of the rational soul” (mens agens … non divina, sed humana, et in nostra facultate posita … non Deus, non angelus, non separata intelligentia, sed facultas animae rationalis, in Libri ad scientiam, bk. 1, ch. 10). The agent intellect is not distinct from the possible in reality, but only abstractly and “its action and passion are not so much contrasting that they
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cannot be part of the same subject, because it is passion only metaphorically. Contrasts and distinctions that are found in material things are easily resolved and reduced to unity when they are posited above matter” (cuius actio et passio non ita pugnant ut non valeant eidem competere, cum sit passio solum per metaphoram, et in collocatis supra materiam quae in materiatis pugnant et sunt distincta in unum facile veniant simulque conspirent). The same mind when it is considered deprived of notions and ready to be stirred by the phantasm is said to be in potency, and on the contrary when it abstracts, judges, composes, and reasons is said to be active or agent (Ibid., bk. 1, ch. 12). In this way, Piccolomini arrived at the conclusion that in Plato but also in Aristotle the notion exists of the immortality of the individual soul, which only some acute and subtly dangerous individuals wanted to deny: The Philosopher has affirmed that the soul is not a nature, but a super nature that does not concern physics, but the divine plan. The soul is of the same kind of things that are called the intelligibles in absolute sense; it can exist as separate as what is eternal from what is mortal; it is immune from matter, passion, and any mixture with corporeity. The soul is per se intelligible and is intelligent, has no need of corporeal instruments, is indivisible and partaking of divine characters. It is selfconscious, and for its proper condition is in conformity with the nature of things. As a Lady gifted with freedom, it is capable of becoming everything and possesses other similar properties that clearly show that it is free from mortality. With all this there have been men of great ingenuity, who, willing to diabolically adumbrate this light of truth, have excogitated various theories in favor of opposite theses (Ibid., bk. 3, ch. 8). This treatment of Piccolomini is quite abstract, dogmatic, and deprived of power. His greater work is the vast treatise on morality, the Universa philosophia de moribus, in which with the Aristotelian cloth Platonic threads are woven. This work was so fastidiously prolix that the author himself decided to abbreviate it and summarized it in Italian in Compendio della scienza civile (Synopsis of civil science) published only in mid nineteenth century from a “barberiniano codex.” The human soul, created by God, is by the Creator tied to the body, thrown into a life of peregrination, which is the battlefield where one must fight in order to ascend to heaven. “Civil philosophy is nothing else than the rule of human living, law of our actions, faithful support in our dangerous path in this mortal course, and finally the nearest road for our return to the celestial fatherland” (La filosofia civile altro non è che regola dell’umana vita, legge delle nostre azioni, fida scrota nel periglioso sentiero di questo corso mortale, ed insomma vicina strada per ritornare alla patria celeste). Having distinguished in ethics the part that posits the principles from the one that gives the precepts, Piccolomini distributes the subject in an Aristote-
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lian fashion, first examining affections, will, and freedom, moving thereafter to the consideration of the semivirtutes or half-virtues. These semivirtutes are natural gifts, positive habits of obedience, modesty, and continence. After this, he examines moral, rational, and heroic virtues that open up the treatments that go from friendship seen as the bond between human beings to supreme goodness in general, and the supreme good of cities and civil life. To follow Piccolomini in his prolix composition would serve no purpose here and now. Instead we want to point out how he placed heroic virtue at the apex of moral life, identifying heroic virtue not with divine or rational virtue, but with moral virtue “because moral virtue, by being human virtue, which partakes in divine splendor, is found midway between human and divine virtues and makes us heroes” (la quale essendo virtú umana, partecipando dello splendor divino, diviene mezza fra l’umana e divina e ci rende eroi). 3. Francesco Patrizi of Cherso Francesco Patrizi of Cherso was asked to comment on the Republic of Plato at the University of Ferrara when he was no longer young (having been born 25 April 1529) and after a life of toil and problems. He studied in Padua with Tomitano, Passero, the Aristotelian Lazzaro Buonamici, and Francesco Robortello, the only one among these people he remembered with gratitude. “Il Robortello mi fu maestro ed io gli son compare” (Robortello has been my teacher and now I am his partner). Learned in Greek, Patrizi translated beside Proclus the comment of Philoponus on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (Ferrara, 1583), which is mostly known for this Latin version (of which only one manuscript of a later period exists in Vienna). Though his education had been Peripatetic, Patrizi turned immediately all his sympathies toward Platonism, as demonstrated by the publication in Venice in 1553 of La Città felice (The happy city). In 1571, always in Venice, the first volume of Discussiones Peripateticae appeared. This work was completed and published in Basel in 1581 and was dedicated to Zaccaria Mocenigo, who was studying in Padua with Pendasio and Girolamo Amalteo. The work, impressive for doctrine, examines Aristotle’s life, works, and the Aristotelian tradition to contemporary times, comparing it to Neo-Platonic and Platonic thought with the evident intention to strike at Aristotelianism. The anti-Peripatetic intention is almost concealed at first—the one tome is dedicated to the Aristotelian Antonio Montecatini—but becomes open and aggressive in the last tomes of the work. Rightly, after the first part, in which he narrated the life of the philosopher, Patrizi impetuously protested, “Not one motive would induce us to admire such life. His customs were not so holy, nor his actions so magnificent, nor so prominent his vicissitudes that they should or could originate admiration among human beings” (nessun motivo può indurci in essa ad ammirazione; infatti né i suoi costumi furono cosí santi, né cosí magnifiche le sue azioni, né cosí varie le sue vicende da dovere o potere ingenerare ammirazione negli uomini, in Discussiones Peripateticae, bk. 1, ch. 2).
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In the second part, Patrizi shows how Aristotle agreed with Plato but also with Neo-Platonists in quite many subjects. His intention was far from that of Pico or, from among his own contemporaries, of Francesco Vimercati. Patrizi used “concordia” or correspondence to show how Aristotle, after having widely profiteered from his predecessors, instead of kindly acknowledging what he owed them, he bitterly attacked them. He revealed his intention immediately at the beginning of part three. “But how could he—without any respect for the ancient virtue and wisdom of such great men, from whom all of his philosophy he conveniently derived—bitterly attack them? Why has he revealed their arcane truths in such a pompous way? Why has he appropriated the largest part of their discoveries?” (at cur, nulla antiqui moris, nulla tam magnorum virorum—a quibus philosophiam omnem suam haurire non est dedignatus—sapientiae habita ratione, eos omnes acerbissime carpsit? Illorum arcana profusa oratione reseravit? Illorum inventa maxima ex parte sua fecit, in ibid., bk. 3, p. 295). It is very indicative that Patrizi opposed the Pre-Socratic principles to those of Aristotle. Aristotle spoke of privation and derivation of things through contrariety; but “nature does not generate its own things producing contrary from contrary, but similar from similar.” The philosophy of the naturalists was much better, much truer, while the Aristotelian principles “could not even be principles. If … they were to be principles they would have no strength, no force, and no power to generate things. They don’t contribute to the generation of any kind of thing. What does the cold of a piece of wood contribute to the fire so that the fire would warm up or burn the wood? Or what does the privation of a form contribute to the generation of a form?” (Ne principia quidem esse possunt. Et si … possunt, nullam tamen vim, nullum robur, nullam virtutem ad res gerendas habent, nihil ad cuiusquam rei generationem conferunt. Quid enim frigiditas ligni confert, ut ab igne aut calefiat, aut ignescat? Aut quid privatio formae confert ad formam generandam? In ibid., bk. 4, sect. 1, pp. 369–374). Patrizi offered more insights: Aristotle very often exalted the senses, but then he posited principles that in no way could be perceived by the senses (admiror principia ea posuisse quae nullis sensibus percipiantur). Again, if all principles were eternal, if the sun were eternal, if eternal were the world and the heavens, from where would originate mutation? Unfortunately, Patrizi stifled the observations that were expressing the everywhere circulating new exigencies with exaggerated erudition and a continuously growing fervor in attacking Aristotle. This explains Bruno’s reaction, though he came very near to many of Patrizi’s opinions. Bruno shouted once referring to Patrizi: “Manure of pedants! He has much of the bestial manner and of the donkey!” (Sterco di pedanti, mostra aver molto del bestiale e dell’asino). Just read his book and you will discover “how much madness and presumptuous vanity would make a pedantic habit a cause of ruin” (in quanta pazzia e presentuosa vanità può precipitare e profondare un abito
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pedantesco). But Bruno would not have maintained his judgment after the publication in 1591 of Nova de universis philosophia, libri quinquaginta comprehensa: in qua Aristotelico methodo non per motum, sed per lucem et lumina ad primam causam ascenditur. Deinde nova quadam et peculiari methodo tota in contemplationem venit divinitas. Postremo methodo Platonico rerum universitas a conditore Deo deducitur (A New Philosophy about all things in fifty books, in which with an Aristotelian method we ascend to the first cause not through motion, but through light. Then with a new and peculiar method, divinity appears in contemplation. Finally, with a Platonic method the whole of things is deduced from God Creator). Appendixes to the work were the oracles of Zoroaster, Hermes Trimegistus, the Asclepius, the Theologia Aristotelis in the version of Moses Rovas, reviewed by P. N. Castellani (published in Rome in 1519), the ordo scientificus of Plato’s dialogues discovered by Patrizi and, finally, “many points in which it is revealed that Plato is in agreement, whereas Aristotle is in disagreement with the Catholic faith” (molti punti in cui si rivela che Platone è in accordo, Aristotele in contrasto con la fede cattolica). In the book Patrizi showed to be imbued with the pia philosophia of the Neo-Platonists, and did not hesitate to proclaim that in Hermes Trimegistus the mystery of the Trinity is more explicit than in Moses, the Platonic dialogues are all full of Christianity, and in Plotinus all the sacred theology can be found: Almost all the Fathers, discovering that with a few changes the Platonists could easily become Christians, preferred Plato and his disciples and never even mentioned Aristotle except with infamy. But about four hundred years ago, Scholastic theologians reversed the preference and founded faith on the Aristotelian impiety. In part, we excuse them because not knowing Greek, they could not know what they did, but still we do not excuse them for having placed faith on the roots of impiety. Addressing himself to the pope, he expressed the wish that the pope and his successors would assure, as he did for fourteen years in Ferrara, the teaching of the Platonic philosophers, imposing them in all Catholic countries and in the schools of the Jesuits: “Perhaps, even the German Protestants would follow the example and then they would return to be Catholic.” The old motive of Ficinian apologetics is here reaffirmed in a more explicit way. Patrizi subdivided his work into four parts, panaugia, panarchia, pampsichia, and pancosmia. In the first part, he exposed the theory of the universal light that descends from God, pater luminum, and diffuses itself throughout the whole as material, ethereal, and empyrean light. The treatise must begin from light because it is on the senses that we must first of all rely, and among the senses, sight is the first and it primarily perceives the light of the day and of life (a sensibus exordium primum, inter sensus visus est primarius. Visui prima et pura cognita sunt lux et lumen).
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The function of light is of being intermediate between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Light is “the simplest of things, not double, and no matter and form are existing in it. It is uniquely matter and form to itself.” The light fills up the infinite space, incorporeal body and it is infinite like space. Heat and fluid matter (ille primaevus fluor) are united with light and permeate the whole. With the infinity of light and space, the infinity of the world is connected. “If space and world contain the whole, then world and space would be the same for what concerns capability and local specifications. Then if the space is infinite, the world as well would be infinite.” It is an infinity justified as an infinite effect of an infinite cause and as the necessary presupposition of a reality experienced as finite. When a contrary (finite) is given, the contrary (infinite) is also given; when a part (finite) is given, the whole is assumed. 4. Marcello Palingenio Stellato. Aonio Paleario. Scipione Capece Other Philosopher-Poets The anti-Aristotelianism of Patrizi, with its motives of a philosophy of nature rooted on the ancient metaphysics of light that in the Platonic currents had always animated naturalistic conclusions, brings us in one way back to Telesio and in another way ahead with Bruno. Bruno saw Patrizi in communion with Peter Ramus, who was animated by rhetorical and humanistic preoccupations present as well in Patrizi, but also like Patrizi occupied in a violent anti-Aristotelian polemic, open to Platonism, and rich with mathematical interests. From Telesio, to whom in 1572 he addressed a series of objections that had some effects, Patrizi perhaps derived some inspiration for his doctrine of space. With Bruno, Patrizi shared the conception and the justification for an infinite universe. In connection with this conception and the theory of light, we must mention the work of Marcello Palingenio Stellato (Pier Angelo Manzoli), who in one of his poems, Zodiacus vitae, celebrated in twelve books, titled according to the signs of the zodiac, a kind of Platonic vision of things, but without Epicurean-Lucretian resonances. Stellato knew that his Platonism could very well be in contrast with faith, but sustained that the fact could not be imputed to him because, he explained, “When I speak of things of philosophy I refer to the different opinions of the philosophers, especially the Platonic ones. If their opinions are false, they and not I should be condemned.” He spoke of the world of ideas, hovering above the sky, in the kingdom of pure light, with accents of inspired faith, as in Pisces (vv. 181ff.): It is there that the immaterial forms of things are perfect and pure. The long ages would not make them old or used or consumed by their destiny. It is there that the most beautiful things are found, created by omnipotent nature, not in the corporeal world. The divine mind of Plato has known these incorporeal
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forms. What matters if the invidious multitude attack the writings of this great man and ridicule him? The mysteries of the Gods cannot be known by everyone! (Ergo illic formae rerum sine materia sunt perfectae ac purae, quas nec longaeva vetustas laedere, nec vis ulla potest dissolvere fati. Plurima sunt illic etiam pulcherrima quae non corporeo in mundo omnipotens natura creavit … Has formas incorporeas divina Platonis mens olim agnovit: quamvis turba invida tanti scripta viri carpat risuque illudat amaro, sed cunctis non posse datum est mysteria Divum). All creation is constituted by three worlds: sub-celestial, celestial, and supercelestial. Above the sub-celestial world, beyond the closed limits of the celestial world, the infinite light-that God, the infinite power, has produced without limitations-extends infinitely itself, demonstrating God’s continuous activism: Because God could produce an infinite entity, we can believe It produced an infinite work, with all power. But the learned Aristotle has denied there can be an infinite body and I agree with him in this. Beyond the terminals of sky we have posited no bodies, but a pure immense light without corporeity (Quoniam potuit facere infinita, putandum est fecisse infinita, omnemque explesse vigorem. Atqui infinitum corpus posse esse negavit doctus Aristoteles; ego in hoc assentior illi, quipped extra caeli fines non ponimus ullum corpus, sed puram immensam et sine corpore lucem). This is a light invisible to human eyes, in which the world swims, and the gods reside. Plato unites with Ficino and Pseudo-Dionysius, not without some Aristotelian elements. This new metaphysics of light as it subdivides into three parts, in visible light, light as kingdom of God, and intermediary light, zone of the minor gods, shows some uncertainties. The observations on the impassibility of God and on the eternity of the world are not always original. Present in Palingenio is a curious contrast between a Lucretian inspiration that translates into a hymn to Epicurus and Epicurean morality, and a PlatonicFicinian conclusion. Ficino had already experienced this difficulty and resolved it with a precise choice in favor of Plotinus against Epicurus. In Palingenio, in the enigmatical Palingenio, many motives, not only of ethics, but also of Epicurean-Lucretian physics persist. He aspires not to a choice, but to a synthesis; he is still open to themes of any kind, especially those magic-
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astrological. It is difficult to say that his intentions have succeeded. He succeeded as an effective poet when, touching a cord truly profound, he condemned the vanity of the world, from which only a robust moral faith can save. Brief and fleeting residence is the world! See in Pisces (vv. 295–297; 320–322): Brief is the permanence on earth; God has posited your fatherland in heaven. Make the effort of returning to your paternal abodes. Despise this frail life, which begins with crying, grows with fatigue and pains, and ends with death. (Terra breve hospitium est: patriam Deus aethere vestram constituit: patrias optate revisere sedes. Hanc igitur fragilem vitam contemnite, cuius principium est fletus, medium labor et dolor, at mors finis). The anguish is so great that suicide alone would end it, as In Virgo (vv. 964ff.): If religion, the laws of Plato, and God were not contrary, / I would exhort you to end your own life, / this mad destiny, and abandon these lands of wickedness. (Quod nisi religio obstaret, legesque Platonis / et Deus, hortarer te ultro dimittere vitam / et sortem insanam et sceleratas linquere terras). The foolishness and absurdity of the world bring him to formulate an affirmation on the radical evilness of the whole. Wickedness and uselessness reveal themselves in the flight of time beyond the illusory present, a flight impossible to seize. In Capricornus (vv. 725ff ): Here he was, did this, fought, won, loved, ruled, controlled his household and subjugated nations. Here he composed books. But now where are all things? Nowhere. Where is he now? Nowhere. What does remain of all this? Nothing. Where did he go? To the wind. Alas! All things that on earth seem beautiful and admirable are nonsense and dreams. What do I care about what I was or what I did? One simple “I am” is worthy more than a thousand “I was.” But this “I am” too has wings, and flies away (Hic fuit, hic fecit, pugnavit, vicit, amavit, regnavit, gentes domuit, populosque subegit, composuit libros; at nunc ubi talia? Nusquam, ipse ubi nunc? Nusquam; quid nunc? Nihil; aut abiit quo? In ventos. Heu, heu nugae et mera somnia sunt haec, Quaecumque in terris pulchra et miranda videntur. Quid mihi cum fuit aut fecit? Nempe est valet unum
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Plus quam mille fuit. Verum hoc est utitur alis, Transvolat.) The poetry of Palingenio, the fortune he had in Protestant countries, reminds us of another philosophical poem among the many of the unhappy Aonio Paleario, De immortalitate animarum (On the immortality of souls). The two works were composed almost in the same period around 1535, and reflected similar taste and orientation. The poetry of Lucretius influenced Paleario’s poetic form and Platonic thought influenced his poetry’s content. It is to Plato, instead of Epicurus, that he raised a hymn (De immortalitate animarum, bk. 2, vv. 1–6): O glory of the Greek people, from whose mouth golden rivers spring, where in the rich fields grow the happy Panacea and the sweet reddish hyacinth. O beautiful Aristocles of divine origin, with you as my guide I would have no fear in exploring the things hidden by blinding darkness. (Flumina qui Grajae gentis decus aurea fundis ore sacro, surgit passim quo pinguibus arvis et felix Panacea, et suave rubens Hyacinthus, pulcher Aristocles, sanctis natalibus orte, te duce non verear coecis offusa tenebris explorare). From Platonism and Stoicism, for which in many other writings he manifested admiration, Paleario derived the sense of the divine and of the divine presence throughout all creation. God lives Its interior process (De immortalitate animarum, bk. 1, vv. 51–58): Surveying the sacred abodes and those in depth posited, God—What a wonderful thing to tell!—sees Itself alone. God inspects the eternal fires and the walls of the heavens, the ships cutting through oceans, the bitter lands of the earth, the range of forms of things, everything everywhere. When It looks at Itself, It is inflamed with the holy love of Itself, embraces all kinds of human natures and beasts, and immense as God is, It embraces the immense universe (Ille quidem sacros aditus, penitusque repostos adservans, se ipsum tantum (mirabile dictu) dum videt, aeternos ignes et moenia coeli prospicit, et mare navigerum, et dura aequora terrae, et varias rerum formas, et quicquid ubique est. Dumque ipsum spectar se, sancto incensus amore ipse sui, genus omne hominum, genus omne ferarum,
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The fixed goal of all this whirlwind of things is the source of a strictly observed order challenged or made impossible by the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus (De immortalitate animarum, bk. 2, vv. 322–325): If the organs and the members of our mortal bodies / were due to an encounter fortuitous, they would not / all grow and function in a specific time, but truly / as fate would decide, now faster, now slower (Nam si fortuitis fierent concursibus, artus / tempore non certo moribundaque membra vigerent: / verum nunc citius, nunc serius, ut tulerit sors). Of the soul, Paleario speaks in terms strictly Platonic or, better, in terms that fluctuate between echoes of the myth of Phaedrus and reminiscences of the theories concerning the souls and the intelligences that guide the heavens (Ibid., bk. 2, vv. 125–132): [The soul] conscious of itself considers its own immense powers. Taken by the sacred desire for things eternal, the soul follows on the arduous conquest of the splendid heaven, ascending with agile wings. It comes and goes in the same ways, circling around. When it finally sees the immortal Gods, it turns to itself like to some God and the countenance, the form, and the splendor of the Gods it recognized. Then, the soul admires and loves itself. (Illa itidem sibi nota, suas secum ipsa volutat immensas vires: sanctaque cupidine capta rerum aeternarum, liquidi super ardua caeli dum sequitur, sese tollit pernicibus alis, itque reditque viam et gyros metatur eosdem: dumque Deos videt immortales illa Deus quis in se convertit vultum, formamque coloremque agnoscit Divum, et sese admiratur amatque). What we saw in Paleario is the return of the motives of reflection of the first Renaissance, characteristically presented with a fine humanistic coating and styled in Lucretian forms. It was the philosophy that was loved and praised by Pietro Bembo and his good friend Jacopo Sadoleto, who in 1536 wrote to Sebastiano Grifio: “The rhythm of the poem wishes to imitate Lucretius, and indeed it smacks at the ancient poetry; but … it also possesses a humanistic flavor…. A Christian mind, and a religious manifestation that is perfect and pure” (numerus porro carminis is est, ut videatur Lucretium velle imitari, redolet enim antiquum illud; sed … sapore humanitatis conditus…. Christiana mens, integra castaque religio). The Lucretian rhythm, although with its different content, seemed to insinuate an amorous adoration of nature, a humble and at the same time exalted admiration for the world in its totality. Not by pure chance, Giorgio Veneto wrote what follows, translating in his strange
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vision the symphony of the world, and combining together in a Platonism with Stoic tendencies, mysticism and naturalism, “The elements and the principles of nature, all this beautiful world is all … emanated from the One overflowing with the fecundity of all things and of both sexes, containing in Itself the total power of generating…. For this reason, the Poets named It Pan” (Elementa principiaque naturae, pulchrum quoque mundum totum emanasse [affirmant] … ab eo qui est omnium rerum, et utriusque sexus fecunditate plenissimus, vim totam continens generandi…. Hinc a Poetis Pan … dicitur). The poem of Paleario did not remain isolated in its own kind. Ludovico Parisetti da Reggio in 1541 also published a De immortalitate animae and in 1550 a Theopoeia in six books. More fortunate was Scipione Capece, a Neapolitan jurist, a protégé of Sanseverino, praiser of Seripando, follower of Valdés, author of a poem De principiis rerum, published in 1546, often reprinted until the 18th century when it was translated into Italian. Nobody, however, no matter how moderate or elegant in expressions, ever reached the loftiness of the enigmatic author of the Zodiacus vitae. 5. Giordano Bruno In De immenso Giordano Bruno unfolded the thought of Marcello Palingenio Stellato, whom he liked very much, not only for the poetic vision of the universe, but also for a bitter and suffering self-awareness. All the motives and aspirations of Renaissance philosophy converged in different ways in Bruno’s work, in an intertwining of the disparate opinions. It is inevitable therefore that we should begin with the consideration of the ambient within which his activity came to situate itself among diversity of tendencies and contrasts, increased by religious discussions between Platonic inheritances and Aristotelian motives. These motives could have pertained to Averroism, Alexandrianism, Thomism, or any other of the many variations that in sixteenth century the Aristotelian tradition made its own. A. Life and Works Filippo Bruno, born in the beginning of 1548 near Nola, until the age of fourteen studied in Naples. “In Naples, up to the age of fourteen, I studied the humanities, logic, and dialectic. I also used to audit the public lectures of someone called ‘Sarnese’ and privately took logic with the Augustinian friar, Teofilo of Vairano, who later taught metaphysics in Rome” (E sono stato a Napoli a imparar lettere de umanità logica e dialettica sino a 14 anni; e solevo sentir le lezioni pubbliche d’uno che si chiamava il Sarnese, ed andavo a sentir privatamente la logica da un padre augustiniano, chiamato fra’ Teofilo da Vairano, che doppo lesse la metaphysica in Roma). Giovan Vincenzo Colle of Sarno, because of his native place, was called “Sarnese” and was known for some writings on logic published as an appendix to an Averroist commentary of Girolamo Balduino, a writer at that time
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much esteemed and discussed. Of Sarnese, Antonio Corsano has correctly made in evidence the polemic against the grammarians who were criticizing Averroès only because of his way of writing, and that he professed an antideterministic faith common to Balduino and Aurelius Pacca, who were teaching logic at the university. The first formation therefore of Bruno was of the Aristotelian kind, and he will remember in the proem of Eroici Furori, “those men learned in Peripatetic doctrine by which we were educated and nourished in our youth” (gli peripatetici nella dottrina de quali siamo allievati e nodriti in gioventú). Of Teofilo of Vairano nothing is known, with the exception that he was a friar of the Order of the Augustinian Hermits, which with Giles of Viterbo and Girolamo Seripando shared the Renaissance exaltation of Platonism. We must also add to the influence of these teachers the very early one of Ramon Lull and his art of memory. In Triginta sygillorum explicatio (Explanation of the thirty seals), Bruno will again write, “When I was till young I found this principle from Pietro Tommai of Ravenna’s works. It was a small spark … but used as a match it gave way to many new sparks” (Adhuc puer ex monumentis Ravennatis expiscari potui [hoc principium]. Hoc modica favilla fuit … e cuius flammiferis ignitus plurimae hinc emicant favillae). It was an opuscle of mnemonics, titled Foenix, which Pietro wrote in 1491and became widely known and used. At the age of eighteen—and not as he declared by error, of fourteen and fifteen—Bruno entered the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, taking the name of Giordano and beginning perhaps to attend the Studium of St. Thomas, of which he always declared himself to be an admirer. Charles Cotin wrote,“Il prise souverainement Saint Thomas in Summa contra Gentiles et in Quaestionibus disputatis” (he [Bruno] greatly esteemed St. Thomas in the Summa contra Gentiles and in the Quaestionibus disputatis). At the same time and in contrast to the above, Cotin mentioned Bruno’s disdain for Scholastic subtleties, Cardinal Cajetan, Gian Francesco Pico, and all the philosophy of the Jesuits, “within which only the text and the interpretation of Aristotle are discussed.” It would be almost impossible to review analytically all the readings that Bruno did. He certainly studied both Platonists and Aristotelians, with curious anxiety going from the texts of antiquity to the medieval and contemporary ones, plunging into that hermetic, magic, and astrological literature, whose echo so often returns in his works. The desire for knowledge brought him to fraternize with those spirits who believed to be able to trace the secret of the whole in works surrounded by mystery and in the sciences of the occult. Bruno would still indulge mystical-magical motives even after a vision of things that remained alien from any concession made outside of rational processes precisely and affirmatively had established itself in his mind. The discipline of Aristotelianism, which remained with him beyond the polemics, could never overcome the confused residues of Neo-Platonic tendencies that
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we saw continuously sprouting forth in citations and references. These were citations and references of many kinds from which Felice Tocco was able to retrace in addition to other sources some of the readings of Bruno. It was on these readings that Bruno’s new synthesis radicalized with originality, transfiguring Aristotelianism and Platonism, Lull and the divine Cusanus, so dearly admired and loved, Ficino and Pico and Copernicus, and the ancient with modern philosophers and scientists. At the same time, the insistent and scourging popularity of the satire of pedants, literati, grammarians, all those who in rhetoric were wasting away the germs of the Renaissance revolution, was growing around him. The cloistral life was unsuitable to the restless and hot temperament of Bruno. Within a short period after his profession of religious life, he was prosecuted two times: The first time for having given away certain figures and images of saints and only kept a Crucifix, giving the suspicion that he despised the images of saints. And the second time was when he told a novice who was reading the History of the Seven Joys [of the Virgin] in verses of getting rid of that useless book and of starting to read some other books, like for instance, The Life of the Holy Fathers (Prima per aver dato via certe figure ed imagine de Santi e retenuto un Crucifisso solo, essendo per questo imputato de sprezzar le imagini de Santi; ed anco per aver detto a un novizio che leggeva la Istoria delle sette allegrezze [della Vergine] in versi, che cosa voleva far di quell libro, che lo gettasse via e leggesse piú presto qualche altro libro, come è la “Vita de’ santi Padri”). At first, the proceedings were put aside, but then they were reactivated in 1576 when it happened that Bruno imprudently spoke with some fellowmembers. It was the time when Protestant suggestions had some effect on him who was reading Erasmus and was impressed by the new Biblical criticism. It was his impetuous and imprudent disposition that brought him to speak without any restraint in front of ignorant evil-minded individuals, ready to report and distort his assertions. We can read with painful awareness what his jail companions were saying about him who of his speeches could grasp only what their vulgar nature could allow. Very early Bruno must have had doubts about religion and, if we were to believe the proceedings of the process, he made no mystery of it. He would tell the Venetian Inquisitors: “I had doubts about the name of person given to the Son and Holy Ghost … and I had this doubt from the age of eighteen to the present. But I have never denied, taught, or written on this matter, which I have doubted and kept for myself” (Ho in effetto dubitato circa il nome di persona del Figliuolo e dello Spirito santo … e questa opinione l’ho tenuta da disdotto anni della mia età sino adesso; ma in effetto non ho mai però negato,
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ne insegnato né scritto, ma sol dubitato tra me). He also confessed of having doubted about the Incarnation: “I doubted how this second person could incarnate” (Ho dubitato come questa seconda persona se sia incarnata). All that he affirmed was done by way of philosophizing, “I have not professedly said or written these things to challenge Catholic faith, but solely relying on philosophical reasons” (ma però io non ho detto né scritte queste cose ex professo, né per impugnar la fede cattolica, ma fondandomi solamente nelle raggioni filosofiche). During the confession and exposition of his own ideas, he made this preamble before the Venetian Inquisitors: The matter of all these books, speaking in general, is matter concerning diverse parts of philosophy as the different titles of these books indicate.… In these books I have philosophically defined all terms according to the principles of natural reason, with no reference to what has to be accepted by faith. I believe that nothing exists in them that can be used against me because they professedly show that I did not intend to attack religion but exalt philosophy. It is possible that I may have said some impious things on the basis of my natural insights (La materia di tutti questi libri, parlando in generale, è materia filosofica e, secondo l’intitulazione de detti libri, diversa … nelli quali tutti io sempre ho diffinito filosoficamente e secondo li principii e lume naturale, non avendo riguardo principal a quel che secondo la fede deve essere tenuto; e credo che in essi non si ritrova cosa per la quale possa esser giudicato, che da professo piú tosto voglia impugnar la religione che esaltare la filosofia, quantumque molte cose impie fondate nel lume mio naturale possa aver esplicato). It is most clear from both his preoccupation of reforming mankind through a universal faith, in which Christianity could be shaped within the terms of his philosophy, and from the constant polemic he continuously engaged against Catholicism, that Bruno never limited himself merely to philosophical discussions, entrenching himself in a kind of renewed double truth. In the Sommario of the process published by Angelo Mercati we find an accurate classification of the critical points referred to not only by Zaccaria Mocenigo, but also by his fellow-prisoners, in which the constant polemic motive against Catholicism and often even against Christianity is present, although we may concede that there was some hostile idle talk. It may be that nothing irreverent existed in his discussions over the form of the cross, but it is not improbable that he would derive from it a motive to assert, “Christ did die shamefully” (Christo aveva fatto morte vituperosa). Of Christ he used to say, “all the miracles He did were done through necromancy” (che tutti li miracoli che fece li fece per arte di nigromantia), and also that Christ “sinned mortally when during the oration in the garden refused the will of the Father” (peccó mortalmente quando fece l’oratione nell’orto recusando la volontà del Padre). It should
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not even be excluded that he ridiculed the sacraments and denied the existence of hell, “There is no hell and no one is damned to an eternal pain, … for sure there is a purgatory that is the same as what we call inferno, which is in effect purgatory because the pains of inferno are not eternal” (che non ci è Inferno e nissuno è dannato di pena eterna, … ma bene il Purgatorio ch’era quell’istesso che noi chiamiamo Inferno, ma che in effetto era Purgatorio perché le pene dell’Inferno non erano eterne). We could continue with making evident some similarities in Bruno with the attitudes of Campanella and some concordances in the testimonies brought against the two monks. This parallelism is something not to be disregarded because it is of use for a better understanding in Bruno of the desire of renovating the world through his philosophy, eliminating all disagreements and contentions. With Charles Cotin, Bruno was looking forward for “the absence of problems in religion” (des troubles en la religion), and it is probable that he looked at Henry IV as the political and moral renewer of Europe. It is not excluded that, contrary to Campanella, Bruno thought at one time of having some valid efficacy on the spirit of the pope when, being frustrated with the Protestants and tired of the exile, he hoped to conquer the pope’s benevolence with the gift of his works on the liberal arts. Bruno saw in religion a social factor. Among Catholics, it is convenient to live as Catholics, among the Reformed as Reformed—as he was saying—in order not to upset the common weal. He confessed: I was living as they were, eating and drinking any kind of food at any time of the year as they were on Fridays, Saturdays, Quadragesima, and other prohibited times.… I was making no distinction, except when I was among Catholics. The truth is that I had scruples; but I did it, because I was among [the Reformed] and ate with them and did not want to appear scrupulous and be laughed at (Vivendo come facevano loro nel mangiar e bever cibi d’ogni sorte in ogni tempo come facevano loro, cioè venerdí e sabbato, quadragesima ed altri tempi proibiti mangiando carne come facevan loro … non avendo nel viver distinzion alcuna, se non quando pratticava tra cattolici. Vero è che io ne aveva scropolo; ma perché praticavo con loro e mangiava con loro, per non parer scropoloso e farmi burlar da essi). No timidity baffled Bruno, who was prompt, when ideas required, arousing tumults, and disorders. On that issue, he was convinced of the uselessness of disputes and contrasts. Only when the ideas he was professing would be affirmed among humankind, having overcome all contrasts of rituals, would human beings embrace each other in the universal cult of the God that expands Itself in the whole. A God that would have very little in common with the Christian God, but could be acceptable, in the dreams of Bruno, to Henry of Navarre, or to the Signoria of Venice, or, perhaps, to the Church itself,
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which would prefer to be Catholic [Universal] instead of Christian. Averroès showed in respect to civil laws the detachment of the philosopher that wishes only to reach the beatitude of the contemplative life. Bruno felt the need of reforming the world of humanity overcoming the causes of their eternal dissentions by means of a common re-education of humankind. Only by keeping present in our minds this attitude of Bruno, we would be able to understand his conduct, not merely in relation to Catholicism, but also in relation to the reformed churches, of which he was always ready to declare himself the follower for the advantage of restating his critique. This was not the cautious expression of a refusal because it implied the initial acceptance of certain values of the positive religion, which should have been modeled according to the exigencies of the philosophical cre
