History of Italian Philosophy (Value Inquiry Book Series Vol. 191)

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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

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

x

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

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

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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

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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-

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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).

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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-

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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.

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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

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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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY thing, do we then doubt that all this come to be not merely by reason but by some outstanding and Divine Reason?

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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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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY of learning it! But this is the only one teacher of Greek letters and once he is gone you will have no one else from whom to learn them.” At last, won by these reasons, I gave myself totally to Chysoloras with so much eagerness for learning that what I had learned during the day, by night sleeping I was still thinking upon. I had many companions in these studies, but those who succeeded more than the rest were Ruberto Rufo [Rossi] and Palla, the son of Nofri degli Strozzi. Jacopo d’Agnolo was also learning that discipline with us … and later even Pier Paolo Vergerio joined the group.

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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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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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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY the one our souls have in the effort of knowing themselves] overcoming the obstacles of the bodies. Of this ability lack completely the souls, which are unhappy, which, instead than themselves, see foremost through nature and the senses their own bodies and those of the others. Wherefrom derived that disgraceful error that these souls are incapable of considering themselves as entities distinct from their bodies.

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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY (Conspiciens librorum quorundam magnitudinem, tedium constituentem in animo studentium, nec non et aliorum nimiam brevitatem, quibus nulla fere est annexa doctrina, ideo volens medium retinere utriusque sapiens naturam extremi, compendium construxi iuvenibus, pluribus divisum tractatibus quorum primus summularum tradit notitiam; secundus suppositionum declarat materiam tertius consequentiarum ostendit doctrinam; quartus terminorum vim instruit probativam; quintus ligandi regulam docet obligativam; sextus insolubilia solvendi dat artem et viam; septimus contra primum obiicit, solutionem addens responsivam; octavus tertium fortificat per rationem argumentativam.)

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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY angel is imperfect to the angelical multitude, which the angel possesses by being numbered, a creature. What in the angel is perfect we attribute it to its approaching unity, which the angel possesses so to be joining God (angelus non est ipsa unitas, alioquin Deus esset…. Reliquum est angelus numerus sit. Quod si est numerus, alia sui parte multitudo … est autem omnis numerus eatenus imperfectus quatenus multitudo, perfectus autem quatenus unus…. Quidquid in angelo imperfectum est angelicae multitudini, quam inde habet unde est numerus, id est creatura, et quicquid perfectum est accedenti unitati quam inde habet, unde Deo coniungitur, ascribamus).

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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY izes an inferior matter. And this has to be so, though, according to the Truth that Aristotle did not know, the human soul must be considered indivisible. My opinion is that this must be posited only through faith, not through natural reason.… The Roman Church does not rely on the nonsense of the philosophers or on the human reason that is all so much wrapped in mist, but on the Holy Spirit, on the most evident miracles in which there can be no error. Not even the reasons or the words of Aristotle will convince us to recede from this pious determination.

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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY nations clearer and more authentic vestiges of those events. I am speaking of Chaldeans, Armenians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians. It is among these peoples that the Theology of the Ancients can be found partly clear and manifest, partly mixed with fables and intricate, and partly corrupted by impious figments (Hinc nations hae quae priores sunt satae et in quorum terris natae et gestae res antiquorum sunt, earum rerum clariora ac pura quam ceterae monimenta retinuerunt: dico Chaldeos, Armenios, Babylonios, Assyrios, Aegyptios, Phoenices, pene quos partim aperta et detecta, partim fabulosa et scyrpis et latebris absconsa et dissimulata, partim impiis figmentis violata Theologia maiorum resedit).

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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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY and as they are they wish to be seen in the splendor of light. (Ollis divina super mens Astat, magna, micans: cuius radiata nitore, Quae fuerant obscura prius simulacra, repente Fiunt coram anima, claraque in luce refulgent. Non aliter quam quae caeca sub nocte tenentur, Si feriat rutilum Solis iubar, omnia late Splendescunt, pulchraque petunt in luce videri).

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 credo of Bruno and in conformity with his practical intentions. B. Trials and Condemnation The trial for heresy in Naples forced Bruno to escape to Rome. Then he had to abandon Rome for the worsening of the trial and for the fear of being charged with murder in the case of assassination of a monk, not because he did it, but because it was easy to implicate him since the deceased was one of Bruno’s accusers. From Rome Bruno, dismissing the monk’s robe, went to Noli “territory of Genoa” where he “taught grammar to children … and interpreted the sphere for some gentlemen.” From there he went through Savona and Turin to Venice where he gave to the printers a small book titled Dei segni de’ tempi (On the signs of our times). From Padua to Lyon, from Lyon to Geneva, Bruno continued on the run, and in Geneva tried to approach the Protestant world, joined Calvinism, audited courses in theology, and then again rebelled, printed a libel against a professor, and restarted his peregrinations. In Toulouse he obtained the title of Master of Arts and “for two years commented on the text of Aristotle’s De anima and gave other lessons in philosophy.” Soon after, because of the wars of religion and the indifference of the students, he placed himself on a new journey. In Paris, Bruno gave “an extra-curricular course,” printed the De umbris idearum, in addition to Candelaio and Cantus circaeus. At this time he was also teaching the art of memory to Henry III, became “extra-ordinary lecturer with stipend,” but, because of the tumults that originated thereafter, he passed on to England under the protection of the French Ambassador De la Mauvissière. He stayed in England from spring 1583 to November 1585, where he published the Italian dialogues, continued to write on mnemonics, and initiated the De immenso. For a very short time, he was a lecturer at Oxford, where “he publicly disputed with those doctors in theology in the presence of the Polish Prince Alasco and members of the English nobility.” It was a tempestuous disputation, in which the adversary, a certain Doctor John Underhill, was beaten in at least fifteen positions he held and ended looking like a helpless creature (pulcino entro la stoppa). Underhill, by leaving the debate, showed “incivility and discourtesy.” Bruno could not

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complete his “public lectures on the immortality of the soul and on the fivefold sphere.” Bruno demonstrated his irritation against the grammatical pedantry and flat Oxonian Aristotelianism in other occasions, but found its specific manifestation in the letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University, which was not an inopportune request for venia legendi, but the violent and manifest expression of the indignation of Bruno. In England, he found learned and illustrious friends like sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, but also hostilities that only the protection of Monsieur De la Mauvissière could render innocuous. Back to Paris with Michel de Castelnau, he published some minor writings and in the College of Cambrai together with his disciple Jean Hannequin was involved in a violent dispute attacking Aristotelian physics in 1586 with CXX articuli de Natura et mundo adversus Peripateticos (One hundredtwenty articles concerning nature and the world, against Peripatetic scholars), which were reprinted in 1588 with the new title Acrotismus Camoeracensis (Lectures at the College of Cambrai). This meridian light cast over the eyes of the Aristotelian moles, the voice of nature “examined on the basis of the indications of the senses and confirmed with the defining reason” gave way to a tumultuous reaction. Charles Cotin narrated the facts in this way: “The students were detaining Bruno saying that they would not let him free unless he would answer their questions or renege the calumnies he had expressed against Aristotle” (Les ecoliers tenoyent aux mains Brunus, disant qu’ils ne le laisseroyent aller, s’il ne respondoit ou s’il ne renonceoit aux calumnies par luy jectées contre Aristote). Then from Paris Bruno moved to Germany, where in Wittenberg, for the mediation of Alberico Gentili, whom he had known in England, the authorities allowed him to teach for two years philosophy and comment on the Aristotelian Organon. In the fights between Lutherans and Calvinists, Bruno placed himself with the Lutherans and in the Oratio valedictoria, when again he had to move on because of the prevalence of Calvinists, he sang Luther’s praises (Opera Latina, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 21): O Luther, you saw the light! You considered and listened to the consoling divine spirit and obeyed its command. Defenseless, you faced terrible enemies, princes, and kings, with your word. You opposed, rejected, resisted, and won them. Finally, high to the heavens you raised as trophy the spoils of the most arrogant enemy (Vidisti, Luthere, lucem, vidisti lucem, considerasti, excitantem divinum spiritum audisti, praecipienti illi oboedisti, horrendo principibus atque regibus inimico inermis occurristi, verbo oppugnasti, repugnasti, obstitisti, vicisti, et hostis superbissimi spolia atque trophaeum ad superos evexisti). Bruno, the enemy of the reformed, was not Lutheran at Wittenberg more than he was Calvinist in Geneva or Catholic Christian in Naples. He was truly Jordanist, however true or strong were the slanderous accusations of Mocenigo

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that in Germany he wanted to found “a new sect under the name of a new philosophy” (Documenti, p. 60; Sommario, p. 57). His jail companions would often say that Bruno was always happy to remember how “by chance once he read the verse of Ludovico Ariosto: ‘D’ogni legge nemico, e d’ogni fede’, opposed to every law and every faith (Orlando Furioso, canto 28, v. 99) and that he liked it because it conformed with his own character asserting that he, living in his own manner, intended to offend no one” (Sommario, p. 59). This certainly portrayed Bruno’s intolerant temperament. Once he abandoned Wittenberg, Bruno went to Prague, Helmstädt, and Frankfurt, where he printed his Latin poems, in which, as he would confess later in Venice (Documenti, p. 93): Peoples would be particularly capable of seeing his intentions and what he personally had upheld. I presuppose that an infinite universe, which is the effect of the divine infinite power, exists. For I do not consider it worthy of God’s power and goodness to have created only a finite world when It was capable of creating beside this our world an infinite number of other worlds. For this reason, I have affirmed that infinite particular worlds exist similar to the Earth, which with Pythagoras I consider to be a planet. Similar to the Earth is the Moon, other planets, and other stars in an infinite number. All these bodies are countless worlds and they constitute the infinite universality in an infinite space. This is what is called “infinite universe” in which innumerable worlds are found. This means that a double kind of infinitude is found: infinitude of magnitude of the universe and infinitude of multitude of worlds. Consequently, we understand indirectly that this truth according to faith is repugnant (Particularmente si può veder l’intenzion mia e quel che ho tenuto; la qual in somma è ch’io tengo un’infinito universo, cioè effetto della infinita potenzia, perché io stimavo cosa indegna della divina bontà e potenzia che, possendo produr oltra a questo mondo un altro ed altri infiniti, producesse un mondo finito. Sí che io ho dichiarato infiniti mondi particulari simili a questo della Terra; la quale con Pittagora intendo uno astro, simile alla quale è la Luna, altri pianeti ed altre stelle, le qual sono infinite; e che tutti questi corpi sono mondi e senza numero, li quali costituiscono poi la università infinita in un spazio infinito; e questo se chiama universo infinito, nel quale sono mondi innumerabili. Di sorte che è doppia sorte de infinitudine de grandezza dell’universo e de moltitudine de mondi, onde indirettamente s’intende essere repugnata la verità secondo la fede). The De Minimo arrived in Venice in 1591 by way of two Venetian booksellers who had met Bruno at the Frankfurt’s exhibition. The book attracted the interest of Giovanni Mocenigo, the Venetian noble who invited Bruno to Ven-

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ice. Bruno would later confess that Mocenigo invited him, “because he wanted me to teach him the art of memory and the inventive one, promising that he would have treated me well and that I would be satisfied with his treatment. That was the reason why I accepted to come” (Documenti, p. 77). Here stood Bruno: the eternal exile, the deserter from all churches, and the scornful man from Nola, who with his burning mouth provoked tumults wherever he went, the academician of no academy, who was fatally addressing himself to Italy. Was he attracted by the hope for peace and agreement with the Church? Was he hoping to influence somehow with his work his own fatherland? His expressed desire was that of placing in the hands of the Pontiff the manuscript of Delle sette arti liberali (On the seven liberal arts) with some other already published works. He had heard that the pope liked the “li virtuosi” (the men of virtue): Bruno hoped for the absolution and “the grace of being allowed to live in clerical clothes outside his religious order.” First, he resided in Padua and finally became the guest of Mocenigo, to whom he began to open up, without limits, as it was in his nature. The accord with Mocenigo was ephemeral, perhaps because the Venetian noble was soon taken by scruples or even delusions. When Bruno decided to return to Frankfurt and publish his new writings, his host first tried to obtain with a kind of ultimatum the magic secrets he believed Bruno possessed and then denounced him to the Holy Office, after having treacherously locked him inside the house. On 23 May 1592, the painful pathway of Bruno began. Mocenigo denounced him saying that he did it “by obligation of conscience”: a conscience that allowed him to promise full freedom if the philosopher would decide to share his secrets! With profound bitterness, Bruno took the habit of saying that, once he excluded Mocenigo, he had no other enemy. He began to lament that Mocenigo was the man “from whom I have been most seriously offended because he has murdered me in my life, my honor, and all my things” (Documenti, p. 128). Mocenigo’s accusation against Bruno was a terrible one (Documenti, pp. 59–60): I … declare … to have heard Giordano Bruno from Nola saying that to believe that bread can transubstantiate into flesh is a great blasphemy of the Catholics, he was against the Mass and liked no religion. For him, Christ was a scoundrel who could very well predict his death because of his malintentioned work of seduction among the people. It is an imperfection of God to believe in Its distinction into three persons. The world is eternal and there is an infinite number of worlds. God continuously creates infinite worlds because, as [Bruno] says, It wants as much as It can. The miracles of Christ were apparent because he was a magician and so were his apostles. He, Bruno, could do as much if he wanted, and perhaps more than they could. Christ showed no desire to die and avoided death as long as he could. There is no punishment for sins; the souls that are created by nature transfer from one

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY animal to another. As the animals are born with corruption, so it is for the human beings who returned to be born after the floods. Bruno has shown the intention of founding a new sect under the cover of a new philosophy. He claimed that the Virgin could not give birth and that our Catholic faith is a complete blasphemy against God’s majesty. He asserted that it is necessary to deprive the friars of speech and income because they soil our world; they are like donkeys and the opinions they support are doctrines for donkeys. No proof is given that the Catholic faith has merit before God. All that is needed in order to live well is not to do to others what we don’t want others to do to us. No other sins are truly sins. It was amazing how God could tolerate so many heresies of the Catholics. Bruno said that he could apply himself to the art of divination and have the masses follow him (Io … dinunzio … aver sentito dire a Giordano Bruno nolano … che biastemia grande quella de cattolici il dire che il pane si transustanzii in carne; che lui è nemico della Messa; che niuna religione gli piace; che Cristo fu un tristo, e che se faceva opere triste di sedur popoli, poteva molto bene predire di dover esser impiccato; che non vi è distinzione in Dio di persone, e che questo sarebbe imperfezion in Dio; che il mondo è eterno, e che sono infiniti mondi, e che Dio ne fa infiniti continuamente, perchè dice che vuole quanto che può; che Cristo faceva miracoli apparenti e ch’era un mago; e cosí gli appostoli, e ch’a lui daria l’animo di far tanto, e piú di loro; che Cristo mostrò di morir malvolentieri, e che la fuggí quanto poté; che non vi è punizione di peccati, e che le anime create per opera della natura passano d’un animal in un altro; e che come nascono gli animali brutti di corruzione, cosí nascono anco gli uomini, quando doppo i diluvi tornano a nasser. Ha mostrato dissegnar di voler farsi autor di nuova setta sotto nome di nuova filosofia; ha detto, che la Vergine non puó aver parturito, e che la nostra fede cattolica è piena tutta di bestemie contra la maestà di Dio; che bisognerebbe levar la disputa e le entrate alli frati, perchè imbratano il mondo; che sono tutti asini, e che le nostre opinioni sono dottrine d’asini; che non abbiamo prova che la nostra fede meriti con Dio; e che il non far ad altri quello che non voressimo che fosse fatto a noi basta per ben vivere; e che se n’aride di tutti gli altri peccati; e che si meraviglia come Dio supporti tante eresie di cattolici. Dice di voler attender all’arte divinatoria, e che si vuol far corer dietro tutto il mondo).

Mocenigo did not stop at this. In an addition to the denunciation of 29 May, he underlined the aspirations of reformation held by Bruno (Documenti, p. 66): I remember to have heard him saying … that the way the Church pro-

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ceeds now is not the same that the Apostles used. … This world cannot continue as it is because it is full of ignorance and none of the religions is good. He preferred the Catholic religion, but this too needed new ground rules. Things were not going well, but soon the world would be experiencing a general reformation of itself because it was impossible that so much corruption could continue. Bruno relied a lot on the intervention of the King of Navarre and wanted to hurry in making his own works known in order to obtain some credit in this fashion because when the time would come he would wish to be captain [prefect of the people]. In the future, he would not always be poor because he would enjoy the same treasures that others possess (Mi sono ricordato d’avergli sentito dire … che il proceder ch’usa adesso la chiesa non è quello ch’usavano gli Apostoli … che questo mondo non poteva durar cosí, perché non v’era se non ignoranza, e niuna religione che fosse buona; che la Cattolica gli piaceva ben piú de l’altre, ma che questa ancora avea bisogno di gran regole; e che non stava bene cosí, ma che presto il mondo avrebbe veduto una riforma generale di se stesso, perché era impossibile che durassero tante corruttele; e che sperava gran cose su’l Re di Navarra, e che però voleva afrettarsi a metter in luce le sue opere e farsi credito per questa via, perché quando fosse stato tempo voleva esser capitano; e che non sarebbe stato sempre povero, perché averia goduto i tesori d’altri). This was a remarkable addition to the previous denunciation because, together with the demonstrated confidence that the Venetian government would make a reform addressing the goods of the clerics, it reveals not so much a contradiction with anti-Christian attitudes, but the dream of a renewed Christian “Republic” within whose institution the philosopher could be “captain.” Precisely because in many points it was corresponding to truth and people easily could prove it with the published writings of Bruno in hand, this accusation was devastating. The chosen conduct of Bruno was sincerity: “Io dirò la verità” (I will speak the truth). Although hiding and vigorously rejecting the more evident blasphemies, the philosopher admitted a lot, but sustained of having spoken as philosopher, “too much philosophically, dishonestly and not too much as a good Christian … founding his doctrine on sense and reason and not on faith” (Documenti, pp. 87–88). He was therefore repenting and on 3 June made ample retraction, while on the 30 July asked for a punishment “that would exceed in gravity … instead of in a show … of public nature” (che ecceda piú tosto nella gravità … che in far dimostrazione … pubblica). Was this revealing the hope of avoiding the imminent danger? Was this again the manifestation of his fundamental indifference to religion? All of this served no purpose. The request of extradition from the Roman Curia, no matter how strong the Venetian opposition was, found its course, and on 27 February 1593, Bruno was prisoner in the Palace of the Holy Office, where he

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languished for eight years. Of the vicissitudes of the Roman trial, we have no information, and not even the publication of new documents brought out any truly new light on it. We know only that on 24 August 1599 Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino demanded a precise retraction (ipsum clare revocare) of what Bruno had sustained in a document written on 5 April. In September, Bruno addressed himself to the pope. On 21 December, “he said that he neither should nor would retract; he had nothing to retract or a reason for retracting; and finally he has no knowledge concerning what he should retract” (Documenti, p. 183). After this, he never again deflected from his decision. A last memorial sent to the pope was opened but not read. When on 20 January 1600 he was told to abjure, “he did not want to consent to it, affirming that he never brought forth heretical propositions, but that his propositions were erroneously excerpted and interpreted by the ministers of the Holy Office” (Documenti, p. 189). He was ready to discuss them with any theologian. What did induce Bruno to change his attitude in this way? Was it the profound desperation about his fate and the anger against his accusers? Certainly, he had been hurt by the nature of the retractions he was asked to make. He was ready to retract but to a point, until he saw that he would have compromised the ideal program for which he fought all his life, and preferred to die. In his last attitude something remains that no explanation, no matter how ingenious, could completely clarify. Bruno had recognized as heretical the eight propositions that were presented to him on 4 February 1599, affirming, “he was ready to abjure and detest them in a place and time that would please the Holy Office” (a detestarle ed abiurarle in loco e tempo che piacerà al Santo Offizio). But he thereafter returned “in other writings” to the usual positions. To change him, was it the firm decision of not conceding at the philosophical level what he was ready to concede at the religious one? Or perhaps on his extreme determination, those motives of human order were truly influential, which are now too often forgotten in the reconstruction of his last acts. The death sentence was read to him on 8 February 1600. He was degraded and excommunicated, and then consigned to the secular magistrate with words that sounded like a cruel mockery: “so that he would be punished most clemently and without bloodshed” (ut quam clementissime et sine sanguinis effusione puniretur). He, always such a hard scourge of the friars’ hypocrisy, almost menacingly exclaimed, “Perhaps you are pronouncing this sentence against me with greater fear than I have in accepting it” (maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis, quam ego accipiam). His firm attitude did not fail when on 17 February “he was taken by the ministers of justice to Campo di Fiori, where naked and tied to a pole he was burned alive” (da ministri di giustizia fu condotto in Campo di Fiori, e quivi spogliato nudo e legato a un palo fu bruciato vivo, in Documenti, p. 197). In order that Bruno would not say anything more to the people in attendance, they muzzled him by inserting a block of wood or a ball of cloth between his tongue and the roof of the mouth (con la lingua in giova). This particular referred by Scioppius, if

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it were true, it would not make us wonder why on the pyre Bruno diverted disdainfully his look from the crucifix that his tormentors offered for a final kiss. What a confirmation of his condemnations must have appeared the horrible martyrdom given in the name of the One who went to his martyrdom for a message of love and pardon! His strength was to his judges “a pertinacious obstinacy.” Then they said, “He was dying willingly like a martyr with the confidence that his soul would return with that smoke” into his eternal vicissitude. With an unhappy and cruel irony, they could not hold back the last sneer. Scioppius wrote: “So he died on the pyre to go to refer, I believe, in the other worlds that he has imagined, how the Romans [Catholics] are used to treat blasphemous and impious people” (Sicque ustulatus misere periit renunciaturus, credo, in reliquis illis, quos finxit, mundis, quonam pacto homines blasphemi et impii a Romanis tractari solent). In Avvisi di Roma, in the same tone, one could read, “Now he would find out if he was saying the truth” (Ora egli se ne avede se diceva la verità, in Documenti, p. 207). How different was the sorrowful comment of Kepler! 6. Giordano Bruno: His Thought In the study of Bruno’s thought, to omit as “simple curiosity or oddness” his mnemonic and Lullian writings is not in its complex justifiable. His adhesion to Lullism (Ramon Lull, 1235–1315) and mnemo-techniques was not a mere oddity. It brought Bruno to share it with Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Leibniz, and with that lucid mind that was Descartes, who at a certain moment believed he could find satisfaction for his idea of a universal science just in the art of Lull. At the root of this preoccupation, that we see present in some of Bruno’s works with strong Neo-Platonic tinctures, we must find doubtlessly a more profound motive. A. The Art of Memory: Lullism In Bruno, the echo is perceived of a Cabalistic and Platonic conviction of an order that proceeds according to the same rhythm on the plane of reality as on the plane of knowledge. The characteristic Cabalistic enthusiasm of Pico, which afterward overflowed widely over figures of minor thinkers, and that came to strongly oppose grammatical superficiality, was the sign of love for terms that would not be diaphragms between thought and reality, but elements of the same reality. The articulations of thought that can translate themselves faithfully into corresponding terms are an aspect of the same development of the whole. By following that rhythm, we insert ourselves, let us say, in the rhythm itself of reality because essentially the motion of thought and the motion of things are a unique motion. Bruno must have been certainly aware of this tendency of Lullism since he, in the dedication letter to the senate of the University of Wittenberg that he premised to De lampade combinatoria, wrote that from Lullian sources Scotus derived theologicam metaphysicam,

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Cusanus his mysteries, and Paracelsus his medicine. Apart from what they had of mechanical, Lull’s combinations seemed to offer the plan for a general reconstruction of the map (tissue, constitution, texture, trama) of the whole, the method for enucleating the reason of things, which could be enclosed in a rationally complete system. The pansophical ideal, which will torment also Descartes in the search for the inventum mirabile that he demanded first from Lull and Cornelius Agrippa and finally found in analytical geometry, is what brought Bruno to embrace Lullism, to which he remained substantially faithful, conscious of its meaning as a construction of infinite real possibilities. The Cabalism of Pico was not mentioned by chance because Bruno himself in De lampade combinatoria and in Lampas triginta statuarum promised to teach how to conquer “many mysteries of the Pythagoreans and Cabalists” (plurima mysteria Pythagoricorun Cabalistarumque). Pythagorical numbers and Cabalistic signs, alphabet of mind and alphabet of things perfectly correspond to each other. When the secret of combining mental elements is found, we are then in possession of the combinations of reality. Given Bruno’s position, it is comprehensible how he had no sympathy for Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) and even less for Ramus’s antiAristotelianism. Bruno was always studying the logic of Aristotle and commented on it in De progressu et lampade venatoria logicorum of 1587, in the same way that in Artificium perorandi of that same year he had exposed the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum of Anaximenes of Lampsacus, which at that time was attributed to Aristotle. Around this time, from 1586 to 1588, Alberigo Gentili had introduced Bruno to the senate of the University of Wittenberg as lecturer on the Organon for a period of two years. On this subject, Augusto Guzzo observed, “Bruno does not oppose Aristotle in logic or in rhetoric. Even less we can say that he opposes Aristotle in ethics, although he is not completely satisfied with it. He opposes Aristotle in physics and metaphysics” (il Bruno non si oppone ad Aristotele in logica e in retorica; nemmeno si può dire che gli si opponga in etica, sebbene non ne rimanga interamente pago; gli si oppone in fisica e metafisica). Or better, as someone suggested, Bruno especially opposed Aristotle in physics because physics reaches the chance of becoming metaphysics. Ramism, being so much involved in philological and grammatical preoccupations, was moving in a very different direction. Where for Bruno the rhythm of thought established the rhythm of the real, Ramism instead concentrated on the term and became concerned with juridical and rhetorical questions, with the search of techniques of argumentation, with instruments for classification, and with educational methods. But Aristotle, “that man of integrity and honor” (quel galantuomo), already had established in Topics the logic of invention. Those easy anti-Aristotelian critiques that smacked of pedantry angered Bruno; he was so angered that he harshly reacted against all forms of anti-Aristotelianism, including even that of Patrizi whom he opposed to Telesio, with whom instead he agreed on many points.

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In addition to Lull’s works, others have sometimes been added which Bruno despised: his own mnemonic works of De umbris idearum, followed by Ars memoriae, edited in 1582 in Paris, De imaginum signorum et idearum compositione, published in 1592. In all of these works, multiple motives are intertwined. At any rate, Bruno’s early enthusiasm for mnemonic-techniques was not without relevance, since in this Bruno revealed, under a different aspect, the same tendency that determined the acceptance of Lullism. Lullism was always a way of avoiding the abstraction of the old logic, and of substituting in its place a technique based on images, but capable of admirably developing the field of knowledge. Instead of a logical mechanism, we had in Lull a psychological mechanism founded on connections between images, and images and letters, connections capable of immensely extending the field of our knowing. Felice Tocco, although attending with much attention to the development of Lull’s works and mnemonic ones, reduced to a superficial analogy of an abstruse language the rapport between the ones and the others. Antonio Corsano, more correctly, combined Lull’s works and the mnemonic ones in a unique need of concrete inventive processes and in opposition to the logic of terms. In relation to this, Corsano commented on the locus of the Triginta sigillorum explicatio, in which Bruno mentioned the spark nourished by a great flame that was for him the discovery of Phoenix, the treatise of Pietro of Ravenna, which opened up the prospect of vast mental adventures before his juvenile mind. Bruno himself, in the De umbris idearum, specifying the metaphysical foundations of the art of memory, clearly indicated the links that tie it with his conception. He said that the human being does not possess the ability of moving from darkness to light in one instant, “Nature does not allow the immediate passage from one extreme to another, but with the mediation of shadows, little by little, with a veiled light.… Shadows prepare the sight to light, shadows temper light” (sed umbris mediantibus, adumbratoque lumine sensim … Umbra igitur visum preparat ad lucem. Umbra lucem temperat). It is probable that Tocco or other scholars have not insisted enough on the obvious source of Bruno’s inspiration, the Platonic myth of the cave, in which the same words as his are encountered. It is here that the released prisoner suffers for the sun’s light: “first, he can see the shadows, then in the water he can see the images of things, and later on the things themselves” (Republic, 516 a). Bruno also mentioned, “Some individuals, coming suddenly from darkness into light, lost the faculty of seeing” (naturalem videndi potentiam perdidere nonnulli de tenebris in repentinam lucem prodeuntibus). In this way, he pointed to the Cabalists whose veilings were the coverings that participated in different degrees of the sensible and that allowed us to approach gradually the truth. More than anyone else Plato is the one who can help us. In Plato, we find many degrees or levels of shadows that in a succession of degrees could be-

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come clearer until we reach the sun’s light. Every level or plane has its own ties: ties of mere succession for the plane of eikasia or imagination; ties psychologically constituted for the plane of pistis or faith; ties logically constructed for the dianoia or thought, and ties intimately united for the plane of noesis or knowledge. At this point Bruno in order to explain an analogous gradualism of planes cited the Anselmian and Biblical “nisi credideritis non intelligetis,” saying that even the philosophers can admit a first moment during which the ties or connections are not yet explained since they precede the rational moment: The theologian in his own language said: “you would not understand if first you would not have believed.” The philosophers, too, from their own side, declared that the sciences should be derived from what is posited and accepted by way of faith. They say that we have to proceed in the explanation of forms following the formal and rational course, beginning from what is in potency, in the root, in an implicit form.… Nature before offering the species already explicated, presents them in an involute manner (In suo genere dixit theologus nisi credideritis non intelligetis, et in suo genere confirmant philosophi ex concessis positisque iis quorum fides esse dicitur … aucupandas esse scientias, et ex iis quae in virtute et radice et implicatione quadam continent ad formarum explicationem et per formalem et rationalem cursum nobis est progrediendum.... Natura dat involutas species, antequam tradat easdem explicatas). What is of interest to Bruno is not so much the metaphysical construction as much as the justification of his mnemonic technique together with Lullism that in its particulars—as Tocco has observed—proceeds in a parallel fashion. The grades of shadows are many and different: there are physical shadows, reflected and fluctuating in nature, and ideal shadows reflected in the intellect. Ideas relate reciprocally and connect among themselves. Ideas are supreme and real. If we were to keep in mind this gradation and the rapports posited between faith, or undemonstrated knowledge, and reason, then we would reach with clarity the conclusion of Bruno’s considerations. The intelligible connections that reflect the system of the ideas run on the sensible plane into a system of imaginative nexuses, but precisely because behind these images there is a logical system, on the psychological plane a systematic translation of these nexuses would correspond to the nexuses themselves. Our benign nature manifests itself in every plane with an exact correlation: It is nature that unites the souls to the bodies. It is nature that provides the souls with suitable faculties. They say that Pythagoreans and ingenious Magi would be capable of deducing life and specific kinds of

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souls from the forms of the bodies. Nature would help you in everything, unless you remove yourself from nature (Natura est quae animis corpora configit; natura animis instrumenta congrua suppeditat—unde Pythagorei et ingenia Magorum vitam atque animae speciem a corporis formam deprehendisse perhibentur—natura ipsa tibi, nisi avertaris, aderit in omnibus). Mnemo-technique is the art of using the psychological mechanism that corresponds in the plane of fides to the one that is the logical mechanism in the plane of intellectus. If we could still use the Platonic analogy of the cave, relying on the metaphysical conception of the ideas and on the logical connection of the intellect, when returning back to the cave we could rectify and simplify the process of the images: “We think that this art under the shade of the ideas, when it overcomes timid nature with its stimulations, directs or guides its devious or exaggerated ways, or enforces and supports it in its deficiencies” (tum artem sub umbra idearum degere arbitramur, cum aut torpentem naturam antecedendo sollicitat, aut deviam et exorbitantem dirigit et perducit, aut deficientem lassamque roborat atque fulcit). The Cantus Circaeus, also published in 1582 in Paris, exposed with greater perfection the theory and the technique of the imaginative nexuses of the art “that shows the way and opens the entrance to the greater inventions.” The Brunian mnemo-technique and the theory indissolubly connected with the range of functions of the soul and of the cognitive processes developed according to the already exposed principles of Triginta sigillorum explicatio, Sigillus Sigillorum, and De imaginum compositione. B. The Metaphysics In Sigillus Sigillorum (The seal of all seals), we see the process of elevation from sense to intellect. Sense, which is duplex, is at first admonition and then comprehension of the qualities of things, but in its most basic significance it is common to all things and diffused everywhere. In the second position imagination is found; in the third, reason; and in the fourth, the intellect. The person that reaches the peak will comprehend “that one is the life in everything, one the light, and one the goodness; that all the senses are one sense, all notions one notion; and also that at the end, notions, senses, light, and life are one essence, one virtue, and one operation alone. Essence, potency, and action; to be, to be able, and to act; what is, what can be done, and what acts are one thing. The whole is one, as Parmenides very well thought. Everything that is, is one.” With this elaboration of Platonic concepts, Bruno was at this same time developing his critique of Aristotelianism or, better, of that Aristotelian physics that was presenting itself to him as a pure metaphysics. In Acrotismus Camoeracensis, published again in Wittenberg in 1588, containing the theses sustained in 1586 by a student of Bruno, Jean Hannequin, in public discussion

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in the College of Cambrai, stating that to the physical Aristotelian conception can be opposed that of the Pre-Socratics. The metaphysics of the PreSocratics was a metaphysics completely based on an infinite universe. Certainly, Aristotle was wrong in the concept of the infinite or in the concepts of space and time, or in that of motion, in which it is absurd to admit an extrinsic first motor, whereas this motor is internal to all things. In Summa terminorum metaphysicorum (Synopsis of metaphysical terms) that was composed on the model of the fifth book of the Aristotelian work in 1591 and published by one of Bruno’s auditors, Raphael Eglin, we find the development of those concepts that are at the center of the Italian works and of the great Latin poems, to which we must now refer. In London, as it is well known, Bruno published the Italian dialogues and initiated the De immenso et innumerabilibus (On immensity and the innumerable) in its three first books. At this time, Bruno is at the peak of his speculation and La Cena delle Ceneri (The supper of ashes) almost constitutes the exordium of this period. It was therefore natural that Bruno—as Guzzo rightly pointed out—more than anywhere else would speak in this book of Copernicus, the one person who in the scientific field was furnishing him with the bases of a new vision of the universe, the one who was providing him with the chance of developing a conception that, on every plane, was going beyond its own bases. At any rate, Bruno in the work of Copernicus was seeing “the dawn that was supposed to precede the coming of this sun of the true ancient philosophy, for so many centuries hidden in the tenebrous dens of the blind, malignant, haughty, and envious ignorance” (una aurora, che dovea precedere l’uscita di questo sole de l’antiqua vera filosofia, per tanti secoli sepolta nelle tenebrose caverne de la cieca, maligna, proterva ed invida ignoranza). It was the dawn. Copernicus, “researcher in mathematics more than about nature, was not able to deepen or penetrate it as much as he could until he succeeded in removing the roots of inconvenient and useless principles” (perché lui, piú studioso de la matematica che de la natura, non ha possuto profondar e penetrar sin tanto che potesse a fatto toglier via le radici de incovenienti e vani principii). From this initiated the most violent invective of Bruno against Andrew Osiander, “an ignorant and presumptuous donkey,” who in the anonymous notice premised to De revolutionibus orbium caelestium intended to limit the Copernican intuition to a pure mathematical hypothesis, “that most honorable cognition, without which to know how to compute, measure, geometrize, and make perspectives is reduced to nothing else than to a pastime for ingenious mad men” (quella onoratissima cognizione, senza la quale il saper computare e misurare e geometrare e perspectivare non è altro che un passatempo da pazzi ingeniosi). From this came Bruno’s enthusiastic exaltation of his own liberating work that, by abolishing the antitheses heaven and earth, breaking the barriers of the world, opened to humankind the infinite spaces and disclosed to them the path to a higher vision of God and things:

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The man from Nola … has freed human spirit and cognition; they inhabited as shut-in the narrowest dungeon tormented by winds. It was as if through some holes, the human spirit could barely look at the farthest stars. It was also as if the spirit’s wings were cut-off so that it could not fly and open the veil of these clouds and see what truly could be found up there.… But now here is the one [Copernicus] who has gone beyond the windy atmosphere, penetrated the heavens, jumped from star to star, trespassed the limits of the world, dismantled the fantastic walls of the first, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth spheres and of any other sphere that could be added.… Our reason is no longer imprisoned with shackles by fantastic mobiles and motors.… We know now that only one heaven exists, an ethereal immense region, in which these magnificent lights respect their own distances, for the commodity of participating in the perpetual life. These blazing bodies are the ambassadors that announce the excellence of the glory and majesty of God. We are advancing in this way toward the discovery of the infinite effect of the infinite cause, the true and living vestige of the infinite vigor (Il Nolano … ha disciolto l’animo umano e la cognizione, che era rinchiusa ne l’artissimo carcere de l’aria turbolento; onde a pena, come per certi buchi, avea facultà de remirar le lontanissime stelle, e gli erano mozze l’ali, a fin che non volasse ad aprire il velame di queste nuvole e veder quello che veramente la sù si ritrovasse…. Or ecco quello ch’ha varcato l’aria, penetrato il cielo, discorse le stelle, trapassati gli argini del mondo, fatte svanir le fantastiche muraglie de le prime, ottave, none, decime ed altre che vi s’avesser potuto aggiungere, spere…. Non è piú impriggionata la nostra raggione coi ceppi de’ fantastici mobili e motori…. Conoscemo che non à che un cielo, un’eterea reggione immensa, dove questi magnifici lumi serbano le proprie distanze, per comodità de la partecipazione, de la perpetua vita. Questi fiammeggianti corpi son que’ ambasciatori che annunziano l’eccellenza de la gloria e maestà di Dio. Cosí siamo promossi a scuoprire l’infinito effetto dell’infinita causa, il vero e vivo vestigio dell’infinito vigore). This is the motive of the infinity of the whole, which would be at the center of the dialogues De l’infinito, universo et mondi (On infinity, universe, and worlds). Bruno used it already as the fundamental argument against the Aristotelian conception. The constructions of this conception that were merely built on appearance, fabricated without keeping into any account the reality of things, with the help of a too simple experience, were falling apart, because the other stars as well are not more or differently fixed in the heaven than this star that is the earth is fixed in the same firmament that is the air. This firmament is no more suitably called the eighth sphere, where is the tail of the Bear, than third sphere, in which we are.

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY The one and same ethereal region is like an identical great space and field in which all these distinct bodies are found, with specific and convenient intervals between them, far removed the ones from the others (perché non son piú né altramente fisse le altre stelle al cielo, che questa stella che è la terra, è fissa nel medesmo firmamento, che è l’aria, e non è piú degno d’esser chiamata ottava sfera, dove è la coda dell’Orsa, che dove è la terza, nella quale siamo noi, perché in una medesma eterea reggione, come in un medesmo gran spacio e campo, son questi corpi distinti, e con certi convenienti intervalli allontanati gli uni dagli altri).

In addition, bodies that per se are light or heavy do not exist, “given that these qualities are not convenient to a thing that is natural in its constitution; they are coming from outside the nature of the bodies.” This infinite world does not possess a principle of motion from outside itself, motion found in assistant forms (forme assistenti), according to the language of the Scholastics. This infinite world has in itself life, soul, and motion: As the male moves towards the female and the female to the male, so every herb and animal, some more and some less manifestly, move toward their vital principle like the sun and other stars. The magnet moves toward iron, the straw to amber, and finally everything searches for its like and avoids its contrary. Each thing changes because of its sufficient interior principle, for whose reason it naturally agitates, and not because of an exterior principle, as we see happening to those things that are moved against or beyond their own nature. The earth and all the other stars move according to their space differences, distances, because of an intrinsic principle, which is the individual proper soul (Come il maschio se muove alla femina e la femina al maschio, ogni erba e animale, qual piú e qual meno espressamente, si muove al suo principio vitale, come al sole e altri astri; la calamita se muove al ferro, la paglia a l’ambra e finalmente ogni cosa va a trovar il simile e fugge il contrario. Tutto avviene dal sufficiente principio interiore per il quale naturalmente viene ad esagitarse, e non da principio esteriore, come veggiamo sempre accadere a quelle cose, che son mosse o contra o extra la propria natura. Muovensi dunque la terra e gli astri secondo le proprie differenze locali da principio intrinseco, che è l’anima propria). There is universal life, in which death is merely an appearance in the eternal vicissitudes of reality: composition, decomposition, and transmutation. In the composition, lightning of life over life exists, center beside center, and form with form:

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Given that everything partakes in life, many and innumerable individuals live not only in us, but also in all composite things. When we hear that something or someone is dying, we should not believe that something or someone is dying but that they are mutating. The accidental composition and harmony in which they were is gone and what remain are the single things that were present in that composition, which are immortal (Essendo che ogni cosa partecipa de vita, molti ed innumerabili individui vivono non solamente in noi, ma in tutte le cose composte; e quando veggiamo alcuna cosa che se dice morire, non doviamo tanto credere quella morire, quanto che la si muta, e cessa quella accidentale composizione e concordia, rimanendone le cose che quella incorreno, sempre immortali). These thoughts were opening up one of the most serious problems of Bruno; it was a problem on which the most vigorous differences between critics centered. The problem dealt with the soul of the world and on its relation with the body, on its unity and rapport with the individual souls. The problems of matter and form, of the world and God are at the center of the most labored dialogues, the De la causa, principio et uno (On the cause, and the unique principle), which constitutes a decisive moment in the cognitive ascension and in the liberation of the human spirit through knowledge “because science is the most exquisite path to reach the goal of making the human spirit heroic” (perché la scienza è uno esquisitissimo cammino a far l’animo umano eroico). Hard was the task assumed by Bruno who wanted to arrive to the comprehension of the unitary root of the whole, its variety, and its unity together with the multiplicity. Leaving aside the speculation about God in Itself, as the first principle and cause, which is unattainable for the human thought, it is convenient to address oneself to God’s mundane vestiges, to nature in which as in a book Its infinite power manifests itself. God is cause and principle, aitía and arké, intrinsic as principle and such that it remains in the produced thing, as matter and form; extrinsic as cause, like the efficient and final causes. The efficient cause of the world is the universal intellect: The universal intellect fills up the whole, illuminates the universe, and directs nature to produce its own species, as it is proper to each … internal artificer because it forms matter and figure from within. From within also it [the universal intellect] orders the seed or root to send out and evolve the stem; from within the stem it brings out limbs; from within the limbs branches; from the branches it displays the buds. It is the true efficient cause, extrinsic as well as intrinsic, of all natural things (Empie il tutto, illumina l’universo e indirizza la natura a produrre le sue specie come si conviene … artefice interno, perché forma la materia e la figura da dentro, come da dentro il seme o radice manda ed esplica il stipe; da dentro il stipe caccia i rami; da dentro i

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY rami le formate brance; da dentro queste ispiega le gemme; … vera causa efficiente, non tanto estrinseca come anco intrinseca, de tutte le cose naturali).

The universal intellect as cause is extrinsic, but it is also immanent to all things, it is spirit infused in the whole, “spirit that gives interior vigor, and the mind infused in all members agitates the corporeal mass mixing itself with it” (Spiritus into alit totamque infusa per artus mens agitat molem, et toto se corpore miscet). The universal intellect is the “fabricator of the world” (fabro del mondo), “it is most fecund with seeds and at the same time it is the seeder, because it impregnates matter with all the forms” and makes all things animated, giving to all of them the soul as a unique form: No matter how small and minimal a thing might be, it would still have in itself a particle of spiritual substance. If this substance finds a welldisposed subject, then it would extend itself to become plant or animal, and would receive the members of a body that we commonly know as animated. The reason for this is that the spirit lives in all things, and there is not one minimal entity that does not contain in itself its portion of spirit. And this spirit animates it (Sia pur cosa quanto piccola e minima si voglia, ha in sé parte di sustanza spirituale; la quale, se trova il soggetto disposto, si stende ad essere pianta, ad esser animale, e riceve membri di qualsivoglia corpo che comunemente se dice animato; perché spirto si trova in tutte le cose, e non é minimo corpuscolo che non contenga cotal porzione in sé che non inanimi). The universal form of the whole is soul and life, which may be latent at times, but they are present everywhere in some way. Consequently, the magus is not wrong when he questions, speaks, and controls things, nor is the necromancer doing something abnormal when he calls up the dead and somehow commands them. This was a thesis very dear to Bruno, who in the De Magia, in Theses de magia, and in De magia mathematica illustrated his point of view, so that if in a relative sense we may speak of inanimate beings, in reality we cannot sustain that something deprived of life can exist: “Nature, as it has given life to species so it has also given to every individual [within the species] the desire of self-preservation in the present condition, so it has also posited within all things a certain internal spirit, or if you wish a certain sense” (natura enim, ut dedit esse speciebus, item et appetitum unicuique rei conservandi se in praesenti statu, ita etiam impressit internum quondam spiritum, seu sensum dici mavis, rebus omnibus). Whole in all things, though with variations, the universal soul beats everywhere. It is a universal form, a uniquely earthly soul. Then, where is distinction coming from? Bruno asserts that distinction is due to matter, which receives forms in various degrees. He contemporaneously would be able to affirm the ideal priority of the form and

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to concede to matter those dispositions and faculties whence the various representations of reality derive: I claim that, if life lives in all things, the soul becomes the form of all things. The soul [as form] presides everywhere over matter and rules in what is composite because it effects the composition and the consistence of the parts. Persistence is equally due no less to form than to matter. The form, in my understanding, is one in all things and, according to the diversity of the dispositions of matter and the faculties of the material active and passive principles, succeeds in producing diverse representations and accomplishing different capacities (Dico che, se la vita si trova in tutte le cose, l’anima viene ad esser forma di tutte le cose; quella per tutto è presidente alla materia e signoreggia nelli composti, effettua la composizione e consistenza de le parti. E però la persistenza non meno par che si convenga a cotal forma, che a la materia. Questa intendo essere una di tutte le cose; la qual però, secondo la diversità delle disposizioni della materia e secondo la facultà de’ principii materiali attivi e passivi, viene a produr diverse figurazioni, ed effettuar diverse facultadi). The mutations of the individual things happen in the womb of matter. Matter and its vicissitudes partake in eternity. It is precisely at this point, facing the problem of death and immortality, that the total difficulty of his position confronts Bruno. On one hand, Bruno presented the becoming of the whole as a perennial vicissitude without meaning. He loved to repeat the motto of the Ecclesiastes, which in Wittenberg, on 8 March 1588, he wrote on the album of Hans von Warndorff, “What is that which is? It is that which was. What is that which was? It is that which is. Nothing is new under the sun” (Quid est quod est? Ipsum quod fuit. / Quid est quod fuit? Ipsum quod est. / Nihil sub sole novum). On the other hand, he stated that the fear of death is foolish and that “against such foolishness, nature raises its voices assuring us that the body or the soul should not fear death because both matter and form are the most constant principles” (contra la qual pazzia grida ad alte voci la natura, assicurandoci che non gli corpi né l’anima deve temer la morte, perché tanto la materia quanto la forma sono principi constantissimi). Is Bruno not aware that a cry of terror is exactly arising when any person faces this vain tossing of time, when human beings become aware of these mutations without meaning, in which what remains permanent is the one principle, not the human being that would try to firmly hold and assert itself in this fleeing cycle? Bruno in the Candelaio is exultant precisely when facing this infinite and vain coming and going, and praises the unity of the whole. By his own temperament Bruno was brought to deny individual personality, though his was overbearing, and saw it reducing itself in the whole as a shadow that rapidly fades away: “Time takes everything away and gives everything back: everything

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changes. Nothing comes to anything. Only one cannot mutate. Only one is eternal and can persevere eternally as one, similar and equal. With this philosophy my spirit is aggrandized and my intellect is magnified” (Il tempo tutto toglie e tutto dà: ogni cosa si muta. Nulla si annihila: è uno solo che non puó mutare, un solo è eterno e può perseverare eternamente uno, simile e medesmo. Con questa filosofia l’animo mi s’aggrandisce e me si magnifica l’intelletto). Again, unity of form and matter exists. But with its diverse possibilities, it is matter that individuates forms: “Every numeral multiplication depends from matter” (ogni multiplicazione numerale depende da la materia). Matter, variously accepting in itself the unique form, infinitely varies the form. The form, which is one and multiple, “is all in whatever part, as my own voice is heard in every part of this room” (è tutta in qualsivoglia parte, come la mia voce è udita da tutte le parti di questa sala). The problem of matter is thus imposed. Matter no longer can be limited to a mere passive power because it has become the principle of determination of forms. Bruno here worked with potency and act (actus et potentia), matter and form, the synthesis without which the unity of his world would become inconceivable. In the same way that the divine Cusanus showed that act and potency coincide in the absolute, in God, we may state that this in some guise happens everywhere. We can say about God that It is extreme of purity because It is absolutely everything, “God is everything It can be; It would not be everything if It could not be everything” (è tutto quel che può essere, e lui medesimo non sarebbe tutto se non potesse esser tutto). Matter, on the other hand, assumes all forms, “is everything that can be, in a manner that is explicated, dispersed, and distinct,” accepts everything, and is potency to being everything. Act and potency do not coincide in matter “in the instant of eternity,” but “in the instants of time.” Matter is deprived of forms “not as the ice is deprived of warmth, the dark is deprived of light, but as the pregnant is deprived of its offspring, which are issued and derived from it” (non come il ghiaccio è senza calore, il profondo è privato di luce, ma come la pregnante è senza la sua prole, la quale la manda e la riscuote da sé). To the concept of forms that come from the outside to impress themselves on matter and to the idea of a matter capable of producing forms, a living and infinite Nature is substituted, a Nature that is the resulting synthesis of the two principles. It has been called a reversion or rather a contradiction. Bruno, who began the Dialoghi with a critique of Dicson, the interlocutor who sustained materialism, by the end became himself a materialist. He placed Neo-Platonism and Telesio’s materialism, one beside the other, without mediation, maintaining in full all contradictions without any solution. Is it truly so? Has Bruno underlined the exigency of a solution or has he somehow already posited the bases for it? Did he not clearly criticize the Aristotelian matter when he pointed out its merely logical character? “The shadow should not be considered purely as a fiction of an order exclusively logical, but as

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something very consistent, or rather of something like a most consistent nature” (umbra non habenda est quid fictum et quasi pure logicum, sed constantissimum quid, immo constantissima natura). Has he not somehow already posited the bases for a solution when he showed that the true actuality is found, not in the forms that mutate on the surface of matter, but in matter itself that is its basis? Bruno has derived from Plotinus the exigency of the unity, but not the idea of a descent from the loftiest places of the One downward toward Reality. He made the form of unity intrinsic in nature as being all alive and dynamic. Neo-Platonism is not rejected or accepted in its completeness, but transfigured in the idea of a nature that has in itself all the richness of the archetypal world. It is nature not matter, because Theophilus in the Dialoghi rejected and did not return to the materia of Dicson: “Every individual sees that the true name of this matter that carries in itself the source of all forms and has no need of receiving them from outside, is no longer matter, but Nature” (il nome vero di questa materia che ha in sé il fonte delle forme e perciò solo non ha bisogno di riceverle di fuori, ognun vede che non è piú materia, ma è Natura). To the unity of nature, to the Unity that is not supernatural, but of the universe, the hymn of the fifth dialogue is dedicated. It is a religious hymn— as it has been recognized—rather than philosophical: The universe is One, infinite, and immobile. I say that One is the absolute possibility, One is the act, One the form or soul, One is matter or body, One the thing, One is being, One the greatest and the best. The The One is incomprehensible and capable of being infinite and endless; it is infinite and interminable, and consequently immobile.… It is not matter, because it is not configured or subject to configuration; it is not limited or subject to limitation. It is not form because it does not form or configure anything other, given that it is everything; it is the greatest, the one, and the universe. Being the One and the Same, it possesses no existence added to other existence, whence it has no part added to parts, and thus it is not composite. It is that kind of end that is not an end, it is so much a form that is not a form at all, it is so much matter that it is not matter, it is so much soul that is not even soul. Why? Because it indifferently is the whole and the one, the universe is one (È dunque l’universo uno, infinito, immobile. Una, dico, è la possibilità assoluta, uno l’atto, una la forma o anima, una la materia or corpo, una la cosa, uno lo ente, uno il massimo e ottimo; il quale non deve posser esser compreso; e però infinibile e interminabile, e per tanto infinito e interminato, e per consequenza immobile…. Non è materia, perché non è figurato né figurabile, non é terminato né terminabile. Non è forma, perché non informa né figura altro, atteso che è tutto, è massimo, è uno, è universo. Essendo medesimo e uno, non ha essere ed

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY essere; e perché non ha essere ed essere, non ha parte e parte; e perciò che non ha parte e parte, non è composto. Questo è termine di sorte che non è termine, è talmente forma che non è forma, è talmente materia che non è materia, è talmente anima che non è anima: perché è il tutto indifferentemente, e però l’uno, l’universo è uno).

This is the universe: “One, infinite, subject, matter, life, soul, true and good.” Bruno—after ruining the finely composed earthly system and its boundaries; breaking with the Copernican intuition classical and medieval physics and cosmology; vindicating the unity of the whole and its infinite becoming in the perennial cycle of a succession in which everything comes to be affirmed—in the dialogues De l’infinito, universo et mondi puts finally the accent on the infinity of the world as the mirror of divine infinity. In Venice, Bruno confessed: I posit an infinite universe that is an effect of divine power, because I esteemed a thing unworthy of divine goodness and power that, while God could produce beside this world one and infinite others, It would produce a finite world. I have claimed infinite particular worlds that are similar to this one of the Earth, by which with Pythagoras I mean a planet, similar to which are the Moon, other planets, and stars, which are infinite. I also declared that all these bodies are worlds without number, and all of them constitute an infinite university in an infinite space, and this is called infinite universe, in which are innumerable worlds. In this way, there is a double kind of infinitude: the infinitude of the greatness of the universe and the infinitude of multitude of worlds (Io tengo un infinito universo, cioè effetto della divina potenzia, perché io stimavo cosa indegna della divina bontà e potenzia che, possendo produr oltra questo mondo un altro ed altri infiniti, producesse un mondo finito. Sí che io ho dichiarato infiniti mondi particolari simili a questo della Terra; la quale con Pittagora intendo uno astro, simile alla quale è la Luna, altri pianeti e altre stelle, le quali sono infinite; e che tutti questi corpi sono mondi e senza numero, li quali costituiscono poi la università infinita in uno spazio infinito; e questo se chiama universo infinito, nel quale sono mondi innumerabili. Di sorte che è doppia sorte de infinitudine de grandezza dell’universo e de moltitudine de mondi). Polemical arguments from Aristotle cannot be brought against this Brunian conception. When Aristotle criticized some theses, he constructed them imaginatively or fictionally so that they could be confuted; and he did not develop them in all their possible accessions. What meaning can we find in thinking with Aristotle a finite world? What could there be beyond the boundaries of the world? Unboundedness and innumerability of worlds are

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given, because only in this way the universe could be adequate to God: “It is a shame that the infinite implied in the most simple and individual first principle would not be explicated preferably in this infinite and limitless representation of itself, most able of producing innumerable worlds.” C. The Moral Problem The motive of Timaeus was returning. If in God an infinite potency and no envy exist “because in It to be able to do something and to do it is one and the same thing,” then “for what reason would we believe that an agent who could do infinite goodness, would instead do it finitely?” A power that does not translate itself into action, that does not concretize itself in its work, would have no meaning; it would be an imperfection. Work done is mature expression and precise significance of the will: “The person that denies the infinite effect denies the infinite power” (Chi nega l’effetto infinito, nega la potenzia infinita). But Bruno here was saying “will,” but intended “nature,” because he was insisting on the necessity of an infinite effect. It has been observed that in this we have an extension of the Plotinian position in which, once infinite God is posited, nature too as “shadow and vestige of divinity should be infinite as much as God, though not in the same way as God” (ombra e vestigio della divinità, vien ad esser infinita quanto Dio, anche se non come Dio). The problems that we encounter here are as tormentuous as the thought of Bruno and constitute the major difficulty for the understanding of that part of his theories that specifically deals with morality: the rapport in which God is with the world, the soul of the world with our soul, and fate with freedom. Bruno may make you think of Spinoza, but Bruno is not Spinoza. Bruno has not identified God and nature, denied meaning to moral good or evil, or doubted the possibility of the coexistence of fate and freedom. In Venice, at the trial, Bruno confessed: I place in this universe a certain universal providence, in virtue of which everything lives, vegetates, moves, and stays in its own perfection. I understand this providence in two ways: one is the way in which it is present as the soul in the body, whole in all, and whole in whatever part, and this is called nature, shadow, and vestige of divinity. The other way is the ineffable one by which God by essence, presence, and power is in everything over all not as a part, not as a soul, but in an inexplicable way (In questo universo metto una providenza universa, in virtú della quale ogni cosa vive, vegeta e si move e sta nella sua perfezione; e la intendo in due maniere, l’una nel modo con cui presente è l’anima nel corpo, tutta in tutto e tutta in qual si voglia parte, e questo chiamo natura, ombra e vestigio della divinità; l’altra nel modo ineffabile col quale Iddio per essenzia, presenzia e potenzia è in tutto e sopratutto, non come parte, non come anima, ma in modo inesplicabile).

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God is an absolute, an identity of act and potency, and that is all what It can be. What exists are the world, nature, the universe, which is the whole, the infinite, “because it has no borders, no terms, no superficies,” but it is not infinite “because every part that we can take of it is finite, and of all the worlds that the universe contains, each one of them is finite.” The single worlds are not everything they could be, but only that specific thing they individually are, which can change into the whole, but remains that determined reality they are. We can distinguish “the sun, the universal Apollo, and the absolute light that is supreme and of the most excellent kind” from “its shadow, Diana, the world, the universe, nature, which is in things, which is light in the opaqueness of matter, light that shines in the darkness.” God is actual absolute fullness, coincidence of act and potency; the world is also everything, but in the multiplicity of its own positions. Every thing is what it is, though it is capable of becoming gradually and successively all things. If a distinction is justifiable, it does not imply an acknowledgement of autonomous subsistence of the single things, which are nothing more than ephemeral positions in the intimate process of the whole, whose law is transmutation. This affirmation is valid also for the individual souls, which are a flash of the unique soul of the world. If it is true that Bruno was never fully explicit on the argument, it is still true that he never intended to deflect from his affirmation of the soul of the world, which at one time posited and excluded the autonomy of single souls. The polemic between Gentile and Rodolfo Mondolfo on this topic, in which Mondolfo sustained a Brunian monadology, and in which at first even Tocco believed, had the merit of making known the difficulty of the problem. At the same time the polemic underlined how Tocco with good reason arrived at the repudiation of his original assertion, concluding, “The individuation of the soul is for Bruno only a temporary condition that in the infinite series of time has no greater consistency and persistence than a flash of light. For that reason … if the material part is all transformed into insensible and irreducible atoms, the spiritual part instead knows no fractionalizing, and remains always one in quality and substance.” Spiritual life is under the rhythm of the duplex process of descension and ascension, in which the whole one in its one root, soul of the soul and life of life, tends to celebrate anew the prime unity through the ascension. The whole is good all over, without shadow, because the shadow is nothing but light confronting light: “As the whole comes from the good, so it is all good, it is for the good, and to the good. The whole is from goodness, through goodness, and for goodness. The contrary appears to those who only comprehend the present being, in the same way that the beauty of a building is hidden to the one who sees a minimal part of it” (come tutto è da buono, cosí tutto è buono, per buono e a buono; da bene, per bene, a bene; dal che tutto il contrario non appare se non a chi non apprende altro che l’esser presente; come la beltade dell’edificio non è manifesta a chi scorge una minima parte di esso). Spiritual life is an eternal circle sustained by providence that regulates

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every thing and directs it to a good end: “Everything, no matter how minimal, is under an infinitely great providence. No matter how vile we would consider it, providence in relation to the whole or universe is most important.” It is most important in the “circulation” in which every thing tends to become everything else, and everything tends to realize the whole: It is a lofty and magnificent vicissitude that equalizes the inferior waters with the superior ones, changes the night into the day, and the day into the night, in order that divinity would be in each thing, in the manner by which each thing is capable of every thing, and the infinite goodness would infinitely communicate itself according to the capability of each single thing (Alta e magnifica vicissitudine, che agguaglia l’acqui inferiori alle superiori, cangia la notte col giorno, e il giorno con la notte, a fin che la divinità sia in tutto, nel modo con cui tutto è capace di tutto, e l’infinita bontà infinitamente si communiche secondo tutta la capacità de le cose). What an optimistic vision of the whole, in which we cannot see any place for human autonomy and any sense for freedom, except in becoming one with the whole! Scholars have remarked that in the dialogues De l’infinito Bruno strongly defended, as he did in other places, human works against the denials of the reformers, and asserted the coexisting possibility of human liberty with the necessity of the divine process: No philosopher, no human being learned and honest, has ever been found, which under some pretest would derive from that proposition the necessity of human affections and destroy human election. Like Plato and Aristotle among many others, with positing the necessity and immutability in God, we have no less posited moral freedom and the faculty of choosing. They know and can well understand how this necessity and this liberty can both be possible (Non si è trovato giamai filosofo, dotto ed uomo da bene che, sotto specie o pretesto alcuno, da tal proposizione avesse voluto tirar la necessità delli affetti umani e distruggere l’elezione. Come, tra gli altri, Platone e Aristotele, con ponere la necessità e immutabilità in Dio non ponemo meno la libertà morale e facultà della nostra elezione; perché sanno bene e possono capire, come siano compossibili questa necessità e questa libertà). Bruno, some people said, accepted the traditional theological solution on free will. In that same place, he concluded that the philosophers are well aware “that faith is required for the education of coarse people that need to be governed” (che la fede si richiede per l’istituzione di rozzi popoli che denno esser governati). The only proper solution may be that of Gentile, who in a comment on the cited passage refers to the clear words of De immenso (p. 243),

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“[Man] may act by some kind of necessity of nature, not truly free. He would act totally without freedom if he were to act differently than what need and nature or necessity of nature requires” (necessitate naturae, non libere agat: sed potius immo omnino non libere ageret, aliter agendo quam necessitas et natura immo naturae necessitas requirit). Gentile added, “The free will of Bruno is quite lacking but the development of reason will gradually remedy its deficiency.” Freedom consists in the conformation with the whole, in living and collaborating with the soul of the human soul. Human will is a confused love, not yet directed (amor confusus, non adhuc limitatus). As we become aware of the metaphysical presuppositions of the moral dialogues of Bruno, their general position becomes clear to us as a process of ascent toward the one, toward the supreme love. This supreme love reaches the final stage with the crowning of the “death by kiss” (morte di bacio), in which the functions of imagination and senses become extinguished, “no differently than a drop of water that vanishes in the sea, or a speck of dust that gradually loses its substance in the spacious and immense atmosphere” (De gli eroici furori, v. 462). D. Two Antithetical Positions in the Italian Works The interpretation of Tocco, which others have followed, presents us with the problem of the rapport between the Spaccio della bestia trionfante and the dialogues De gli eroici furori, which, according to this well-deserving scholar, would represent two very different positions that appear antithetical: earthly and Aristotelian, the first work, all enthusiasm and Neo-Platonic, the second. If we want to maintain some coherence in Bruno and not divide his ethic into an ethic of temperance and measure and one of ascent, the opposing works represent an ethic of the multitude of common folks and an ethic of the few sages, an ethic of animals (asini, donkeys) and an ethic of human beings. Bruno quoted the Scriptures: “You will redeem the first born of the donkey with the exchange of a sheep; but will redeem the first born of man with a price” (il primogenito dell’asino cangerai con la pecora; il primogenito dell’uomo redimerai col prezzo). The reading of the two works would convince of their agreement, in the same way that in Nicomachean Ethics no irremediable contrast is found, but inner harmony between the apex of contemplative virtue and the practice of proper ethos. In Spaccio della bestia trionfante the beginning of the kind of life that ends in De gli eroici furori is described. In the Spaccio, “Giordano speaks to the vulgar, the common people” presenting the fundamental principles and the first agreements: When I intended to treat of moral philosophy according to the interior light that the divine sun irradiated and irradiates in me, I found expedient to advance certain preludes at the example of musicians. I drafted some occult and confused outlines and shadows, laid down some low, profound, and blind foundations, as the great builders do. It appeared

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to me that no more convenient way was possible of accomplishing what I intended than by giving in a list and in a certain order all the primary forms of morality, which are the virtues and the capital vices (Essendo io in intenzione di trattar la moral filosofia secondo il lume interno che in me ave irradiato e irradia il divino sole intellettuale, mi par espediente prima di preponere certi preludii a similitudine de musici; imbozzar certi occolti e confusi delineamenti ed ombre; e gittar certi bassi, profondi e ciechi fondamenti, come gli grandi edificatori, il che non mi parea piú convenientemente poter effettuarsi, se non con ponere in numero e certo ordine tutte le prime forme de la moralità, che sono le virtudi e vizii capitali). The Jove who frees and reforms the heavens is the human being that initiates the process of its redemption. “Jove, the soul, the human being” signifies how is it that “in every human being, in every individual a world is contemplated, a universe” (come in ogni uomo, in ciascuno individuo si contempla un mondo, un universo). In all this, Jove in particular symbolizes the faculty of understanding, which is necessary for an interior reform; Jove represents “the act of ratiocination of the internal counsel … that is consulting on what should be done.” Reason looks at the truth and regulates accordingly the will “against the waves of natural furies.” As Bruno narrated in Spaccio: Then the triumphant beast would come into view, the vices that prevail and usually oppress the divine part. Let us cleanse the spirit from error and adorn it with virtues. Do cleanse the spirit and make it fit for the love of the beauty that is seen in natural goodness and justice; for the desire of the pleasure that derive from the fruits [of natural goodness and justice]; and for the hate and fear of the contrary deformities and pains (Allora si dà spaccio a la bestia trionfante, cioè a gli vizii che predominano e sogliono conculcar la parte divina; si ripurga l’animo da errori, e viene a farsi ornato de virtudi; e per amor della bellezza che si vede nella bontà e giustizia naturale, e per desio de la voluttà consequente da frutti di quella, e per odio e tema de la contraria difformitade e dispiacere). The battle against evilness celebrates the goodness, which in Spaccio della bestia trionfante we can find in this continuous action by means of which the human being always measures its valor in an ineluctable collision. Virtue in Spaccio della bestia trionfante means war; it is this world’s war, which is an eternal war: The beginning, the middle, and the end of all that we see are from contraries, in contraries, for contraries. Where contrariety is, action and reaction are present; motion, diversity, plurality, and order are present.

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In this battle against the beast, the contraries are always reunited through an admirable magic, and always separate for vital necessity. The goodness of today would be the obstacle and the evilness of tomorrow, in the same way that the goodness of yesterday is the limit that has to be overcome today. In the meantime, we must be aware that “not one thing is absolutely bad in nature” (nessuna cosa è assolutamente mala in natura). The universe, the divine infinite universe, is good, and humanity finds in it the admirable field for its vertiginous operosity: “Climb, overcome, and go beyond … each stony and harsh mountain … away from me all intentions of laziness, sluggishness, leisure, negligence, and appealing indolence” (Monta, supera e passa … ogni sassosa e ruvida montagna … via da me ogni torpore, ogni ocio, ogni negligenza, ogni desidiosa acedia). Leisure should be removed by work. To the myth of the golden age the vision should be opposed of a humanity laboriously working, a humanity animated by solicitude and industrious Fatigue. Joy is hard work: “O fatigue, you would not be worthy fatigue unless you overcome yourself in such a way that you would not think of yourself as fatigue…. Supreme perfection is the ability of not feeling fatigue or dolor, when we are in point of fact suffering fatigue or dolor” (però non sarai degna fatica, se talmente non vinci te stessa che non ti stimi esser quel che sei, fatica…. La somma perfezione è non sentir fatica e dolore, quando si comporta fatica e dolore). If in the loftiest place of heaven, instead of the Bear, Jove were to place Truth and Wisdom together, it would not be for reason of contemplation, but so that they would be the supreme norms of all life’s activities. Beside Truth, “which is the safe guide of all those who wander through this tempestuous sea of errors,” Wisdom is given “because the one without the other would hardly bring profit or be honored.” The intellect is guidance to action; it directs the hands; it does not allow aristocratic contemplation, but worldly activity that is strong and efficient. Bruno’s morality is fully concerned with the mundane, constructive and realistic; it relies on the world and on nature, “nature that is nothing else than god in the things” (la qual natura non è altro che dio nelle cose). We must condemn every religious teaching that “nature is a vulgar whore, natural law is a mischief, nature and divinity cannot concur on an identical good goal” (la natura è una puttana bagassa, che la legge naturale è una ribalderia, che la natura e la divinità non possono concorrere in uno medesimo buono fine). As he is generous with harshest criticism toward the heretics who deny the importance of works, Bruno is no less disrespectful toward Christ in the known

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and irreverent allegory of the centaur Chiron. No other value is assigned to positive religions than the educational and moral: “All those who have natural judgment judge the laws to be good because their purpose is the practice. Those laws are comparatively better that give better occasion for better practice” (tutti quei ch’hanno giudicio naturale giudicano le leggi buone, perché hanno per scoppo la prattica; e quelle in comparazione son megliori, che donano meglior occasione a meglior prattica). The Spaccio de la bestia trionfante liberated the horizon of human life from the presence of the beasts of vices. To the astrological conception in which animals’ figures populate the celestial sphere and influence and determine impulses and passions, we substitute the humanity that works for the achievement of human ends and earthly goals. It is a humanity governed by an eternal law, by an absolute justice, which is absolute norm that dominates over the whole nature. In Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, Bruno’s metaphysical conception insists on the immanence of the divine in nature in order to justify an earthly morality. God is nature, is infinite nature, but not indifferent nature, because It supports and rules a conduct that totally centered on human life. This conversion of the beast into the human being serves as the foundation for the conversion of the human being into God, for the vision of a God, not yet exhausted in the rhythm of things, but an admirable Unity in its multiple diffusing and expanding. The allegory of the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante is the reform of the feral life into human life through human laboriousness. The vicissitude of Degli eroici furori is the conversion of the human being into God, the omoiosis theou or similarity to God. This conversion of things that brought Bruno to repeat the bitterest words of the Ecclesiastes clears itself up in the inspiration of the philosophy that the theoreticians of love weaved concerning the Song of Songs (Cantico dei cantici) wherefore he, too, intended to call Song (Cantica) his work of love. The God scattered about the universe concentrates Itself in the One; the human activity diffused throughout the universe dashes forward to perceive, among the many, this unique significance. In the human chase, Actaeon gaped at the naked Diana, by whose splendid beauty he is captured and transformed from hunter into prey. At the same time the hounds, “the thoughts concerning divine things,” destroy Actaeon, and make him dead to the vulgar people and the multitude. He is now free from the chains of the perturbed senses and liberated from the carnal prison of matter. Hence, he would look at his Diana no longer through pinholes and windows, having removed all walls, but with eyes wide open he can gaze at the whole of the horizon. He sees everything as one and distinguishes no differences and numbers, which, according to the diversity of the senses, help us to see and learn only in confusion from diverse rhymes. He then sees Amphitrite, the fountainhead of all numbers, of all species, and of all causes. She is the monad,

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The cycle ends in the ascent from the many to the One, “the one that is the being itself” (quello uno che è l’istesso ente), now considered in its full Unity. This is the supreme impulse: the “becoming-a-god” reserved to a few because “many remain happy with the hunting of wild beasts” (molti rimangono contenti de caccia de fiere salvatiche): “Rare are the Actaeons to which it is given by destiny the possibility of contemplating naked Diana” (rarissimi son gli Atteoni alli quali sia dato dal destino di posser contemplare la Diana ignuda). These are the ones for whom natural virtue is not enough; they raise themselves up “to that superior intellect, which by itself is beautiful and good” (a quello intelletto superiore il quale da per sé è bello e da per sé è buono). They raise themselves up for love, pulled by the presence itself of God, “given that God is near, is with us, is in us” (atteso che Dio è vicino, è nosco, è dentro di noi). God is not the possession obtained, It is the tormenting stimulus that in the kingdom of the dissipated multiplicity makes us longing for the uppermost Unity. Unity is the prize for the vexing hunt, not for the supine asininity that carries the sacraments on its back, already ridiculed in Spaccio de la bestia trionfante and violently criticized in Cabala del cavallo pegaséo con l’aggiunta dell’Asino cillenico. The morality of human work, of paradise reconquered in the ascent, is exalted in the ethics of the heroic impulse toward the divine Apollo. The two moments of reality and the two aspects of Bruno’s metaphysics form the two moments of his morality. The universe lives on the rhythm One-Many and God-Nature, and in this universe, the two terminal worlds eternally change the one into the other. The human being, at the border

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between the two worlds, is the horizon that unites and separates them. In the human being, who knows and lives, the knot is found of the Many and the One. Humankind perennially works out its return to the One, a return that is not an exasperating and vain circularity without motive because it nourishes itself with that same infinite love by which God loves Itself. In “the eternal thirst eternally satisfied” (esuriens satiata, satietas esuriens), the problems of Bruno’s thought are illumined and defined. Nature is divine, but in its diffusing, it is not God, though God is in it. God is nature, but as the Unity and the Truth of nature. Hence nature, having God within itself, runs eternally toward God, and always comes closer to It, without ever possessing It. E. Bruno’s Thought in the Latin Works If we now move from the Italian works to the three Latin poems—De minimo, De monade, and De innumerabilibus, immenso et infigurabili—to which in 1591 Bruno trusted the last formulation of his thought before the unlucky trip to Venice, we do not find in them new positions or ulterior developments of doctrines. We may find in them a more sober and traditional exposition of his philosophy, almost as if, having dismissed polemic violence, he meant at last “to come back in some measure into the course of humanistic and scientific tradition, and speak a language that could be understood in every part of Europe.” Bruno, in De minimo, says that we ardently desire (studiose cupimus); in De monade, that being dubious, we question (incerti quaerimus), and in De immenso, that we will find out with great clarity (clarissime invenimus). Truly, it is only in De immenso that we find a vision of the whole. Tocco wrote that Bruno in “De minimo dwells on the elements of things; in De monade unveils numbers and figures of elementary things; and in De immenso studies the infinite worlds that are the results of the aggregations of such compounds.” In De minimo, he examines three minima: the unity, or arithmetic minimum; the point, or geometric minimum; and the atom, or material minimum. This explains the complete title of this work: De triplici minimo et mensura ad trium speculativarum scientiarum et multarum activarum artium principia (On the three kinds of minimum and measure for the principles of three speculative sciences and many practical arts). At the root of every order of reality, there are two minima with which everything is composed, no matter whether they are soul or atoms constituting the body and agglomerating around the soul: “Birth is expansion of the center; life is consistency of the sphere; death is contraction in the center” (nativitas ergo est expansio centri; vita consistentia sphaerae; mors contractio in centrum). The mutation of the whole is due to this uniting and dissolving, in which to an increasing aggregation no limit rules on the superior part, meanwhile on the inferior part the atom represents the minimum below which it is not licit to descend. The motive of the infinity of worlds is affirmed and the inexhaustible natural vicissitude is seen in the perennial aggregating and disaggregating of parts.

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Throughout the four parts of this work, Bruno dwells on mathematical considerations that we would not follow. We would not even consider the development of De monade, in which he reconsiders in large part the motives of the Neo-Platonic, magic, and cabalistic tradition. The De monade opens with the dedication to the Duque of Braunschweig, in which an autobiographic note appears rightly pointed out by Tocco in De monade (part 1, ch. 2, p. 324), “We, who from childhood faced a long battle / with fortune, no matter how much adverse is our fate, / we, not yet subdued, would keep faith to our proposal (At nos quantumvis fatis versemur iniquis, / fortunae longum a pueris luctamen adorsi, / propositum tamen invicti servamus). The search for truth and the certainty of having found it gives the philosopher a renewed strength in the contrast between his search and the trifles of the pedants: O Sun, free from adorning clouds, come! The ornaments of quadrupeds are not for human backs. Truth, searched, found, unveiled, Even if no one else would understand, I am more than satisfied for sharing wisdom with nature and deity (Procedat nudus, quem non ornant nebulae, sol; non conveniunt quadrupedum phalerae humano dorso. Porro veri species quaesita, inventa et patefacta me efferat; et si nullus intellegat, si cum natura sapio et cum numine, id vere plusquam satis est). What strikes us in De monade numero et figura, secretioris nempe physicae, mathematicae et metaphysicae elementa (the complete title), what appears before anything else, is the return to that mystical Pythagorizing tradition of which Ficino was so delighted and, even more so, Pico. In De monade (part 1, ch. 2, p. 334), we read, “Summarizing what has been proposed, we say that the numbers of this kind were—at least according to Pythagoras, Aglaophemus, Zoroaster, and the Babylonian Hermes—the principles on whose basis human beings could become cooperators in the operations of nature” (Sed nos propositum resumentes dicimus huiusce generis numeros Pythagorae, Aglaophemo, Zoroastro, Hermetique Babylonio fuisse principia, quibus operanti naturae homines cooperatores esse possint). These could very well be the words of Ficino, as Ficinian is the mystical tradition here mentioned. Truly, Bruno, in the transcription of his intuition into geometric terms, connected himself with that Platonic tradition that conceived the mundane process as the pulsating of a nature governed in its interior by numbers infused so to regulate and direct the whole. Bruno’s symbols in De monade bring us back to the intuitions of the Cabalists that became a fashion toward the end of the fif-

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teenth century. The circle is the perfect figure, which is principle and norm of the others. If from geometry we move to arithmetic, then the Monad is the perfect reality, the unique principle that generates and embraces everything, as in De monade (part I, ch. 2, p. 345): The circle and the monad explain all genera. / The circle as a simple center implicates everything. / Given that it is everything that can be, / the center is the substance of things (Circulus inde monas genera explicat omnia primo, / circulus ut simplex centrum implicat omnia, cum sit / quidquid et esse potest, ergo et substantia rerum est). The Pythagorism contained in the premises of the De monade (part 1, ch. 2, pp. 346348) repeats the motives of the dialogues De la causa: One is the infinite Space, one is Magnitude, and one is Momentum, with infinite possibility and potentiality. One is the first Essence, one is the first Goodness, one is the first Truth, through which everything is Being, Good, and True. One is the Mind that everywhere in its totality measures everything. One is the Intellect that everywhere regulates everything. One is the Love that conciliates all things with all things. … One is the Monad, unique substance of every number. One is the first Dyad that distinguishes everything by way of opposition. One is the first subject of all opposed things. One is the Intention that disposes all things. One is the last Goal to which all things aspire. One is the Means through which all things are attained. One is the Motor that provides mutation to all things. One is the Act that completes all things and one is the Soul that gives life to everything (Unum est Spacium, Magnitudo una, Momentum unum, cum possibilitate and potentialitate infinita, infinitum. Una prima Essentia, una prima Bonitas, una prima Veritas, qua omnia sunt Entia, Bona, Vera. Una Mens ubique tota, omnia mensurans, unus ubique omnia ordinans Intellectus, Amorque unus omnia omnibus concilians…. Monas una omnis numeri substantia, Una prima Dias omnia distinguens, oppositio. Unum primum omnium oppositorum subiectu…. Intentio una omnia disponens. Finis unus ad quem omnia conspirant ultimum. Medium unum per quod omnia consequuntur. Motor unus omnibus vicissitudinem praebens, Actus unus omnia perficiens, una omnia vivificans Anima). From the monad, the dyad and the triad are generated, and so on, up to the decade, which constitute the ten aspects in which reality manifests itself. Bruno compared this series to the Cabalistic sephiroth or vestments of God, “Divinity is celebrated with terms referring to vestments since words do not signify the God who cannot be named and is incomprehensible in Its absolute substance. Words as a veil of an inaccessible light, refer only to some exterior appearances of God” (Indumentorum nomine celebrata, quia Deum in substantia absoluta innominabilem et incomprehensibilem non significant, sed externis quibusdam respectibus, tamquam lucis inaccessibilis velaminibus, in

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De monade, part 1, ch. 2, p. 462). As anyone can see, in De monade, Bruno is pleased to record his intuition as being within the limits of the NeoPythagorizing tradition, showing how his conceptions are in no way different from those verba, audita, divina, within which the Ficinian and the Pichian schools had constrained and disguised their own ideas. It was a disguise that Bruno refused in De immenso et innumerabilibus, seu de universo et mundis (part 1, ch. 1, p. 202), the greater Latin poem that is similar for development and exposition to the dialogues of De l’infinito, whose impetuous and exalted enthusiasm is repeated: It is the mind that infused in our chests vital sensation. The mind liked to adorn our back with wings and to pull our heart to the prescribed end in the lofty order. Thus, we can despise Fortune and death … Centuries, years, months, days, succession of generations, the arms of time, harder than steel and diamonds, they wanted to preserve us from their furor. Intrepid with wings I cut through the immense space … Therefore, while I proceed safely in my journey in that blessed condition, sufficiently learned for my past studies, I become Guide, Law, Light, Prophet, Father, Author, and Way: and while I surge from this world to resplendent others, I explore every part of the ethereal fields (Est mens, quae vegeto inspiravit pectora sensu, quamque iuvit volucres humeris ingignere plumas, corque ad praescriptam celso rapere ordine metam: unde et Fortunam licet et contemnere mortem … Secla, anni, menses, luces, numerosaque proles, temporis arma, quibus non durum estaes adamasque, immunes voluere suo non esse furore. Intrepidus spacium immensum sic findere pennis Exorior …Quapropter dum tutus iter sic carpo, beata conditione satis studio sublimis avito reddor Dux, Lex, Lux, Vates, Pater, Author, Iterque: atque alios mundo ex isto dum adsurgo nitentes, aethereum campumque ex omni parte pererro). Bruno continued to insist on the infinity of the whole, on its unity, on the intrinsicality of God and world, and on the rationality of universe and God. In addition, he felt polemic against the distinction of Palingenio Stellato between physical and metaphysical light was truly the affirmation more radical and significant of the unity that Bruno’s thought wanted to purge of any residual equivocation, in order to grab in full the mystery of the immanence of one God in the infinite universal multiplicity: “God is infinite in the infinite, eve-

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rywhere in everything, not above, not outside, but absolutely present, in the same way that entity is not outside or above beings, nature is not outside natural things, and goodness outside of the good is nothing” (Deus esse infinitum in infinito, ubique in omnibus, non supra, non extra, sed praesentissimum, sicut entitas non est extra et supra entia, non est natura extra naturalia, bonitas extra bonum nulla est, in De monade, part 1, ch. 2, p. 213). This is the motto of and the seal to all the tormented speculation of Bruno. F. Giulio Cesare Vanini and Gerolamo Cardano Under certain aspects, we may place the speculation of the unfortunate Giulio Cesare Vanini beside that of Bruno, though it falls far short in precision and breath. From one place to another, Vanini saw refuge from his persecutors until he became a victim of the Inquisition, which had him tortured and at the age of thirty-four burned as a heretic. He was destined to become the symbol of libertines and freethinkers. Vanini was an enthusiastic admirer of Pomponazzi, whom he named his ideal teacher, divine preceptor, and prince of the philosophers of our century (magister meus, divinus praeceptor meus, nostri saeculi Philosophorum princeps). He almost believed to see in Pomponazzi a reincarnation of the spirit of Averroès: “Pythagoras would have placed in his body the spirit of Averroès.” The naturalistic interpretation of supernatural phenomena, which Pomponazzi gave in De incantationibus, the golden opuscule (aureum opusculum), is at the center of Vanini’s De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis libri IV (On the admirable secrets of nature, queen and goddess of all mortal things) published in Paris in 1616. This work takes profit from his wide readings of Pietro Pomponazzi, Gerolamo Cardano, Giulio Cesare Scaliger, and other thinkers of the sixteenth century. Hereby, on this basis, some scholars have sustained that this work no less than the other one of Vanini, the Amphitheatrum aeternae providentiae (Lugduni, 1615) is nothing but a colossal plagiary and a great mockery to posterity. In this regard, Guido De Ruggiero concludes in agreement with Luigi Corvaglia by calling Vanini’s work “a patchwork without any originality and scientific reliability.” Besides the fact that the people of the sixteenth century had a different conception of the use of their sources, what counts, in Vanini, are the tone and the accent that doctrines and thinkers assumed in his lively prose, justly considered almost pre-illuminism. From the works of Cardano, Vanini derives a deterministic vision, in which the ancient astrological credences are part, including the doctrine of the horoscope of religions, “God acts on sublunary beings only through the heavens (spheres) used as instruments.” He saw in this the origin always strictly natural of giving natural explications of all the supposed supernatural phenomena, “When imminent dangers are ready to fall on human beings— especially on sovereigns to whose example the world conforms itself—the supreme Being, by means of dreams, oracles, or brutes, offers answers in order to warn them” (De admirandis … arcanis, ch. 4, p. 52). With the reminis-

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cences from Cardano, those of the De incantationibus of Pomponazzi regarding his rationalistic explanation of religious life also return, but the scholastically constructed argumentation of Pomponazzi in the hands of Vanini becomes simple and elegant. It takes often the shape of a refined dialogue of Vanini with himself. Precisely to these characteristics of a brilliant and at times offending open-mindedness, the misfortune and fortune of Vanini are due. Father François Garasse properly judged the Dialoghi as “the most pernicious work that on the theme of atheism has appeared during the last onehundred years.”

Nineteen POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS MOTIVES 1. Niccolò Machiavelli What we can say about Machiavelli’s early years is very little. A. His Life and Works Born in 1469 of a family that was part of the small and impoverished gentry of Florence, Niccolò must have had the kind of boyhood that most children had in the homes on the streets of Florence in the fifteenth century. He stepped unto the threshold of history in 1498, at the age of twenty-nine, a month after the execution of the friar-politician Savonarola. Machiavelli obtained a minor job as one of the secretaries to the Chancery. For fourteen years, he held that bureaucratic office, which he loved and at which he was good. The politicians relied on him as the man who got papers drawn up and orders sent out and correspondence carried on and record kept. In due time, the scope of his duties was broadened and he was chosen for diplomatic missions, coming to visit every important state in Italy and several courts outside Italy. He acquitted himself invariably well; he met “the movers and shakers of the world” while his narrow horizon expanded into the vistas of the European state-system. Introducing The Prince and The Discourses, Max Lerner wrote: Machiavelli was in the position to become the first modern analyst of power. Where others looked at the figureheads, he kept his eyes glued behind the scenes. He sought the ultimate propulsion of events. He wanted to know what made things tick; he wanted to take the clock of the world to pieces to find out how it worked. He went on foreign missions, organized the armies of Florence, and carried through successfully the long protracted siege of Pisa. Yet he was concerned with what these experiences could teach him about the nature of power. In an age of portraiture, it was natural that he should be a painter, but his subjects never knew they were sitting for him. He studied Pope Julius II, the secular princes, the condottieri; above all, he studied Caesar Borgia, the Duke Valentino, who came to embodying the naked ideal of power.

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When in 1512 the political situation of Europe demanded the restoration of the Medici in Florence, at the age of forty-three the staunchly republican Machiavelli became a dejected liberal without job. He tried to make peace with the Medici, but to no avail. Instead, they had him arrested, drawn by the rope, and tortured. He was found plainly innocent, therefore released. He receded to a small suburban farm near Florence, and for the next fourteen years until his death, he tried to make himself useful to the Pope and the Medici without success. Lerner again wrote on this, “Ironically, it was this period of his disgrace that represents the high point of his creative power. The enforced leisure compelled him to fall back on himself.… The result was his books—his solitary song. More and more he retreated to his study and his mind. From them came The Prince, the Art of War, the Discourses, the History of Florence.… The civil servant, the politician, the diplomat, the military organizer has become a man of letters.” When in 1527 a democratic government was reestablished in Florence, Machiavelli hurried back to Florence, eager to regain his post as secretary. He never stood a real chance. The Prince, circulated in manuscript, had made him enemies; the small dull men who had it in their power to dispense office feared his brilliance and wit. Mercifully Machiavelli fell sick and never learned that the final vote of the Council was overwhelmingly against him. Before the news came, he was dead. B. His Thought In Machiavelli, we find a characteristic aspect of the Renaissance movement: the theme of “effective truth” (verità effettuale) that puts one in direct contact with reality. Inquiry should be conducted, in every field, on the grounds of a living experience. When he introduced his work, he proposed it as a work that accounted for true reality, the experienced reality. His was an adherence to the unrolling of things, a humble presence in the face of them, “My intention being to write something of use to those who understand, it appeared to me more convenient to go to the effective truth of a thing instead of to the imagination of it” (sendo l’intento mio scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende, mi è parso piú conveniente andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa che alla immaginazione di essa). In Machiavelli, we find the appeal to a natural origination, to which it is necessary to regress if we want to understand life and human history. It is the felt need for the return to the origins, to nature, which was the proper characteristic of the first humanistic culture. In the unrolling of things, in the process of events, a root must be traced out. This root is the basis of historical processes. It gives the reason of the insuperable limits that regulate such processes, in which the development is rather an appearance. Their original essentiality is already fully completed; and the essentiality’s temporal manifestation is purely the expression of an intrinsic necessity. Meinecke has observed that the accent of Machiavelli in Discorsi (bk. 1, ch. 6) is placed on this hard necessity, “Given that all human

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things are in motion and cannot stand firm, it is convenient for the human being to decide whether to go one way or another, and at all moments when reason does not help in the deciding, necessity would induce” (Sendo tutte le cose degli uomini in moto, e non potendo stare salde, conviene che le saglino o che le scendano, e a molte cose che la ragione non t’induce, t’induce la necessità). If it is differently ordered, a necessity can bring to ruin a republic, no matter how wise its rulers are. Livy called this necessity “the last and greatest weapon” (ultimum et maximum telum); this necessity, when there are no other solutions, would make “the war just and the arms sacred” (giusta la guerra e sante le armi). In Discorsi (bk. 3, ch. 12), Machiavelli narrates: Claudius Pontius, at that time commander of the Samnite army, pointed out to them in a remarkable speech that the Romans were decided for war under any circumstances, and that, although they themselves desired peace, yet they were thus forced to accept the war, adding these words, “War is just for those who are forced to it by necessity; sacred are the arms of those who have no hope but in their arms.” It was upon this necessity that he based his hope of victory with his soldiers (Claudio Ponzio, capitano allora dell’esercito dei Sanniti, con una sua notabile orazione mostrò, come i Romani volevano in ogni modo guerra, e benché per loro si desiderasse la pace, la necessità gli faceva seguire la guerra, dicendo queste parole: ‘Iustum est bellum, quibus necessarium, et pia arma, quibus nisi in armis spes est’: sopra la qual necessità egli fondò con gli suoi soldati la speranza della vittoria). History is dominated by an intrinsic necessity that makes its development return in a continuous cycle, in which the traditional forms of state, good or degenerate, already established by Aristotle, alternatively reappear: Monarchy easily becomes tyranny; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and the popular government lapses readily into licentiousness. A legislator who gives to a newly founded state any of these three forms of government, constitutes it but for a brief time. The reason for this is that no precaution can prevent that any one of the three forms that are reputed good would degenerate into its opposite kind (Perché il principato facilmente diventa tirannico, gli ottimati con facilità diventano stati di pochi: il popolare, senza difficoltà in licenzioso si converte. Talmente che se uno ordinatore di repubblica ordina in una città uno di quelli tre stati, ve lo ordina per poco tempo, perché nessun rimedio può farvi a far che non sdruccioli nel suo contrario). The mutation is a circulation within the boundaries of necessity. It is an internal life, so to say, which does not alter the solid unity of this “nature” that is

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devoid of a true and proper historicity because it is rolled up in a rhythm that renews itself without substantially changing. The Biblical saying that is present in Cardano, Bruno, and Campanella—“what is now is what was” and “nothing new under the sun”—is manifest as well in Machiavelli. All interpretations looking everywhere for conscious historicisms in Machiavelli are clearly erroneous. All this explains also a concept of an exemplary Roman history, which is not a utopian vision of a world subtracted from all mutations and elevated beyond human events in its purest perfection, such as the one that in Vico invests the history of the chosen people. Roman history is a cycle that has been completed, in which every vicissitude has already been exhausted, and for that reason may indicate the typical rhythm of every event within it. In Roman history, the norms that regulate the life of commonwealths can be read, in the clearest of ways. The paradigmatic character, which antiquity possesses in the eyes of the humanist, is an exemplary character because more natural, and it is found in the Machiavellian position. There are no other ways, except the necessary ones of nature, against which it is impossible to rebel. The Machiavellian vision of humankind and of political life must be understood within the frame of this natural necessity. It is not an optimistic or a properly pessimistic vision, but it is intended in order to show how things and human beings are. Machiavelli’s vision is a natural inquiry that wants to specify for common advantage the immutable reality of human vicissitudes, and does not delineate ideals purely fictitious. In The Prince (ch. 15), Machiavelli confessed, “My intention being to write something of use to those who understand, it appeared to me more convenient to go to the effectual truth of the thing instead of to the imagination [we may have] of it.” This truth reveals an immutability in which nothing is created and nothing is lost on the plain of values. “I … think that the world has always been the same, and there has always been as much good as evil in it. We agree that this good and this evil vary from place to place” (Io … giudico il mondo sempre essere stato ad uno medesimo modo, ed in quello essere stato tanto di buono quanto di cattivo; ma variare questo cattivo e questo buono, di provincia in provincia). Geographic mutation, if this is what we have, is a surge of waves that come and go. Given that human realities are always in motion, human beings must consequently go up or down accordingly. It is a perennial identical flux, and this is the teaching of the naturalism of Cardano and Bruno. C. Human Perfidy The Machiavellian assertion concerning human perfidy must also be interpreted at the light of this vision of reality. Machiavelli insists on this point, with perseverance. Why is it so? In Il Principe (ch. 17), he shared his opinion: We may say in general of human beings that they are disloyal, insincere, deceitful, timid of danger, and avid of profit. As long as you

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benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children … when the need is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt (Perché delli uomini si può dire questo generalmente: che sieno ingrati, volubili simulatori, fuggitori de’ pericoli, cupidi di guadagno: e mentre fai lor bene, son tutti tua, offerenti el sangue, la roba, la vita, e’ figliuoli … quando il bisogno è discosto: ma quando ti si appressa, e’ si rivoltano). These motions are proper to humanity, natural to humanity and they are not good or bad in themselves, but when they are compared to some ethical ideals formed by us, only then may we speak of perfidy. We should, in truth, rather speak of contrast and equilibrium of natural forces, which we could call malign only by referring to principles that transcend the order of nature, to “what ought to be” instead of “what is”: An individual in its effective living is so far removed from how it ought to be living that if it abandons what it is doing for what it should be doing, it will face its ruin instead of its safety and preservation. A human being who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good (Elli è tanto discosto da come si vive a come si doverrebbe vivere, che colui che lascia quello che si fa per quello che si dovrebbe fare, impara piuttosto la ruina che la preservazione sua; perché un uomo, che voglia fare in tutte le parte professione di buono, conviene rovini in fra tanti che non sono buoni). Human reality as a fact is appetite, passion, and craving for the triumph of personal egoism. Who does not keep this into account would miserably fail on the practical level of the temporal succession of human actions. Justice and goodness are not gifts; order is not already made, it needs an instauration. Duty, to have to do something, is not like merely living, or just being. In Discorsi (bk. 1, ch. 3), we read: All those scholars who have reasoned about civil institutions demonstrate—and history is full of examples to support them—that the person that desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all human beings are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find free occasion for it. If some perfidy remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason (Come dimostrano tutti coloro che ragionano del viver civile, e come ne è piena di esempi ogni istoria, è necessario a chi dispone una repubblica, ed ordina le leggi in quella, presupporre tutti gli uomini essere cattivi, e che gli abbiano sempre ad usare la malignità dell’animo loro qualunque volta ne abbiano libera occasione: e

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It may be improper to speak of perfidy because the term has meaning only in the confrontation with an ideal goodness, with a “what ought to be” opposed to a “what is,” of which it may not be convenient to make mention on the plain of natural inquiry. It is to that inquiry and its experience that Machiavelli wishes to remain faithful, and in which only one morality is possible: the acceptance of the necessity that goes beyond and is superior to every human value. Machiavelli advises, “Be equal in strength, superior in necessity” (virtute pares, necessitate superiores estis). If this vision could be concluded at this time, liberating itself from the improper presence of the distinction between good and evil, it should arrive to an obliged acknowledgment of nature. In confrontation with nature, human action could at most aspire, not without incoherence, as to a capable technique, to a well-organized prudence, to that prudent expedient according to necessity, of which Machiavelli often speaks. Machiavelli if he tends with Renaissance naturalism to disperse the common moral distinctions in the supreme command of nature, still feels most ardently the exigency of a valorization of the human will. In this way, we have the problem of the human being and of its place in nature, which per se is indifferent to the goals and evaluations of the human being. The problem of virtue-virtue meaning skill, talent, strength, and initiative-and, by a necessary connection, that of fortune, were problems proper to a large part of the culture of the fifteenth century in which the infinite possibilities of the ego unveil their contrast with the revelation of natural necessity. This is the point of encounter between a motive typically humanistic and the naturalistic tendency, where nature and spirit seem to renew the medieval antithesis of humankind and God. D. Fortune, Chance Not long before Machiavelli wrote Il Principe, Ficino was writing to Giovanni Rucellai that in dealing with fortune it is convenient to use humility and prudence and adapt to its decrees. This in the Platonic Ficino meant a wide concession to the forces that limit human power. This awareness was so real that in such open abdication of the will the exalted dignity of the human being was vanishing. Among the oracles of Cardinal Girolamo of Correggio you can read: “Prudently acts the person who allows time to have its course or submits to irate fortune” (Prudentemente fa chi serve al tempo o alla fortuna irata cede). Machiavelli senses the yoke of fortune as the inviolable limit with which all human action has to deal: “Fortune’s natural power compels all human beings; because its reign is always violent, unless some great virtue would calm it down” (Sua natural potenza ognuno / Sforza e il regno suo è sempre violento, / se virtú eccessiva non l’ammorza). It is possible for the human being to escape fortune by means of virtuous acts, through its will and

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humanity. This does not exclude that the barrier of things and of the course of events still remain as the constituted field within which the human act inserts itself. In Il Principe (ch. 25), we read: In order that our free will may not be altogether extinguished, I think it may be true that fortune is the ruler of half of our actions, but that it allows the other half or thereabout to be governed by us. I compare fortune to an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from one site, and places it in another. Everyone flees before this river, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it. Though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, human beings can make provisions against it by dykes and banks, so that when it raises either it will go into a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. The same goes for fortune. Fortune shows its power where no human action has orderly prepared to resist, and directs its fury where it knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold it (Perché il nostro libero arbitrio non sia spento, iudico potere esser vero che la fortuna sia arbitra della metà delle azioni nostre, ma che ancora lei ne lasci governare l’altra metà, o presso, a noi. Et assomiglio quella a uno di questi fiumi rovinosi, che, quando s’adviano, allagano e’ piani, ruinano li arbori e li edifizii, lievono di questa parte terreno, vengono da quell’altra; ciascuno fugge loro dinanzi, ognuno cede allo impeto loro, sanza potervi in alcuna parte obstare. E, benché sieno cosí fatti, non resta però che li uomini, quando sono tempi quieti, non vi potessimo fare provvedimenti e con ripari et argini, in modo che, crescendo poi, o andrebbono per uno canale, o l’impeto loro non sarebbe né sí licenzioso né sí dannoso. Similmente interviene della fortuna: la quale dimostra la sua potenzia dove non é ordinata virtú a resisterle, e quivi volta li sua impeti, dove la sa che non sono fatti li argini e li ripari a tenerla). Fortune is at the same time obstacle and occasion; it is a law that closes the path like a barrier and a base that supports the possibility of action. Virtue is prudent human action. Machiavelli says, “It is necessary to be prudent” (li è necessario essere tanto prudente), even though afterward he will express his admiration, aesthetically instead of profoundly reasoned, for fortitude, “I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master a woman, to conquer her by force” (io iudico bene questo, che sia meglio essere impetuoso che respettivo, perché la fortuna è donna: et è necessario, volendola tenere sotto, batterla e urtarla). Virtue, a well-disciplined virtue is needed, which respects the reality of things and inserts into such reality the action, remaining always on its guard and always fighting the mutable barrier of things and of the course of events. This barrier in turn places itself in an ambiguous rapport with the necessity inherent in the course of nature. If the rhythm, by which the whole is

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exhausted in its immobile mutability, is all gathered in the necessity; if necessity “is the causal construction, the instrument fit for shaping the inert mass into the form wanted by virtue”; if “virtue is the living force of the human being, then what is the place of fortune? Machiavelli represents fortune more as seer than as blind, given that fortune is always prompt to dash where even a minimal fracture in the cuirass of virtue presents itself. It is written: “Fortune has two meanings: one is fortune as the authority that governs from above all human things and in whose power is virtue itself; the other is fortune as the enemy of virtue that wants to subdue virtue to its own ends.” Objectivity can be found in the two meanings. In the first sense, we have precisely what has been called necessity, the absolute law with which the human being must always deal. It is necessity, not because Machiavelli nullifies free will—as by coherence he could do— but because free will is inserted in something of whose structure free will must avail itself. Humans are humane and ferine, and, among animals, possess the characteristics of both the fox and the wolf. In order to rule over human beings, it is useful to learn at the school of Chiron, the centaur, semi-animal and semi-human, and to have the nature of both the fox and the lion, “for the lion cannot protect itself from traps, and the fox cannot defend itself from wolves” (Il Principe, ch. 18). As we have seen, virtue is “to comply with fortune and not to oppose it; to weave its orders and not rip them apart” (secondare la fortuna, non opporsele; tessere gli ordini suoi e non romperli, in Discorsi, bk. 2, ch. 29). Again, virtue is “to know the times and the order of things and fit oneself to it” (conoscere i tempi e l’ordine delle cose e accomodarsi a quello, in Lettere Familiari, epistle num. 116). In these descriptions, fortune is identified with nature and its necessity, and thus fortune would turn completely within the moderation that is also the instrument of virtue. Fortune is obstacle and occasion to virtue, so that not only half of the human act, but the whole of it would be equally in the power of the free will. As Gentile concluded, “fortune has no power where already virtue is prompt to offer resistance.” In the act itself in which the obstacle from being an imposed barrier becomes a wanted instrument, natural necessity changes into the moral will, and the evilness of nature becomes common goodness. We should always remember that this freedom is the circumstantially determinate freedom. E. Power, Virtue The Machiavellian concept of fortune has a second side, something by which fortune is different and distinguished from nature, from necessity, from God, and from the order of things. If it is true that transcendence in a laicized form persists in the concept of fortune, we must then clarify that in “fortune” the God of the voluntarists is triumphing instead of the one of the intellectualists, a power that radically escapes the human reach. It is a power “human beings cannot correct with their prudence, a power against which no remedy will be

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found.” The reason is “that it is beyond any human conjecture.” For this reason, now and then, impulse is more useful than calculation; force is more profitable than prudence. In Il Principe (ch. 25), Machiavelli said: We see that human beings in those things which lead to the aim that each of them has in mind, namely, glory and riches, proceed in different ways: one with circumspection, another with impetuosity, one by violence, another by cunning, one with patience, another with impatience (Si vedono gli uomini, nelle cose che l’inducano al fine, quale ciascuno ha innanzi, cioè glorie e ricchezze, procedervi variamente; l’uno con respetto, l’altro con impeto, l’uno per violenza, l’altro con arte, l’uno per pazienza, l’altro con il suo contrario; e ciascuno con questi diversi modi vi può pervenire). In short, it is possible to change nature by dominating its forces with new forces, or, in a human way, by comprehending its motions and obliging them to our aims. By nature, the human being is two-edged, at the border between two worlds, human and bestial. The human being, as the strongest among beasts or as the most astute, can rationally and humanly dominate the beasts. Thus, human beings may beat fortune in the same way as a man beats a woman who at the end submits to violence, or astutely wins her over with fondling, politeness, and discernment. The problem is that in Machiavelli a common ambiguity is found by reason of which the rapport between the vision of nature as force or impetuous torrent, and the concept of a rational order, is never clearly posited. At the end, the same essence of the human beings who live at the limit of that ambiguity remains indissolubly entwined with uncertainty. The Ficinian position was a typical example of this, oriented as it were toward the affirmation of human spirituality and liberty, and at the same time impaired by an uncertain consideration of the astral fate. The fortune of Machiavelli is like the Ficinian one. In Machiavelli, fortune is the nature’s objectivity that human beings may control by seizing its immutable and necessary order in which they are also inserted; but thereafter fortune transforms itself into an adverse malign power that blindly operates, indifferent to all human efforts of defense. By objectivity, Machiavelli meant the objects, the situations encountered in life, and the obstacles. We may even say that Machiavelli is more inclined toward this second vision: “Fortune lets itself be overcome by the bold instead of by those who proceed coldly. Like a woman, fortune acts friendly with younger men, because they are less cautious, they are fiercer, and master her with greater confidence” (e si vede che la si lascia piú vincere da questi, che da quelli che freddamente procedono. E però sempre, come donna, è amica de’ giovani, perché sono meno respettivi, piú feroci, e con piú audacia la comandano, in Il Principe, ch. 25). The mentioned ambiguity is also reflected in the concept of

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virtue. Virtue is not only prudence, comprehension of the fated necessity of nature, and free insertion within nature of human activity. Virtue is force of lions and astuteness of foxes, comprehension of the situation and use of the necessary force when the situation requires it. If Machiavelli were to stop at a naturalistic vision of reality as necessity, he would have redeemed the apparent negation of morality with the concept of conformation of the will with the universal necessity. In the Spinozian game of the true and the false usefulness, morality saves itself in the highest form. Machiavelli, on the contrary, has taken an equivocal concept of fortune. While at some times the action comes to be justifiable for the instauration of a reign for the common good or political good in the immediate interplay of natural forces, at others, the political ideal breaks down into the particular expedients that would allow using force to triumph over another force. In Machiavelli, virtue may be the “prudence” and the power according to which the wise lawmakers of a state act having “the good intention of being useful not to themselves, but to the public good, not to their own progeny, but to the common fatherland” (animo di volere giovare non a sé, ma al bene commune, non alla sua successione, ma alla commune patria). Machiavellian virtue may also be the successful wickedness that with force imposed violence on fortune. In Discorsi (bk. 1, ch. 10), it is written, “If among those who died a natural death there were some wicked ones, like Severus, it was due to their extraordinary good fortune and virtue, which two things happen to few men” (se entra quelli che morirono ordinariamente ve ne fu alcuno scellerato, come Severo, nacque da una sua grandissima fortuna e virtú, le quali due cose pochi uomini accompagnano). In this last case, virtue is violent power and astuteness in deciding upon a particular case; it is not the conformation with the universal necessity. F. Necessity Machiavelli had the most vivid sense of concrete reality, of life in its manifestations, and within reality, he had at least a glimpse at an inner, iron-like necessity. What he did not know how to do was to gather in its totality, in its fullness, the laws of this necessity; he always examined particular cases, particular situations, particular interests, without reaching in the particular what in it is of necessity and has often transformed factual verifications into principles of law. For him a natural objectivity, which should be overcome, opposes as an obstacle each human action. To the victory achieved in the comprehension of the law, he prefers too much the success obtained in a victorious skirmish, in which the human being arrives to a kind of equilibrium on the natural plain, but not to the nature pacified with the spirit. In the famous chapter fifteen of Il Principe, he correctly contrasts “how we live” with “how we ought to live.” Goodness and justice are not given: human beings do not tend to the common good, but to their own particular happiness. From this, a political virtue could originate that, keeping into ac-

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count human impulses, comes into a battle with them, and could reach the point of dominating and disciplining them for the common good and that of the fatherland’s, which is the political science’s intended goal. In order to be concrete, a political virtue may be tough and violent, ready to perform beastly or humanly, having to deal with beings that are two-edged and should be acting for an actualization of humanity. For this reason, a political virtue must act for the love of justice and goodness, for a natural order that, because wanted, is redeemed and raised to a value capable of transfigurating any act. The Machiavellian equivocation is all in this, in the experience that virtue, although covered by duress, although aiming at power, should always be virtue and not wickedness. On the political plain, this virtue should be achievement of the common good; on the plain of existence, with the means that existence offers, it should be the realization of the obligation, which is the order intrinsic to social reality. However, Machiavelli has not taken this vision. He opposed each individual to another individual, one force to another. His is not a reverse of a force by way of a strong reasoning, but by way of a stronger force. In Il Principe (ch. 18), his opinion is, “If human beings were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but because they are wicked and untrustworthy, you are not bound to be trustworthy for them” (E se li uomini fussino tutti buoni, questo precetto non sarebbe buono: ma perché son tristi e non la osserverebbono [la fede] a te, tu ancora non l’hai ad osservare a loro). This is not the confirmation of the original wickedness of human nature, but a reduction of the ability of the ruler to use mere shrewdness that does not change at all the situation in which it is inserted and becomes flattened. This is an aware acceptance of things as they are, not a transformation of events. Virtue here does not overturn fortune; it does not change the objective situation, but adapts to it and loses itself in it. Fortune, on the other hand, contravenes this view because it is not just an occasion, but strong coercion. A natural power like the act of deception cannot be lightly modified in respect to trust, but must be acknowledged as deception and overcome with another deception. In this way, unfortunately, the first deception is not truly overcome but it is used as an occasion of apparent victory for the new deceiver. Machiavelli, in reality, because incapable of finding a passage from wicked nature to human ideal, destroys the ideal. By so doing, he eliminated the possibility of overturning nature and trampled his notion of virtue on that of fortune. He destroyed every possible advantage of humanity, with the consequence that while it appeared that all fortune could be controlled with virtue, it happened instead that all human virtue came to be reduced to contingent fortune. The insistent counsel of becoming fox among foxes, liar among liars, traitor among traitors, and rascal among rascals is certainly not the rational acknowledgment of the effectual truth—this acknowledgment would already be an overcoming of the effectual truth—but the cave in of the human being and its actions in a natural immediacy. This is Machiavellianism. Machiavellianism is not the acknowledgment that, in order to bring the ideal

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down in the real or to raise the ideal up to the real, we must equip the ideal with powerful weapons, in such a way that it would be possible to compel the beast to become man. This would be a rigid vision of the ruthless of life. Machiavellianism is to contrast with shrewdness one force against another without inserting liberty in this contrast of forces, in order to reduce all of them to mere instruments for the forging of reality by human beings. The praised sense of the compactness of the real runs the risk of becoming a loss of the significance of the human being considered as a free agent capable of constructing new realities beyond the small vicissitudes whose aim is to maintain certain concrete situations. As we said before, we have here foxes against lions, and lions against wolves, not human beings who wish to transform foxes and wolves into human creatures. Campanella meant precisely this when he reproached Machiavelli for not having included in his vision the goodness of the whole, for having only considered the good of a part of the whole, hereby forcing his Machiavellian virtue to become sheer wickedness, instead of the universal manifestation of the victory of liberty. G. Ambiguity Scholars have spoken of the ambiguity of Machiavelli. Machiavelli certainly felt the necessity of a principle to which it was necessary to return, as of a necessity imposed by laws. It was difficult to seize the passage from historic experience to necessity. Typical was his position concerning religion, which was considered by him essential to civil life, so much that Numa was said to be superior to Romulus (Discorsi, bk. 1, ch. 11). Machiavelli did not hesitate to affirm, “If the Christian religion would have maintained itself from the beginning in harmony with the principles of its founder, the Christian states and republics would have been much more united and happier than what they are” (se in tutti i governi della Repubblica Cristiana si fusse mantenuta la Religione secondo che dal datore di essa ne fu ordinato, sarebbero gli Stati e le repubbliche cristiane piú unite e piú felici assai, che esse non sono, in Discorsi, bk. 1, ch. 12). This does not stop him from considering religion as an instrument of ruling and from instituting in the Discorsi the famous comparisons between religion and religion. In them it is not the impiety that stricken us as much as the reduction of every credence to an episodic force. The Machiavellian consideration of religion was a consequence of the reverse made in respect to the Middle Ages. To the subordination of all values to the heavenly city, Machiavelli substituted the universal dependency of everything from the earthly city, the absolute true on earth, in respect to which religion was merely a means. What is hard to find in Machiavelli, as a doctrine clearly posited, is the valorization of the state as the supreme end. Machiavelli is not Hobbes or Hegel. In his examination of the political experience, he remained within the limits of the interplay of forces of the Italian States of the fifteenth century and did not know how to find a point of reference and convergence of his most acute ob-

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servations and, about the particular, quite profound. One of the most correct observations on Machiavelli has been saying that in regard to the episodic and the particular, even more than Guicciardini, he has been “the man capable of observing the particular,” which opens up in the technical suggestion or counsel. In him, it is not possible to find a solid political theory, or a conception of the useful as a sphere in itself distinct and autonomous, or a rigorous construction of the problem of the rapports between politics and morality. The exasperation itself of Machiavelli’s antitheses and the profundity of some of his analyses increased the awareness of the problems and the need of determining the significance of political activity. 2. Francesco Guicciardini. Politicians and Utopians The profound similarities of Guicciardini’s thought with that of Machiavelli have been so often mentioned that any insistence on this would be vain. It will be useful to observe that the usual comparison between the two is hurting instead of helping the comprehension of Guicciardini’s attitude, in whose regard exaggerated insistence has been placed on the evaluation of the “particular,” which has been taken almost as the sign of an analytical and scarcely constructive mentality. Guicciardini is constantly apprehensive about the kind of theorizing that by becoming too general slides into abstractness and no longer is capable of connecting reality with its principles. Machiavelli, although he appealed to “effectual reality,” loved too many abstract generalizations. On the contrary, Guicciardini is preoccupied in preserving humility in the presence of facts, which are the only things we know and that represent for us the unique means for an orientation. Guicciardini does not believe that the reaching of the essences is possible to human wisdom. In Ricordi (bk. 2, p. 125), he wrote, “Both philosophers and theologians and all others who scrutinize supernatural things or invisible things speak nonsense. Human beings are truly at the dark of things and their inquiry served and serves for the exercise of minds more than for the achievement of truth” (e’ filosofi e e’ teologi e tutti gli altri che scrutano le cose sopra natura o che non si veggono, dicono mille pazzie: perché in effetto gli uomini sono al buio delle cose, e questa indagazione ha servito e serve piú a esercitare gli ingegni che a trovare la verità). No less inscrutable is the nature of God whose decrees totally escape us “for the reason that Its counsels are so profound that they are properly said to be ‘immeasurably deep’” (essendo e’ consigli suoi sí profondi che meritatamente sono detti “abyssus multa”). Everything proceeds with an immutable rhythm. At the bottom of reality, a perennially and substantially immobile recurring process exists, according to which things change. This change is a change in surface, not in essence, “Everything that has been and is at the present, will still be in the future … the destiny of the world has always been the same (Tutto quello che è stato per el passato ed è al presente, sarà ancora in futuro … el mondo fu sempre di una medesima sorte). No recurring uniformity in time is given, but

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a correspondence, so to say, spatial, because the root of things is unique. We read in Ricordi (bk. 1, p. 114; bk. 2, pp. 12, 76), “Things in every place are identical or similar” (le quali [cose] in ogni luogo sono le medesime or simili). For this reason, the proverbial sayings are the same in the various nations and “the things past illuminate the future ones” (le cose passate fanno lume alle future). For the precise reason that the constant essences are unknowable and that the variation is of names and colors and of “surfaces,” no advantage in abstract theories is recognized, but a “sharp eye” (buono occhio) and the most diligent observation and consideration are required. Only in this way, we would not be deceived by the uniform or the mutable: not by uniformity because it would make us neglect the peculiarity, not by mutation because it would make us forget the constancy. In this way, we would acknowledge the mutation of human tastes together while grasping the slow motion of events, which pass unnoticed by the superficial looker, “The things of the world never stand firm” (Le cose del mondo non stanno ferme); their moves are imperceptible and we are blind to them. The whole wisdom is found in seizing the mutations; taking hold of what is characteristic, discerning, and adapting our own conduct to reality, which is not rigid, but multifarious, plastic, and pliant. He said, “Without the accidental of the experience” that becomes gradually molded according to reality, nothing can be achieved (Ricordi, bk. 1, ch. 10). Again: To speak of the things of the world in an indistinct and absolute fashion and, so to say, by habit, is a great mistake. The reason is that almost no distinctions and exceptions due to the variety of the circumstances can be judged with the same rule. Distinctions and exceptions are not written down in manuals, discernment must teach them to us (È grande errore parlare delle cose del mondo indistintamente ed assolutamente, e per dire cosí, per regola: perché quasi tutte hanno distinzione ed eccezione per la varietà della circunstanzie, in le quali non si possono fermare con una medesima misura; e questa distinzione ed eccezione non si trovano scritte su’ libri, ma bisogna le insegni la discrezione, in Ricordi, bk. 1, ch. 6). Variety of circumstances, distinctions, exceptions, and discernment are the terms that describe the whole Guicciardini, whose wisdom is fully conscious of the fact that reality is individual, and that to seize it in its infinite abundance the law is useless. He adds, “How well the philosopher put it: ‘On the contingent future there is no established truth!’ Protest and search as much as you want because the more you protest the more you will find out how most veracious this saying is” (Quanto disse bene il filosofo: de futuris contingentibus non est determinata veritas! Aggirati quanto tu vuoi, che quanto piú ti aggiri, tanto piú truovi questo detto verissimo, in Ricordi, bk. 2, ch. 58).

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Guicciardini does not negate an identity of nature, a norm, and a law; he knows that at the root of becoming there is a strong process that is ineluctable and within which finds fulfillment the truth of the famous sentence (in Seneca, Epistles, num. 107, sect. 11; Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 5, v. 709): “The Fates guide those of good will, but drag those who resist” (Ducunt volentes fata, nolentes trahunt). The human being would not obtain the notion of the essence, which truly would help it very little in its life, in which it does not have to face the law, but the particular cases with their infinite individual peculiarities and the infinite cornucopia of its possibilities. These particular cases are not decided by law (e’ casi non si truovano decisi … dalla legge); the law does not help in foreseeing the singularities of the particular cases, because “every minimal variation in the particulars is capable of making a change in the conclusion” (Ogni minimo particulare che varii, è atto a fare variare una conclusione), hence, the things of the world must be judged and resolved from day to day (giudicarle e risolverle giornata per giornata). The politicians, like the doctors and the merchants, do not deal with mathematical lines, but life, human beings, and a reality that subtly changes, which cannot be reached by way of an abstract thought, but with “discernment” and “eye” of an experienced intuition. The seizing of the secret that unites the particular to the law is not within the human power of those who have to act in the particular, so that it is necessary that they spy on the particulars and follow them in their infinite vital modifications. Guicciardini favors no abstract models that deceive and falsify perspectives. He no longer relies on the examples of the Romans, who were in different situations, after whom new experiences have been accumulated. In Discorsi (bk. 2, ch. 24), we read: Antiquity should not be praised much … because experience has revealed many new things that have never been considered by the ancients. How wrong are those who at every sentence refer to the Romans! It would be necessary to have a city structured like the one they had and ruled according to their model [for the reference to have validity]. In fact, given that our qualities are so disproportionate from theirs, the example is so much disproportionate as much as if we would make a donkey gallop like a horse (Non si debbe laudare tanto l’antiquità … perché la esperienzia ha scoperte molte cose che non furono considerate dagli antichi Quanto si ingannano coloro che a ogni parola allogano e’ Romani! Bisognerebbe avere una città condizionata come era la loro, e poi governata secondo quello esempio; il quale, a chi ha le qualità disproporzionate, è tanto disproporzionato, quanto sarebbe volere che uno asino facesse il corso di un cavallo). In Guicciardini, we have the preoccupation of the art of politics with the conviction of the impossibility, in addition to the uselessness, of political theories. In the world of humanity, which is subject to a perennial change, made of

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shades and of voluble sentiments, only “the sharp eye” can guide: every generalization remains irremediably useless. Locked within the world of political experience, Guicciardini is a subtle and most balanced observer. He avoids every extreme thesis because he knows that the pliability of life is far from rigidity, it is plastic and diverse. He is aware that in the course of human events “fortune”—the bizarre entity that escapes even the most alert wisdom—insinuates itself to make the events even more fleeting. Virtue or human prudence can determine for human beings the date of birth; which is the inevitable datum, the irremovable “first” that cuts into all the successive life. He said (Ricordi, bk. 2, ch. 31), “The persons that attribute everything to prudence and virtue by excluding the power of fortune must at least confess that it is quite important for human beings to find themselves alive in an age or to have been born in a time when the virtues and the qualities that they value as possessions are or were appreciated” (Coloro ancora, che attribuendo il tutto alla prudenzia e virtú, escludono quanto possono la potestà della fortuna, bisogna almanco confessino che importa assai abattersi o nascere in tempo che le virtú o qualità per le quali tu ti stimi siano in prezzo). Politics is the art of civil life, an art that is founded on an alert experience and is translated into a subtle, punctual counsel. The counsel is that of experimenting, of making use of “the eye” that cannot substitute the capability of intuitions, whenever they are missing. No calculations, no reasoning can dominate this multiple and infinitely different nature, in which, as shrewd discernment is of help, so what can also help are those forces, those uncompromising attitudes, those decisions, which in their unreasonableness have the immediate power of nature itself. Religious faith and the blindest audacity have obtained results that were denied to pondered reflection. The same turning away from uncompromising conclusions, from views separated from the human happenings in their earthly concreteness, is found in the moral attitude of Guicciardini. The Machiavellian linearizing transformed into a conflict what could not be composed by an agreement, both in the political practice as in the moral life. The morality of the civil life that exhausts itself in the setting of the earthly kingdom admits no other evaluations implanted on a conscience and on a law inspired by the need of constructing the heavenly kingdom. The conflict that originated from Machiavelli is resolved in the composition of the commandments of honor and ambition, which we have in Guicciardini: The human beings who successfully handle the affairs of this world are those who always have before their mind as their goal their own interest and value all their actions in accordance with this end. The fallacy is in those who do not know very well what their own interests are, thinking that they consist always in pecuniary gains instead of in the honor and ability of maintaining the reputation of their good name (Quegli uomini conducono bene le cose loro in questo mondo, che hanno sempre innanzi agli occhi lo interesse proprio, e tutte le azioni sue misurano con questo fine; ma la fallacia è in quegli che non cog-

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noscono bene quale sia lo interesse suo, cioè reputano che sempre consista in qualche commodo pecuniario piú che nell’onore, nel sapere mantenersi la riputazione ed il buon nome, in Ricordi, bk. 2, ch. 218). Ambition, desire of glory and honor, are praiseworthy for the reason that they move to the accomplishment of great deeds, “Those who lack these desires are human beings of a cold spirit and are inclined more to leisure than to actions” (e chi manca di questo desiderio, è spirito freddo ed inclinato piú all’ozio che alle faccende, in Ricordi, bk. 2, ch. 32). The human goal is consciously brought within the borders of personal interest, in which sociality is present not as an imperative to the common good, but as the impulse toward that refined satisfaction that comes from the opinion of the others and from the triumph and perseverance in such opinion. The superiority of Guicciardini over Machiavelli consists in the absence of any acknowledgment of ethical exigencies that overcome the potentiality of the human individual as it is naturally aggregated to other individuals. The painful affirmation of Machiavelli that human beings are wicked implies the nostalgia for goodness in a different order, of a virtue that would not be an earthly triumph. The more serene affirmation of Guicciardini on the goodness of human beings is the acknowledgment of the human nature as it is, not good or bad in relation to a universal good, but only concerning the civil life. This is not a command of giving ourselves to others, but only the field in which the single human being reaches, through the multiplicity and variety of the others, the more refined self-interest of honor and glory. In Guicciardini, as the ideals become oriented toward the earthly world, they obtain their harmonious fulfillment because the overcoming of the human ego as individual is excluded, but at the same time the civil good and the continuity of values is preserved within an environment rigidly social. The exact determination of the horizons within which the human activity comes to be actualized brings to the logic consequence of absorbing moral life within the limits of political life. In this way, the Machiavellian contrast is overcome in the collapse of “being moral” (moralità) within “being politic” (politicità). This “politicità” is a game between forces in which, given the gregariousness of the human being, egoism is not eliminated but is combined with “otherness” without any appeal to charity, but only to the incidence in others of judgments of condemnation of what is dangerous and of approbation of what is grand and advantageous, which could be uninterestedly aesthetic or cunningly fascinating. Machiavelli had violently subordinated religion to politics; Guicciardini uses some of his stronger affirmations in praise of suicide committed for political reasons. The fatherland within which human beings are human is the earthly city, in which each individual does not work for the far removed ideal of an eternal and supernatural goodness, but for an ideal exclusively civil, to which it dedicates every effort.

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Consequently, many treatises written at that time dealt with the notion of honor as an earthly value. Among these works, the classically famous one was published under the name of Giambattista Possevino, Dialogo dell’Onore (1553), but it was allegedly plagiarized from a script of Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola. Among the many others, we have a booklet of Verino the second, who intended to find in an earthly motive the spring for a new individual transcendence; the De honore of Flaminio Nobili, published in Lucca, in 1563; and the vast treatise against the duel of Bernardi della Mirandola, in which is found a long confutation of a work Contro l’uso del duello (Against the use of dueling), published in 1553 by Antonio Massa against Possevino. Then again, the writings appeared of Girolamo Muzio [Mutius Justinopolitanus]; the books on duel of G. B. Susio, in 1555; of G. B. Pigna, in 1560; of Dario Attendolo, in 1563; and the Discorsi of Annibale Romei, in 1585. These works consist in discussions in which the concepts of glory and honor are linked to a “reign” totally of this world but intend to find ways to transcend the terrestrial caducity by intertwining permanently resurgent ethicoreligious needs connected with Christianity. The voluminous and quite important work of Bernardi came to provide a frame to the examined questions and discussions of the notions on religion of Pomponazzi and the theses of Pomponazzi and Porzio concerning immortality. Bernardi could perceive that, behind the particular ethico-political problems, a new metaphysico-religious conception was coming to age. In order to resolve those ethico-political problems he decided first to work on the solution of the new metaphysico-religious formulations. In the same plane where the inquiries of Machiavelli and Guicciardini had reduced every human ideality, moral exigencies in the area of civil life reappeared again, no longer as illusions of a static transcendence, but as imperatives to actual self-transcendence. These new moral needs were going to reintroduce the problem of the rapport between moral and political values, which had in vain been avoided in the fantastic constructions of the new utopias, inside of which the Platonic inspiration could badly support the need of an evasion from the crisis of the world. In these always more frequent attempts, the religious imperative that wanted to realize itself in a radical renewal of humanity was always more manifestly unveiled. In it was also made noticeable the practical failure of the humanistic ideals that, in front of a failed reform of life, were dreaming happy cities, cities of life, in which in the semblance of a political program was instead translated a recurring theological motive (In questi tentativi sempre piú frequenti si svelava sempre piú chiaramente quell’imperativo religioso che voleva innanzitutto attuarsi in un radicale rinnovamento umano; vi si svelava insieme il fallimento pratico degli ideali umanistici che, dinanzi a una mancata riforma della vita, sognavano città felici, città di vita, dove nella parvenza di un programma politica si trvestiva un ritornante motivo teologico).

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3. Religious and Political Reformers Ferments and needs for reform have been already present in the age of the Renaissance, from the polemic and critique of Valla to the need of a more intimate and profound religion affirmed by the Ficinians, to Savonarola’s appeal for a moral renewal. Though these motives together with the antiScholastic reaction could induce some ardent spirits to be openly interested in the ideas of Luther and Calvin, the mentality itself that humanism had formed was alien to what of most characteristically original was present in the great reformers. Between Humanism and Reformation, although there were some hints to a polemic engagement, a substantial incompatibility of character persisted. Humanism based its advantage on the exaltation of the human being, and if it is true that the human being of Pico was the Adam who from the hands of the Father came out perfect, it was true that the distinction was frequently forgotten and the human being was glorified in its eternal humanity. When Calvin, mentioning in the Institutes the Socratic “know thyself,” was condemning the philosophers who spoke always of human dignity and excellence and exalting the children of sin who are the descendants of Adam, he was probably considering the attitude so characteristic of the thought of the Renaissance, which was all burning with divine love and human liberty, neglectful however of sin and grace. On one hand, the new philology had opened ways to Biblical criticism; reason had advanced rights to the free examination of religious doctrines; rites and cult, the corruption of the priests, and the dissolution of the Church have been criticized. On the other hand, attitudes have been formed and delineated for an individual contact with God and even an appeal to moral renewal had been formulated. What was never abandoned was the faith in the forces of humanity, in its capability of raising itself to the divinity. If the human beings were moving far from the Church, it was in order to move in the direction of an interior illumination that could join them to God, according to the motive so dear to the Augustinian Platonism. The supporters of this tendency were closer to Erasmus instead of to Luther, while the critics in the school of Valla were arriving at a rationalism that could badly conciliate with the reforming orthodoxy. It was exactly this type of the heretical position of many Italian religious spirits that made them estranged and contrary to the various reformed churches, and what characterized and made them peculiar in the midst of the wider and imposing picture of the Reformation. While the Waldensian movement of Naples was relying on interior piety and on the intimate illumination characteristic of much Spanish Erasmianism, Aonio Paleario, imitator of Lucretius in De immortalitate animarum, with Actio in Pontifices Romanos (A legal action against the Roman Pontiff), in 1536, was disclosing “the movement’s fundament as more ethico-political than religious and doctrinal.” In Bernardino Ochino, in spite of his antiphilosophical attitude of Calvinistic color, evident reminiscences of the Florentine Platonism are evident even in written concordances:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Who intends to reform the world has no need of reforming the heavens, the elements, and the other mixed bodies; it would be sufficient to reform the human being. The reason is that once this small thing called human being has been controlled, the whole world would be reformed. In the world, no other evils are done than the ones the human beings accomplished. Not all other creatures can return to God except through the human being whom they serve. Whoever wants to reform the world must start with the reformation of humanity. O human creature, you are the knot, the link, and the bond with which all other creatures can unite with God. When the human being broke the bond, dissolved the link, and severed the knot with God, everything went badly and was at loss.… Let each person reform itself and through it the world will be reformed as well (Chi volesse reformare il mondo, non bisognerebbe reformare i cieli, gli elementi, né altri corpi misti, basterebbe reformare l’huomo. Imperocché temperato che fusse questo piccolo istrumento dell’huomo, sarebbe reformato tutto il mondo. Immo nel mondo non ci sonno altri mali se non quelli che fanno gli homini. Né si possono le altre creature redurre in Dio se non per mezzo dell’huomo al quale servono. Bisogna adunque reformare l’uomo, chi vuol reformare tutto. Tu, huomo, sei il nodo, il nesso, et il vinculo con il quale le creature s’uniscono con Dio. Rotto, dissoluto, et sciolto l’huomo da Dio, ogni cosa va male et in dispersione … ogn’uno reformi sé et per lui sarà reformato il mondo).

This is found in the Prediche of Ochino, but the concept and the words of the text can also be found in the Heptaplus of Pico, with whom Ochino meets in a concordant discordance even when he apparently detaches himself from Pico. Pico exalted in a supreme manner the human being, the human spirit, and the cognitive and practical human activities, Ochino instead (Seconda parte delle prediche, ch. 3) weakened exceedingly the power of human reason: Natural reason … unhealed by faith is phrenetic and foolish. How can you think that reason can be rule and guide to supernatural things? How can reason’s erroneous philosophy be the foundation of theology and the ladder to ascend to God? If the human reason were not mad, even with the little light it possesses about created things, it could still use it not only in order to reach the cognition of God, but much more to know, with Socrates, not only that it does not know but that also cannot do anything without the divine grace.… In addition, by being mad, reason is a bit bizarre and, if not healed by faith, would not accept as true anything but what it likes. A person of this kind would not even try to understand truth, unless beforehand its mad reason has proved that truth can conform to its blind judgment. Philosophy remains in the lowest level, in the obscure valley of sentiments where it

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cannot raise itself to the consideration of higher and supernatural things, at the sight of which it is completely blind (La ragione … naturale non sanata dalla fede, è frenetica e stolta. Sí che puoi pensare, come possi essere guida e regola delle cose soprannaturali, e come la sua erronea filosofia possa essere fondamento della teologia, e scala per salire ad essa. Se la ragione umana non fusse frenetica, ben che habbi poco lume delle cose create, pure se ne servirebbe, non solo per elevarsi alla cognitione di Dio, ma molto piú in cognoscere, con Socrate, non solo che non sa, immo né può alcuna cosa, senza la divina gratia…. E … per essere frenetica è in modo cervicosa, che se per fede non è sanata, non accetta per vero se non quello che gli pare, né se gli può dare ad intendere una verità, se in prima sindacata dalla sua frenetica ragione non è conforme al suo cieco giudizio. La filosofia adunque sta giú bassa, nella oscura valle de’ sentimenti non puó alzare la testa alle cose alte e sprannaturali, alle quali è al tutto cieca). In this sermon, we find the full depreciation of human natural faculties. The sacred writings are also not enough for Ochino, who suggests the recourse to the light of God, which is a direct and gratuitous gift of God not obtainable from nature (le litere sacre non bastano però ci bisogna spirito e lume soprannaturale). This individual gift would be a personal, private and gratuitous illumination, but of such a nature to divinize the person who has received it. This new human being with the graciously illumined reason would have the right of establishing itself as the unique and supreme rule of truth. Antonio Rosmini observed that Ochino began with the depreciation of thought, but ended with the divinization of it. In his Epistola published in Bologna in 1550, Giorgio Siculo who was sentenced to death in Ferrara in 1551, a significant question was addressed to the Protestants: “Why do the Protestants exaggeratedly vilify reason? … The divine scriptures do the opposite; they magnify human nature and inform us of its greatness and divine dignity” (Perché gli protestanti vilificano tanto essa raggione? … Le divine scritture fanno il contrario, percioché grandemente magnificano l’humana natura et ci fanno conoscere la sua grandezza et divina dignità). In Renato Camillo, a friend of Caelius Secundus Curio, “whose doctrine was manifestly Platonic,” the influence of the Ficinian theory of love was considered central: “The omnipotent Christ, who is doubtlessly the author of life, is the one alone who holds and protects everything in his divine embrace” (Omnipotens Christus, vitae certissimus auctor, unus divino qui amplectitur omnia nexu ac fovet). Humanism, Neo-Platonism, and numerical Pythagorizing and Cabalistic symbols are present in the more famous Curio, inspirer, and teacher of Olimpia Morata. Curio is all taken by the mystical trust in the work of the divine

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spirit in the world and is hopeful for the moral education of humankind. Beside this movement inspired by a form of Platonizing Humanism, the current of a critical Humanism existed; Valla inspired it and it culminated in the work of Lelio Sozzini. While in the Platonizing Humanism, a mystical spiritualism and a Platonic mysticism were prevalent; in the Critical Humanism, philological observation, subtle doubting, and critical insistence were preferred. Sozzini, moving from the principle “Nothing should be believed that is contrary to reason” (nihil esse credendum quod rationi sit adversum), attacked all sacraments, and moved his critique even to baptism, and came to deny the Trinity. His was the obedience to a reason (ratio) that intended to penetrate to the bottom of the questions, moving with norms of its own, autonomous, with those same norms that Giacomo Aconcio of Trento determined. Aconcio left Italy in 1557 and found refuge in England, where he tried in De methodo, hoc est de recta investigandarum tradendarumque artium ac scientiarum ratione (On method or the right way of inquiring and sharing the arts and the sciences) to establish specific norms for the processes of reason, processes precisely capable of aiding him in overcoming his lack of a philosophical education. He did all this without the technicality of being a member of a school, but in touch with the immediacy of a concrete experience, for an exact advantage, in which logic becomes the technical instrument of life. Fausto Sozzini was the individual representing in its fullness the critical attitude of dealing with the Sacred Scriptures as a common text that must be examined according to the norms of philology. Though he stopped his rationalism where he acknowledged the revelation, his position was justly called “exegetical rationalism,” which did not exclude, but intended to underline the obligation of obedience to the Evangelical commandments because they reflected the highest morality. A rigid ascetism became the characteristic attitude of Fausto Sozzini, who although denying the Trinity, continued to adore in Christ the divine man, the lord of humankind, and the ideal type of our conduct. In Sozzini’s doctrine, as he sustained in a polemic writing of 1580, no distinction of humanity according to states and nations. “True Christians” must abstain from any fight or war against other human beings, even at the price of having to go against the law of the state. It was a rebellion in which implicitly the negation was formulated of all political life in whatever form. The Machiavellian reduction of all ethics to politics is in Sozzini substituted with the negation of all politics in the name of the most rigid morality. Common to all forms of Italian heresies of the sixteenth century is this moral exigency, which is clearly manifested in Forma d’una repubblica catholica (The form of a Catholic republic), an anonymous work in 1581 of the Florentine Francesco Pucci, who belonged to the Humanistic Platonizing movement. Introducing this work, Delio Cantimori in Eretici italiani (p. 407) said: The element that prevails in this work, and in all the Italian reform, is the moral. Doctrinal formulations are useful only when they create a

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platform on which some agreements can be established, but the theological discussions should be avoided because what is important is the life according to the moral norm understood religiously, in its most simple and elementary significance. This prevalence of morality, understood as the observance of a natural law according to a religion also “natural,” above any other aspect of religious life, is the profound motive that brings together the two tendencies of the Italian heretical group: the one of Critical Humanism and the other of Platonizing Humanism. On this prevalence of morality is also based the identification of political and religious life, which is implicit in the introductory declaration of this book, “It is most clear that it is our obligation to reform the religion and the commonwealth at the same time in order to do a durable and good thing, which would produce a reasonable and convenient alliance. One thing will help the other and we know that when force and reason are joined together marvelous will be their effectiveness” (Egli è chiarissimo che conviene riformare la religione e la repubblica tutto a un tratto, a voler far cosa durabile e buona e che abbi riscontro e convenienza ragionevole, con ciò sia che l’una cosa aiuta l’altra e quando si congiunge insieme la forza e la ragione se ne veggiono mirabili effetti). This motive, while reversing the Machiavellian position, perfectly agrees with that kind of “Catholicism” in which are situated the first reformative aspirations of the humanists like, at least in part, Bruno and, above all, Campanella. The motive inspired, even before inspiring the deists and the apostles of tolerance, the supporters of a natural right of the nations, of a right of human beings as human, so long they remain humane in any contingency, even in a depreciable war. The thought runs to De iure belli (1589) of Alberigo Gentili of Sanginesio, in which the Ciceronian motive of natura docet (nature teaches) is posited at the base of a universal natural right of people, in which all nations are tied with an intimate identity that goes beyond every barrier of nations and every antithesis of faith, which is celebrated in a perennial human communion. War is not natural: “No war is from nature” (a natura bellum esse nullum). Not even the war against the Turks or against the pagans is natural. “We shall not break trust: no war can be brought against those who live in tranquility, cultivate peace, and bring no injury to us” (Non eis frangenda fides est: non inferendum bellum quiscentibus, pacem colentibus, in nos nihil molientibus). The human being is truly God to another human being; let the theologians be silent, because they should not declare themselves on this (silete theology in munere alieno, in De iure belli, bk. 1, ch. 12). In the humanity of the human being a sacrament is present: the image of God. Within reality a divine law is present, the archetype of every human law. Alberigo Gentili kept Plato and Seneca continuously present, and the idea of a voluntas Dei iustitia summa (The will of God is the supreme justice), whose

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voice does not resound in the deserts, but cries in our hearts, is at the root of all human consortium, the model of all societies, and must be the bond among human beings as they are human. This supreme law, in the tragedy of war, repeats with Seneca that “each human being ought not to abuse another human” (homini non est homine prodige utendum); and that always with the wisdom of the ancients advises that “if a person has the opportunity of abusing another one and it did not, this person unquestionably deserves praise” (si tamen, cum posset, non fecit, laudandus est potius). This law teaches the absolute eternity of a custom, levied on human beings, to each in its native speech, the respect of honesty: “Not everything that is legal is also honest. We should always consider not only what is permissible but what is honest” (non omne quod licet, honestum est. Semper non solum quod liceat, considerandum est, sed quod honestum est, in De iure belli, bk. 2, ch. 21). Campanella and Vico are already on their way.

Twenty PROBLEMS OF AESTHETICS AND MORALITY 1. Mario Nizolio The Anti-Aristotelianism of Ermolao Barbaro or Rodolfo Agricola, strengthened by a despiteful aversion for the ancient logic in the name of Ciceronian rhetoric, found in the sixteenth century its most solid exponent in Mario Nizolio. Nizolio is known for his polemics with Marcantonio Maioragio and for Thesaurus Ciceronianus instead of for the De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudophilosophos (On the true principles and method of philosophizing against the pseudo-philosophers), a work of 1553, reprinted afterward and admired even by Leibniz. The work of Nizolio, though some historians have negatively judged it, shows the spirited need of rejecting abstraction and assuming in its place a process of thought more adherent to the reality of things. According to Nizolio, we can reach the concreteness of reality by regaining the original function of language and by grasping in the articulations of grammar, in which language expresses itself, the genuineness of the articulations of thought. For Nizolio, as for Ramus, Aristotle, though he had written useful works as Ethics and Politics has done great damage with his logic. Nizolio, avoiding the Aristotelian logic, applied himself to the analysis and study of grammatical processes. He introduced his theory saying, “The first general principle of truth and good philosophy consists in the knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages”; the second is “the knowledge of those precepts and topics that can be found in grammar and rhetoric, without which every doctrine is worthless and every erudition is ignorance” (primo principio generale della verità e della buona filosofia consiste nella cognizione delle lingue greca e latina; la conoscenza di quei precetti e documenti che si trovano nella grammatica e nella retorica, senza le quali ogni dottrina è indotta ed ogni erudizione inerudita). Rhetoric and grammar must take the place of metaphysics. An inquiry that intends to establish the full meaning of things and is pertinent to life must take the place of the speculation that searches for the truth, but unfortunately is separate from concrete, useful, and immediate details. The metaphysicians deal with the opposite: “They are especially solicitous about one thing, truth, and about the usefulness, necessity, and pertinence of the things they discussed, they are

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ignorant or have the wrong information. They give the impression that it does not matter if the things they discussed are false, useless, unnecessary, and irrelevant” (de veritate tantummodo soliciti esse apparent, de utilitate vero et de necessitate et de pertinentia rerum quas tractant, vel nullam prorsus vel perversam susceperunt cogitationem, perinde quasi nihil intersit, rerum quae traduntur, esse non solum non falsas, sed etiam non inutiles, non supervacuas, non impertinentes). In this appeal to what is useful, something more than what the words could let us believe is included; the need is claimed for a process of thought that is more suitable to things and human needs. A sincere need for the construction of a new philosophy of the human mind can be noticed in the third of Nizolio general principles, in which he sustained that no preparation is more profitable than the reading of the classic masterworks and than the reflection on the manner of speech of the common people. In the language studied in its uppermost sincerity and spontaneity a part of truth can always be found, since it is not possible to separate true wisdom from true eloquence. Nizolio, though still in an obscure way, sensed that the new research should accept no presupposition, should do no violence to things, but receive reality as it is, and respect it in its integrity. This meant vindication of the freedom of philosophizing against any extrinsic constriction: “The fourth general principle of truth is unrestrained freedom of feeling and judging about all things, as the truth itself of things requires” (quartum generale principium veritatis est libertas et licentia sentiendi et iudicandi de omnibus rebus, ut veritas ipsa rerumque postulat). Let us stop for the last time, he said, to follow Plato or Aristotle and let us take “as our teachers the five senses, intelligence, cogitation, memory, and the use and practice of things” (tamquam magistros, quinque sensus, intelligentiam, cogitationem, memoriam, usum et experientiam rerum). It was a profound appeal, even though afterward Nizolio reduced his horizon within the borders of rhetoric. The fifth and last precept, very complex as it is, required in essence that we do not move away from the clarity of the common discourse, that we do not deal with inconsistent questions, and that we do not introduce novelties, “unless it is for a great reason and forced by necessity” (nisi magna ratione ac necessitate coacti). Nizolio suggested that we needed to free ourselves of all chimerical inventions, first among them the Platonic ideas, and then to fight to the end the doctrine that saw in the universals some kind of reality. Reality is individuality, and science in order that it would not follow phantasies must “be concerned with singular and individual things, not according to their proper and individual nature, but to their perpetual and common progression” (de singularibus et individuis, non per naturam propriam et privatam, sed per communem et perpetuam successionem, in De veris principiis, bk. 1, ch. 7). In the substitution of “abstraction” with “comprehension,” Nizolio placed the novelty of his logic in comparison with that of Aristotle. By abstractio, he said, we pretend to separate from the single realities some quid that is treated

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thereafter as an entity in itself; by comprehensio instead the “human mind understands simultaneously and in one act all singular individuals of a species” (mens hominis singularia omnia sui cuiusque generis simul et semel comprehendit, in ibid., bk. 3, ch. 7). By exemplification, we may say that we will replace the abstract term with a collective one. The human mind can gather similar cases and consider grouping according to similarities; it cannot and should not pretend a separation of a real universal. Nizolio explained: Your universal derives from your fictional and vain abstraction, while ours originates from the comprehension of all the singulars of any species all gathered together with one act alone, without any intellective abstraction, but through the help alone of the intelligence that comprehends the singulars. Your universal, though it exists through the nature of the singulars, as you say, it is abstracted by the intellect and detached from the singulars as an invisible cloud in the air.… Our universal exists by nature in the singulars and it is not separated by the intellect from them, no differently than when we understand the terms “people” or “army” that signify nothing else that all the singulars understood by the intellect all together in one act alone. It is almost the same as when we gather mentally a flock of sheep or a herd of oxen (Il vostro universale deriva da quella vostra finta e vana astrazione, il nostro deriva dalla comprensione di tutti i singolari di ogni genere accolti insieme con un atto solo, senza alcuna astrazione intellettiva ma mediante il solo aiuto di una intelligenza che comprende i singolari. Il vostro universale, pur esistendo per natura dei singolari, come voi dite, tuttavia è dall’intelletto astratto e staccato dai singolari, come una nube invisibile nell’aria…. Il nostro universale è per natura nei singolari mentre dall’intelletto non è scisso da essi, non diversamente da quando noi intendiamo “popolo” o “esercito,” che non significano altro che i singolari compresi dall’intelletto insieme con un sol atto, e quasi raccolti come si raccoglie mentalmente un gregge di pecore e un armento di buoi, in ibid., bk. 1, ch. 7). We would not follow Nizolio in his difficult efforts in order to understand the universal in its link with the particular, nor would we handle his violent and complicated disputations with Maioragio, the adversary of Cicero, but he too completely involved in the rhetoric of the sixteenth century. On the logical plane, Nizolio introduced us to a problem that the sixteenth century had to debate for a long time on the more suitable plane of aesthetics, trying to grasp that characteristic universality of the beautiful, which must be valid for everyone, as something that is part of the intellect, but which on the other hand is indissolubly tied to a phantasm individually determined. The substitution operated by Nizolio of rhetoric to dialectic and of grammar to logic was augmented in its critical moment because of the ab-

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stractism and limits of the Aristotelian position, but in its constructive moment could not find a sufficient base for that new “logic” of which it was the expression of need. In regard to the problems of aesthetics, translators of and commentators on Aristotle’s Poetics were beginning to agitate problems of no little interest in connection with those of the writers of treatises on rhetoric. 2. Problems of Aesthetics The Platonists began to pay attention to aesthetic problems when they tuned on the concept of beauty as a universal aspect of reality seen under the species of sensibility, when the senses as such succeed in grasping with their own means the intelligible. The Platonic Phaedrus, by positing the three fundamental aspects through which the whole reality can be considered—being (ens), good (bonum), and beautiful (pulcher)—offered copious matter for discussion. From Ficino to Campanella, the question of the beautiful in its relation with the good and the true had been amply discussed, and also discussed had been the more subtle difficulties: what is the translucency of the idea in the sensible? What is the connection between mathematical measures and artistic harmony? Many artists had repeatedly examined specific difficulties like the one of the comparison (paragone) between the different arts. Michelangelo and Leonardo were the first to agitate this issue in their reflections on the rapports between painting, sculpture, and architecture. At the end of the fifteenth century, Giorgio Valla (1498) offered in Latin the Poetics of Aristotle, which Politian already had studied in Greek. This Aristotelian text, little known during the Middle Ages, carried a decisive weight by renewing the motives mere humanistic that were persisting in the poetics of Marco Vida and Gian Giorgio Trissino. His work originated the most passionate disputes among numerous translators and commentators, from Alessandro de’ Pazzi to Antonio Riccobono, from Francesco Robortello to Segni, to Vincenzo Maggi, to Alessandro Piccolomini, to Pietro Vettori, and to Paolo Beni. Around the work of the Florentine Aristotle flourished the poetics of Girolamo Muzio, Giovanni Pietro Capriano, Girolamo Fracastoro (Naugerius sive de Poetica, 1555), Antonio Minturno, Patrizi, Scaliger, and the discussions of Tasso with Patrizi. At the same time, there were the discussions on rhetoric by Giovanni Cavalcanti, Patrizi, and Vettori, and those on history, of which the intention was to clarify its rapports with poetry, by Giovanni Antonio Viperano, Francesco Robortello, and again Patrizi. We do not mention here the discussions on language and the controversies among critics. Aristotle gave origin to many problems, and in particular to that of the position of poetry in rapport with logic, history, and other spiritual activities: this problem was going to transform itself into the one about the object of poetry. One group, including Robortello, Riccobono, and Zabarella were considering poetry as a rational discipline, strictly connected with philosophy “because it consists in discourse or also in reasoning” (quod sola oratione vel etiam ratiocinatione continetur). Quite close to the position of this group was

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Francesco Piccolomini. Characteristic was the position of Bernardino Tomitano, who was interested in proving “that philosophy is necessary to the perfect orator and poet” (la Philosophia esser necessaria al perfetto oratore e poeta), but, on the contrary, the philosophers were permitted to express themselves in an unpolished manner. The poet has the duty of the exposition of the true, because poetry, as Varchi sustained in his lessons of 1553, is part of rational philosophy together with logic, rhetoric, history, and grammar. Maggi, a colleague of Varchi in Padua, and, in part, his inspiration, had been for a long time uncertain between the above thesis and the one that considered poetry occupied, not with concepts and words, but with the real life with ethicopedagogical goals. Patrizi and Iacopo Mazzoni adhered to this second position. Mazzoni sustained that poetics should go with politics because of the strict rapport that negotium (politics, in the proper sense) and otium (poetry) have. Mazzoni assigned political goals to art that he Platonically subordinated to the State’s exigencies, while another professor in Padua, Giason de Nores, did not hesitate to affirm that poetry had to “become a teaching in civil life … in order to introduce virtue in the spirits … at the advantage of a well ordered republic” (ammaestramento alla vita civile … per introdurre virtú nehli animi … a benefizio di una bene ordinata Repubblica). Capriano, in no different way, had taught that the object of poetry were the human actions with a moralizing intention; Viperano, instead, assigned to poetry the duty of training the spirit against adversities, with the goal of making life honest and happy. The most interesting discussion was certainly the one concerning the relationship between poetry and history, intending to explain how it was possible that Aristotle could say that poetry more than history could approach the universality proper to philosophy. Fracastoro had already mentioned that while the historian reproduces the things as they are, the poet recognizes an idea and expresses it in a representation. Ludovico Castelvetro asserted that the greater universality of poetry was because poetry makes reference to the possible rather instead of the real, with the addition that, according to him, the matter of poetic imitation must be such to catch the imagination penetrating it permitted with amazement. Beni then concluded that two are the motives why poetry is different from history: first, because the poet could change at will the interplaying characters; second, because he narrates not what actually happened, but what should have been happening. Piccolomini wrote a complicated definition that pretended to be complete: Poetry is imitation not only of natural or artificial things, but also of actions, customs, and human affections. This imitation of things in their universality is done by means of language, in order to delight or to be advantageous by delighting.… We have said “in their universality,” in order to differentiate this imitation from those that concern things in their supreme [referent], according to how they really are or

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY were in this or that singular person. These so made imitations are narrations instead of imitations because they narrate true things and must be valued as the things that concern the verisimilar and the dutiful (poesia è imitazione non solo di cose naturali o artificiose, ma principalmente d’azioni, di costumi e d’affetti umani, fatta col mezzo del parlare, nel loro universale, affine di dilettare o dilettando finalmente giovare…. Abbiamo detto nel loro universale, per far tale imitazione differire da quelle che le cose riguardano nel loro sommo, cioè secondo che in questa o in quella singolar persona veramente sono o furono, onde cosí fatte imitazioni piuttosto narrazioni, come che cose vere narrino, che imitazioni, e quali il verisimile ed il dover riguardino, stimar si devono).

Through the problem of imitation, as in the discussion of the verisimilar proper to poetry, is shown in all its difficulty the problem of the universality of art, which altogether is a precise determination of an image. In the definition of Piccolomini, another point among the most debated of the sixteenth century is touched, the one concerning the end of art. Fracastoro excluded that it was merely delight; Robortello added the useful to the delightful; Maggi refused the delightful and posited the useful as it derived from the truthful; and Castelvetro stopped at the pure delight, because poetry “has been only found for the delight and the recreation of the spirits of the uncouth multitude.” The formula that imposed itself in the complex of all these discussions was that of “dilettando giovare,” docere delectando, or, by using the expression of Tasso, of the “somministrazione del vero condito in molli versi” (imparting truth dressed in tender verses). Scaliger says that poetry is accessio sapientiae (the ladder to wisdom). He is the author of that fortunate systematization of the poetics of the sixteenth century that found vast consensus outside Italy. Scaliger in Poetices libri septem (bk. 1, ch. 1) composed a eulogy of the poet in rapport with the orator, the philosopher, and the historian: Poetry embraces all things in a justly more excellent way than all those other arts of which we said that they represent things as they are, … but poetics truly even more splendidly than the other arts represents the things that are and posits the images of those which are not. [The poet] like another God forms the things themselves, hereby receiving a name common with God, assigned not by human consent but by nature’s providence (Sola poesis haec omnia complexa est, tanto quam artes illae excellentius, quod ceterae, ut dicebamus, res ipsas, uti sunt, representant … poetica vero … et speciosius quae sunt, et, quae non sunt, eorum speciem point … videtur sane res ipsas … velut alter Deus condere, unde cum eo commune nomen ipsi, non a consensu hominum, sed a naturae providentia inditum videatur).

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While in the Aristotelian conception of art as catharsis the moralistic preoccupations of the Counter Reformation would find large satisfaction, the Aristotelian doctrine offered instead an open field for the discussion of the position to be assigned to history. Is history a mere empirical narration of facts or does it also assume some more significative, ethical or rhetorical-oratorical, function? To history widely and frequently discussed, Robortello attributed the duty of narrating with oratorical efficacy in order to educate; Viperano equally insisted on the motive of the rhetorical ornament; and Patrizi underlined the usefulness that history has for politics, saying “because it suggests to us by ways of past experiences the manner of governing our country for true peace and possible happiness” (dandoci per la via dell’esperienza il modo del governo della nostra patria per la pace vera e per la possible felicità). The considerations of Patrizi were the ones that generated the most profound enthusiasm of Aconcio, who would exalt for this reason the philosopher of Cherso even above Plato. 3. Problems of Morality Aristotelianism, though fiercely contrasted on the ground of physics and particularly on the metaphysico-theological level, was still dominating in the moral sciences. Aristotle’s Poetics was a new great discovery, which added extra insights to the already energetic discussions on aesthetics. The writings on ethics formed the basis of the greater part of the treatises of the sixteenth century. These writings often were only comments on the Nicomachean Ethics or paraphrases of it, so that Ludovico Antonio Muratori with much insistence criticized their uniformity and monotony, given their little or no originality. It would be useful to observe how far from truth was the opinion that to favor the Nicomachean Ethics, during the sixteenth century, meant to oppose the Platonic currents, or at least the dream of a possible conciliation between Platonism and Aristotelianism. Let us, for instance, think of the constant appeal made to the Nicomachean by all those who were supporting an agreement between the two major philosophers of antiquity. We would understand this if we were to realize that both the celebration of the contemplative life as an exercise and an act of the mind, and the conception of goodness as mode and measure were motives characteristically Platonic, though their Aristotelian treatment came to cast them in a more concrete humanity. Pico, Ficino, and Diacceto had sustained the theory of the agreement between the moral Aristotle and the moral Plato. Consequently, Antonio Brucioli could not be an unfaithful disciple of Diacceto for having professed Aristotelian views, because it was in his teacher that he could find the union of Nicomachean philosophy with Platonic thought. If the Florentine Brucioli was a remarkable personage of the beginning sixteenth century for his involvement in the conversations at the Orti Oricellari, his political and religious positions, and his adhesion to Lutheranism, he was less interesting in the three volumes of Dialogi della moral filosofia that he published in Venice, between

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1526 and 1529, even though in them we find repeatedly the echo of the conversations in the cultural circles of Florence. It would be useless to try to identify in these Dialogi something more than a refined repetition of Ficinian motives, corrected now and then with brilliant Aristotelian colors and a more alert political concern. An example of this is found in the dialogue Dell’huomo with which the Dialogi della natural philosophia humana begins. On the contrary, Felice Figliucci, a Ficinian of strict observance, did not, in commenting on the Nicomachean, move away from Ficino, “the great Marsilius … the greatest man Florence ever had; perhaps the most profound Platonist that ever was until our times from the Academy.” These were the words that in 1549 Figliucci wrote in the dedication to Cosimo I of the elegant edition of the “divine” Epistles of Ficino. On this matter, let us read some comments of Bernardo Segni, which are found in his excellent translation of the Nicomachean in L’Ethica d’Aristotile … in lingua vulgare fiorentina, published in Venice, in 1551: While we are saying something in favor of Plato and the truth itself, let us remember that Aristotle does not go against the mind of Plato, but against that position that was falsely attributed to him. Plato by going up from sensible and particular things to the intelligible and universal ones was placing in God Supreme the universals of each created thing, separated from matter.… Therefore, Plato was attributing to God the efficient causation of all things, and not just this, but also the formal and final causations.… Hence, with this most beautiful opinion, Plato reduced the similitudes of all things to God and they are in It in a manner more excellent than they are encountered on this earth.… This opinion is conforming to Christian Religion and it is confirmed by our excellent Poet Dante in the thirteenth canto of Paradise, where he says, “Everything that does not die and what can die / is nothing but the splendent reflection of the Idea / which our Lord in Its love generates” (Parlando qualcosa in favor di Platone e per la verità stessa sappiasi che Aristotele non va contra la mente di Platone, ma contra quella posizione che a lui falsamente s’attribuiva; ché Platone nel vero salendo dalle cose sensibili e particulari alle intelligibili e universali veniva a mettere in Dio ottimo gli universali di ciascuna cosa creata e separata in tutto dalla materi…. Attribuiva adunche Platone a Dio la causa efficiente di tutte le cose, né pur questa sola gli attribuiva, ma la formale e la finale…. Onde con questa bellissima oppenione Platone in Dio riduceva tutte le similitudine delle cose e in un modo piú eccellente che non sono esse cose di qua…. Questa oppenione è conforme alla Christiana Religione e dal nostro eccellentissimo Poeta Dante è confermata nel canto XIII del Paradiso, ove e’ dice: “Ciò che non muore e ciò che può morire, / non è se non splendor di quell’Idea / che partorisce amando il nostro Sire”).

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These were words similar to those with which Verino, the second, forty years afterward, would publicly discourse about Platonic Ideas with the goal of renewing the glories of the Ficinian school, while Alessandro Piccolomini, who boasted of not having written in the Instituzione morale anything less than Peripatetic, was acknowledging that “Aristotle himself in the truth of the matter does not differ from Plato.” In the sixteenth century, among the writers of moral issues many followers of the movements of the fifteenth century could be found. Think of Alessandro Farra, a jurist from Piedmont, who in 1564 published in Pavia Tre discorsi, il primo di Miracoli d’Amore, il secondo della Divinità dell’Homo, l’ultimo dell’Ufficio del Capitano (Three lectures: the first, on the miracle of love; the second, on the divinity of the human being; the third, on the duty of the head of state). In this work, speaking of human dignity, Farra translated entire pages from the discourse of Pico, without even mentioning him, and again abundantly drawing from him in Settenario dell’Humana riduttione (Casal Maggiore, 1571), in which in symbolic and cabalistic terms are outlined the seven steps of ascent of the human being to beatitude. Among the commentators and expositors of Aristotle, we have already remembered Galeazzo Florimonte, Bishop of Sessa, when speaking of Nifo, of whom he was a disciple. Florimonte in 1550 published in Venice his Ragionamenti sopra l’ethica di Aristotele, which was reprinted in four books corrected and enlarged in 1567. Florimonte takes pride of nothing else than of having exposed the Aristotelian comments of Nifo, because “the moral precepts that we can read in the books of the Gentiles dispose the spirit of the Christian to the divine ones.” When he published his book, the work of Figliucci and the first edition (1542) of the Instituzione of Piccolomini had already been published, so that Florimonte declared that if he had known, he would not have taken up his work. Florimonte’s work possesses interesting parts and reflects in some loci the subtle though chaotic mind of Nifo, like where he discussed lying, on whether it is convenient, opportune, and deserving approval. Nifo, though affirming of trying to follow the opinion of Augustine, “a position most secure and in possession of Christian rigorousness,” does not hide that at times falsehood is opportune like usury is opportune, because “when usury is moved by piety, it is no longer usury.” Having to refer to Nifo in treating Florimonte, let us also mention Nifo’s De misericordia liber, ad virum religiosum Hieronymum Seripandum, completed on 5 July 1533, conserved in a codex (“VIII G 36”) of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Naples, which is about compassion and in honor of Girolamo Seripando. Virtuous compassion sprang from reason is compared to sympathy as an impulse, which is instead vicious when it originates from sensual appetite beyond reason (misericordia quae ad intellectum attinet, cum fuerit ratione regulata, erit virtus, cum vero fuerit praeter rationem appetitum sensualem sequens, est vitium). To the name of Florimonte that of Giovanni Della Casa is indissolubly linked, because Della Casa represented in “messer Galateo” precisely the

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Bishop of Sessa, who inspired the author in writing the famous Galateo (Venice, 1558), in which the ideal of graciousness, characteristic of the Renaissance, represented, in a renewed form, the concept of the well-rounded man, as Aristotle wished. The name of Nifo reminds us also of the dialogue of Torquato Tasso, Il Nifo, overo del Piacere (1582). In the dialogue, the Aristotelian synthesis of virtue and happiness, which was affirmation that virtue is happiness, became a subtle composition of two terms now disjointed and that only an expert interior politics could reunite, if not in an orderly peace, at least in a fortunate mixture, “a mixture very convenient human nature.” Tasso was in the process of gathering the motives of contemporary thought, and titled his dialogues with the names of one or another of the philosophers. Little can be found of the thought of Simone Porzio in Porzio, which is a pure exaltation of knowledge for reason of knowledge, and of contemplation for reason of contemplation. In the other dialogue of 1583, Del fuggire la moltitudine (On the avoidance of the multitude), some echoes of the ideals of the fifteenth century resound. Tasso exclaimed: “Abandon solitude at any time and go among the multitude, whenever the fatherland needs you: then all your escapes from solitude would be counted as an honor for you” (Rifuggite, quando che sia dalla solitudine alla moltitudine, per giovamento della patria: e tutte le vostre fughe saranno onorate). Tasso, “the official moralist of the Restoration,” was not a philosopher; his dissertations are too often extrinsic and cold; the doctrines do not say anything, though faithfully presented, and seem to be deprived of a soul. Eugenio Donadoni rightly observed: “His speculation is outside time, it has no history. In it we see a gradual vanishing of the individual, an increasing concession to the spirit of the church, and to the official and collective credences.” We are by now outside of the atmosphere of the Renaissance, in which instead were still immersed Sperone Speroni and Alessandro Piccolomini, whose life ended toward the end of the century, but whose most notable works had appeared around the middle of it. Speroni was born in 1500 and died in 1588. He had been auditor and disciple of Pomponazzi, who in Speroni’s dialogues is often remembered with the most vivid touches and a great love for the light of truth that was animating his lessons, in which if brilliancy of language was missing, still the force of the argumentation was refulgent. Pomponazzi knew only one language, the dialect of Mantua, but he knew how to impart an insatiable love for philosophizing. Of this philosophizing we find often reverberations in the beautiful prose of Speroni, in which the wishes are also felt for having elegance of language and formal values. Speroni says, “I say that civil life includes not only the goodness of customs and the moral conduct, but also the ability of fine speech at the advantage of propriety, personality, and honorability of all human beings” (Chiamo vita civile non solamente la bontà de’ costumi col moralmente operare, ma il parlar bene a beneficio dell’havere, delle persone e dell’honor de’ mortali).

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“Civic life” meant the ideals of the heroic age of the Renaissance, to which the dialogue Della vita attiva e contemplativa (On the active and contemplative life) brings us back, in which in order to live humanely it is required “to act civilly … instead of to contemplate and speculate.” If it is true that only the wise, the philosopher, is a good citizen, it is also true that “human beings cannot be citizens, or human, if they are not good and do not act civically.” If it is true that speculation is convenient to the mind as the active life is to the body, then active life is convenient to people when taken as a harmonic totality. This was the distinction between making (fare) and doing (agire) of which Salutati expressed satisfaction in one of his letters. Speroni, accepting this distinction, agreed with Salutati and make fun of the individuals who are merely speculative and for that reason limited “in the guise of a paralytic unable to move its all body, with the exception of its head alone” (a guisa di paralitico, a muovere il capo fermo restando il rimanente della persona). The human being is a civil animal that acts morally because it acts in the world, because it is immersed into “history,” which “is human and civil, but not divine and contemplative.” Paolo Paruta was arriving to similar conclusions in Perfezione della vita politica (The perfection of political life), where we should look for, as someone believed, not for Thomistic tendencies, but for the conclusion of the eulogy of the civil life that initiated with Coluccio Salutati. Paruta, too, sings the praises of Socrates, sustains that among “our actions none is more noble and perfect than the one intended for the advantage of many” (fra le nostre operazioni, nessuna ve n’ha piú nobile e piú perfetta di quella che a salute di molti è indirizzata). The life of association is not merely an aggregation of individuals by themselves already perfect and accomplished, but the condition and the result of their highest activity: The obligation that we owe to the fatherland is truly immense. Fatherland is a community of people that has not been created by chance and for a short period like a crew of sailors. Fatherland is founded by nature, confirmed by choice, and is at every time suitable and necessary. In the city we are no longer at danger … not our few possession, but all the persons dear to us are together safe, because the fatherland contains in itself our possessions, sons, parents, and friends. In addition to these external goods, we also are protected in what is internal, our supreme goodness due to virtue (Grande è l’obbligo che noi abbiamo alla patria: la quale è una compagnia di uomini, non fatta a caso per breve tempo, come quella de’ naviganti, ma è fondata dalla natura, confermata dall’elezione, in ogni tempo cara e necessaria: né arrischiamo ne’ pericoli della città … alcune poche merci, ma tutte le cose nostre piú care insieme; contenendo ella in sé sola le facoltà, i figliuoli, i parenti, gli amici; e con questi esterni, quel nostro e sommo bene della virtú).

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Human virtue is civic virtue, earthly activity, which becomes concrete in the daily conquest of the world. We see the exaltation of fortitude, the celebration of justice and laws, but also the reaffirmed value of wealth as the necessary instrument of action: “Riches are the strong base of families and cities, accrue prosperous fortune, and protect from the adverse. To every action, private or public, of ours, wealth assigns a certain authority and marvelous dignity” (le ricchezze reggono le famiglie e le città, accrescono la fortuna prospera, non lasciano sentire i colpi dell’avversa; ed ad ogni nostra azione o privata o pubblica, apportano certa forza e dignità maravigliosa). The mathematician and poet Bernardino Baldi in his dialogue Della dignità of 1587 expressed himself with even greater efficacy, when he observed, “Though splendor is an external thing, it possesses its own internal principle. The reason is that the person who is not magnificent is not splendid. We may claim that splendor is a certain light that derives from actions performed with magnificence” (lo splendore sebbene è cosa esterna, ha nondimeno il suo principio interno; poiché non può essere splendido colui che non è magnifico: anzi, altro non pare che sia lo splendore, che una luce la quale risulta dalle azioni della magnificenza). When someone challenged Baldi on the issue of the virtuous poor and the vicious rich man, reproaching him of following the prejudices of the common folks, he answered: The rich person is honored peradventure by the common folks as the person who, because it possesses the instruments of those virtues that by themselves are the most important and the most desirable, is assumed able to act virtuously. This is not so for the virtuous but poor individual who, because it possesses no means [for the practice of the virtues] it would be esteemed by peoples no less and no more than like the person who, though without hands and feet, promised to help in a construction (Il ricco per avventura viene onorato dal volgo, come quello che, avendo l’istrumento di quelle virtú che per se stesse sono piú riguardevoli e piú amabili, si presuppone che debba operarlo: ma non cosí del virtuoso povero; il quale per mancamento di detti instrumenti, è tenuto dal popolo in quella stima, che da chi s’avesse da servire dell’opera del corpo d’alcuno, sarebbe tenuto colui che non avesse né piedi né mani). Similar motives and concepts became precepts for the good life in the strange but interesting manual that, in a form of dialogue, at the end of the century, the noble Stefano Guazzo from Piedmont dedicated to La civil conversazione.(On civil conversation). Alessandro Piccolomini of Siena was the author of the lively and quite liberal Raffaela, dialogo della creanza delle donne (Raffaela or a dialogue on the education of women). He was an illustrator of the Poetics of Aristotle, a fortunate popularizer of scientific knowledge with the diffusion of his Italian works on logic and natural philosophy. Having noticed the abundance of trea-

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tises dedicated to the physical and sensitive parts of the human person, but none or very few concerning the part that in the human being is “divine,” Piccolomini aimed at filling up this lacuna with a treatise that would describe and follow the growing of the human being from its birth within a family to its maturity and creation of a family of its own: We consist of two parts. One part has minor value and is soon lost; another has greater dignity and is everlasting. In spite of this fact, people spare no labor or expenses in filling whole volumes with medical treatises on the health of the former; and the schools resound of such matters. But nobody bothers to waste a single word on the well-being and care of the other part—unless, of course, one wishes to suppose that those people who expound the law according to the criterion of justice and explain the intentions of legislators in our Italian academies, are in charge of the care of our minds (Essendo composti noi d’una parte che poco vale e presto manca, e d’un’altra, che è degna molto, e sempre dura; per la salute della prima, senza perdonare a spesa e fatica, in favore della Medicina, e dell’altre arti, indirizzate al commodo della persona e delle ricchezze nostre, se ne vergan le carte e ne rimbombano ogni hor le scuole; e per la cura e salute dell’altra poi non è chi pensi di far parola, se già dir non volessimo che alla cura delle menti nostre attendano coloro che, per gli studii d’Italia, con la misura del giusto interpretando le leggi, fanno altrui conoscere la mente dei legislatori). Jurisprudence cannot substitute morality because the “virtuous person, since it is guided by its prudence, becoming law to itself, has no need of other laws.” In this way were born the Libri dieci in lingua Toscana dove et peripateticamente et platonicamente, intorno alle cose dell’Etica et Iconomica et parte della Politica, è raccolta la somma di quanto principalmente può concorrere alla perfetta e felice vita (Ten books in the Tuscan language in which Peripatetically and Platonically are explained those things concerning Ethics, Economics, and part of Politics that are principally of advantage for a perfect and happy life). The work was compiled in 1540 and published in Venice in 1542, but it angered Speroni who found in them some parts of the dialogues that he had written on the care of the family and on love, without even being mentioned. After this discovery, Speroni obliged himself to publish immediately in that same year those Dialogi so much plundered. Piccolomini, as things go, in 1560, reviewed the twelve books, changed the title, by which the work is mostly known, to Istituzione morale in dodici libri, and republish it. As the original title was stating, the work was drawing from Aristotle and Plato, especially from Aristotle, not because of a disagreement between the two philosophers, but because Aristotle is occupied with things of this world, while Plato is all lost in things beyond. Introducing the Istituzione, he wrote:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY In these books we have not dealt with the noble contemplative happiness, which is more appropriate to the Divine philosopher than to the Moral one, but with a practical happiness, may we call it active, civil, or moral. This practical happiness as much as it is less noble and honorable than the contemplative so much is more orderly and suitable to the goal proposed. Though we confess that the Platonic opinion about the supreme goodness is true, we also affirm that it is not the one under consideration in these books, in which we must consider the human being as a civil animal and by nature in need of communication, and, as such, we will study it. This education of the human being would thereafter be the means for reaching the other, better, and ultimate happiness, which the human being deserves when it has achieved its perfection in the first (Perchè noi in questi libri non habbiam preso a trattare di cosí nobil felicità contemplativa, la quale piú al divino filosofo, che al Morale appartiene, ma di quella felicità pratica, overo attiva, o civile, o morale che la vogliamo chiamare, la quale sí come è men degna e men nobile della contemplativa, cosí è ordinata ad essa, e in essa si riposa al fine; di qui è, che l’opinion Platonica del sommo bene, si come approviamo per vera, cosí affermiamo che non è quella, che noi cerchiamo in questi libri, nei quali considerar dovendosi l’huomo come animal civile e per natura comunicativo, come tale lo instituiremo, acciocché cosí fatta instituzione possa esser poi mezzo a quell’ultima felicità migliore, che per ultimo compimento della sua perfettion gli conviene, come vedremo).

The work was intended for the formation of humankind in the worldly life, and in it almost in its entirety the Nicomachean Ethics is considered, but present are also all the many interests of Piccolomini, from the treatment of honor to the digressions on poetics, from the observations on the constellations to the stellar influences. In the work of Piccolomini, the wide harmonic conception of human education found a precise place and clarification, since the author delineated with efficacy the ideal of the human being of the Renaissance, the ideal of that harmonic completeness of grace, and the fortunate earthly growth that animates the pages of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano, which gives life to the precepts of Della Casa’s Galateo ovvero de’ costumi. A complete picture of the moral conceptions of the sixteenth century cannot be said complete without at least mentioning the works of Giovan Battista Gelli (I capricci del Bottaio, La Circe) and Anton Francesco Doni (I marmi, I mondi e gli inferni, La libraria), or of all the others, artists or thinkers, who worked on ideal portraits and aspirations that perhaps were not systematized, but were poignant, alive, and powerful. More than in the systematic school treatises, to which until now we have referred, or in the pages of literati, the drastic formulation of the practical problems that some Renaissance reflections had gen-

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erated and imposed, was found at the core of those religious and political discussions, which in their exacting connection were decisively drawn in the sea of moral issues. We had many times the occasion of insisting on the ideal of the common good, of the civic life, which, after the decisive humanistic formulation, composed itself with Platonic mystical aspirations. In this was present an energetic mundane exigency, which favored in the first place the earthly city to the heavenly one, or intended at least to a composition of the two cities into a new harmony, different from the too simple solution of the subordination of the first to the necessities of the second. This harmony capable of assigning a place to both was not reached: the Italian culture and society oriented themselves toward the elimination of one in the name of the other. If we were to return for a moment to the political thought of a Machiavelli and of a Guicciardini, to the exigencies of reformers such as Francesco Pucci or Fausto Sozzini, we would discover in line with the growth of typical motives of the Renaissance the reduction of the moral life to political life or, vice versa, the absorption of politics in the ethical premises in which the faith of the Italian reformers came to change itself. For this reason, the specific treatises of ethics had too often the flavor and color of scholastic texts, arid and deprived of any meaning and actual strength. If we except works like Cortegiano and Galateo, or perhaps even Dialoghi of Gelli, authentic master works of the moralistic literature, but to be counted outside the treatment of philosophy in a strict sense, the technical works on the argument give us the clear sense that the ethics of the Renaissance must be searched elsewhere. In the same way, we could in vain search for politics in the Aristotelian commentaries instead of in Il Principe of Machiavelli or in Ricordi of Guicciardini.

Part Four THE COUNTER REFORMATION AND THE BAROQUE AGE: FROM CAMPANELLA TO VICO (Chapters 21–25)

Twenty-One THE COUNTER REFORMATION 1. Ancients and Moderns. Alessandro Tassoni. Daniello Bartoli. Sforza Pallavicino Benedetto Croce was correct when he observed that the general and common judgment that identified the end of Italian philosophical thought with the great figures of the Renaissance was superficial. He said: Truly, it was difficult to believe that the Italian people, which had accumulated so many experiences and so much culture, though falling at that time into a kind of languor, could all at once lose every virtue, and dismiss all works of meditation and critique (Era difficile, in verità, che un popolo come l’italiano, che aveva accumulato tante esperienze e tanta cultura, pur cadendo a quel tempo in una sorta di languore, perdesse di colpo ogni virtú, smettesse ogni opera di meditazione e di critica). The consciousness of a cultural flourishing suitably connected with the awakening of the Renaissance and directed toward a progressive Italian and European enlightenment was surely present. If we were to read in the tenth book of the Pensieri of Alessandro Tassoni the “paragone degli ingegni antichi e moderni” (comparison between the ancient and modern minds), which in 1620 anticipated the famous querelle, we would sense in every page the pride of a continuity that by this time was firmly establishing itself after the medieval darkness. Tassoni did not believe in a semi-automatic application of the veritas filia temporis (truth is the daughter of time). The historicism of this kind, or the illuministic faith in the progress of learning, was as much extraneous to the humanistic conscience, as it was instead alive in the polemic with the Middle Ages, accused of a barbarism without redemption, and was fervid in the exaltation of the ancients, elevated to an ideal paradigm. It was exactly the conscience of this break that gave flavor to the comparison and made one proud of this new exuberance that dared to compete with the ancient: The arts are perfected with galore work and study, “because in every

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY activity the beginnings are always far removed from perfection,” as Seneca said. For this reason, this conflict would be ending in favor of modernity, given that all things which originate from nature or art are ordinarily imperfect in their beginnings, and afterward are gradually polished and perfected through the experience and the industry of human work and craft. But this manner of argumentation is weak. The same arts and doctrines do not always continue their growing course through the powers of many excellent minds. It happens that now and then, they fall into the hands of slow and weak intellects and then they halt, regress, and sometime completely vanish.… Penuries, pestilences, and wars end human beings and artifacts. All professions that have birth, youth, and perfection, have also old age and death. In the same way that at times the professions grow and develop by leaps, so also at other times they vanish in an instant (Si perfezionano le arti con lunghezza di fatica e di studio, ‘et in omni negotio longe semper a perfecto fuere principia’, come disse già Seneca; per la qual cosa egli parrebbe che si avesse a terminare questa lite in favore della modernità, posciaché tutte le cose, le quali dalla natura o dall’arte hanno origine, per ordinario, imperfetto sogliono avere il principio loro, e quindi coll’esperienza e coll’industria degli uomini andarsi di mano in mano dirozzando e avanzando. Ma debole è tal maniera d’argo-mentare, imperocché le medesime arti e dottrine non sempre si vanno con un seguíto corso di molti ingegni eccellenti continuando, ma ora cadono in mano di gente di tardo e fiacco intelletto che le ritorna indietro, ora si estinguono e mancano affatto…. Le penurie, le pestilenze e le guerre spengono gli uomini e le arti. Tutte le professioni che hanno nascimento e gioventú e perfezione, hanno anche vecchiezza e morte; e come alle volte crescono e si dilatano a salti, cosí talora mancano in un istante).

Tassoni insisted that the golden age had returned to Italy after so many misadventures: “From a few years ago to the present it seems that God, moved by compassion for the miseries [of Italy], has given light to its blindness” (da non molti anni in qua pare che Iddio, mosso a compassione delle miserie sue, l’abbia quasi di cieca ralluminata). The light of the new age, far from vanishing, was increasingly resplendent. Philosophical thought and every type of cultural life were in full development. The exaltation of culture was the constant motive of this spiritual crisis. In a work of the early seventeenth century that intended to show how “modern wisdom was deceiving, vain, and foolish,” a saying was found that asserted that of all the goods that humankind possesses on earth, “with the exception of that of grace,” the greatest was knowledge. Daniello Bartoli, in L’Huomo di lettere difeso e emendato (Venice, 1670), after having maintained that the wises are always happy, even in poverty, “in prison, banished or sick,” for the pleasure that comes from culture, asked himself if, by any chance, the plainness of saints, the simplicity of

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apostles, and the very words of the Gospel were against this exaltation of culture: “The beauty of understanding is not weighed on the scale of God, the goodness of will is. Acute thoughts do not burn in the heart, but ardent affections do” (Su le bilance di Dio non si pesa la bellezza dell’intendere, ma la bontà del volere, né gli penetrano il cuore gli acuti pensieri, ma gli affetti accesi). Hesitation lives no more than an instant, and the answer is promptly given in L’Huomo di lettere (p. 61): Nobody denies that sanctity even without letters is respectable and precious. Who would doubt that it is better to be saint than literate? But who can argue with reason that to be a saint and a sage is not even better than to be just a saint? (Che la santità senza lettere non sia e riguardevole e preziosa non vi è chi lo neghi. Che meglio non sia esser santo che letterato, chi ne dubita? Ma che non sia meglio esser santo e savio, che santo solamente, non so chi possa con ragione contenderlo). Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, a fine writer, in the proem of 1665 to Arte della perfezione cristiana (The art of Christian perfection), thanked God for having made him well disposed toward the study of the fine letters. He called this disposition and the ecclesiastic vocation gifts of the divine goodness because the dedication to literary studies is the noblest, most delightful, and most honored among all human activities. He explained: It is the noblest art because it is the most similar to the life of the blessed ones and even of that of God. It is the activity that is most dissimilar and most superior to the life of the brutes and of those human beings whose life is like that of the brutes. It is the most pleasurable since it delights the loftiest part of the human nature and its delight has no limit. This delight ameliorates the faculty [of the intellect] that more than any other intensely takes enjoyment in it.… It is also the most honored art, because at the end all other human faculties yield to the intellect: the intellect judges all things; the intellect rules the world; power, riches, and all the other goods of the world are merely instruments of the intellect, from which depend the good and the praiseworthy, or the bad and blameworthy use of them.… But this activity is superior to all other activities in honor because it causes glorious fame for posterity. This glory may be a shadow of true glory, but being almost an immortal shadow it will be among the exterior earthly goods the least dissimilar image of that solid glory that the inhabitants of Heaven already possess (La piú nobile, come è la piú simile alla vita de’ beati, anzi pur di Dio; e la piú dissimile, e la piú superiore al viver de’ bruti e di quegli uomini che piú hanno del brutale. La piú dilettevole, come quella che diletta la piú alta parte dell’uomo; e il cui diletto non sazia mai, e migliora quella potenza che di tale operazione intensamente dilettasi.… E altresí la piú onorata; perocché in fine

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY tutte l’altre potenze dell’uomo s’inchinano all’intelletto: l’intelletto giudica di tutte le cose, l’intelletto governa il mondo; la possanza, la ricchezza, e tutti gli altri beni del mondo sono meri strumenti dell’intelletto, dal quale depende il buono e laudevole, o il reo e vituperevole uso loro.… Ma principalmente questa operazione supera tutte d’onore nella gloria della posterità, la qual gloria, ancorché sia ombra, essendo nondimeno un’ombra quasi immortale, è fra gli esteriori beni terreni la men disimigliante imagine della gloria solida che hanno i celesti).

Pallavicino’s glorification of literary learning was not unworthy, though his rhetorical intonation, in the Renaissance spirit, included the accentuation of an earthly glory and of the powers of the intellect. If we will open the pages of Pallavicino’s Trattato dello stile e del dialogo (Treatise on manners and conversation) we will find that it took its motives from the polemics of the fifteenth century “on the manner of speaking of the philosophers” (de genere dicendi philosophorum), a theme that was vigorously debated between Barbaro and Pico. Pallavicino, as it is natural, showed himself supporting the thesis of Barbaro, even though he was now no longer dealing with the classic purity of Latin style, but with the elegance of the “Tuscan” form. He was generous in his praises of Pico, but his defense of eloquence used the ancient arguments in praise of speech (la parola), “[Eloquence’s] principal prerogatives are the soft movement of the sweetest affections, the tropes of things, the splendor of locution, the variety of figures, number, sentences, comparisons, and concepts (le sue principali prerogative sono il movimento leggiero degli affetti piú dolci, l’ingrandimento delle cose, lo splendor della locuzione, la varietà delle figure, il numero, le sentenze, le comparazioni, i concetti, in Opere, 1834, vol. 2, p. 585). The “studia humanitatis” constitute the formation of the humanity of the human race, but also the splendid veil, the elegant vest, whereby the precept, of the Aristotelian flavored poetics, of “delighting while teaching” could be made actual. Pico affirmed the priority of the humanism of content; here the humanism of form is celebrated. It is the return to the rhetorical exaltation of speech (la parola), “The tongue resembles the fire, not only for its form and color, speed and volubility, but especially for its efficacy, force, vigor, and activity” (La lingua rassembra il fuoco, non solamente quanto alla forma e al colore, alla velocità e volubilità; ma principalmente quanto all’efficacia, forza, vigore, attività). Danelli, a religious orator, who attributed the diffusion of the doctrines of Luther and Calvin to the efficacy of their speech and not to the content of their teaching, wrote, “A small spark can start a great fire” … the language of Luther spread the heresy throughout whole Germany, that of Calvin through France, and that of Wyclif through Bohemia (“Parva scintilla magnum incendium exsuscitat” … la lingua di Lutero sparse il fuoco dell’eresia per tutta la Germania: quella di Calvino per la Francia; quella di Viclefo per la Boemia).

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The rhetorical aspect of humanism, rightly discovered by Pallavicino in Barbaro who had been its most conspicuous representative, imposed itself in the first place by insisting on the formal value of the Renaissance humanitas. In the seventeenth century, particularly in the first part of the century what was characteristic was the beginning of the divorce between philosophic-scientific reflection and humanistic motives in a broad sense. This same expression was used by Flavio Querengo, a man of the seventeenth century, and a professor in Padua, who wrote the usual books on the morality to Nicomachus, on honor and passions, and, in particular, an essay “on the language of the philosophers, which meant on the divorce between eloquence and wisdom” (sul linguaggio dei filosofi, ossia sul divorzio fra eloquenza e sapienza). In this rhetorical, formal humanitas, the expression and mentality of the Counter Reformation found its outlet or, at least, that much that was alive and reformative of the Counter Reformation. The heroic and creative moment of the Renaissance continued instead in speculation and in science. The heirs of the great thought of the sixteenth century are not Giulio CesareVanini who anthologized Pomponazzi and Cardano instead of rethinking them, but Campanella and the disciples of Telesio, and Galileo with his disciples, who in the last decades of the century were able to derive new forces from Cartesian and Gassendist currents. In the midst of these currents, Vico formed himself, who of the great Renaissance made himself the worthy heir and effective continuator. In Vico, more than we think, the new European thought joined itself with the philosophical and literary tradition of the Renaissance, not without the traces of the labor of the seventeenth century that, in what it possessed of most characteristic and proper of the seventeenth was certainly not meaningless. On the footsteps of Croce, the seventeenth century could be found rather in those moralists, politicians, and theoreticians of the aesthetics in which the motives were expressed that took origin and increment from the Counter Reformation. Galileo’s science or the metaphysics of Campanella, or even the Averroism of Cremonini were part of one aspect of the Renaissance, and part of another aspect of the effort of finding their place within the framework of the more mature and more tormented modern thinking. If something of the Post-Tridentine compromise was also present in them, it remained in such manifest contrast that it could not cut profoundly into the originality of what was positive in their thought. The compromise of the Counter Reformation meant to reconnect the medieval Catholic tradition with what could be saved of the Renaissance, without profoundly innovating anything. This again meant to elect the extrinsic and merely formal aspect of the Renaissance: the cult of the ancient letters or the return to the “true” Aristotle. Even today, the students who evaluate the Renaissance from the visual angle of the Counter Reformation reduced the humanistic motive to the rhetorical motive. The Post-Tridentine movement did not shape an attitude totally ex novo, but took advantage for apologetic motives and ecclesiastical politics of what already had begun to be delineated:

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the distinction between the literate who has become pedant and the thinker who intended the rediscovering of humanity as a re-conquest of the human being in its moral dignity. The “humanae litterae” became not the meal offered to the mind in order to ennoble it but the ornament. The antiquity that had been instrumental in the formation of the mind became its goal and limit. Antiquity was no longer something alive; it was re-shaped and renewed and was now minutely analyzed in an erudite research. The “letters” that no longer were a vital nourishment for a new synthesis were soon transformed into a mask, behind which thought that could not be bridled still continued to develop. Using a fortunate expression of Torquato Accetto, letters continued to develop in “an honest dissimulation” (dissimulazione onesta). Accetto was exalting the opportunistic usage of covering up the excessively blinding and dangerous light of truth with “a veil composed of honest darkness and violent deference, from which the false is not deduced, but the truth is allowed to rest for awhile, in order to demonstrate it afterward at its own time” (un velo composto di tenebre oneste e di rispetti violenti, da che non si forma il falso, ma si dà qualche riposo al vero, per dimostrarlo a tempo). In this way, in practical and aesthetic discussions, as it was convenient to a tendency prevalently literary, at the side of Campanella and Galileo, a cultural movement developed that subtly expressed with curious and often tortuous ratiocinations, concepts mentioned or affirmed by the Renaissance thought, fully exhausting their significance, by preparing at the same time new ideas and new motives. It is indisputable that some doctrines of the Council of Trent strongly contributed to the nourishment of this mental position, and that it favored all attitudes of compromise. It was the sign of stiffening and a reaction. It was a call back to tradition. It was being suspicious of any revolutionary hint. The refusal of conciliating tendencies from the part of G. B. Contarini, or the refusal of concessions by Girolamo Seripando, was the sign of this mentality that in what was new saw exclusively an enemy to be fought. We must notice how the reaction implanted itself into a ground already suitable to receive back what, at least in part, it had generated from its bosom. Conveniently, we must also confess that in the call for a return to tradition, to the historical continuity, a remarkable value was evident. If the considerations of Card. Roberto Bellarmino were poor in comparison with the Biblical criticism that came from the school of Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus and that developed in Sozzini and the protestant scholars, the idea of continuity of interpretation rooted on the idea of a church in which revelation lived in the spirit, was certainly rich with possibilities. It was necessary to have the courage of giving all its value to the perennial growth of the kingdom of the spirit that is implicit in the affirmation of a church in which the divine word perennially becomes alive and concrete within that of the human being. The concept itself of a “catholic church” that, while founding its roots in the past, aspired to an extension over

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the whole world as the universal organism of humanity, fascinated spirits like those of Bruno and Campanella. They recognized in that concept a greater fecundity than in the “fractured protestant churches” that possessed all the intolerances and the limitations of religious groups, without holding the power and the long-standing tradition of the Church [of Rome]. The Post-Tridentine compromise induced the duplicity, but this duplicity was not the exclusive effect of the Council, though the decisions of the Council contributed to an accentuation of it. A profound crisis, of which the political and religious vicissitudes are no more than one aspect, troubled since the beginning of humanism all Italians, who too often showed themselves to be ready to search for accommodations each time when to sustain an opinion became dangerous or injurious. When the commodious as much as easy expedient of the “double truth” could no longer be employed—an expedient also used by Bruno and Galileo—thinkers found refuge in a conscious dissimulation, in which was manifested, in addition to an interior frailty of character, also the tendency of shutting oneself up, as we found such tendency already present in the fifteenth century. The Ficinians pitied the reformative impetus of Savonarola; Ficino condemned him and derided him after his martyrdom, not only because of moral misery, but also because the missionary impetus of Savonarola remained extraneous to his own aristocratic religion, made of a direct contact with God, and to his noble formation. The Italian heretics, no less than the Protestants or the Catholics, evinced this tendency to dissimulate in the face of any church: This (reasoned) form of intended dissimulation, which we could call with Calvin “Nicodemism” consisted in the doctrinal justification of the practice of those who, as the Pharisee Nicodemus went to Jesus at night, fearing to show his faith and full of doubts, were keeping their faith hidden, waiting that the fear of martyrdom would end. For the present they were making profession of obsequiousness to the ecclesiastic authorities of the countries in which they lived. It was a sarcastic labeling, which was suitably attached to that attitude, more political than religious, an attitude so much diffused in Italy at this time (Questa forma di dissimulazione ragionata, che potremmo chiamare con Calvino “nicodemismo,” consisteva nella giustificazione dottrinale della prassi di coloro i quali, come il fariseo Nicodemo andava a Gesú di notte, temendo di far conoscere la sua fede ed era pieno di dubbi, tenevano celata la propria fede, aspettando per manifestarla che cessasse il timore del martirio, e facendo intanto atto di ossequio alle autorità ecclesiastiche dei paesi dove si trovavano. Era un appellativo sarcastico, che si adattava bene a tale atteggiamento, piú politico che religioso, molto diffuso allora in Italia). It was the attitude that Sozzini took in regard to Calvin, and that justified itself

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in a spiritualization and inwardness of religion that would render people extraneous to any church and indifferent in regard to all. Bruno was ready to show himself a Calvinist in Geneva and a Lutheran in Wittenberg, and, perhaps, a repented Catholic in Venice because of his despise for all churches. In the second half of the fifteenth century, every political fervor vanished in the humanists when tyrannies were born, of which such indifference were at least in an equal measure, cause and effect. The Italian heretics themselves at the end of sixteenth century would often prefer to return and live in the fatherland, taking advantage of the ambiguity conceded by the Catholic Church instead of in the ardent and dangerous climate of the nations under Reformation. Paolo Sarpi could identify in the duplicity of the believers the root of the defects of the Church. In Storia del Concilio (bk. 4, ch. 15), he pointed out: Two were the defects recognized in Trent. On the one hand, the defects of the people in authority: charity was changed in pure control. On the other hand, the defects of the people who are required to obey: their obedience was turned into complaints, evasions, and lamentations (In Trento furono conosciuti due difetti, cioè, che dal canto de’ superiori la carità era convertita in dominazione, e dal canto degl’inferiori, l’ubidienza voltata in querele e sutterfugi e querimonie). According to Sarpi, the Council itself did not ameliorate the situation because, by freezing the conflicts on one side, it favored hypocrisy on the other: Consequently this Council that was planned and provided by human beings in order to reunite the Church that was on the precipice of division, confirmed the schism and made the parties so obstinate that the disagreements became irreconcilable; and … caused the greatest deformity that Christianity had ever suffered (Imperocché questo Concilio desiderato e procurato dagli uomini per riunire la Chiesa che cominciava a dividersi, ha cosí stabilito lo scisma ed ostinate le parti, che ha fatto le discordie irreconciliabili; e … ha causato la maggior deformazione che sia mai stata da che vive il nome cristiano). In Italy, the attitude of a compromise, which the Council consolidated with its attempts at doctrinal accommodations and with the reactionary spirit it favored, was in its origins previous to the Council itself and grounded its roots on positions that the Renaissance had consolidated. The Reform, insisting on motives of faith and grace, was actually undermining the incapacity of nature, the nothingness of the human being before God, and the lack of confidence in reason and other human forces. The spirit of humanism, in its exaltation of the human being, had extremely attenuated the meaning of sin and grace, trying to attribute the maximum to human capabilities, and orienting itself toward an evident Pelagianism. This confidence in the human being had often been the

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source of religious indifference. The Council stopped at half the way, trying to maintain the indispensable, but conceding to the human being and its initiative as much as it was possible. If it is true that the compromise was approaching more the humanistic than the reformative motive, it is also true that it was taking away from both what they possessed of greater value. The Council favored the deteriorated aspect of humanism, without being able to establish the heroic cult of humanity and saving the faith that in the human nothingness abandons itself blindly to the divine Whole. 2. Paolo Sarpi The harsher and more significant battle focused on the problem of grace. Grace represented the locus around which the motives were fighting, the ones more characteristic of the philosophical-religious thought of the sixteenth century, from the humanistic celebration of human powers to the total surrender and submission of the Calvinists. The essence itself of Christianity was at stake. Sforza Pallavicino was forced to write: The dogma of the justification was like the uniform that distinguished the Catholics from the heretics. This dogma was like the trunk from which like branches germinated equally other truths as well as other errors. It was precisely this fact that the Imperial representatives used in order to obtain time and justify such a request because of the gravity of the matter to be considered. It is indeed incredible the amount of dedication, subtlety, and assiduity with which every syllable was weighed and analyzed in the congregations, first in that of the theological counselors, and then in that of the deciding fathers (Ora, perché il dogma della giustificazion era come la divisa che distingueva i cattolici dagli eretici, e ’l tronco dal quale germinavano come rami o l’altre verità o gli altri errori, e gl’ imperiali di ciò valevansi perché la gravità dell’affare cagionasse ed onestasse la lunghezza; è incredibile con quanta cura, sottigliezza, ed assiduità si bilanciò e si sminuzzò ogni sillaba nelle congregazioni prima de’ teologhi consiglieri, e poi de’ padri decisori). On the one hand, human initiative had to be saved, on the other divine grace had to remain untouched. Humanism had continuously bordered on Pelagianism, not so much for a pagan impiety that denied God in nature as much as for the deification of the whole of nature seized in the divine essence as the work and the instrument of the Lord. Calvinism insisted on human indignity; no longer was the Socratic and Renaissance “know thyself” an invitation to grasp the divine in us, but to catch all our baseness. When some philosophers invite humankind to the knowledge of itself, they induce it to consider its dignity and excellence and contemplate that by itself alone it will grow in a vain confidence and swelling of pride.

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The Tridentine Council tried a conciliation that missed, at least in part, the confident religion of the humanity capable of everything and the desperate mistrust in the human nature overwhelmed by sin. In the contrast between freedom and grace, the principle selected at Trent posited human collaboration with the divine work. Grace is a divine and gratuitous gift, but human and free is the adhesion or the rebellion. The Council decided, “to receive grace or not, is not in our power, since God makes grace in us without us, but it is in our power to throw it away with our dissent, or to accept it with our assent” (perciocché il riceverla o no, non è in poter nostro, facendola Iddio in noi senza noi: ma bensí è in poter nostro il gettarla via col dissentire, o l’accettarla col consentire). This quite decisive position unfortunately lost its convincing clarity because of the necessity of probing into the disposition of the soul, by which it is induced to accept or reject the gift of grace, “Some dispositions are required without which [the soul] would not be a suitable subject for receiving [grace]” (alcune disposizioni senza le quali [l’anima] non è idoneo subbietto a riceverla). These dispositions are not shaped in the human being by works alone, because otherwise how could the human being with the forces of nature dispose itself to faith and grace? But these dispositions are not even consisting of faith alone, which, however essential and unique foundation of the justification through baptism, does not exclude afterward the works that dispose to the full justification and the infusion of sanctifying grace. It is on these dispositions that the justification is implanted as a gratuitous gift, which excludes every kind of merit (Altrimenti potrebbe l’uomo con le forze della natura disporsi alla fede e alla grazia; ma non consiston neppure nella sola fede, la quale, se è fondamento essenziale ed unico di quella prima giustificazione che si ottiene col battesimo, non esclude poi le opere come disposizioni alla giustificazione piena, all’infusione della grazia santificante. Disposizioni, però, su cui la giustificazione si impianta come dono gratuito, che esclude ogni sorta di merito). Works and faith, grace and freedom, found no synthesis in the Tridentine position; they remained facing each other in the juxtaposition perhaps humanly acceptable, but rationally unsatisfying. Humanism and Calvinism exasperated the antithesis to the point that they encountered themselves again in their extremes, totally human for Humanism, and totally divine for Calvinism. The solution was found in the compromise that reflected the two moments of the irreducible contrast in which human life struggles without hope. This was the prime motivation of the Tridentine position, which, precisely for this, and not only, as it has been said, for practical motives or political oppression, succeeded in imposing itself on many consciences. What Humanism and Calvinism actually expressed was not an antithesis

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dramatically suffered but an elegantly formulated accommodation, in which they presented the two aspects of the conflict, although unacceptable, veiled in their irreconcilable rapport, and attenuated in their reciprocal opposition, not without a soft color of hypocrisy. The human and the divine do not exclude each other, but their rapport does not tend to be enriched by assigning a univocal and full meaning to both. The human and divine beings juxtapose each other with a reasonableness that excludes simultaneously rigorous reason and blind faith. This was the character of all one epoch in which speculation did not disappear but lost all boldness, becoming a subtle composition of motives and often-contorted research of expedients. This need of composure did not hurt, but often blossomed in compromises; it even caused a more accurate research and the exploration of zones of experience still untouched. While the rigidity of the lines and the harshness of the contrasts were vanishing, attention was directed toward these same shadings in the spiritual life of the individual. If the daringness of reason was precluded as dangerous or even vain, the plays of the fantasy, the kingdom of the probable, demanded to be taken into consideration. If moral heroism was going out of style because of the political pressures of absolute states in the shipwreck of national liberties and for the pressures of the Catholic reaction, people applied themselves to the observation of internal contrasts, the balancing, the adapting, and the hiding of the motions of the soul. With the perfecting of external diplomacy, corresponded an all new attention on the interior diplomacy that was revealed, beside the conduct made up with precise contrasts between good and evil, the more subtle vicissitude of alternating affections, accommodations, adaptations, and skirmishes, in which so large a part of our actions is exhausted and in which the more serious and more manifest decisions mature. If the volutes by which the monuments are adorned could be thought of as the corpulent symbols of an interior contortion, at other times these shadowing zones of the spiritual life in which we immerge ourselves with a new and almost morbid curiosity, fascinate us. When Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, one of the more lucid minds of the seventeenth century, called attention to the limits of mathematic certainty and invited to turn the sight in the direction of the vast kingdom of the probable, he was showing himself to be conscious of the fact that the century was opening a door to new discoveries in the field of spiritual inquiry. These discoveries were not less worthy than those, although more brilliant, of Galileo’s science. The epoch of the implacable inquiry into the remotest folds of conscience was also fatally the age of expedients, of retiring into oneself, of an exasperate need of hiding not only from others but also from oneself. In these shadows, strangely twisted, horrid, and sublime vegetations developed. Exactly in these zones, less apparent to those who go searching for systems was concealed the pulsating of the most original thought of the seventeenth century. We must search the spirit of the century, as Croce did with an extreme refinement, in the literati, in the theoreticians of

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morality and politics, and of poetics, instead of in Campanella and Galileo, who for different motives connected with other epochs and, in some ways, were free from strict links with their own epoch. We should not search the spirit of the century in Sarpi, a historian and a harshly robust polemicist, follower of an Ockhamist nominalism, or in a weak flowering of a renewed Scotism, to the development of which perhaps Platonic inheritances contributed. Probably, as Croce noticed, the timid mention of Scotism and Ockhamism was just the sign of a more alive attention paid to what is individual. The development more or less interested in the politics of interiority (whereby to the motions of the soul minutely observed were offered expedients of a sagacious strategy) induced the concern for that interior life that often could appear as a school of vices, but that instead was preparing a more adequate philosophy of humanity and was laying down the foundation, though by contrast, of a safer moral life. All this precisely by contrast was for Sarpi only a school of vice, as he pronounced himself: Every vice finds protection in this politics of interiority. Human beings depend upon it: the miser, so that it could safely market spiritual things; the superstitious, who with the ardent kisses on the sacred images makes itself free from the exercise of Christian virtues; the vulgar ambitious, who delights in the hunt of worthy nominations, and covers with a sacred veil its malicious plots; the indifferent, who sees in it a palliative to its spiritual sluggishness; and the fearless of God, who has made for itself a visible god in order to merit by adoring It above all others (Ogni vizio ci trova patrocinio. Ad essa affidansi gli avari per fare alla franca mercato di cose spirituali; i superstiziosi, per supplire co’ baci infervorati sulle immagini all’esercizio di tutte le virtú cristiane; gli ambiziosi di bassa lega, che non possono andare a caccia di nominanza senza diletto, per coprire di un velo santo ogni cima di ribalderia; gl’indifferenti ci vedono un palliativo all’accidia spirituale; e chi non teme Dio, ha fatto apposta un Iddio visibile per darsi il merito di adorarlo sopra gli altri). To Sarpi, a place apart must be reserved, because in him many of the most fervid aspects of the previous age are still present. He was spiritually relating to the first humanists more than to the last conciliating thinkers of the sixteenth century, and in his Ockhamism, we can identify the worries of the authors of the early fifteenth century: “In William of Ockham, if we could remove the external barbarism, we would find a writer of remarkable judiciousness” (Guglielmo Occamo, del quale chi levasse la barbarie, averebbe un scrittore molto giudizioso). In Sarpi is the love for the concrete, for the individual, and for everything human in its empirical determination: the earthly reality. Fulgenzio Micanzio in Vita del Padre Paolo (Sarpi, Opere, Helmstat [Verona], vol. 1, p. 30) writes:

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The human being is not born for its advantage, but principally for that of the fatherland and for the common good. I leave it to others to discuss whether or not the wise person must apply itself to the government of the commonwealth. The example that our Father Paolo gives us is that we do not refuse any fatigue or danger in the service of the fatherland (L’uomo non è per sé nato, ma per la patria principalmente e per il bene commune. La disputa, se l’uomo savio debba applicarsi a’ governi, altri la trattino. Il nostro Padre ci darà l’esempio di non ricusare né fatica, né pericoli pel servizio della patria). Thinking of Sarpi, friar Fulgenzio was thinking of Socrates: equal was in both the passion for the world within which human beings live, equal was the ethical-political demand. In ibid., vol. 1, p. 26, the good friar said: Perhaps, what is written about Socrates is not a singular fact, or a voluntary one, but like something natural to all minds … which, after having speculated about where we could arrive in the universe, move completely to the field of morality, which in regard to the inferior things is the only speculation available to humankind (Per avventura ciò che di Socrate si scrive, non è un fatto singolare, o pure volontario, ma come naturale a tutti gli intelletti … che dopo aver speculato ove si può arrivare dell’universo, si trasportino totalmente alla morale, quanto alle cose inferiori unica speculazione dell’umanità). Theoretically this was also the fundamental concern of Sarpi: the earthly human being, soul and body, or the incarnated soul. Sarpi’s concerns reveal the pedagogical need of an integral renewal of the flesh and of the spirit; the need of a medicina mentis that is not concretized in vast systematic designs, but that operates by way of maxims and aphorisms. In ibid., vol. 1, p. 27, we read: He totally immersed himself in that kind of learning that consists in completely eradicating the vices of the spirit, and in the implanting and cultivation of virtues. He has written on this matter many notebooks of opinions and descriptions of events, which he always carried with him. … I saw him elaborating in the fashion of the small treatises of Plutarch on three things at his heart: first, a “medicine of the spirit,” in which he applied the aphorisms written for the health and care of the body and the spirit … and suggests some special ways for achieving tranquility; second, a small treatise on “how opinions are born and die in us”; and third, a treatise in which he claims that “atheism” is repugnant to nature and cannot exist as a system because those who do not know the true God, necessarily create false ones (Tutto s’immerse in quella sorta di studio, che tutto versa in divellere i vizi dell’animo, e piantarvi, o coltivarvi le virtú. Ed in questo ha scritto tanti libricciuoli, che si portava addosso, con sentenze e documenti … Tre sole cose ho

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The most characteristic example of these most bitter moral and political aphorisms, as friar Fulgenzio has described them, is the one recently found in the private Archive Donà dalle Rose, in the transcription of Zuanne Donà, of which we must mention the visible effort of constructing in a parallel way both a medicine and a morality: In the care of the spirit, one must begin “first” with what is urgent, so that strength would not fail us as we try to follow a method. “Second,” we should be occupied with the physical cause and then with the spiritual one, if one is given. “Third,” we must remove all impediments that are repugnant to the introduction of a good and healthy opinion. “Fourth,” we should find the way to remove bad opinions. “Fifth,” we should fortify our position. The reason for this method is that if we did not proceed with it, the remedies would do us no good and perhaps could even hurt (Devesi nel curar l’animo attender “prima” all’urgente, acciò, mentre si vuol servar lo metodo, le forze non siano vinte; “secondo” tender alla causa, prima corporea se ve n’è, poi anco spirituale; “terzo” levar gli impedimenti che repugnano alla introduzione della buona opinione e sana; “quarto” al modo a levar la cattiva opinione; “quinto” a fortificare la parte, ché se non s’è proceduto per questi termini, li rimedi non solo non fanno bene, ma ancora s’intendono in male). A gloomily pessimistic morality was born. This morality intended to reach the Epicurean tranquility in isolation, far from human beings. 3. The Moralists. Torquato Accetto, Virgilio Malvezzi, and Agostino Mascardi It is possible that casuistry and legalism could express exterior concerns instead of an intimate need of moral strength. A profound lassitude was corrupting the galore of dull consciences. Every search for expedients should have its justification in some moral concern; the matter of conscience was rooted in a conflict that was unavoidable; and a spiritual skirmish broke out since the fighting was against the voice that resounded inwardly. Perhaps the Renaissance hero, who felt being limited only by the capability of its means, could

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express a form of life more “beautiful” than the bigot who did not know to renounce the mundane commodities or the promises made to its God. In the bigoted person a fight had broken out that no longer was present in the Renaissance human model, or perhaps was not yet present. Though this fight was appeased instead of decided, a tormenting germ often remained that would bloom into a fecund battle. Let us return once more to what was observed about the duality, always alive, though not definite, of the soul of the seventeenth century, characteristically manifested in politics, when the deprecated Machiavellianism would remain hiddenly idolatrized. Antonio Possevino confessed, “We say that Machiavelli did not lack ingenuity and acumen, but did lack piety” (Diximus non defuisse Machiavello ingenium et acumen, sed defuisse pietatem). It is also too simple to state, “Machiavelli was maligned by words” because of ecclesiastic concerns, “but he was imitated, adored … in substance” because of intimate conviction. In truth, an intimate and sincere conflict existed, fervently expressed by Campanella, Descartes, and others who certainly were not timid. The insufficiency of Machiavellianism was clearly felt, but to Machiavelli the Anti-Machiavelli was juxtaposed, and the antinomy was not justified nor given a solution. When Torquato Accetto, in the treatise Della dissimulazione onesta (On the honest dissimulation) of 1641, exalted truth, he manifested sincere and efficacious accents. Accetto regretted the times in which the light of truth had no need of being tempered with shadows, nor of covering its splendid appealing nudity with any vest, when “the friend was speaking to a friend, the lover to the loved one, but with other intention than that of friendship and love” (l’amico parlava all’amico, l’amante all’amante, non con altra mente che di amicizia e di amore). It is not always licit, nor opportune to say what is true; if simulating is never convenient, dissimulating may instead be opportune: Dissimulation is nothing but a veil composed of honest shadows and audacious reverences, with which not the false is made up but the truth is given some rest, in order to demonstrate it at its own time. In the way that nature has decided in the order of the universe to have day and night, in that same way it is convenient to have light and shadow in the cycle of human works. I am speaking about the progression, manifest or hidden, in conformity with the course of reason, which is the rule of life and of the events that occur in life (Non essendo altro il dissimulare che un velo composto di tenebre oneste e di rispetti violenti, da che non si forma il falso ma si dà qualche riposo al vero, per dimostrarlo a tempo; e come la natura ha voluto che nell’ordine dell’universo sia il giorno e la notte, cosí convien che nel giro dell’opere umane sia la luce e l’ombra, dico il proceder manifesto o nascosto, conforme al corso della ragione, ch’è regola della vita e degli accidenti che in quella occorrono).

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This is a prudential calculation, a capable strategy with which to overcome the contingencies of life, the obstacles we face; “the shrewdness of not showing things as they are” (industria di non far vedere le cose come sono), but also a habit of control and moderation, good taste, and education. Accetto, on one hand, relates to Della Casa. On the other hand, he exalts the subtle pleasure of overcoming with a capable ingenuity every difficulty and celebrates also the peace that one finds in hiding the self to oneself, “as if taking a short recreation by going out for a walk, away from one’s self” (per pigliar una corta ricreazione passeggiando quasi fuor di se stesso). As an earthly and social virtue that would vanish when the soul would be facing God, dissimulation is the sign of a mundane wisdom, of a most earthly prudence. Others, like Virgilio Malvezzi, insisted on the duty of using simulation as a device of self-defense, when dealing with the powerful. In this case, the problem is limited to the rapport of the individual with an external tyrannical power, “It is not good to say always what one has in his heart, even if all that we have in our heart is all good. We must at times put a limit to our speaking freely, when living with liberty has already been undermined” (Non è bene sempre il dire tutto quello che si ha nel cuore, ancorché fosse bene tutto quello che si ha nel cuore. Si dee por freno talvolta al parlare libero, quando è già corrotto il viver libero). In Malvezzi, what mostly catches our attention is the construction of the art, of this technique for living, in which the primary virtue is patience understood as the ability of adaptation, flexibility of a weed that the winds bend but never break. It is not the Spartan fortitude, but “patience, mother of all virtues” (la pazienza, madre di tutte le virtú). While practical life becomes a dueling with life, “fortune” ceases to be the mysterious succession of events or provident occasion, but an innate strength in order to face life, only after having become our endowment and a disposition for successful fighting. Fortune has become “the charm of our temperament, as rhetoric is of language” (ella è un incanto del temperamento, come la retorica della lingua). We should not even speak of fight, but of an expert interplay all concerned with the seizing of that universal force that is the personal interest, which “from the sublimity of the lunar hollow … penetrates even the sordid abodes of humble shepherds.… It is the ethics of the world” (dal sublime del concavo lunare … penetra anche nelle basse capanne degli umili pastori…. Egli è l’etica del mondo). No longer did morality indicate the forms by which the soul could reach God; it became the modest reflection on “the alchemy of human passions,” as Flavio Querengo said. Morality became the counselor of a capable interior strategy because to succeed was what was important, not the effort of trying; it was not the generous but vain enthusiasm, but the bountiful effort crowned with success. Daniello Bartoli counseled, “Let us give up, when giving up means victory. Natural goodness consists all in works, whereas philosophical virtue consists all in words” (Cedere, dove cedere è vincere … la bontà naturale tutta in fatti, la virtú filosofica tutta in parole).

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A delightful book of 1663, Geografia trasportata al morale (Geography applied to morality) teaches the maxim “saper vivere” (Know how to live) because “the disadventures, if we know how to use them wisely, become adventures” (le disavventure, col bene usarle, fatte avventurose). Within us, it is suggested the use of the usual subtle art of outflanking, not of that of a frontal attack. The teaching of the Thermopylae is that of isolating the enemies and subduing them one by one. Many are the vices in the soul; taken all together, they are invincible, but they could be beaten one at the time with a wellthought plan and with “a point not truly too sharp and cutting” (punta non troppo veramente aguzza e tagliente). In this kind of medicine of the soul something heroic is found in its composed shrewdness, but also something morbid, an almost sickening complacency. Malvezzi wrote, “Melancholy is not the scum but the flower of blood, it is not a stone, but a gemstone” (La malinconia non è feccia ma fiore del sangue, non è carbone ma gemma). In the measure of every gesture, in the refinement of a well-mannered interior order, there transpires an almost new interpretation of the Aristotelian “rule.” A sense of the conquest of interiority or the terrible loss of interiority may be felt. One lives and shapes a life for himself with the intention of making it acceptable to the eyes of an expert outsider. It is not the acceptance of God that is desired, but the approval of the expert in world’s affairs. In reading Discorsi morali su la Tavola di Cebete Tebano (Moral discourses on the Tables of Cebetes, the Theban) of Agostino Mascardi (Venice, 1662), a truly fine and pleasurable writer, we would notice the curious deformation of Stoicism, in which the loftiest, hardest, and bitterest positions become mediocre, soft, and sweet: If human life is like a fable, then all of us should handle our voice, our hands, and our life in the manner that in the harmony of our customary habits no discordant note could be heard. No unbecoming gesture should appear in us, or an inopportune action…. All actions of the civil human being must be properly well ordered (Se favola la vita umana può dimandarsi, a noi tutti appartiene maneggiar la voce, le mani e la vita in modo, che nell’armonia de’ costumi alcuna dissonanza non s’oda, e non appaia in noi gesto sconvenevole e fuori di luogo…. Siano pertanto l’attioni dell’uomo civile bene ordinate). Life is a play, a play of probability, of fortune, or of God, “What does eternal wisdom say about itself?” Mascardi asks. The Scriptures answer, “I spent all the time every day playing before It, playing in the world, making out of the whole world a game (Et delectabar per singulos dies ludens coram Eo omni tempore, ludens in orbe terrarum. Ludum faciens de orbe terrarum). On this Niccolò di Lira commented, “Nothing more I would say, because as a profane person I know that limits exist and that reverence is prescribed for sacred things. But … rightly so, human life can be called a fable and a

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game (E piú oltre non passo, ricordevole de’ confini, che ad uomo profano la riverenza delle cose sacre prescrive. Ma … favola e giuoco appellar giustamente si può l’umana vita). The conclusion is not bitter nor skeptica: if the game would be well played, we would conquer moral happiness. Moral happiness does not exist in the heroic exaltation, or in an ascetic renunciation, or even in vile calculations. It consists of living with good taste and preserving the soul like a fragile but precious vase, elegant and beautiful to the sight. If aesthetics become moralistic, morality vanishes into aestheticism. Again Mascardi, discussing poetry and having to fight, as he says, against an army of academicians, observed that the true end of a well regulated poem is usefulness; that the well regulated poetry is advantageous to beatitude, and that poetry must offer what is useful and delightful. This utility is the interior beatitude that consists of an orderly soul, elegant, graceful, and beautiful. In this integral devaluation of all values to the pure level of worldliness in which everything is reduced in terms of a shrewd knowing of how to live, can it be said in an appropriate way that poetry is subordinated to morality, morality to politics, and so on? Do not these terms have a different signification than the ones we are used to? If the earthly goal—here of no other end we speak than of the one in this world—is to know how to live decorously in order to satisfy a need of composure, then everything is vanishing in an aestheticism in which every value is absorbed and fused, without any residue, into the ability of a happy recitation: Ulysses was described by Homer as the representation of wisdom, who in the battlefield showed himself a valorous Prince, and fought Ajax for Achilles’s weapons. When the need demanded it, Ulysses went around asking for the little food needed in support of the life of himself and his companions. At the entrance of his own mansion Ulysses, unknown, slept, waiting for the time to opportunely avenge himself of the inopportune rivals. This was as much as fortune, which in this drama assigned to him so many parts, ordered. In the meantime fortune sat apart as the spectator of the injuries to others, as usual, making a most odious game out of the troubling events of the mortals. It was truly so. Human beings in this world are a game of fortune and human life is nothing but the table on which the dice fall with good or bad points, as it would please to chance.… Or it is a game of “primiera” in which fortune deals the cards at its own pleasure and it is up to us to play with wisdom, trying to overcome misfortune by means of prudence (Ulisse, da Omero per l’idea della saviezza formato, seppe nel campo mostrarsi Principe valoroso, e gareggiar con Aiace per l’armi d’Achille; ma quando il richiese il bisogno, soffrí d’andar a sé ed ai suoi compagni il parco sostentamento della vita accattando, e nella propria casa sconosciuto sopra le soglie dormendo, aspettò il tempo di

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fare opportuna vendetta degli importuni rivali. Cosí gli comandava la fortuna, che varie parti nel dramma gli aveva commesse, ed ella intanto sedeva aspettatrice degli altrui danni, prendendosi (come è suo solito), de’ travagliosi avvenimenti de’ mortali odiosissimo giuoco. E veramente cosí; giuoco della fortuna sono gli uomini in questo mondo ed altro non è la vita umana che un tavoliere, sopra cui cadono i dadi con punto buono o reo, secondo che viene in grado alla sorte…. O pure è un giuoco di primiera, in cui la fortuna dà le carte a sua voglia, ed a noi tocca giuocar con senno, vincendo la disgrazia con la prudenza). Johannes Philoponus used to say that God created the scene of the world in order to sit on it like in a theatre. St. Augustine spoke of a beautiful painting in which, beside the lights of the good, the shadows of evil were adding beauty by contrast. At the presence of the omnipotent spectator, implacable and unseizable, we the players to whom the cards have been dealt must with the art of life learn how to play them. This is morality. It was exactly in this inquiry and, together, in this exaltation of human ability, that one would search in vain for new and characteristic notes in the fashionable Aristotelian compilations to which continuously was trusted the arid tradition of the schools. If the Filosofia morale of Emmanuele Tesauro, although full of anecdotes and widely diffused, does not offer elements particularly interesting, the treatise Del bene (On goodness) of Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino contains instead ample and elaborated material, rich of motives humanly concrete. First of all, what is notable is without doubt the insistence on an inseparable connection of the honest with the playful. This is a connection not new in Aristotelianism, but here reaffirmed with new energy and at every step. In Del bene (bk. 1, ch. 10), Pallavicino explained: What I placed as the first assumption of my discourse is that the honest good, or let us say moral, is not a good that is different from all those goods that for their nature are desirable. In fact, all goods, even those possessed without the splendor of any true honesty or praise and independently from voluntary choice, are good by benefit of nature (Io pongo per primo fondamento del mio discorso che il bene onesto, o morale che vogliam dire, non è un bene distinto da tutti quei beni che per loro natura sono desiderabili, quando anche senza lo splendore di veruna onestà o lodevolezza si possedessero e indipendentemente dalla volontaria elezione, ma per beneficio di natura). The useful, the pleasurable, and the good are not in contrast among themselves; they coincide. There may be something pleasurable that is not yet good, but what is truly good is always pleasurable. Here is the origin of the bitter polemics against Stoicism and its condemnation of nature and, on the contrary, an evident sympathy for some positions held by Epicureanism. The

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honest, far from being against nature, is instead “what nature likes” (ció che piace alla natura, in ibid., bk. 1, ch. 10), since nature is the veracious minister of God. All the work of Sforza Pallavicino is a critique of the Stoic asceticism and an exaltation of the eudemonistic Aristotelian ideal, preferred over Platonism whose manifest anti-mundane tendencies could not satisfy him. This does not forbid him from praising and delineating the construction of the heavenly city in Arte della perfezion cristiana of 1665 (The art of Christian Perfection): This art is better than all other arts and will contribute to the true civil happiness for all of us, but nota civil happiness in a city in which our life is mortal, but in a city where life is eternal for all, the city of heaven, of which the supreme artificer of this art is God Itself ([L’arte] che sopra tutte puó conferire per noi e per ciascun altro alla vera felicità civile, ma non in una città ove la nostra vita debba esser mortale, ma nella città e verso di sé, e verso di noi eterna, del cielo. Onde il supremo artefice di quest’arte è lo stesso Iddio). Even here, Pallavicino’s sense of the concrete induces him to the minute examination of the imaginative function, in the same way that, in regard to morality, he largely examined among the various activities of the spirit the one from which poetry originates. Croce had the merit of being the first to recall our attention to these observations of Pallavicino, but of this we will speak later. At the present we will engage in the finding of those attitudes, not dissimilar from those hereherto examined, which can be found in the field of politics or in the rapports between morality and politics. 4. La Ragion di Stato. Tacitism. Traiano Boccalini Giovanni Botero. Ludovico Zuccolo Machiavelli had clearly looked at political problems as technical problems or perhaps as problems of method: what are the suitable means to found, preserve, and amplify a state? Even if his consideration did not stop at this, politics certainly presented itself to him as a science because in many aspects it determines the means fit to reach that specific end. In addition to this preoccupation, Machiavelli dared to exchange in full any preoccupation of the celestial city with the goals of the earthly city. All the poison and all the Machiavellian impiety was mainly seen in this new consideration of things, as Campanella rightly remarked. The seventeenth century decided to adopt the political science newly born with Machiavelli, but conciliated it as much as possible with the tradition. Croce observed that it was a question of domesticating the Machiavellian political science, taming it, and removing the points too sharp or of procuring to conciliate it with orthodox doctrines, and subjecting it to religion and religious morality (addomesticarla, ammansirla, togliere

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le punte troppo acute, o procurar di conciliarla con le dottrine ortodosse, e assoggettarla alla religione e alla morale religiosa). Naturally, there was no lack of open and manifest condemnations and of bitter invectives against that “angry and desperate politics” sadly dragging “into the pit of impiety,” as Traiano Boccalini wrote. The highest point of this opposition to Machiavelli was reached by Gian Lorenzo Lucchesini who delighted in drafting a Saggio delle sciocchezze di N. Machiavelli (Rome, 1677). No matter how strong the opposition was, Machiavellianism imposed itself to all thinkers and revealed itself in the concrete practice of ruling: Even without reading the impious Bodin and the wicked Machiavelli … these were princes who were so barbarous that they made open profession of being capital enemies of the good letters, nonetheless they were kings of men who could exactly understand the government of the World and who knew how to exquisitely practice the most excellent Ragion di Stato (Senza leggere gli empi Bodini, e gli scellerati Machiavelli … principi tanto barbari, e ch’aperta professione fanno di esser capitali nimici delle buone lettere, nell’esattamente intendere il governo del Mondo, e nell’esquisitissimamente saper praticare la piú soprafina Ragion di Stato, erano i Re degli uomini). It happened that those who did not dare to profess themselves expositors and followers of the “demoniac Machiavelli … stinking flower of the beautiful city of Florence” (indemoniato … fior puzzolente della bella città di Firenze) decided in favor of the well-known expedient that was worthy of those Jesuitical times.… They disguised Machiavelli with the figure of Tacitus and his book The Prince with that of Tiberius, and imparted their desired teachings by narration and comments, now with the confessed goal of the profit that the monarch could derive from the arts of Tiberius in maintaining and consolidating his dominion or tyranny, now with the pretext of ridiculing these same arts (degno di quei tempi gesuitici … di mascherare Machiavelli con la figura di Tacito e il suo Principe con quella di Tiberio, e somministrare gl’insegnamenti desiderati, narrando e commentando, ora col fine professato del profitto che il monarca ne avrebbe tratto, ora col pretesto di inchiodarle alla gogna, le arti di Tiberio nel mantenere e assodare il suo dominio o la sua tirannide). It was an ambiguous attitude that could be traced among the crowd of followers of the “Tacitus’ position” and that was completely explained in the writings of Traiano Boccalini. Boccalini was absolutely convinced that whole political prudence—“tough hidden like in a chest, so that inexpert hands would not easily reach the most arcane and most jealously guarded things”—

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was consigned in the pages of the Roman historian. Tacitus has taught the nations the arts of the tyrants under the semblance of teaching the tyrants. His teaching was complete and precise, and the art he taught was an admirable and proven technique. Tacitus appeared also as the greatest speaker on all modern politics: Doesn’t it seem to you, that—from the cruel rule of Tiberius and the rapacious life of Nero, written so much in their particulars by your Tacitus—some modern princes have derived the most noble precepts like for instance that of gradually undermining your adversary and then destroying it? (E non vi pare, che dal crudel governo di Tiberio, e dalla rapace vita di Nerone, tanto esattamente scritta dal vostro Tacito, alcuni moderni principi abbiano cavato precetti nobilissimi da rodere e radere?). In Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso (bk. 2, sect. 33), Tiberius is called upon to defend himself with the same authority of the things written by the implacable Tacitus, his accuser: Tacitus … has clearly stated that the terrible banishment was decided by Augustus … not for inclination of proud spirit, but for necessity of State, and was ordered by those same individuals who were extremely contrary to it…. This was true, and thus should I [Tiberius] be condemned for the prudence shown of knowing how to establish myself in a new Principate, and for having the ingenuity of putting into practice those same precepts, which not only other political writers, but Tacitus himself has given to the world? (Egli … apertamente ha detto che l’orrenda proscrizione fatta da Augusto … non per inclinazione di animo fiero, ma solo per necessità di Stato da que’ medesimi fu ordinata, che sommamente la biasimarono…. Il che essendo vero, debbo io esser condennato per la prudenza di bene aver saputo stabilirmi in un principato nuovo, e per aver avuto genio di por in essecuzione que’ precetti, che non solo ogni altro scrittore politico, ma lo stesso Tacito ha pubblicati al mondo?). In Pietra del paragone politico (The stone of political comparison) of 1615, we can read the thesis completely Machiavellian, which is proven true by the Ottoman Empire, that “the tranquility and the peace of States must be placed ahead of all other human interests” (la quiete e la pace de gli stati devono essere preposte a tutti gli altri umani interessi). Boccalini found in Tacitus the champion of the liberty of people, for the following reason: In writing the life of Tiberius, Tacitus’s goal was not that of showing the kind of an exacting tyrant, but … with the particularized narration

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of enormous cruelties perpetrated no less by Tiberius than by Caligula, Claudius, and Nero … he had no other intention than to make known to the senators of the Republics the deplorable calamities which they might have to suffer when they will put ahead of public utility the interests of private passions and of personal commodities. In this way they foolishly allowed cruel tyrants to deprive them of the precious joy of freedom in their fatherland (Nello scrivere la vita di Tiberio, il [suo] fine non … fu il formare il tipo di un esatto tiranno, ma … con la tanto particolar narrazione delle enormi crudeltadi, non meno dell’immanissimo Tiberio, che di Calligola, di Claudio, di Nerone … non altra intenzione ebbe mai, che di far conoscere a’ senatori delle Repubbliche, in quali deplorande calamità incorrono, quando preponendo gli odii delle private passioni, gl’interessi de’ proprii commodi alla pubblica utilità, da crudeli Tiranni scioccamente si lasciavano rubbare quella preziosa gioia della libertà della patria). On the other hand, the impressive bloody example of Tiberius or of the Machiavellian severity seemed profoundly repugnant to Giovanni Botero, who was gazing fondly at the sweet harmony (dolce armonia) between the reason of State (ragion di Stato) and the reason of conscience (ragione di conscienza), between political exigencies and moral imperatives. Botero, according to the conclusions reached in Aggiunte fatte alla ragion di stato (Venice, 1606), truly knew how to juxtapose the new political science to the traditional morality without succeeding in going far beyond the reason of interest (ragione d’interesse) to which the reason of State can essentially be reduced. “Reason of State—so Botero defined it—is the knowledge of the means fit for founding, preserving, and amplifying a dominion” (Ragione di Stato si è notizia de’ mezzi atti a fondare, conservare ed ampliare un dominio), and he pointed out that what counts first is the conservation of the State. Politics is a science with a clear and precise goal to which the means have opportunely to be adequate. The means are those already delineated by Machiavelli, with whose teachings are full those “principles of prudence” (capi di prudenza) that Botero proposed to the Princes in the second book of the work: The prince must accept as something already assured that in the deliberations of princes, interest wins all parties. No matter who are the persons dealing with the prince, the prince should not rely on their friendship, affinity, alliance, or any other relation because these relations will be certainly founded on some special interest in those who are dealing with a higher power (Il principe tenga per cosa risoluta, che nella deliberazione de’ principi l’interesse è quello che vince ogni partito. E perciò non deve fidarsi d’amicizia, di affinità, di lega, non d’altro vincolo, nel quale, chi tratta con lui, non abbia fondamento d’interesse). This was a principle that, as Meinecke has underlined, was widely developed

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in the Aggiunte fatte alla ragion di stato, and that inspired in a characteristic manner Botero’s full political teaching. Civil prudence is nothing but an exact calculus of interests and contingencies: [The Prince] should make the effort of recognizing the occasions for deeds and affairs, and of opportunely seizing them. Nothing is more important than some specific periods of time that are called opportunities. Opportunities are coincident circumstances, which render the handling of a task advantageous and easy. Before and after that point in time that task will return to be difficult to us (Metta studio in conoscer l’occasioni dell’imprese e degli affari, e l’abbracci opportunamente: perché nissuna cosa è di maggior momento, che un certo periodo di tempo, che si chiama opportunità; e non è altro che un concorso di circostanze, che ci rendono facile il negozio, che innanzi e dopo quel punto ci resta difficile). When Botero spoke of liberty, or even of Church, he treated them as elements of which it was necessary to value the power in the complex political game. In him, we would search in vain for any different accent: [The Prince] should not fight powerful republics unless, for his great superiority, he is certain of victory. The love for liberty is so old and has so many roots in the spirit of those who have enjoyed it for some time, that it is difficult to overcome it and impossible to uproot it. The deeds and the decisions of Princes die with them, but the plans and the deliberations of free cities are almost immortal. [The Prince] should not even break with the Church because it is with difficulty that such enterprise would be seen just and would always appear impious. In this there would be no profit at all (Non la rompa con repubbliche potenti, se non è, per lo gran vantaggio, sicuro della vittoria, perché l’amor della libertà è tanto vecchio, ed ha tante radici, negli animi di chi l’ha goduta qualche tempo, che il vincerlo ha del difficile e l’estirparlo dell’impossibile; e l’imprese e consigli de’ principi muoiono con loro, i disegni e le deliberazioni delle città libere son quasi immortali. Non la rompa similmente con la Chiesa, perché difficile cosa è che tale impresa sia giusta, e parerà sempre empia e non avanzerà nulla). All the statements of Botero about decisions always confirmed the excellence of the limit demanded by direct interest (ragion d’interesse). Not even his reference to the Church as a political power, not in its spiritual significance, could be without ragion d’interesse. The teaching of Machiavelli was, in its essence, fully accepted and capable of contributing vast material to the discussion of the rapport of the ragion d’interesse with all other values to which Botero referred. Botero, without confronting the question, limited himself to the presentation of the ragion di

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Stato in its crude technical straightforward reality. Without the Machiavellian pathos and the original offensive harshness that, for political motives, appeared as a subversion of morality and religion, the ragion di Stato was in Botero merely an instrument intended to be indifferent to both. This character, which is implicit in Botero, is instead clearly and lucidly expressed in the treatise Della ragion di Stato (1621) of Ludovico Zuccolo: The reason of State regards equally both the dishonest than the honest, and pursues no less the just than the unjust … if the reason of State of the bad republics is iniquitous, that of the good republics must be good. All manners and means that by nature are intended for goodness are by necessity good. It is also true that, because the good governments are rare, the reason of State, which is practiced by them, happened to show itself usually iniquitous and immoral.… This does not exclude that some reasons of State could by their nature be fair and moral (La ragione di Stato sí non meno risguarda al brutto che all’onesto, non manco va dietro all’ingiusto che al giusto … se quella delle male repubbliche è rea, buona sarà quella delle rette. Perché i modi e i mezzi i quali di loro natura sono rivolti al bene, di necessità sono buoni. Ben è vero che, per esser radi i buoni governi, ne nasce che la ragione di Stato, la quale si pratica, si mostri quasi sempre iniqua e rea…. Non si toglie tuttavia, che non sia qualche ragione di Stato di sua natura buona). Reason of State is nothing else than the determination of the means, the calculation, per se properly not good nor bad, but susceptible of being the one or the other according to the value of the end to which such determination and calculation are subordinate. This is the conclusion that can be derived from the observations of Federico Bonaventura, who connected the various reasons of State to the various political forms. After Bonaventura, Lodovico Settala reintroduced the Aristotelian classification by developing the motive of the good and bad reason of State. By this time gone was the passion of Machiavelli, who intended to make a god of the new state, to absorb morality into politics, and to elevate the common good to supreme good. The idea that there could be a political science that would settle with morality without the consequence that the supremacy of one would destroy the value of the other was beginning to form. The compromise, which is all that we can find in these thinkers, was to offer the basis for a solution. As the character merely technical and instrumental of politics was gradually illustrated and understood, political science tended to subordinate itself to the superior goals it wanted to achieve. On the other hand, these goals were still worldly and mundane, so that morality at its own turn in the compromise, more than keeping a subordinate position, placed itself as a collaborator and integrator of politics.

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In the field of the reflections on art—in which the sixteenth century theories on poetics have been left behind because of the always more manifest tendency for the research of a faculty sui generis to which to attribute the aesthetic experience—we find a wealth of interests united with fine observations, but a scarcity of new syntheses. In polemics with Croce, a scholar observed that in reality the problem of the “verisimilar” had not been abandoned at all, but that a new accent had been placed on the subject that evaluate art instead of on the work of art and on the creating artist. This was precisely what Croce intended with his remarks on Sforza Pallavicino. What Croce meant was that the problem of art from a question of content has become a question of spiritual forms, among which the need was felt of finding a place for a faculty that could justify poetry and other artistic productions. Zuccolo who speaks to us about “taste” (gusto) as being a power “that discourses without a discourse” (potenza … la qual discorre senza discorso) may serve as an exemplification. At the same time, a theory of “ingenuity” was elaborated that “intends and searches to find and fabricate the beautiful” (ingegno … mira e cerca di trovare e fabbricare il bello). The common concern was clearly that of finding a function that would not be the intellect but that would give to art its own autonomy. After that kind of general agreement what was discussed was a combination of sensual elements and a reaffirmation that poetry brings out the delightful, and that the delightful would bring with itself the wonderful and the artful: “The shrewd poet starts with putting together a splendid and artful beginning in order to capture and fill with wonderment and delight … the souls of others” (l’accorto poeta va preparando uno splendido e artificioso principio per riempire di meraviglia e diletto … gli animi altrui). From here came the need of the most ornate and most florid speech (il parlare ornatissimo e fioritissimo) and the capacity of moving through” the pathetic,” as Benedetto Fioretti wished; “the magnificent,” as Paolo Beni taught; and “the old-fashioned,” as Francesco Panigarola required. Croce kept apart from the above kind of considerations Sforza Pallavicino and the famous Aristotelian Emanuele Tesauro. Pallavicino, discoursing on the three distinct cognitive functions, “first apprehension,” judgment, and discourse, underlined the immediacy of the “first apprehension” and attributed to it the aesthetic experience. As he said: One of the three modes is called first apprehension because it takes the object almost in its own hands without authenticating it as true or rejecting it as false. It is like when someone reads the narrations of Virgil or Homer with some uncertainty not knowing which have been derived from history, which have been created by invention, always without giving of these narrations the judgment that they are true or false (L’uno dunque di questi tre modi si chiama prima apprensione perciocché apprende quasi l’oggetto fra le sue mani senza autenticarlo

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per vero né riprovarlo per falso; come allor che si leggono le narrazioni di Virgilio e di Omero, con incertezza quali sien tratte dall’istoria, quali create dall’invenzione, e pur senza darne giudizio di verifica o di menzognere). Precisely because poetry falls under the same kind than the first apprehensions, it intends the richness and evidence that are of its own. Wrong are those persons who like Castelvetro aline poetry with history (but “how can poetry sleuth the minutiae of history?”) or treat it as if it were preoccupied with the verisimilar when instead “poetry searches to obtain the similarity of the true only in order to apprehend the false in a more glamorous way.” While Pallavicino was working on how to isolate the dominion of aesthetic from the sphere of knowledge, Tesauro in Cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia idea dell’arguta ed ingegnosa elocuzione of 1654 (The Aristotelian telescope or an idea on the argute and ingenious elocution) was outlining opposite to the logic proper of the sciences of reasoning a poetic logic, distinguishing between “a dialectic caviling” and “a rhetorical caviling” (cavillazione dialettica, cavillazione rettorica). In one we have the false, in the other the ugly; in one the concept, in the other the metaphor; in one the judgment, in the other acuteness; in one the syllogism, in the other ingenuities. The artist progresses in constructing a world, but this world has its own structure, and in this structure is art. Art is all in argutezza (in acuteness): Acuteness, the great mother of every ingenious concept, the clearest light of oratory and poetic elocution, the vital spirit of pages without life, most pleasurable condiment of civil conversation, … the vestige of divinity in our soul ([argutezza] gran madre d’ogni ingegnoso concetto, chiarissimo lume dell’oratoria e poetica elocuzione, spirito vitale delle morte pagine, piacevolissimo condimento della civil conversazione, … vestigio della divinità nell’animo nostro). In short, only that would live which is touched by acuteness, and acuteness is nothing but the capacity of expertly lying (ben mentire), “I conclude that the only praise of witty sayings consists in the ability of expertly lying” (Talché io conchiudo l’unica lode delle argutezze consistere nel saper been mentire). These witty sayings (argutezze) implant themselves in the ingenuity, which “in operating and pleasing has as its own object the true and the beautiful” (tanto nell’operare quanto nel compiacersi, ha per oggetto non tanto il vero quanto il bello). This was the way Matteo Pellegrini, a writer whom Sforza Pallavicino often praised, expressed himself. Pallavicino insisted, “Ingenuity wants no impediment. Ingenuity is the effect of the most agile, mobile, and always flashing, flitting, and flaming spirits” (l’ingegno non vuole pastoie. Egli è sostanziato di spiriti agilissimi, mobilissimi e perciò sempre guizzanti, svolazzanti, scintillanti). Ingenuity, acuteness, metaphor, everything brings us beyond the domin-

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ion of knowledge, in an independent sphere which stands by its own, completely free from the logic of truth, but still regulated by brakes and rules of its own, in which the human being finds pleasure. There, on the other hand, human beings create a world of their own, but in some way correspondent to the divine creation. Can we not think of Vico when we read in Tesauro this praise on “argutezza” (witticism, acuteness)? There is no rich flow of eloquence that without this sweetness [of witticism] would not seem to us nonsense and displeasing. People are not so brutal and inhuman that at hearing these alluring sirens would not brighten up their horrid countenance with a pleasurable smile. Even the angels, nature, and Almighty God, in reasoning with human beings have expressed with verbal or symbolic witty sayings their most important and recondite secrets. By virtue of this divine Pitho [goddess of persuasion] the speech of ingenious human individuals is so much different from that of the plebeians as the speech of the angels differs from that of human beings. But let us add more. By the miracle of this divine Pitho speechless things speak, senseless things live, and dead things have new life. Sepulchers, monuments, and statues receive voice, spirit, and motion from this enchantress and finally they ingeniously converse with ingenious peoples (Non è fiume sí dolce di facondia che, senza questa dolcezza, insulso e dispiacevole non ci rassembri, gente non è sí fiera ed inumana che, all’apparir di queste lusinghevoli sirene, l’orrido volto con un piacevol riso non rassereni, gli angeli stessi, la natura, il grande Iddio, nel ragionar cogli uomini hanno espresso con argutezze, o verbali o simboliche, gli lor piú astrusi ed importanti segreti. Ma non solamente per virtú di questa divina Pito, il parlar degli uomini ingegnosi tanto si differenzia da quello dei plebei, quanto il parlar degli angeli da quello degli uomini, ma, per miracolo di lei, le cose mutole parlano, le insensate vivono, le morte risorgono, le tombe, i marmi, le statue da questa incantatrice degli animi ricevendo voce, spirito e movimento, con gli uomini ingegnosi ingegnosamente discorrono). This is more than a fantastic evasion from political pressure; the Baroque was here penetrating the origins themselves of life, almost catching a glimpse of the roots of the world, experiencing “a creation” placed beyond every logical construction, at the root of logic. A new art of life, free from any assumed scheme, free from any preestablished goal, had already been shaped in the field of morality and politics. Morality had become a scenic art, an art of playing at shows. Politics, too, had become the art that established its own norms. Their point of encounter was ingenuity, in which resided the secret of that wonderful and delightful game to which it seemed that the great fable of the entire universe in its prime sources could be reduced. Such vivid interest for concrete life in its aesthetic, moral, political, and

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economic forms seems to progressively liberate humanity from the tyranny of an analytic logic, of a geometric reason, which would still remain alive (how long?) in the field of physics, at the cost, however, of the rest of human life. The major value of the philosophy of the seventeenth century has to be found in this prosecution of that logical renewal already implicit in the Renaissance, in which to already preconstituted schemes is opposed a conscious and faithful adhesion to the various forms of life, removing abstract logic from the throne of its traditional omnipotence. The most mature fruits of modern thought would probably be found in the eighteenth century with Vico in Italy and Hume in England. They both, in opposite ways, posited the exigency of a new vision of human conduct in rapport with the world of culture and nature. Their theories would constitute the point of arrival of this complex work of meditation and research.

Twenty-Two TOMMASO CAMPANELLA 1. Campanella’s Personality. His Life. Themes from Telesio and Plato. Astrology. Needs of Reformation. First Writings and Trials When considering Tommaso Campanella and his firm faith on the triumph of “Eternal Reason,” we must remember the warm words of Giovanni Gentile: We know that his Christ was not the crucified, but the resurrected, the triumphant. He remains in the history, not only of Italy, but of civilization, like a tower raised to the sky. He had an iron character ruled by one thought that in many of its particulars will wane but in its substance will live, triumph, and animate the modern world (É noto che il suo Cristo non era il crocifisso, ma il risorto, il trionfatore. Perciò rimane nella storia, non pure d’Italia, ma della civiltà, a mo’ di torre che leva alta la cima verso il cielo. Carattere di ferro, retto da un pensiero, che in molti particolari tramonterà, ma nella sostanza vivrà, trionferà, animerà il mondo moderno). When we examine his position and political dreams, the doubts return whether instead of a man who was rigidly walking on the straight path with his assurance and convictions, we may have “a persistent simulator,” as Luigi Amabile said, or a character “circumvoluted, untrustworthy, and tortuous,” as Guido De Ruggiero sustained. The truth could also be that he was a man who, perhaps, throughout the storms of life, at a certain time found again the most orthodox Catholic faith and became in this way a sincere supporter of the Counter Reformation, the paladin of its final triumph, abandoning the dream of a solar society where reason could have shined in a triumph of harmony and unity. That dream did not abandon him even through the tortures in the bitterest of prisons, and inspired the known verses: I sing with an occult rhythm, which makes my small bell resound in the secret ears of the people. Let us pray that now the Eternal Reason would bring all human kingdoms

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In the last analysis, Croce once observed that Campanella’s problem is a psychological, not a logical one. It is the problem of the man Campanella who had the firmest faith, comforted by prophets, saints, celestial signs, and great conjunctions in the advent of a kingdom greatly cherished. With that vein of Machiavellianism repeatingly returning in him, who was so ferociously against Machiavelli, all means had to be good for the triumph of truth, “The world became a mad world because of sin, and … the wise, thinking they could cure the world, were forced to speak, act, and live like mad people, though in their heart they secretly held a different opinion” (il mondo diventò pazzo per il peccato, e … gli savi, pensando sanarlo, furon forzati a dire e fare e vivere come gli pazzi, se ben nel lor segreto hanno altro avviso). He sang: The wise were forced to live like the fools were in order to escape death, because the greatest fool was carrying the weight of ruling. Behind closed doors they lived by wisdom, but in public they applauded in acts and words the mad and wrong wishes of others (Tal che sforzati i savi a viver come gli stolti usavan, per schifar la morte, ché ’l piú gran pazzo avea le regie some, vissero sol col senno a chiuse porte, in pubblico applaudendo in fatti e nome all’altrui voglie forsennate e torte). Which one was the secret of Campanella? He was born in Stilo of Calabria in 1568 and entered the Dominican Order at the age of fourteen, fascinated by the eloquence of a preacher and by the reading of the lives of Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. In the monastery of St. George, during his novitiate, he continued to write lyrics and compose essays “on logic, physics, and on the soul in brief and compendious form,” probably in an anti-Aristotelian tone. Early in time, the Peripatetic philosophy ceased to satisfy him and he began to search elsewhere for a new direction: I began to be annoyed when I realized that in Peripateticism I was

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given an insincere truth, and also falsehood for truth. I commenced to examine all the Greek, Latin, and Arabic commentators of Aristotle. But by doing this I hesitated even more about their doctrines. I came to the wish of scrutinizing whether what they said could also be read in nature, which is the living codex of God as I understood from the doctrines of the wise (Deinde cum essem anxius, quod veritas non sincera, sed potius falsitas pro veritate, in Peripato versari mihi videbatur, Aristotelis commentatores Graecos atque Latinos Arabesque examinavi omnes, et haesitare magis coepi in dogmatis eorum; ideoque perscrutari volui an, quae dixerunt ipsi, in mundo etiam legantur, quem codicem Dei vivum ex doctrinis sapientium intellexi). Between 1585 and 1587, residing in the Calabrian town of Nicastro, he abandoned Aristotelianism and decided to read all the books of Plato, Pliny, Galen, the Stoics, Democritus and disciples, but especially those of Telesio and followers. Comparing them with the primary codex of the world, as to the original autograph, he wished to know what these other books contained of exemplary truth and what of falsehood (Libros omnes Platonis, Plinii, Galeni, Stoicorum et Democriticorum, praecipue vero Telesianos, ac cum mundi codice primario conferre, ut ex originali et autographo, quid veri exemplaria habent et quid falsi). He confessed to have read “especially the works of Telesio and followers” because the method of Telesio, or of his freedom in philosophizing was scornful of the proofs from authority, but fascinated by those from nature. Telesio’s doctrines filled up Tommaso’s conversations with his confreres, in which he could find little satisfaction (inveniebam parum quietis in responses illorum). In 1588, he visited Cosenza in the hope of meeting with Telesio, but he arrived in time only to pay respect to Telesio’s ashes and lay an Elegy on his coffin. In the monastery of Altomonte, where he went on November of that year, Campanella studied “books of Platonists and physicians” (Platonicorum et medicorum libros). Toward the end of 1589 he abandoned the cloister monastic life and moved to Naples where he enjoyed the hospitality of the Tufo family. Two motives were clearly coming together in Tommaso’s education and growing, both connected by their reaction against Aristotle: the inspiration of Telesio’s naturalism and the influence of the Platonists. In Naples, two people, the Jew Abraham ibn Eszra, astrologer and magician, with whom during this period he maintained a strong friendship, and Giovan Battista della Porta, with whom he came in contact, helped him to compose in line with the first Renaissance the two impulses that were antithetical, those of Telesio and Plato. While Telesio tried to understand nature as something autonomous and apart, Campanella studied the possibility of a synthesis in which animated

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nature could combine Neo-Platonic exigencies with scientific requirements. From this came the interpenetration of nature with spirit which could explain the correspondence that Della Porta noticed between body and soul. From this came the extensive links between macrocosms and microcosms that could justify astrology and magic. In all of this, Campanella was not moving away from the thought of the Renaissance, but was instead complying with it, even more than Telesio did. In his magic-astrological initiation, he also found the announcement of the fullness and renovation of time, “The time is darkening: the Anti-Christ is at the door” (tempora sunt tenebrosa, Antichristus est in ianuis). The theory of “the great conjunctions,” elaborated among the Arabs by Al Kindi, had been introduced in the Western world with the version of the writings of Albumasar, fascinated the most pious spirits from Roger Bacon to Pierre d’Ailly, who became certain of seeing in the conjunctions of the superior planets the occult rhythm of the vicissitudes of religions and kingdoms. Pico della Mirandola, in order to confute it, and Pietro Pomponazzi, in order to embrace it, revealed how such a doctrine had the tendency of reducing to a product of mere natural events all religious vicissitudes, and of substituting to the many [religions] born in time and in time destined to disappear, a unique most holy deity, nature. At the end, Campanella accepted astrology that he had previously refused and, until his death, remained deeply convinced of its value, perhaps unconsciously admitting the presupposition for which Pico had instead condemned it for: the idea of a unique nature, Lord of all vicissitudes, the only true and absolute God. His colleagues in the conspiracy concordantly confessed, “He was saying that there is no God, but only nature, and we to this nature gave the name of God” (Dicea che non c’era Dio, ma solo la natura, et noi a questa gli havemo messo nome Dio). Even when he judged astrology or wished to show it compatible with revealed religion, he always sustained its basic assumptions, deriving its confirmation from his own prophecy and prophetic faculty itself. In his own confession of 1599 he will affirm: I … have applied myself to the study of different manifestations of science and in particular of prophecy, which was so much recommended by St. Paul to the Corinthians when he said, “You all can prophesy.” Thus, I delighted in those things that could give indications of future events according to the way in which God has posited these indications as signs among the things of the world (Io … ho atteso a diverse professioni de scienza, et in particulare alla prophetia, tanto raccomandata da S.to Paolo alli Corinthi, potestis omnes prophetare, et per quanto mi dilettai di quelle cose che donano inditio del futuro, secondo che domine Dio l’ha posto per segni delle cose del mondo). In the stars and in the astrological and prophetic books he found the an-

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nouncement of the renovatio, “In the darkness of this century, I have searched for light and I dipped into the pages of as many books of prophets, of as many writings of doctors and sages of the whole world as I could find” (Ego vero qui inter tenebras saeculi huius quaesivi lucem, evolvi prophetarum volumina et doctorum scripturas et sapientium universae terrae quos habere potui). He found in so many volumes the universal true faith, destined to triumph after the Anti-Christ, and found also in the stellar situations, confirmed by earthly events, the certainty of the approaching great event, “In a short time … after having abandoned all barbarism and adopted rationality, as the Anti-Christ would move away … the whole world will be Christian” (post modicum tempus … relicta barbarie assumptaque rationalitate, cum curruerit Antichristus … universus mundus erit christianus). Before the approaching end of the world, humanity will be united, and Campanella was conscious of being the prophet and the apostle of this union: Natural reason has proven from the consent of all human beings that before the end of the world, which is near, a Christian Commonwealth will be formed, constituted by all nations, in the greatest prosperity, and under one ruler.… We know that this coming together of all kingdoms in the Commonwealth of God is near because the end of the world is near, and the reason is that all philosophers have stated that the world is already old.… Truly, theologians and astrologers unanimously teach the same thing (Quod ante finem mundi, qui prope est, sit futura Respublica Christiana, ex omnibus nationibus condita in maxima foelicitate cum uno capite, probatur ratione naturali ex omnium hominum consensus…. Quod hic concursus Regnorum ad Rempublicam Dei sit proximus patet ex eo, quod finis mundi prope est, quia mundus esse jam senem omnes dicunt philosophi…. Theologi vero et Astrologi unanimiter idem praedicant). In support of his vocation, the new prophet promises some miracles. He had promised them to his conjurers and will promise them in 1606 to Cardinal Farnese, “It has pleased the Lord to give me an authority like the one of St. John over the Pharisees, and miracles more impressive than those of Moses. … I will make … miracles and prophecies … to confirm the Gospel and impart fear to the rebels of the Church.” We should not forget that with every probability there was some truth in the constant confession of the conjurers that Campanella was considering the miracles a work of magic, and this statement is after all justified by Campanella’s writings. The anguish for renovation is certainly present in Campanella, like in Bruno, and in Pico, before Bruno, a need for reformation, and a need for the universal human pacification. Faith in astrology and magic tell the philosophers that this renovation is possible, even close to happening, on earth. In a curious synthesis, Campanella groups together the Arab astrologers, St.

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Bridget or Savonarola; becomes a conjurer and dreams the solar city; appeals to Pope and Cardinals, writing and repeating almost always the same things, with his spirit always intent on a unique goal, the renovatio mundi (renovation of the world). The remarkable agreement between the conjurers and the Città del Sole still subsists among the promises made to confrères and heads of the Church. The accentuation and the modes may change according to the needs of the moment, but the substance is always the same. It is the dream of a kingdom of justice and peace on earth, in a unique faith truly human, no longer worshipping the defeated and crucified Christ, “a hanged man” (un appiccato), but the Christ triumphant on every evil: “Alas! Foolish folks who are so rooted on this / earth and are unworthy of the other triumph. / Thus, you only wait for the day of the bitter war!” (Ahi folle volgo, che affissato a terra, / se’ di veder l’altro trionfo indegno, / onde sol miri al dí dell’aspra guerra!). In any case, astrology, magic, and physiognomy made him sure of his vocation, and in the seven bumps (sette monti) discovered in his cranium, he obtained the sure proof of being “the voice” destined to awake up the world: “If by destiny or mistake I was not due so much, / why have you given me seven bumps, new / abilities, and a burning wish to preach to the world?” (Se favor tanto a me non si dovea / per destino o per fallo, / sette monti, arti nuove e voglia ardente. / perché m’hai dato a far la gran semblea?). Between 1587 and 1591, in Naples, Campanella printed Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Philosophy as demonstrated by the senses), completed De investigatione rerum (On the inquiry of things) and drafted De sensitiva rerum facultate (On the faculty of sensation in things). The first work, composed in 1589, was a defense of Telesio against Giacomo Antonio Marta, author of Propugnaculum Aristotelis adversus principia B. Telesii (Defense of Aristotle against the philosophical principles of B. Telesio), published in Rome, in 1587. The De investigatione rerum, a work that has been lost, contained the criticism of the cognitive processes of Platonists and Aristotelians. This criticism was of use for the formulation of a dialectic based on sensation alone (ex solo sensu), with a classification of the objects of the senses posited in nine categories. This was done in order that “any one would be able to reason about anything not only by way of words, as it is the custom of Ramon Lull, … but by way of sensitive objects” (ut quilibet de quacumque re non per vocabula tantum, ut Raymundo Lullio mos est, … sed per sensibilia obiecta ratiocinari posset). The De sensitiva rerum facultate, or in its later changed title De sensu rerum (On the sensation of things), was begun in 1590 following discussions with Della Porta, dedicated in 1592 to the Grand Duque of Tuscany, confiscated in Bologna, and rewritten in Italian in 1604. On the counsel of Kaspar Scioppius, it was translated into Latin around 1609 and published in 1620. Between 1591 and 1592, Campanella was arrested, prosecuted, and condemned to return to the Religious Order of which he was a priestly member, at his original place of residence, as a consequence of his professing the doctrines of Telesio. Defying the sen-

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tence, he left for Rome, and eventually went to Florence, where he tried in vain to be appointed by the Grand Duque to a teaching chair in Pisa or in Siena, saying that he would be ready to teach, perhaps even better than others, both doctrines, ancient and modern. Campanella then moved to Padua, at the same time when agents of the Holy Office sequestered his manuscripts in Bologna. Once in Padua, he was arrested and charged with sodomy, and freed, but eventually imprisoned by the Holy Office, accused of heresy and deprived of all his manuscripts. During the long process he was kept in jail first in Padua, then in Rome. In 1595, he was confined to the convent of Santa Sabina on the Aventine hill in Rome and, in 1596 the proceedings against him reached a conclusion. They reopened in 1597 because of new charges against him, until, at the end of that year, the philosopher was definitively freed but with the obligation of returning to Calabria. The painful series of his misadventures had begun. Campanella was not so distressed for having to abandon his dreams as much as to give up on his ceaseless production. As his written works were taken away from him or sequestered, he gave himself to their re-writing. To demonstrate his orthodoxy and his attachment to the Church and its triumph he composed works in which he forecasted its universal greatness. For this reason, he drafted the now lost De monarchia christianorum (On the monarchy of the Christians) and the De regimine ecclesiae (On the regime of the Church) outlining the conception of a universal dominion of the Church, which as a matter of fact he developed in the Monarchia del Messia (The Monarchy of the Messiah). Strong concepts and affirmations of the power of the popes are found in Dialogo contro Luterani e Calvinisti e altri eretici (A dialogue against Lutherans, Calvinists, and other heretics); but he also composed the Discorsi ai principi d’Italia (Discourses for the Princes of Italy): We have found no nation which after having lost power has succeeded in recovering it. No more hope for Italy is possible and the stars also are opposed to it. But we still possess the glory of the papacy. This glory is so great that all Christian Princes kiss the feet of our Prince, a thing that was not even done for the Roman Emperors. Our Prince elects and removes all princes; he imposes laws to the whole world; he is the head of the celestial monarchy and occupies the magisterial chair of the school of God (Non ci è piú speranza in Italia che le stelle pur contraddicono; solo ci resta questa gloria del papato, ed è tanto grande che tutti i principi Cristiani baciano i piedi al nostro principe, il che non facevano all’Imperatore Romano. Egli pone e depone tutti i principi, e dà legge all’universo, ed è capo della monarchia celeste e seggio della scola di Dio). The ideal of the monarchy of the Messiah and of the monarchy of Spain come together in the unique ideal of the political unification operated by the Catholic King for the spiritual union of the world:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Because the Pope has no militia of his own and because he is the head of Christianity he rules a monarchy using the arms of the Christian Princes, who are the arms of Christianity…. It is clear that the Monarchy of Spain that embraces all nations and encircles the world is that same monarchy of the Messiah who by means of it shows to be the heir of the universe. At last, there would be one sheep-fold and one shepherd (Il Papa non avendo milizia ed essendo capo del Cristianesimo non cammina per sé a tal monarchia, se non per l’arme delli principi cristiani, li quali son bracci del cristianesimo…. Dunque si vede che questa Monarchia di Spagnuoli che tutte le nazioni abbraccia e cinge il mondo, è quella stessa del Messia nella quale si mostra erede dell’universo; et fiet unum ovile et unus pastor).

During these same years, Campanella delineated the bases and began to draft the systematic treatment of physiology, ethics, and practical sciences in general, a work that would be titled Philosophia realis, first printed in 1623 and then definitively in 1637. This voluminous work on a philosophy of reality included parts on physiology, questions on physiology, moral questions, ethics, political questions, politics, the city of the sun, questions on economics, the kingdom of god, and an admonition for the conclave (Physiologica, Quaestiones physiologicae, Morales quaestiones, Ethica, Quaestiones politicae, De politicis, Civitas Solis, Quaestiones oeconomicae, Oeconomica, De regno Dei, and Pro conclavi admonitio). It is impossible to follow in all vicissitudes the complicated series of outlines, drafts, and re-writings of Campanella. He certainly started very early to apply himself to the composition of an immense work touching “on all things” (De rerum universitate). On 15 October 1592, Baccio Valori wrote to Usimbardi that “the major work in which Campanella was involved was De rerum universitate, the system of a complete philosophy” in twenty books, in which he exposed and discussed different physiological theories. This work was soon lost, but in 1595 Campanella, besides writing a compendium in Italian that was also lost, drafted the Compendium de rerum natura (Synopsis of the nature of things) that Tobia Adami published in Germany in 1617 as an introduction to Campanella’s complete works, Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae (A preface to the restoration of philosophy). In the meantime, Campanella abandoned the idea of a great polemical work, which he would approach again later in the Quaestiones, and began to expose his physiological and ethical conclusions in Epilogo Magno (The great epilogue) composed the first time in the years following 1595, thereafter lost and re-written between 1604 and 1609 in the form that has reached us. Having determined in this way his own concepts about nature, after 1613 he dedicated himself to the completion of Philosophia realis. At the time of his release after the trial for heresy, Campanella in 1598 returned to Calabria. He took residence in Stilo where he planned a program of political-religious renewal of which he was convinced of being the prophet,

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the artificer, and the leader, and of which also the celestial announcements were indicating that it would be happening in 1600. The “signs of the death of the world” (Segnali della morte del mondo) were very clear to him; the insurrection that he was organizing would have actualized the worldly unity that, according to the prophets, must precede the final conflagration. Campanella’s reformatory inspiration brings to its peak a typical motif of the Renaissance and, at times, it combines with that of Bruno. If we compare, through the testimony of the acts of the trial, what appears from certain aspects of the “practical” activity of the two philosophers, we would see that, at least in those who heard them, it generated analogous impressions. Campanella wanted “to reform the abuses of religion” and sustained that “Jesus Christ was a man of goodness … but not what they say about God, and that there is no other God but Nature.” He also said that “from now on” confession would be useless, because “souls would go neither to inferno, nor purgatory, nor paradise.” He wanted that “all the books in Latin be burned, because it was like cheating the peoples who could not understand them; all books must be written only in the vulgar.” He denied the supernatural character of miracles and promised to Cardinal Farnese that he too could execute some: He wished for a commonwealth in which life was in common and … human procreation was allowed only to good men, and … the disabled were not permitted to procreate. ‘Disabled’ as he understood and stated were all those who were neither vigorous nor valorous men (Volea fare una repubblica dove si havesse da vivere in commune, e … la generatione humana si doveva solamente fare dali huomini buoni, e … li inhabili non dovevano fare la generatione humana, intendendo e dichiarando per huomini inhabili quelli che non erano valorosi et huomini gagliardi). If we go through the testimonies of the trial, we would find the same elements that form the structure of Città del Sole (The city of the sun), in which what has been the program of the attempted insurrection reappears in an idealized form. This is the great factual difference between Città del Sole and the many utopias of the Renaissance. Even in regard to the fashion of the clothes to wear, as the conjurers confessed, these clothes are described in this work and were selected as elements of propaganda by Campanella. It is this exact concordance between political fight and theorethical idealization that gives the impression of Campanella as a man of the Renaissance, of the age when many learned people did not wish to reduce themselves to be merely literates and pedants. With that same spirit, Campanella decided to renew the world, reunite it, and shape it anew, on the imitation of Pico della Mirandola, who intended to convert all nations to one religion, and of the heretical dreamers of ideal republics, and of Bruno, in his own way a reformer as well. Campanella’s ideal “was the same ideal that appeared in those times to the tired minds

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not yet enslaved, to the spirits that had lost hope but were not yet won, to the isolated heretics, to those persecuted by the churches by now consolidated into regimes. It was an ideal of unification of the separated sects, an ideal of universal agreement in the fight of all against all, an ideal enlightened by apocalyptic visions and sustained by the hope for the millennium” (È lo stesso ideale che appare in quel tempo alle menti stanche ma non asservite, agli animi sfiduciati ma non vinti degli eretici isolati, dei perseguitati dalle chiese consolidate in regimi: ideale di unificazione nella scissione delle sette, di concordia universale nella lotta di tutti contro tutti, illuminato da visioni apocalittiche e sostenuto dall’attesa del millennio). The political reform is for all these souls strictly connected with a religious renewal; only a higher conception of life, a more profound morality, and a reformation of the heart can prepare a truly humane condition. Campanella would never forgive Machiavelli for his “atheism,” his having subordinated religion and morality in general to politics and having reduced them to a practical expedient. The world’s salvation cannot be obtained from the equilibrium of forces or contrasting forces even though better controlled; world’s salvation would be born from the rebirth of the spirit. With an adequate vision of things, a vision that would become norm of life, a spirit, a vehicle of salvation would be able to return to be part of the universal order, which is good, harmonic, and the source of all happiness. In Città del Sole, p. 66, he wrote: This spirit cannot have tranquility unless it could come to know all the histories of the nations, their rites, sacrifices, republics, and the inventors of laws and arts. In addition, it would need the knowledge of the mechanical arts…. It must know all the sciences…. But more than anything else it must be Metaphysician and Theologian, who knows well the root and demonstration of every art and science, the similitudes and differences of things, Necessity, Fate and the Harmony of the World, Potency, Wisdom and the Love of God and of every thing. It must study the gradation of beings and their correspondences with the celestial, terrestrial, and maritime things, as it carefully inspects the Books of Prophets and astrology (Però non può essere tale se non quello che sa tutte l’istorie delle genti e riti e sacrifizi e repubbliche ed inventori di leggi ed arti. Poi bisogna che sappia tutte l’arti meccaniche … e tutte le scienze ha da sapere.... Ma piú di tutti bisogna che sia Metafisico e Teologo, che sappia bene la radice e prova d’ogni arte e scienza, e le similitudini e differenze delle cose, la Necessità, il Fato e l’Armonia del Mondo, la Possanza, Sapienza e Amor divino e d’ogni cosa, e li gradi degli enti e corrispondenze loro con le cose celesti, terrestri e marine, e studia molto bene nei Profeti ed astrologia).

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2. The City of the Sun. Relation with Galileo. French Interlude. His Thought and Method. The Book of God. Science and Religion Campanella’s metaphysics is the foundation of the solar city and, in general, of every one of his political vision, “It is said that first it is needed to look at the life of the whole and then at that of its parts” (essi dicono che prima bisogna mirar la vita del tutto e poi delle parti). The whole organization of the State is justified in this unitary vision. The same metaphysics is the root of religion, God and being, one and trine, “At this point you may realize that they adore God in Trinity, saying that It is Supreme Potency [Omnipotence], from which immense Wisdom proceeds, and from both of them comes Supreme Love. (Qui ti stupisci ch’adorano Dio in Trinitate, dicendo ch’è somma Possanza, da cui procede somma Sapienza, e d’essi entrambi, sommo Amore). What we have here is the theory of the primacy (teoria della primalità), not a positive religion; we merely have a ratiocination, “because the people [of the solar city] experienced no revelation.” The founders of historical religions are all honored as great legislators, “and honored was Jesus Christ and his twelve Apostles were also very highly regarded” (e in luogo onorato era Gesú Cristo e li dodici Apostoli, che ne tengono gran conto). The foundation of the beliefs of these solar citizens is nature—“friar Thomas Campanella has said … that Nature was God” (fra Thomaso Campanella haveva detto … che la Natura era Dio). The center of their credo was the God that is internal to all things and manifests in the world its vital power in the warm spirit that is received from the Sun. To the Sun the inhabitant of the heliolithic city raised their prayers and Campanella “from the farthest place of Caucasus” offered his hymn: You sublimate, give life, and call to a new feast each secret thing that is languid, dead, and lazy. O powerful numen, vivify me as well with all other things, since more than others I love you. Bring me out of the dungeon, while in serene light the green top emerges from the profound roots (Tu sublimi, avvivi e chiami a festa novella ogni segreta cosa, languida, morta e pigra. Deh! Avviva con l’altre me anche, o nume potente, cui piú ch’agli altri caro ed amato sei … Esca io dal chiuso, mentre al lume sereno d’ime radici sorge la verde cima). It is not possible to say that Campanella abandoned his ideal because, almost contemporaneously to Città del Sole, he began drafting Monarchia di Spagna or, in 1605, the Monarchia del Messia. The tone of these new works was different, but the intent was always the same: in the fullness of time, it was opportune to achieve political and religious unity, “Soon the prophecy of the end

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of the world would be verified in regard to nature and politics.… The end of the Monarchies has already happened, and … everything should return under the dominion of the Saints and the Church (Si vede la profezia del fine del mondo presto doversi verificare, tanto nella natura, quanto nella politica…. Il fine delle Monarchie è già venuto, e … ogni cosa ha da venire all’imperio de’ Santi e della Chiesa). The apocalyptic vision does not change, though the language is altered, as in Opere, D’Ancona edition, vol. 2, pp. 91–95: The King of Spain by following this plan, observing prudence and seizing the occasions, would be able to gather together the whole world. This can be deduced from the things that follow. It is clear that the King of Spain is fighting under the auspices of the German Empire meaning of Italy, of Rome, of the Greeks, of the Persians, of Cyrus, and also of Media and Babylonia. He would be assisted by the forces of many angels, of those of Cyrus and Michael, and after that everything would fall into the hands of the Saints, and there would be one shepherd and one sheepfold, of which the assembler [overseer?] today is the King of Spain who holds the office of Exemplar. At the end, for an occasion of triumph, Gog and Magog would be moving against the Christians, but the Christians would win and Christ would return for the final judgment. That would be the end (Il Re di Spagna seguendo questo stile, osservando la prudenza e occasione, otterrà il tutto come per le seguenti cose si vedrà. Giacché è manifesto ch’ei combatte sotto li auspici dell’ Imperio Germanico che è d’Italia, che è di Roma, che è de’ Greci, che è de’ Persi, che è di Ciro, che è anche di Media e di Babilonia; e da piú angeli sarà aiutato, e dalle forze di Ciro e di Michaele, e doppo questo si darà ogni cosa in man de’ santi, facendosi unum ovile et unus pastor; del quale oggi è congregatore che fa l’officio di Tipico, ed alfine per occasione di trionfo si leverà contra i Cristiani Gog and Magog; e gli Cristiani vinceranno e verrà Cristo a giudicare et sic finis). Although the language is changed, the ideas are the same, and the bases of his metaphysics remain what they were. Campanella would promise to Cardinal Farnese as many miracles as he promised to the ignorant monks of Calabria. His professed adhesion to Christianity does not exclude his acceptance of the religion of nature. In the letter of 1607 to the Pope and the Cardinals, he wrote in Letters, pp. 63–64: I found indeed only one true faith that includes the law of an innocent nature. According to that law, we must all live. At last, having considered all things, I recognized that law as the law of Christ. It is a law that only adds to the law of nature the sacraments, which in themselves are symbols of nature. The sacraments contribute to the formation of those who would be reborn into a new admirable doctrine and at the

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same time provide the grace necessary for the observance of what the natural law demands (Comperi enim unam fidem veram, quae legem naturae innocentis continet, et secundum illam omnes vivere debere, et tandem visis omnibus hanc legem Christi esse agnovi, superaddita vero lege naturae tantummodo sacramenta, quae et ipsa sunt symbola naturae et institutioni renascentium in nova mirabili doctrina convenient, et simul gratiam conferunt ut possimus observare quae naturalis ostendit lex). The revelation is received as a confirmation and completion of nature, “Yes, certainly, all these things do not govern themselves, but are governed by the first Artist and the first Wisdom, which is the Word of God” (ideo certum est omnia haec regi non a se ipsis, sed a prima Arte et prima Sapientia, quae est Verbum Dei). Christianity, too, would be introduced as a unique religion in which all humankind would be pacified, in so far as it is the full and complete expression of reason. The ideal of Campanella, whether pro-France or proSpain, pro-Pope or pro-Metaphysician, in its essence remains the same. This ideal of peace and unity, of justice and reason among human beings, would not even change when in Quod reminiscentur (What people should remember) he wished and attempted at the conversion of the whole world to Christianity. Is it perhaps not true that Christianity represents the highest historical actualization of a natural religion? Croce once concluded, “It is not important for us to inquire whether the pope who was supposed to actualize [that ideal] was the Metaphysician of the Città del Sole … or the pope elected by the conclave, a Clement or an Urban VIII; and how much good faith Campanella had in affirming this second thing.” Campanella wanted a unifying reformation; it did not matter much to him if those who would accomplish it were Frenchmen or Spaniards, the pope or the Metaphysician. The important thing was that it would happen. In truth, the solar theocracy was identified with the Christian Papacy, in that world of madmen, “The wise were forced to live like the fools used, to escape death (sforzati i savi a viver comegli stolti usavan, per schivar la morte). Descartes, too, in those years, proposed the wearing of a mask so that he could continue to live in this world, “As the comedians … wear a mask, so should I. As I am entering the theater of the world … I shall proceed masked” (come i commedianti … vestono la maschera, cosí io, sul punto di entrare nel teatro del mondo … mi avanzo mascherato). Campanella removed the mask when he organized the insurrection, attracting to himself ignorant and dissolute monks and bandits who had found refuge in the monasteries. Among these individuals, the one who emerged was Dionisio Ponzio and, at the head of those who were armed, Maurizio de Rinaldis, an impetuous noble, who had made an agreement with the Turks to intervene with the fleet. The planning of insurrection was interrupted by two denunciations, and all the leaders were soon captured and arrested. Campan-

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ella was captured the 6 September 1599, and the thirty Turkish galleons appeared in vain on 30 September in the small gulf of Stilo in Calabria. The series of trials of the philosopher then began. Before a mixed tribunal of clergy and laymen, he was accused of rebellion and heresy. Under torture, Campanella at first conceded dangerous admissions, but then feigned being taken by madness and endured, with his immutable spirit, new and more horrendous torments whose purpose was to remove him from his pretension. The Holy Office condemned him to life imprisonment; the Spanish Government, although keeping the process open, tacitly accepted the same conclusion. Assured for his life in the horrible Caucasus, Campanella who loved so much the light of the Sun did not give up the drafting, writing, and re-writing of his works, including Metaphysics, Atheismus triumphatus, and Astrologica. He corrected, rearranged, and re-wrote his written works, but as he wrote them they were sequestered, dispersed, or lost in the same attempt at publishing them. Even at this time, though his tone might be new, the ancient attitude is still the same: the union of the whole humanity under one leader and in one faith alone. In the Memoriale of 1609 (Lettere, p. 158) to the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of Spain, Campanella promised the construction of a salubrious and unconquerable city, whose vision alone would make people learn historically all the sciences … the writing of a book that would demonstrate with political and natural reasons, divine and human prophecies, and the universal consensus of all the sages of the world, that the time has already come when, after so many disorders that changed humankind for the division of principates and various sects, the whole world would be reduced to accept one catholic faith alone under one most fortunate universal monarchy … and that of this universal monarchy of the world the Catholic King of Spain is already the assembler (Di far fabricare una città salubre ed inespugnabile, con tal artificio che solo mirandola s’imparino tutte le scienze istoricamente… di far un libro dove si dimostra per raggioni politiche e naturali, e per profezie divine ed umane, e per universal consenso delli savi del mondo, essere già venuto il tempo che, dopo tanti scompigli avvenuti al genere umano per la divisione de’ principati e varie sette, s’ha da ridurre il mondo sotto una sola fede cattolica in una monarchia universale felicissima… e che di questa universale monarchia del mondo già è congregatore il re di Spagna cattolico). His own friends were shaken by his exalted words. According to Kaspar Scioppius who was active in trying to ameliorate Campanella’s fate, people began to doubt about his mental state. In March 1607 Scioppius wrote to Fabri de Pereisc: Even the friends of Campanella affirmed that it would be dangerous to give him his freedom. In fact, he has fallen deeper into madness, to

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such a point that he considers himself the new divinely elected legislator. He also dared to postpone Christ to himself, because Christ in his horoscope had the conjunction of five planets only, meanwhile he had six (Ipsi Squillae amici negant tutum esse libertatem ei concedi: eum adeo insaniae processisse, ut se a Deo novum orbis legislatorem electum putet, neque Christum ipsum sibi postponere formidet, quod Christus quinque tantum planetas in ascendente habuerit, ipse sex habeat). Still, in 1618, addressing himself to Pope Paul V in Quod reminiscentur completed just that same year, the philosopher Campanella did not appear to have changed. His promises of a universal conversion and the exalted praises of his own work were the same. He wanted the same things, and “the fruits of penance of nineteen years” truly had not produced a radical interior transformation. It cannot even be said that in other questions he showed himself inclined to ingratiate the Church to himself with a remissive attitudes. In 1611, he began to be interested in astronomy and was therefore in touch with Galileo. In 1616, when the Church condemned the Copernican hypothesis, he wrote the Apologia pro Galileo, and of Galileo he would be a courageous defender in 1632, always showing his admiration for him. The great man of science remained cold toward Campanella, probably because he was not convinced that from their collaboration a positive advantage could be derived. Meanwhile the philosopher ingenuously thought of his partnership with Galileo as being decisive for the destiny of the world. In 1632, Campanella wrote to Galileo: I dare to say that if we were to join together for a year in a villa, both you and I, we could establish great many things. Though your person would be more than sufficient for the task, I would consider myself useful whenever I would be with you. I could raise many doubts, but not of the Peripatetic kind or vulgar, concerning the first decrees of philosophy (Io oso dire che se stessimo insieme in villa per un anno, s’aggiusteriano gran cose; e benché Vostra Signoria sola è bastante, io mi conosco utile, giunto a lei; e farei molte dubitazioni, non peripatetiche né volgari circa i primi decreti della filosofia). He powerfully added, always in the same apocalyptic mood: “These novelties of ancient truths of new worlds, new planets, new systems, new nations, etc. are the beginning of the new century” (Queste novità di verità antiche di novi mondi, nove stelle, novi sistemi, nove nazioni etc. son principio di secol novo, in Lettere, p. 241). We would not follow Campanella in the alternating vicissitudes, hopes, and delusions that accompanied him until the 23 May 1626 when Spain finally decided to free him. Arrested then by the Church, he was sent to Rome where he succeeded to win the favor of Pope Urban VIII with the praises and the practice of magic and astrology. The hopes of publishing his works, of obtaining a high dignity in the Church, and of influencing the Church in the direction of his ideas were again soon cut off. The hostility of

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the prelates, the enmity of the Master of the Sacred Palace Niccolò Riccardi (nicknamed Padre Mostro), made his situation in Rome difficult and even dangerous. His manifested sympathy in favor of France, which now seemed to the philosopher more adapt than Spain to the goal of accomplishing the unity of the world of which he was continuously dreaming, was certainly worsening the situation. In 1634, accused by the Viceroy of Naples of having inspired friar Tommaso Pignatelli, the leader of a conspiracy plotting against the Spaniards, Campanella escaped to France, by suggestion of the pope. He lived in Paris, benevolently received by the king, the Cardinal Richelieu, and the Sorbonne, and published his works in an organic and definitive corpus. In France, he had rapport with La Motte Le Vayer, Marin Mersenne, and Pierre Gassendi; he was widely appreciated, and became convinced that France, by now involved in the Thirty Years War, will be the nation destined to the realization of his dreams. In dedicating the De sensu rerum et magia (On the sensation of things and magic) to Cardinal Richelieu in 1636, he was entirely auspicious, “That the City of the sun that I have planned and you would construct without any eclipse be forever resplendent with the assistance of Your Eminence” (et Civitas solis per me delineata, ac per te aedificanda, perpetuo fulgore numquam eclipsato, abs Tua Eminentia splendescat semper). When the son of Louis XIV, the future Sun-King was born in 1638, Campanella sang: Brotherly love will reconcile all opinions. Kings and nations will unite in the city called “of the Sun,” which a great hero will construct. A temple like the celestial one will be built in its center: the kingly power, the senate’s authority, and the scepters of kingdoms will be laid down on Christ’s altars. (Conciliabit amor fraternus cognitus omnes … Convenient reges, populorumque agmina in urbem “Heliacam” dicent, quam construet inclytus heros. Et templum in medio statuet coelestis ad instar: praesulis aulam summi, regificumque senatum sceptraque regnorum Christi deponet ad aras). When he became aware that death was approaching, in vain, in order to exorcise the malign stellar influxes, he adorned with candid linens the cell of the monastery of the Dominicans in rue Saint-Honoré, in which he lived. In vain, he lighted two torches and five candles, sprinkled the cell with the essence of roses, and burned branches of laurel, myrrh, and rosemary, while sweet and calming music was playing. Piously he passed away the 21 May 1639: We were all in darkness. Some were

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dozing in their ignorance, while paid musicians were sweetening the ill-famed slumber. Vigilant others were ravishing all honors, things, and blood or were making husband wife of any sex, ridiculing the simpletons. I lit a candle…. (Stavamo tutti al buio. Altri sopiti d’ignoranza nel sonno; e i sonatori pagati raddolciro il sonno infame. Altri vegghianti rapivan gli onori, la robba, il sangue, o si facean mariti d’ogni sesso, e schernian le genti grame. Io accesi un lume….). The stars had destined him to the renovation of knowledge. The renovatio saeculi announced by saints and seers, promised by stellar conjunctions, had in Campanella the highest and most sonorous accent. It was a renovation both practical and theoretical, so that philosophy assumed in him the tone of prophecy and of a certainty of revelation, “I believed to have God in my power, not by following God, but through the shrewd reasons of my mind, which to me and many others procured death” (Io mi credeva Dio tener in mano, non seguitando Dio, ma l’arguta ragion del senno mio, che a me e a tanti ministrar la morte). As the announcer of a new word, he did not intend to bow before any school of philosophers who would impose their own authority as the seal of a universal acceptance or of a venerable and ancient usage, “Do not look back once you begin to plough the field” (Non guardi a dietro chi a solcar la terra ha posto mano). In the famous letter, which he wrote from the “depths of the Caucasus” of the Neapolitan prison in July 1607 to Monsignor Antonio Querengo, who compared him for ingenuity and doctrine to Pico, he answered that his was not a philosophy of books, but the right reading of the unique book of the world, as in Lettere (p. 134): I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass, not to mention the most marvelous anatomy of the world, than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun to philosophize and read the book of God. This is the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the universe (Io imparo piú dall’anatomia d’una formica o d’una erba che non da tutti li libri che sono scritti … dopo che imparai a filosofare e leggere il libro di Dio. Al cui esemplare correggo i libri umani malamente copiati e a capriccio, e non secondo sta nell’universo libro originale).

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In this we can see the long steps made by early humanism, when thought asked for the forces of authority of the ancients in order thereafter to proceed by itself until reaching the point of putting aside even the teachers newly discovered and of deriding as pedants those who continue to rely on them. Nature is the true teacher in so far as it speaks the language of God, and the one who succeeds in penetrating nature penetrates truly in the secrets of God, “The person alone who can become the Other, God, and can become pregnant with God, would be certain, happy and a blessed knower of the divinity, because it will be the penetrator of and the penetrated by God (Solo chi s’illuia, cioè chi si fa lui, cioè Dio, e chi s’incinge, cioè s’impregna di Dio, vien certo della divinità e lieto conoscitore e beato: perché è penetrante e penetrato da quella). To the truth in which God reveals Itself we do not arrive through authority, which is almost like to touch an object with other people’s hands, and not even by the syllogism that is like an arrow that hits the goal, but remains far from the object and cannot enjoy it (a learning from afar and of little taste). God is reached by direct vision and immediate contact. In the preface to the Metaphysics, Campanella elaborates his appeal to the direct communication with the world and with God: I wanted to construct a new metaphysics in which we who were moving away from God would for his punishments be brought back to the path of salvation and to the cognition of divine things. This should not be by way of syllogism, which is like an arrow with which we can reach a goal from far away without obtaining any flavor of the thing, and should not even be through authority that is almost like to touch an object with someone’s else hands, but through an intrinsic contact accompanied by a great suavity that God conceals from those who have fear (Novam condere metaphysicam statuimus ubi a Deo errantes per flagella reducti sumus ad viam salutis et cognitionem divinorum, non per syllogismum, qui est quasi sagitta qua scopum attingimus a longe absque gustu, neque modo per authoritatem, quod est tangere quasi per manum alienam, sed per tactum intrinsecum in magna suavitate, quam abscondit Deus timentibus se). In which passage, the same images derived from the senses (gustus, tactum, suavitas) bring us back to Plotinus and to the intuition of the mystics, in whose modality and tone is covered the appeal to experience as a reading of the book of God and as the entrance to Its living temple: The world is the book in which the eternal Mind has written Its own ideas. The world is God’s living temple in which It has painted Its acts and examples, and adorned it with alive statues up in the highest

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as in the lowest places. All spirits can here read and contemplate the art and the rule in order not to become impious and to be able to say: “I complete the universe contemplating the God that is intrinsic to all things” (Il mondo è il libro dove il Senno eterno scrisse i propri concetti, e vivo tempio dove pingendo i gesti e ’l proprio esempio, di statue vive ornò l’imo e ’l superno; perch’ogni spirto qui l’arte e ’l governo leggere e contemplar, per non farsi empio, debba, e dir possa: “Io l’universo adempio Dio contemplando a tutte cose interno”). As it is known, in this image, which has been often used by Galileo and became famous with him well before Campanella, a motive is renewed that is not rare in Platonic Humanism, in which the elements are the letters on which God has engraved Its wisdom with sensible evidence. In Metaphysics (ch. 2) it is written: When God makes things, God writes a living book … on which we reflect and learn. For this reason it is said … that the wholeness of things that we call World was once called wisdom of God…. Indeed it is so, because it is on this world that God writes all Its concepts and expresses the world in the word. Nothing exists in the world that does not express something that is ideally hidden in God’s mind. In God, saying and writing are the same as making in reality. Only the awareness exists in us of what is made and of intentional making as when we imagine fables that we could certainly make real if we had equal power as God (Cum Deus res facit, codicem vivum facit … in quo dispicientes addiscamus. Unde dictum est … quod universitas rerum quam Mundum appellamus olim sapientia Dei vocata est … et profecto sic est, quoniam hic Deus scribit omnes conceptus suos et verbo ipsum exprimit. Propterea nihil est in mundo, quod non aliquid in mente Dei latens idealiter exprimat. Dicere autem Dei ac scribere est ipsum facere realiter, sicut nostrum est declarare facta vel facere intentionaliter, ut cum fabulas fingimus, quas realiter exprimeremus si Deo aequivalentes essemus). These are words to which an accentuated naturalistic significance of a Telesian kind has been attributed, but perhaps in them it is renewed also the NeoPlatonic intuition that loved to interpret the universe as the embodied discourse of God. This intuition also wanted to understand the famous Psalm 18, Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei et opera manuum eius annuntiat firmamentum, in

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the sense of the proclamation of the heavens as the evident and perennial revelation of God. Campanella, with his firm faith in astrology, would proclaim exactly the same. This proclamation of the world as the “living book of God,” this affirmation that we can read this book only by an immediate contact, which excludes both the mediation of any other reality and also that of the syllogistic deduction, brought Campanella to value with Telesio all direct experience and to deny with Galileo the possibility of an interference with revealed truth. We will see that the encounter with Telesio and Galileo remained at the edges of the substance of Campanella’s reflection, for whom nature is very far from being in itself a system dominated by a rigid mechanism of calculable forces. The presence of God in things is more direct than the one in an order that proceeds in autonomous guises. God is truly present and living in the whole, in the contemplation of which Campanella does not look for a constant mathematically calculable, but for the exuberance always present and always new of divine activity. Along with Galileo, Campanella claimed for his own inquiry the right of proceeding without obstacles imposed by religion because God has engraved his truth in the world and did not deposit it in any book. Neither Moses nor Jesus has revealed cosmography or astronomy because God has sent us back to the world where, through the visible things, we could raise to the invisible ones. Revelation is limited to the teaching of the right norms of life and the supernatural dogma, to which we could not arrive with our forces alone. Any person who forbids or obstructs philosophical and scientific inquiry does not help Christianity but undermines it because religion can only find confirmation from the truths that may be found in the world. In Difesa di Galileo (pp. 68-69), Campanella said: Every sect or religion that forbids its followers to study the natural world should be held in suspicion of being false. For since one truth does not contradict another … and since the book of wisdom by God the creator does not contradict the book of wisdom by God the revealer, anyone who fears contradiction by the facts of nature is aware of his own falseness.… For when the Moors philosophized, many of them, having detected the falseness of their religion, wrote against it, for example, Averroès, Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Haly Abenragel (Ogni setta o religione, che vieti ai suoi seguaci l’indagine delle cose naturali deve essere sospetta di falsità. Chè siccome la verità non contraddice alla verità … e il libro della sapienza di Dio creante non è in opposizione al libro della sapienza del Dio rivelante, chi teme d’esser contraddetto dalle indagini della natura è conscio della propria falsità. Infatti quando i Mori attendevano agli studi filosofici, molti di essi, riconosciuta la falsità della loro religione, scrissero contro di essa, come Averroès, Avicenna, Alfarabi, Hali Abenragel).

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The Christian law, by being completely true, does not admit or allow any prohibition. If apparent contrasts seem at times to crop up between scriptural letters and science, one must not forget that Moses did not teach physics or astronomy. He briefly treated of creation “as much as it was necessary for a legislator and not for a scientist” and used “popular language, not scientific language, in conformity with popular sentiment instead of with philosophical reason.” But this does not prevent, Campanella adds, that all those who understand the mystical meaning would not be able to go beyond the veil of the letter and reach the truth. Thus, in Difesa di Galileo, he was moving beyond Galileo to accept the concept of the Platonists who saw in the scripture as such a point of departure instead of a given explication. The defense of the man of science, which Campanella composed in Apologia pro Galileo, or Difesa di Galileo, is not substantially different from the one attempted by Galileo himself, and connects itself to the arguments traditionally used to defend reason as the direct revelation of God from the authority posited in books. The internal voice about which Scotus Eriugena spoke and, more recently, Pico della Mirandola, is incarnate in this concept. This voice resounds not only in our intimate part, but also roves about space and makes itself heard in the whole universe: caeli enarrant gloriam Dei. The call to return to the book of God, to the original (deh torniamo, per Dio, all’originale!), is not only a polemical motive; it is also full of the positive content of the appeal to the naturally genuine, free from any superstructure, in its purity. It is the liberation from books and dead temples, “which were copied from life with more errors” (copiati dal vivo con piú errori). It is the direct vision of the living book, of the world, the testimony of God. This explains the encounter with Telesio from whose spirit Campanella would depart when Telesio’s nature would become the bark in whose roots a divine soul pulsates and the science of nature was transformed into a science analogous to that of Della Porta, the means for seizing through the external features an interior living soul. 3. The Influence of Telesio. The Sensation of Things Campanella approached “the great Telesio, splendor of nature” as the one who suppressed Aristotle, tyrant of the human minds, “O Telesio, the arrow from your quiver / kills without error from the midst of the field / of sophists the tyrant of the minds. / Sweet liberty asks for truth” (Telesio, il telo della tua faretra / uccide de’ sofisti in mezzo al campo / degli ingegni il tiranno senza scampo; / libertà dolce a verità impetra). Telesio, his followers, and the “buon Gaieta” (Giacomo Gaieta) adorned truth with diaphanous garments in order not to conceal but reveal its natural beauty. Their task and their greater significance consisted in banishing “all the individual imaginations fabricated by the Peripatetics, in fighting against all those who philosophized according to their own will, but not with the guidance of sensitive nature, and in confuting the errors of Aristotle, but not as nature decreed.”

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In Campanella, the “nature” of Telesio assumed soon meaning and value much different from the ones it possessed in the philosopher from Cosenza. Campanella himself was conscious of the limited influence that Telesio had on him, and among his teachers he counted Plato beside Telesio, declaring that the thought of Telesio attracted him because he claimed the freedom of philosophizing and his philosophy was based on nature, not on authority (Sed Telesius me delectavit, tum of libertatem philosophandi, tum quia ex rerum natura, non ex dictis hominum penderet). The same reason is given in Syntagma for his own opposition to the learned Pico, as we saw in the letter to Quarengo. Consequently, it would be far from true to assign to Campanella’s appeal to nature a value analogous to the one of Telesio, that is, a consideration of nature as a construction ruled by scientific interests. The direct contact with reality, as Campanella envisaged it, was intuition, and vision, and not at all an analysis carried out after reflection on repeated, well controlled, and systematized experiences. Campanella was placing himself at the side of Galileo as a restorer of science, saying that “it is necessary to restore the sciences starting from the world, the book of God, as I have done and Galileo is never tired of doing” (bisogna restaurar le scienze partendo dal mondo, codice di Dio, come ho fatto io e Galileo non si stanca di fare). At the same time, Galileo challenged Campanella, “I value the finding of truth of the least important thing more than the long disputation on the greatest questions that do not achieve any truth (io stimo piú il trovar un vero, benché di cosa leggiera, che’l disputar longamente delle massime questioni senza conseguir verità nissuna). They were different methods at the service of different intents. While Galileo could even formulate philosophical hypotheses in support of scientific hypotheses (but first of all he proceeded to a rigorous analysis of the reality he experienced), Campanella like a good metaphysician wanted to penetrate the roots of reality itself, exploring human mind in connection with the work of God. In Telesio, Campanella found and appreciated the idea of a nature that is sufficient to itself and moves naturally by way of nature’s intrinsic motors and not because of impulses that come from outside (movetur naturaliter, ab intrinseca natura, quae est forma non separata). In Telesio, he could satisfy his need for explanations by close causes, powers internal to the elements, without the continuous appeal to God, an appeal that annihilates the science of nature (secus enim recurremus ad Dei velle, et sic periret scientia naturalis). In addition, Telesio had clearly formulated the doctrine of universal sensibility when he sustained that everything must have the capability of sensing in order to be able to continue living and to be able to avoid or find what is convenient or harmful. He stated that if the elementary forces would not be capable of sensing, then not even the animals, which directly derive from them, could be assumed capable of sensing. “If the capacity of sensation is not in both heat and cold, we have to deny it, if not to other things, certainly to the animals that originate from earth under the action of the solar heat” (nisi

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calori frigorique sentiendi insit vis, ea, si non est reliquis, iis certe abneganda necessario sit animalibus, quae e terra a solis calore immutata fiunt). Campanella in Senso delle cose (bk. 1, ch. 3, sect. 9) proclaimed: If things become sensitive, then it is licit to affirm that the elements can sense, too, and so does anything produced by them, as the good Telesio wrote.… Where order is, sensation also exists because every plant, stone, and animal is made with order and reason, and it possesses sensation. All creatures praise the creator and obey it, says Wisdom. David invited all things to praise God because they know It through their faculty of natural sensing. It is a sense that is intrinsic to all of them while they possessing being and abhorring nonbeing enjoy life. Joy witnesses the most joyful God, as St. Paul says (Or se cose sensitive si fanno esser senzienti gli elementi affermar lice, e ogni cosa da loro prodotta, come il buon Telesio scrisse … dove ci è ordine ci è senso, perché ogni pianta, pietra e animale con ordine e ragione son fatti, senso hanno. E tutte le creature laudano il creatore, e a lui obediscono, dice la Sapienza; e David le invita a lodarlo perché di senso naturale lo conoscono, senso intrinseco a tutte, mentre godono dell’essere e aborrono il non essere e godono della vita: e la letizia è testimonianza del lietissimo Dio, dice San Paolo). Sensing is needed in order to explain the tendency or individual impulse of every being to persevere in its own status, given that every being can avoid only the perceived evil: Not even the animals would avoid the net that they don’t see, nor the sheep could escape the wolf they averted or the arrow they did not hear. Equally, the fire and the earth and any other thing, if they did not sense, they would not run away or follow. Even more, in every thing there is appetite, love, hate, and abhorrence. In addition, every love is born from the knowledge of the thing loved, so that natural love produces natural knowledge (Né anco gli animali la rete che non veggono schivano, né le pecore il lupo non visto, né il dardo non sentito; cosí il fuoco e la terra e ogni altra cosa se non sentisse non fuggiria né seguiria. Di piú, in ogni cosa ci è l’appetito e amore e odio e aborrimento, e ogni amore nasce dalla conoscenza della cosa amata; e l’amar naturale, dunque, dà conoscenza naturale). It is life and animation that is intrinsic to things. A force that is extrinsic, like the separate intellect of Anaxagoras, does not explain the order of the world, unless an immanent intellect, which would execute its commands, is posited. Every one thing obeys the universal law because it has a greater or smaller comprehension of that law according to the place occupied in the universal order, “We conclude that every thing possesses as much sense as it is neces-

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sary for its own conservation, though some more and some less” (Conchiudiamo, dunque, che ogni cosa ha tanto senso quanto basta alla sua conservazione, e però chi piú e chi meno). Campanella suggested that no one should object by saying that the world is an arrow thrown toward the rainbow, in which case the thrower remains extrinsic. On the contrary, God is intrinsic to things even more than the forms themselves … and aims all things toward their goal in a manner that the things themselves move with their nature; God posits in them not only the power of reaching the goal, but also the power of the knowledge of moving toward their goal. If things were different, God would be equal to us, who, because we cannot give power to the arrow itself, give the arrow an impulse that lasts a brief time and in this way we waste the arrow (È alle cose intrinseco piú che le stesse forme … e non tira al fine se non con l’istesse nature, imprimendo virtú, non solo d’andare al fine, ma di saper andare; altrimenti seria Dio eguale a noi che, per non poter dar virtú alla saetta, le doniamo violenza che dura pochissimo e struggemo la saetta). The first intuition of Telesio became transfigured. God through life is everywhere present within things. Intelligence is not lowered to the level of sensing and of becoming natural instinct, but on the contrary the natural impulse of every thing elevates itself to the characteristics proper of divinity: Since God is powerful, wise, and most loving … all beings are composed of Power, Wisdom, and Love, and … each being is because it can be, knows to be, love to be, and fights against nonbeing. When a thing is without either power, wisdom, or love for being, it dies and is transformed into that which has more of each one of these three agencies (Perché Dio è potente, sapiente e amante ottimo … tutti gli enti si compongono di Potenza, Sapienza e Amore, e … ognuno è perché può essere, sa essere e ama essere, combatte contro il non essere, e quando gli manca o il potere o il sapere o l’amore dell’essere, muore e si trasmuta in chi n’ha piú). Telesio hesitated in attributing sensibility to coldness and all inert matter. Campanella assigned a soul to every single thing and saw conscience in everything. It seemed to him an absolute madness to deny life to the world or to beings that have no organs or hands and feet like ours: It is foolish to think that the world has no sensation because it has neither legs, eyes, and hands. These are instruments of the animal spirit enclosed in gross matter that has need of them in order to move and to perceive through cavities. On the contrary, to move the world needs

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only the round figure; hands are rays and active virtues capable of widely operating without being limited by heavy arms; eyes are the stars and the planets that see and help us to see. Thus we can embrace that which in the all air and sky is open and manifest. It is truly as much foolishness to deny sensation to things because they don’t have eyes, mouth, and ears as much as to deny motion to the wind because it has no legs, and eating to the fire because it has no teeth, and seeing to those in the farmhouses because they have no windows through which to look out, or to the eagle because it has no glasses. The same nonsense induced other peoples to believe that God has a certain kind of body, eyes, and hands (Stolta cosa è stimare che il mondo non senta perché non ha gambe, occhi, mani. Questi stromenti convengono all’animale spirito chiuso in materia grossa che bisogna con quelli muovere e per pertugi sentire. Ma al mondo, per il moto basta la figura tonda; mani sono i raggi e virtuti attive diffuse ad operar senza esser chiuse in braccia grevi; e occhi sono le stelle e luminari che vedono e fan vedere noi, che serriamo quel che in tutta l’aria e cielo è aperto e noto. Tanta sciocchezza è negare il senso alle cose perché non hanno occhi, né bocca, né orecchie, quanto è negare il moto al vento, perché non ha gambe e il mangiare al fuoco perché non ha denti, e il vedere a chi sta in campagna perché non ha fenestre d’affacciare e all’aquila perché non ha occhiali. La medesima sciocchezza indusse altri a credere che Dio abbia certo corpo e occhi e mani, in Senso delle cose, p. 35). In this case, everything lives, everything senses. Human egoism alone has brought the human beings to deprive the world of life: “By selfishness, credulous human being thought that the elements or the stars, though they are stronger and more beautiful than us, have no sense and love, and they just circle the heavens for us” (Credulo il proprio amor fe’ l’uom pensare / non aver gli elementi, ne’ le stelle / (benché fusser di noi piú forti e belle) senso ed amor, ma sol per noi girare). This sensation of the senses, this life, and this conscience are something beyond what is material, beyond nature, which is their immanent principle, but which in its value is clearly different from the elements, “Senses are not merely a mode of existence, but something essential, an active force that is superior to the coarse qualities of the elements” (Sensus non videtur esse modus quidem existentiae, sed res essentialis, visque activa, superans vulgares qualitates elementorum). 4. Knowledge and Sensation. The Soul. Value of Human Beings Metaphysical Crisis of Campanella Sensation should not here be understood Aristotelically as “in/form/ation,” in which case sensation would entail the cessation of the thing that senses, which would completely transform into what is sensed. Sensation is here “im-

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mutazione” [the /m/ is an intensive /n/, not a negative /n/, hence immutazione means “a deep change”], a greater or lesser passion, as Telesio already observed, who also realized that it was perceptio, conscience of a passive modification. Campanella clarifies in this way: If sensation is passion, and all the elements and the things made out from elements are subject to passion, then all of them sense. Often the human being can be subject to a passion of which he had no sensation, as the bites of fleas when sleeping. Therefore, the senses are perceptive of passion (Or se il senso è passione, e tutti gli elementi et elementati patiscono, dunque tutti sentono; ma spesso l’uomo pate quel che non sente, come in sonno i morsi di pulci. Dunque il senso è percettivo di passione). Immutazione, or passion, is the becoming, in a certain way, the things, and becoming conscious of having become those things or, even better, of one’s transmutation into them. On the other hand, the suffering of passions always limits as an insuperable wall our apprehension, which is never a full infarsi, making oneself to become another person. In the comment to the second hymn to Primo Senno (The First Intelligence), Campanella wrote: Pure spirit is like the light that makes itself … all colors and represents them as they are … and judges them as they are; it cannot lie and does not want to lie. But impure spirit is fuliginous and transforms itself only in so far as it is transformed by something else; as red glasses represent red things as red, but not as they are, so the impure spirit has sensation of them, but it is by nature mendacious (Lo spirito puro come luce s’infà … di tutti i colori e gli rappresenta come sono … e però gli giudica come sono, e non sa mentire, né vuole. Ma lo spirito impuro, fuliginoso, non s’infà, se non com’egli è infatto; e come il rosso occhiale rappresenta le cose rosse, e non quali sono, cosí l’impuro le sente, e però è per natura mendace). This is precisely the human condition: human knowing is a becoming other than itself, but a becoming that cannot entirely strip itself of its own being, “Knowledge consists in a real penetration of the object; in becoming intrinsically and effectively one with it.” Human knowledge is a limited transmutation and a mendacious knowledge: Telesio has sustained that sensation is a limited immutazione (deep mutation), reason why thereafter we must judge of the whole by way of an instinctive syllogism. The subject agent wants to become the object and it wishes that the passion and the mutation in depth would be transforming the knowing faculty into the specific object, becoming able of knowing and judging it. But, because the subject agent does not

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become completely the object, the consequence is that our knowledge is most unconvincing, limited, and remote (Telesio [ha sostenuto che il sentire] è poca immutazione; donde si giudica il tutto poi per sillogismo subitaneo. L’autore vuol che sia essere, e che’l patire e l’immutarsi servano a far che la virtú conoscente sia esso oggetto, e cosí lo conosce e giudica. E, perché non si fa del tutto quello, però debolissima è la conoscenza nostra, corta e lontana). From our lightly changing transmutation into the object, we judge the whole in the same way that, from the little warmth we feel, we argue about the sun. Human beings are always the prisoners of their “humanity,” and they cannot intrinsically become other things: Even if the human beings were to become [intrinsically and effectively the object], they would not know [of this becoming other than themselves] because they would not know themselves when they receded within themselves. They would not even know the object by the measure of being of the object itself, but only by the human measure, [coming to know] the loftiest things much less and the lowest things much more [than what they are] (E se pur s’internasse, men lo saprebbe, perché se stesso intra se stesso non conosce. Né con la misura dell’essere lo saprebbe, ma con la sua, le piú alte [cose] piú bassamente, le piú basse piú altamente). Only God fully knows because God is, ideally and eminently, all things. Its being is not mutation and passion, but pure act. It is like the inventor of a thing “that does not learn from others, but the others learn from it, after the thing is done” (ch’e’ non impara da altri, ma altri da lui, dopo ch’è fatta), even though the human inventor always continues to be posterior to nature. In regard to this concept, Gentile has compared Campanella to Vico, who has often mentioned that God knows everything because God makes everything, instead of being subject to the passions of everything: God is the only one who knows things as they are; God alone is not subject to the passions effected by things in order to know, but knows things because It makes them and gives to all single things the measure of being due to their proper entity (Deus autem solus omnia novit prout sunt, qui solus non patitur a rebus ut sciat, sed scit eas quia facit eas datque singulis propriarum entitatum mensuram). Distinct from matter is the soul that is capable of sensing all that is matter, and such soul is not a form but a reality that informs everything. It is “hot spirit, subtle, residing in various vessels in the whole body,” corporeal, and acting by contact:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Aristotle ... has conceived every soul to be incorporeal … but he has never been able to say, and it cannot be said, how … the soul, not being endowed with qualities, could produce heat and cold just by thinking. God alone can do that by thinking. The soul cannot rapidly make so many colds and warms as the bendings and wrigglings of a man who jumps and dances. If this were the case, we would know about it. We clearly see the nerves and the muscles expand and shrink, as the spirit thrusts in and out of them; and we see at times the cords of the nerves being twisted and bent to produce motions. Never will Aristotle show that these acts can be produced in nature by pure power of imagination. But I move this pen while thinking of a doctrine and not of the various movements that I make with my hand, which follow by themselves the motion of the imagining spirit (Aristotile … facendo ogni anima incorporea … mai non ha saputo dire, né può dirsi, né credersi, come … di nulla qualità dotata, possa, solo col pensiero, calore e freddo produrre. Solo Dio questo, pensando, far può; né può l’anima, cosí presto, quando un uomo salta e balla, far tante freddezze e caldezze quante sono le piegature e dispiegature del ballo; e questo a noi saria noto; ma ben veggiamo i nervi e muscoli gonfiarsi e disgonfiarsi, ora spingendosi lo spirito dentro, et or fuori, e or torcendosi le corde de’ nervi e producendo moti; né mai Aristotile mostrerà nella natura questi atti da sola immaginazione procedere. Io movo questa penna pensando alla dottrina e non alli movimenti varii ch’io faccio, ma sieguono da sé al moto dello immaginante spirito).

This spirit, which senses and is diffused throughout the body, is also capable of remembering, imagining, and reasoning. The process, through which in the cognition one ascends from the immediate particular to the universal, is a process of becoming less intense and attenuating, of which we have examples also in the brutes (bruta quoque immaterialiter cognoscunt universale). In his evaluation of sensing and sensation, Campanella insisted in preferring them to the intellective processes, which pale when compared to intuitive evidence: Christopher Columbus built with audacious ingenuity a bridge between Caesar and Christ, and acquired an immense Ocean. He won against the reluctance of the mathematicians, the dreams of the poets, the plans of physicists and theologians, and the obstacles of Hercules, Neptune, and Jove (Cristoforo Colombo, audace ingegno fa fra due mondi a Cesare ed a Cristo ponte, e dell’Oceano immenso acquisto. Vince di matematici il ritegno,

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de’ poeti il disegno, de’ fisici e teologi, e le prove d’Ercol, Nettuno e Giove). The poet commented, “Christopher Columbus of Genoa with eyes saw more, and in body went farther, than poets, philosophers and theologians, like Augustine and Lactantius, who denied the antipodes, did with their minds (piú vide Cristofano Colombo, genovese, con gli occhi, e piú col corpo corse, che non fecero gli poeti, filosofi e teologi, Augustino e Lattanzio con la mente, che negàro gli antipodi). In this devaluation of the intellective processes it is important to keep in mind, as it has been already said, that Campanella’s conception of sensing and sensation is in general an intuitive vision, an immediate seizing of reality by physical tactile contact, in opposition to discourse and process. Unfortunately, at a certain point, Campanella had to face a much more serious problem: if the human being is a spirit like the brutes, and if the human understanding is indissolubly tied to corporeity, then how could he, Campanella, celebrate the immortality and the human dignity that inspired his famous lyric to the thinking human being and the no less famous pages of the De sensu rerum? We see that the human being in its understanding does not stop before the nature of the elements of the sun and of the earth, but goes beyond them and understands, desires, and produces effects that are loftier than any one of the sun and earth. This makes clear that the human being does not depend from the elements but from a cause much higher that is called God. When the human being cogitates, it thinks things higher than the sun, going higher than the sun, and even beyond the heavens, and then infinitely many worlds … [and] this kind of going from similar to similar endlessly is the act of a thing that participates of the infinite (Ma noi veggiamo che l’uomo non si ferma sotto la natura degli elementi del sole e della terra, ma molto piú sopra loro intende, desidera e opera piú che nullo effetto loro, altissimi effetti, talché non pende da loro, ma da cagione molto piú alta che Dio s’appella. Ecco che quando l’uomo va cogitando, pensa sopra il sole e poi piú sopra, e poi fuor del cielo, e poi piú mondi infinitamente … [e] questo camminare di simile in simile senza fine, è atto di cosa partecipe dell’infinito). How would Campanella reconcile this human infinity of thought, this human rising infinitely beyond the natural world, with the thesis that between nature and humankind there is no separation? If all the faculties of our soul are common with those of the brutes, which one would then show that our soul as immortal would separate from the mortal body and not vanish like a spirit in the air? … I answer

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY that what is in God is in all things, more clearly here, more obscure there, and that although the animals have all the faculties that the human being has, they are so obscure in respect to those of the human being that from it we can see how certain it is that human beings are immortal, as God has manifested to many pious and wise people. Yes, stones and plants have senses, but when compared with animals they are without the senses; and the oyster in comparison with the elephant is not to be an animal. Animals like the horse, the dog, and others are capable of becoming friends and companions of the human being, but not so the plant and the stones that are suitable to lower advantages. [In the same way that humans and animals can be companions and friends], so the human being is able of being companion of the Angels and of God, which is not true for the brutes (Se tutte l’operazioni dell’anima nostra sono communi alli bruti, qual ne mostrerà che si separi come immortale dal mortale corpo e non come spirito svanisca in aria? … Rispondo che quel ch’è in Dio, è in tutte le cose dove piú chiaro, dove piú oscuro, e che se bene gli animali hanno tutte l’operazioni che ha l’uomo, nondimeno sono tanto oscure rispetto a quelle dell’uomo che si può vedere esser certo quel che Dio manifestò a tanti pii e savi, che l’uomo sia immortale. Hanno pur le pietre e le piante senso, ma rispetto alle belve paiono insensate, e l’ostraga rispetto all’elefante par che non sia animale. Nondimeno l’animale è atto ad esser amico e compagno dell’uomo, come il cavallo e il cane e altri, ma non la pianta e la pietra che solo servono ad usi bassi, come l’uomo è atto ad esser compagno degli Angeli e di Dio, ma non le belve).

The difference in grades would distinguish human beings from other beings, all rooted in one only nature, which animates and guides all things. In this we find the true problem of Campanella’s metaphysics: what is intrinsically the value of the senses and sensation? What is the relation between sensing and being? What is the significance of the grades of sensing and sensation? In other words, this is the problem of the relation between Campanella and Telesio. It has been said—Léon Blanchet affirmed it, and on his footsteps Guido De Ruggiero repeated it—that Campanella’s Metaphysics brought to Telesio’s physics a Neo-Platonic structure. Blanchet even spoke of a profound evolution of ideas in Campanella during the early years of 1600, in consequence of which from a pure dependence from Telesio in the Prodromus (1595) he moved to Neo-Platonism in Metaphysics and De sensu rerum. Such crisis, according to Blanchet, would have been “determined in the spirit of Campanella especially by the awareness of the difficulties encountered in the effort of reconciling with a sensualistic doctrine of knowledge the essential dogmas of natural religion, and in particular the credence in the immortality of the soul.” A comparison of texts—it should be noticed that from 1590 Campanella had

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begun to write both Metaphysics and De sensu rerum—justifies the idea of a deepening of the problems, but appears to exclude the thesis of the passage from one theory to the other. The sensualistic theory and the concept of sensus sui and of the primalities always coexist. Telesio’s doctrines are not refused by Campanella, but thought anew to the point of making them much different from what they actually were in their original author. We read in the Prodromus (p. 83): We live by three kinds of substance: body, spirit, and mind. The body is the instrument, the spirit is the vehicle of the mind, and the mind is the apex of the soul. The soul resides on the limit [between two realms] and gives form to the spirit as well as to the body because by being incorporeal it can shape the various mixtures of solid, soft, and tenuous, which the corporeal spirit cannot do…. Being known that the spirit can sense and understand, it is vain to assume that another substance exists beside the spirit as intellect. The intellect, by which name the mind is called, is inserted by God in order to bring to perfection the works of body and spirit, and to render them capable of happiness (Triplici vivimus substantia: corpore scilicet, spiritu et mente.... Corpus est organum, spiritus vehiculum mentis, mens vero apex animae in horizonte habitans, quae spiritum et corpus item informat; quia incorporea cum sit, diversa temperamenta potest informare solidi, mollis, tenuisque; non sic autem spiritus corporeus…. Cum ergo notum sit spiritum sentire intelligereque, vanum putamus aliam propter hoc substantiam esse intellectum. Sed ipsum, quo nomine mens vocatur, immissum esse a Deo, ut corporis spiritusque opera perficiat et felicitatis capacia reddat). Similar text is found in the De sensu rerum (bk. 2, ch. 30): We would say … that the mind that God has inserted into the human being is the form of the whole body because it is independent and incorporeal and can reside in many mixtures of things. The soul resides principally in the spirit and since it performs no proper operation, it senses, reasons, and understands through the spirit. If the soul were to posses some operation of its own, it would not be the form of body and spirit, but a separate form like an Angel (Diremo … che la mente che Dio all’uomo infonde sia forma di tutto il corpo perché è indipendente e incorporea e può piú temperamenti abitare, ma che principalmente abiti nello spirito, e ch’essa nulla operazione propria tiene, ma sente, discorre e intende con lo spirito, perché se propria n’avesse non saria forma di quello, ma separata come un Angelo). The problem is not solvable with the theory of a development or crisis in Campanella’s thought because the two instances, which we could also call

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Telesian and Neo-Platonic, do not exclude each other, but coexist. Not even the idea of a mere juxtaposition—witnessing an intimate speculative uncertainty of the philosopher, who accepting diverse lines of thought (Telesio and Plotinus), tried to agreeably combine them—gives full satisfaction. The question consists at the least in identifying Campanella’s effort to reach an accord, which was the effort of combining the naturalistic instance with the other instance strictly humanistic that nourished itself constantly with Platonism. Fiorentino, in Bernardino Telesio (vol. I, p. 329) had already observed how, within Telesio’s movement, Agostino Donio in De natura hominis (Basel, 1581) had admitted “that there is a concealed knowledge of oneself and of one’s condition, which I think someone may very well call a sense or better a first sense that originates from and tends to the sense itself” (Quod quidem sui ipsius statusque sui “abditam in se intellectionem,” esse quoque sensum atque adeo primum sensum, jure opinor aliquis dicere posset, et ex intentione in sese fieri atque constare). With these words, the philosopher from Cosenza was joining Pico della Mirandola’s concept of an intelligere abditum (a secret intellection) with which the soul understands itself. In the Apologia of 1601 (vol. 2, p. 62), Pico wrote, “The soul knows nothing actually and distinctly, except itself. By saying this, I was thinking of the hidden knowledge” (Anima nihil actu et distincte intelligit, nisi seipsam. Hanc propositionem declarando, dixi quod intelligebam de intelligere abdito). This doctrine of Plotinian and Augustinian derivation was a doctrine already professed by Henry of Ghent, the Doctor Solemnis, who showed that the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines were in harmony and that soul and body had a reciprocal intimate union. 5. To Know. To Know Is to Die. The cogito. Knowledge and Existence In order to retrace the path of Campanella, it is useful to reconsider the theory of knowing as sensing, knowledge as sensation, as “the mutation of oneself (immutarsi), with the effect of becoming other than oneself (infarsi, affici).” To know is to sense, to suffer, to experience or undergo a new unpleasant or painful experience. Knowing is not merely a mutation, as Telesio already said, it is also the perception of this mutation. In reality, we do not sense the thing, but the mutation produced in us by the thing, “Even if we would intrinsically become the things, we would not know them as they are, because we know them as we are affected by them” (neque si intrinsecaremur rebus, saperemus prout sunt, quoniam sapimus prout ab illis afficimur, in Metaphysics, p. 7). We sense ourselves, or our modifications, and from them we infer reality. An adequate cognition would be a complete mutation, a total alienation, and a becoming the thing itself. Consequently, “if we would become another being, we would lose our own being” (nam si fieret esse alienum, perderet esse suum). We are facing a solution and a problem. If “to sense” is to sense a modification—perceptio passionis—then to sense oneself is no longer possi-

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ble, because how could the senses sense themselves? “The senses cannot be affected by the senses … hence nothing is less known to human beings than their soul” ([sensus] a se non potest pati … unde nihil minus notum hominibus est, quam propria anima). On the other hand, to sense is always to sense oneself, one’s modification, one’s being, the being from which the human being as human cannot free itself. The God who is everything, knows truly everything. The human being instead knows itself alone, its being or its work and modifications, which again are its being, because really … and fundamentally, to know is to be…. Given that sensation is assimilation, all knowledge happens when the knowing substance itself becomes itself knowable, the thing to be known. Once become itself knowable, the knowing substance knows perfectly the knowable thing, because it has already become the thing. In conclusion, to know is to be (Realiter … et fundamentaliter cognoscere est esse…. Nam cum sensatio sit assimilatio, et omnis cognitio fiat, propterea quod ipsa essentia cognoscitiva fit ipsum cognoscibile; et cum factum est cognoscibile, perfecte illud cognoscit, quoniam iam est illud, ergo cognoscere est esse). Telesio’s affirmation that “everything is knowable, except oneself,” is converted into the other, “nothing is knowable, except oneself.” The new truth is that “to know is always to know oneself” (semper ergo scire est scire sui). This means that to know means to know our modifications, “We know other things because we know that we are moved and modified by other things” (scimus enim alia per hoc quod scimus nos ab aliis motos et affectos). In other words, consciousness is self-consciousness. On the other hand, selfconsciousness is consciousness; a being that is known for what it is, and that it is for what it is known. To be and to know are not really and essentially distinguished (realiter et fundamentaliter), but only formally (formaliter). This too was a development and a reversal of the position held by Telesio, who observed that, given the coexistence of sensation and reality, given the full immanence of sensing in being, no sensing that senses itself in opposition to being is possible; only the sensing of being is possible. To this “sensing of being,” Campanella reacted by stating that “being is of sensing.” Hence, to know effectively something else, if it is possible, is always to die, at least in part, because to know is to lose oneself and one’s being and to become consciousness of something else, of the other thing we come to know: To learn and to know, because they signify a mutation of oneself into the nature of what is known, are certain kinds of death. Only when we mutate into God, we have eternal life, because then we do not lose our being in the infinite sea of being, but we magnify our being (E l’imparare e il conoscere, sendo un mutarsi nella natura del conosci-

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For this reason, to know is illuiarsi, “to become the other,” and infarsi, to make one’s being into another being, to change according to the thesis that the human being has no nature of its own, but the nature of what it would intend and comprehend. The sensus sui or self-consciousness, into which Telesio’s passion is changed, is still the rigid unity of Telesio who did not oppose a self-conscious ego to the thing, but wanted to see the thing itself as a sensing entity. In this way, he returned to the concept of unity of the Pre-Socratics. The only difference is that in Telesio this construction gravitated toward the bottom, separating God from the world, whereas in Campanella the system ascends toward the top, and God is intrinsic to the whole, and the whole is a dynamic becoming, an ascending process toward a pure activity, toward a being beyond all limits. Consequently, the sensus sui is intrinsic, primary in every being; it is “innate cognition, infused; infused sense” (cognitio innata, indita; sensus inditus). The sensus sui is constitutive of being itself. The “acquired, deduced science” (scientia acquisita, illata) and the superadded sense (sensus superadditus) are specifications introduced in consequence of the passivity of every being; they make us aware of the sensation of the limitation of being, the sensing of the dying being. In sensing the others, in knowing the world, the negation of oneself is encountered, the losing of oneself, the forgetting of one’s being in the ephemeral being of the sensate things, because the multiplicity of these new adventitious beings weakens the sensing of the original sensing being. Its new birth with each new adventitious being is an obstacle to the comparison with the past being and to the sense of unity of being, and also to the knowledge of itself (Quoniam multiplicitas suorum esse adventitiorum obnubilat esse nativum; et nativitas sui, et cum novo esse adventitio, impedit collationem cum praeterito, et unitatem entitatis, ergo et notitiam sui). True being can only be found through true knowing, when compenetration of knower and known becomes actual in the sensus sui. The world is only open to God who embraces the whole. Since God makes all things, It is all things, and knows all things. We know ourselves, and this knowledge of being that is intrinsic to being is—as Campanella observed—beyond action and passion; it is something higher, something more profound, it is the truth of being, the preeminence of being (praeminentia entitatis). Campanella explains, “We do not call any action or passion by the name of cognition, but by something more divine; with a new word we called them “preeminence of being” (Nos autem neque actionem neque passionem esse cognitionem dicimus, sed quid longe divinius, et entitatis praeminentiam vocamus vocabulo novo). If perceptio passionis means to sense the limit and the death of being, and as such it is

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a “most feeble, short, and removed” perception, the sensus sui instead being the intrinsic cognition of being, the preeminence of being, is indubitable evidence. The cogito is inserted at this point as the absolute certainty of being, “I cannot fail, if I am not” (Non enim possum falli, si non sum). This is the basis and the limit of this kind of human knowledge, which is all contained within the knowledge of one’s being. This is the abandoned theory of Telesio, whose perspective on the problem still remains in Campanella, “It seems to Telesio that all knowledge is perception of suffered modifications, but we don’t think so” (Videtur Telesio esse perceptio illatae passionis omnis cognitio. Nos autem aliter sapimus). Modifying Telesio, Campanella comes to affirm that being possesses a direct vision of itself, which is not due to passion or action, and kept Telesio’s opinion in regard to the cognition of things: Since Telesio justly admonishes us that sensation is not a passion but the perception of a passion, it follows that sensation is not a faculty of the being of things and instead it refers to the perception of the being that we are when we are affected by the passion (At quoniam Telesius recte nos monere videtur, sensum esse non passionem sed perceptionem passionis, ideoque sequitur non pertinere ad ipsum esse rerum sed ad perceptionem ipsius esse quod simus dum patimur, in Metaphysics, bk. 2, ch. 59, sect. 68). Consequently, every being in every thing knows itself, its passion or modification, not the thing, “The human being, the star, the angel, every creature, they all sense differently of even each small thing” (L’uom, la stella, l’angelo, ogni fattura, diverso han senso pur d’ogni cosella). God alone knows everything, because It is everything: The First Wisdom, however, that made all things, was and is all things together. In order to know them, God does not have to change into them; It was already in a truer being what they are (Ma lo Senno Primero, che tutte cose feo, tutte è insieme, e fue: né, per saperle, in lor si muta Deo, s’egli era quelle già in esser piú vero). From this we see the difference between Campanella’s position and the one held by Descartes, who at the end separates being from knowing in such a way that the conjunction of the two is no longer operable. Thought knows only itself, and there is no possible passage from the ideal to the real. Campanella tried to unite being and knowing, positing knowing as the preeminence of being. At his own turn, Campanella locked every being into itself,

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and it is not possible to see the passage from one being to another, because for him cognition is always cognition of oneself. Hence, contrary to Telesio who intended all things, we experience the return toward the strictly Augustinian kind of interiority. Telesio himself—Campanella observed—could justify the cognition of reality only through a “sillogismo subitaneo” (an instinctive syllogism) by whose means from the perception of the passion one could infer its cause. Campanella, too, in regard to things would assume an inferred cognition justifiable by the unity of reality. Things act on us because they possess something similar to us: “Objects move us because they have something of us” (obiecta nos movent in quantum habent aliquid nostri). We can grasp things because of the unity between original nature and first cause, “We can easily run from one thing to another because they are all reciprocally similar and they are similar because they all depend from the same cause (discurrimus facile ad obiecta omnia quoniam similia omnia sunt invicem: similia autem sunt, quoniam ab eadem pendent causa). No Cartesian divine veracity is found here, but, again, a divine unity that encompasses and unifies in itself the whole reality. 6. Primalities. Infinity. Goodness. Magic and Astrology. Sympathy and Things. Miracles. Moral Conclusions As everything has an impulse of self-preservation, of a love for its being, it has also been endowed by God with the cognition of its end and with the capability of reaching that end. Love, knowledge, and will are the triple universal character of every being and of being in general, “These primalities, will, knowledge, and love come together mutually and simultaneously” (nam hae primalitates, potentia, sapientia et amor mutuo et simul se consequuntur). In De sensu rerum (vol. 2, p. 26), Campanella said: God, Who is the First Power, Wisdom, and Love, has given to all things enough power to live, know, and love that are sufficient for their preservation…. Heat can be, can sense, and can love being, and so does everything and everything desires to become eternal like God. For God nothing dies, everything only changes. A thing may appear dead to another thing and it is truly dead, in the same way that fire appears evil to cold and it is in a true way evil to cold. But for God everything is alive and good (Esso Dio ch’è Possanza Prima, Sapienza Prima e Amor Primo, a tutte cose ha dato possanza di vivere e sapienza e amore quanto basti alla conservazione loro.... Dunque il calore può, sente, e ama essere, e cosí ogni cosa, e desidera eternarsi come Dio, e per Dio nulla cosa muore, ma solo si trasmuta, ma l’una all’altra par morta et è invero morta, cosí come il fuoco pare al freddo malo e invero a lui é malo; ma per Dio ogni cosa è viva e buona). The primalities of being are present in each thing, and they are the necessary

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and inseparable aspects of being. Everything is life and goodness if one knows how to look at the whole of things, beyond their external limitations. Nothing truly dies, “The bread dies and becomes chyle, the chyle dies and becomes blood; then the blood dies and become flesh, nerves, bones, spirit, semen, and suffers many deaths and lives, pains and pleasures” (muore il pane e si fa chilo, poi questo muore e si fa sangue, poi il sangue muore e si fa carne, nervo, ossa, spirito, seme e pate varie morti e vite, dolori e voluttadi). The human soul deserves a different life than the one subject to this alternating vicissitude and perennial cyclical recourse of things, “The one who was before would also always be. / I sense that every entity would be happy / more than what it could wish” (E sempre fia chi fue; dal che farsi contento, piú che non sa volere ogni ente io sento). Giordano Bruno said: Time takes away everything and gives everything back; everything changes. Nothing is annihilated. Only one being does not change, is eternal, and can persevere eternally one, similar, and identical…. Know that whatever would be the moment of this evening that I’m waiting for … I who am in the night, awaits the coming of the day, and those who are in the day await the coming of the night (Il tempo tutto toglie e tutto dà; ogni cosa si muta. Nulla si annihila: è un solo che non può mutarsi, un solo è eterno e può perseverare eternamente uno, simile e medesmo.... Però qualunque sii il punto di questa sera che aspetto … io che son nella notte aspetto il giorno, e quei che son nel giorno aspettano la notte). There is something in the human being that, like the Platonic winged biga, runs beyond the mutation of things where everything perennially baths in the waters of Lethe. The human being is capable of an infinite discourse and impetus, which can bring it beyond the world of heat and cold, of battles and alternating vicissitudes. In De sensu rerum (vol. 2, p. 25), Campanella asked, “How could the sun have ever given to human beings an infinite course higher than the sun’s path, if the whole human soul were a spirit solely generated by the sun? (Ma come potrà il sole aver dato discorso infinito sopra sé all’uomo, se tutta l’anima umana fusse spirito, solo dal sole ingenerato?). A mind exists in human beings, a mind infused by God (mens, a Deo in singulos homines immissam), and this mind tends to God as its origin and abode. To the mens the Metaphysics attributes proper functions, such as the faculty of an intellectual intuition. The intuition goes farther than the discourse of the spiritus and operates with a vision of its own, which is noetic; it discovers the ideas and discloses the limits of the knowledge of the senses. The process of interiorization allows us to reach God, Who, through the mens, is more interior to us than we are to ourselves (intimior nobis quam nos nobis). We who exist—if we were not, we would not even understand (si enim non sumus nequaquam intelligimus)—acknowledge in our own being, at the

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roots of our being, God, and in our infinity we find the infinity of God. In Metaphysics (vol. 2, p. 15) it is written, “If we are, then God is … because if a diminished entity exists by participation, then an entity perfect by its essence also exists” (Si autem nos sumus, et Deus est … quoniam si datur aliquod ens per partecipationem diminutum, datur et ens per essentiam et perfectum). This does not mean a separation, a break of the infinite from the finite. Mens and spiritus collaborate; they are tied together like God and world. Our consideration of them is what changes. In the direction of the external limits, we find our distinction from things, through the perceptio passionis, the falsehood of things. In the direction of interiority, we do not find nonbeing, or death, but find being, life, the cognition that things are not what they appear, our horizon (cognoscere quod res non sunt sicut nobis apparent). We are going beyond the finite bodies, infinitely (in infinitum), “above the sun and then higher, and after that beyond the heavens” (sopra il sole e poi piú sopra, e poi fuor del cielo). Knowledge, the direction toward being, toward us and, through us, toward God, exceeds, overcomes, and goes beyond things, the limit, the nonbeing. The mind, not the spirit, though with the spirit, is the path from the finite to the infinite (mens, non spiritus, licet cum spiritu). Campanella continuously insists on this concept: the divine seal in human beings is their motion toward the infinite, the infinite mental discourse, and the craving for the infinite: This clear knowledge of the invisible infinite is manifest only in human beings … the human desires are equally infinite. The justification of this is our awareness that human beings are never satisfied with their possessions, nor with their city, nor with their kingdom, and not even with the possession of the entire world (Questa chiara scienza dell’infinito invisibile nell’uomo solo è manifesta … similmente l’appetito dell’uomo è infinito, perché non gli basta un podere, né una città, né un regno, né un mondo). If you recall what we have seen concerning the nature of knowledge proper to sense, this development would not seem contradictory but complementary. Things have appeared all finite and locked into a nonbeing that was their limitation; the senses’ cognition, perceptio passionis, has appeared as death or alienation. Reality for each thing was being, and true knowledge was to know oneself; foundation of the cognition of things was the unity of the common being. The solution stood in turning from alienation (insanity and death) to the possession of oneself, from the limit to what was limiting, from nonbeing to being, from finite to infinite, and from the world to God. The infinite nonbeing, which Campanella Platonically sees as the limit of finite things, is not a positive being; it is the determination of the individual. It is necessary to pass from the limited individual thing to the consideration of the infinite being that is at the root of the whole, which contains the whole, which keeps the whole in itself. The finite-infinite dialectic rhythm resolves

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and explains the oppositions and allows the overcoming of the limit. This overcoming is actuated by the conversion from nonbeing to being, intending nonbeing in being, and not by trying being in nonbeing, as it happens to the people that wish to find the truth of finite things in their finitude, which is their nonbeing. Nonbeing, nothing, has no positiveness at all, except for the fact of being an internal limit of the world posited by God: The Being, which is Universal in existence and causality, intends the Supreme Good, whose proper character is to be indefectible, to have no needs or fears, to love and care for no one than Itself, but, in loving and caring for Itself, still for Itself loves and cares for all things. Because Universal Being is infinite, Nonbeing is absent within or without. Notice how every being is thus within God, and it is surrounded and pregnant with God, and nevertheless is far removed from God because finite, while God is infinite. Observe also how all things die in God, and still live, like a drop of water thrown into the sea, into which it dies but also lives (L’Esser universale nell’essere e causare propone per Sommo Bene: di cui proprio è che sia indeficiente e di nullo abbia bisogno o paura, né ami, né intenda altro che se stesso; ma amando e intendendo sé, ama e intende tutte cose per sé. E perch’é infinito, non può dentro né fuor di lui stare il Niente. Nota com’ogni ente è intra Dio, ed è cinto ed incinto di lui, e pure è da lui lontanissimo, perché è finito, e quello infinito. E come le cose muoiano in Dio, vivendo; come una gocciola d’acqua, gittata in mare, muore e vive). Being extends itself like space, which penetrates everything and embraces everything: In the same way that space penetrates all beings and localized them, and by them is also penetrated, so God is internal to all beings and goes through space not as placed or localized, but in a preeminent way. Hence, God orders space to become place, bodies to become mass, agent virtues to become active, and the composite into which all these things change. Because God is, consequently everything is, like the splendor for the lighted candle. But God hides and reveals Itself in different forms, within which we always live, as atoms in the air (Come lo spazio tutti enti penetra, locando, e d’essi insieme è penetrato; cosí Dio gli enti interna, e ’l spazio, e passa, non come luogo, né come locato,

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ma in modo preeminente; donde impetra lo spazio d’esser luogo, e ’l corpo massa, e l’agenti virtú d’essere attive, e gli composti in cui sempre trapassa. E perch’egli è, ogni ente è per seguela, qual splendor per candela; ma si occulta e rivela in varie fogge, in cui sempre si vive, come atomi nell’aria).

God is infinite goodness, there are no bad things in the universe. Everything bad is only apparently bad in relation to us, but it is good in itself and good in the whole, “Badness is no essence, but a relation, if you reflect that the shrub of broom is sweet to goats and bitter to us” (Rispetto è, non essenza, il mal, se mire dolce al capro, a noi amara la ginestra). Distinction and badness are like semitones and metaphors, which are beautiful in a poem, though in themselves vices (La distinzione e’ l male sono come semitoni e metafore, belle nel poema, bench’in sé vizi). In the world, from the intertwining of being with nonbeing, beside the positive primalities, there are the negative primalities: impotence, ignorance, and hate (impotentia, ignorantia, odium). As from the positive primalities the three influxes of necessity, fate, and harmony (necessitas, fatum, harmonia) descend, so from the negative primalities contingency, chance, and fortune (contingentia, casus, fortuna) derive. The insertion of a Platonic influx in Telesio’s physics becomes clear in the hierarchical determination of the five worlds through which the divine activity reveals itself. There is the archetypal world, which is God Itself in Its perfection, the mental, or world of spirits, the mathematical or spatial, within which the corporeal mass moves or material world that penetrates the mundus situalis or world of the systems spatially determined. In God, the Archetype, the virtualities of all things are found: Worlds, virtues and ideas, made and remade within God from eternity. They appear new to the remade beings, but ancient to those already made. They are figures and shades of sacred existences, which in the first existent were one and friendly, though they possessed among themselves difference in appearances (Mondi, virtuti e idée, nel suo interno fatti e rifatti in piú fogge ab aeterno, nuove agli enti rifatti, a’ fatti antiche; figure ed ombre di sacre esistenze, che nella prima son una ed amiche, quantumque abbian tra lor varie apparenze).

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The world, if we follow Campanella, becomes real also to us if we come to consider the creative acts of God: At first God made space composed by Potency, Wisdom, and Love. Within space, God put matter, which is corporeal mass, similar to the womb, the place with two triads: that of being able, of knowing, and of loving; and the other of length, width, and depth…. Within matter, God afterward sowed two active principles, which are masculine, heat and cold, because both matter and place are feminine and passive principles. These masculine principles of the divided matter, by fighting, form the two elements, sky and earth, which also battle between themselves, and from their languid virtue are born the secondary entities, always having as the guide in the process of generating the three influences, Necessity, Fate, and Harmony, which arrive to the production of the Idea (Dio prima fece lo spazio, composto pure di Potenza, Sapienza ed Amore; e … dentro a quello pose la materia, ch’è la mole corporea, consimile al seno, cioè al luogo, in due triadi, cioè nel potere, sapere ed amare, e nella lunghezza, larghezza, e profondità…. Nella materia poi Dio seminò due maschi principî, cioè gli attivi, caldo e freddo, perché la materia e ’l luogo sono femmine, passivi principî. E questi maschi d’essa materia divisa, combattendo, formano due elementi, cielo e terra, gli quali, combattendo tra loro, della languida fatta virtú loro nascono i secondi enti, per guida avendo della generazione le tre influenze, Necessità, Fato ed Armonia, che portan l’Idea). Given this concept of the universe as a living unity, it is understandable how Campanella fully accepted magic and astrology, “The fools are those who deny … the sense and the consent of the whole universe” (sono sciocchi coloro che negano … il senso e consenso di tutto l’universo insieme). He narrates that the first inspiration for the De sensu rerum came to him from the discussions with Della Porta, “We decided to compose the De sensu rerum after some public discussions and in particular after conversing with Giovanni Battista Della Porta, author of Physiognomy, in which book he denied the possibility of explaining sympathy and antipathy in things” (in Syntagma, p. 14). Campanella’s animation of the whole, on one side, and the indistinction between spirituality and mechanicism on the other, explain quite easily the influx that every being exercises over others. The influences on which magicians and astrologists rely do not imply anything of a supernatural or diabolic nature. Demons are at the foundation of diabolic magic, which “emulates the divine” (aemulatrix divinae). The natural forces, the spiritus diffused in the whole, and the reason why the whole is all connected, are at the root of natural magic, which is a science. The original tie of all things among themselves is enough for the explanation with primitive affinities of all secondary effects. The person who was seasick on the ship in high sea gets nausea just by seeing the sea. Equally, the person who has been stung by the tarantula gets better

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when the tarantula dies. Thus even the gentleman from Tropea, who lost his nose and remade it with the skin of a servant, saw his nose putrefying, because the soul of that nose failed when the complex to which originally it was a part failed. In De sensu rerum (bk. 4, ch. 10), we read: The whole world has the same common sense, and in addition it has a mind like we have. Everything also has a particular sense of its own that derives from the sense that is common, like the light of the sun, which is multiplied and penetrates the earth, becoming red, white, green, and assuming many diverse shades. Everything has its grade of native warmth, though all heat comes from the sun, and it is appropriated by every part according to the climatic conditions fated by the concourse of the agent and passive causes together, but according to the measure to which they participate to the Idea of the universal Fabricator. Without doubt similar things could be born and die in similar ways. Thus the friend suffers with the friend and the same celestial influx influences what is similar and what is alike. This can be clearly learned in the natural and astrological sciences (Tutto il mondo vive d’un comun senso, e di piú ci è la sua mente, come in noi la nostra, e di piú c’è il senso particolare a ciascheduna cosa difusa del comune, come la luce del sole, la quale multiplicata poi et impressa dentro la terra, diventa rossa, bianca, verde, e di tante apparenze, che ogni cosa ha il proprio grado del caldo nativo suo, benché tutto venga dal sole; ma s’è appropriato ad ogni particella secondo le temperie fatale avvenuta dal concorso delle cause agenti e pazienti insieme, a misura della participalità dell’Idea del Fabro universale. E senza dubbio le cose consimili potero nascere e morono consimilmente: onde l’amico pate per l’amico e quel medesimo influsso celeste che serva il simile, serva il consimile. Questo si vede chiaro in naturale e astrologica scienza). With magic, astrology is justified because of the universal sympathy, “The stars act upon the things below by way of heat, light, motion, and configuration” (agunt … sidera in res inferiores calore, lumine, motu et aspectu). In addition to physical properties, the stars influence with the configurations that are determined by their dispositions (Astrologica, ch. 9). This naturally does not imply that those persons are right who submit indistinctly everything to the power of the planets, “as the Machiavellians do for the reason of State.” Astrology and magic are sciences and they embrace the dominion of the natural sciences, respecting definite laws. This reduction of everything that appears strange and uncommon to the phenomena regulated by natural laws and the reaffirmed tie of the spiritual with the material certainly show that at times Campanella intended to explain every miracle as a purely natural operation. Maurizio de Rinaldis, in his confession, would say, “I recall to have heard friar Tommaso Campanella … that

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in the case of war he would have done miracles” (mi ricordo aver inteso dal detto fra Thomaso Campanella … come quando voleva far le guerre n’avería fatto deli miracoli). Pietro di Stilo also speaks of this: Concerning the miracles, Campanella was making fun of them and used to affirm that he too could do miracles in confirmation of his science and works. He said that the miracles were an application of the miracles of intention, of what was intended by the person for whom one would do the miracle. Anybody could do this kind of miracles (Quando si parlava de miracoli il Campanella se ne burlava, e diceva che esso ancora faria miracoli in confirmazione della sua scientia e delle sue opere e che li miracoli non erano che un’applicazione di miracoli d’intenzione di quello alla cui persona si faccia il miracolo, et ch’ognuno poteva far miracoli in questo modo). Giordano Bruno, too, at least if we believe his accusers, supposedly stated, “The miracles done by Jesus Christ and the Apostles were illusory and not true miracles and were done through magic; he himself had in his heart the will to do the same miracles and even greater ones” (Che li miracoli che faceva Gesú Cristo e gli Apostoli, erano miracoli apparenti e fatti per arte magica e non veri; e che a esso … sarebbe bastato l’animo di farli medesimi e maggiori). Where the complex rapport between the naturalistic tendency and the Platonic thematic, between Telesio and Plato, returns in full with its difficulty is in the link between the descriptive morality of the Epilogo Magno and the soul itself of Metaphysics. To specify this link is not easy. It is hard to find in these works the condition and method of passage from the love of oneself, as it is posited by the physiological structure of the human being, and the love that expands itself toward the universal being, overcoming the barriers of the individual ego. If we faithfully restrict ourselves to the concreteness of the senses, we must fatally renounce to the Platonic motion toward the divine. Chained to the Caucasus of its own sufferance, locked in the dungeon of the conatus of self-preservation, how would the human being be able to break through the boundary of its finite existence to become one with the infinite Being? The motion toward the infinite, the conversion from the limit toward God, the unlimited, from where do they originate?

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 Galileo was not a philosopher in a technical sense, but he efficaciously contributed more than anyone else to the formulation of the concept of a nature completely free from metaphysical preoccupations and presuppositions. He declared of not having read Cardano or Telesio, whose positions under many aspects were similar to his own; he never mentioned Bruno, and for this Kepler would reproach him; and toward Campanella he remained cold and indifferent. In general, Galileo kept himself removed, almost extraneous, from the new philosophy and instead kept in touch with the Peripatetics against whom he was fighting, but with whom for many reasons he shared many positions. This was due, more than to some methodical attitudes, to his profound need of considering sensible nature as the autonomous source of all scientific knowledge, “We do not consider what God could have done, but what It has done” (Noi non consideriamo quello che Iddio poteva fare, ma quello che Egli ha fatto, in Opere, vol. 7, p. 565). His Anti-Aristotelianism was a battle, more than against a doctrine or a method, against a mentality that the Renaissance strangely enough partially supported: the acceptance of authority as an argument of truth. The return to antiquity, which became the cult of what is ancient, invigorated an attitude of adhesion to the great teachers of the past. At times these teachers were changed with others; in place of Aristotle, Cicero became an authority; but the soul of this culture did not change. Nizolio, for instance, who was so proud in vindicating the freedom of investigation and ready to fight and abuse Aristotle, was a great admirer of Cicero to a point of giving credit to an Aristotle elegant stylist, of whom it is spoken in the works of Cicero. Galileo intended to reject all appeal to authority, whatever this authority could be, different from reason and sensate experience, “Aristotle himself has taught me to satisfy the intellect with what reason persuaded me and not with what comes from authority alone” (Lo stesso Aristotele m’ha insegnato quietar l’intelletto a quello che m’è persuaso dalla ragione, e non dalla sola autorità, in Opere, vol. 4, p. 65). Aristotle, vindicating concreteness against

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Platonic abstractions, appealed to experience, to reality; he was the one who, going against his own teacher, appealed to reason, “His followers assigned authority to Aristotle; he did not take or usurp authority for himself” (Sono i suoi seguaci che hanno dato autorità ad Aristotele, e non esso che se la sia usurpata e presa). If Aristotle were alive, he would have dismissed his selfstyled disciples: Do you doubt that if Aristotle were to have seen new discoveries in the sky he would not have changed his opinion, corrected his writings, and accepted more sensate doctrines? Do you doubt that he would have dismissed those simpletons who so cowardly insisted on holding on every one of his sayings? (Avete voi forse dubbio che, quando Aristotele vedesse le novità scoperte in cielo, e’ non fusse per mutar opinione e per emendar i suoi libri, e per accostarsi alle piú sensate dottrine discacciando da sé quei poveretti di cervello che troppo pusillanimemente s’inducono a voler sostenere ogni suo detto, in Opere, vol. 7, pp. 133 ff.). Galileo’s polemic against Aristotelianism should not be misconstrued; before anything else, that polemic was against the mental laziness of those Simplicii who, at all times, have confused fecund inquiry with the memory of the opinions expressed by others, “Do not call yourselves philosophers but historians or memory’s doctors” (Deponete il nome dei filosofi e chiamatevi o istorici o dottori di memoria). Galileo’s appeal was not that of a philosophical school against another, but an appeal to free inquiry, experience, and reason. It was precisely this investigation so curious about nature, which, without the metaphysical frivolities, would destroy the paper-made castles of the worshippers of antiquity, that is, of those who substituted a dead letter to the living word of God, open and clear in the world. We find ourselves dealing with the question itself that dramatically agitated the life of Galileo after the Church, on 24 February 1616, condemned Copernicus’ hypothesis. Which ones are the attitudes and the duties of the philosopher, of the scientist, before the sacred texts and the Church as their official interpreter? In 1616, Campanella pronounced himself in favor of Galileo, clarifying most of those same arguments that Galileo expounded in his letters to the Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine in the summer of 1615; the Benedictine priest Benedetto Castelli on 21 December 1613; and to other friends: arguments already expressed, at least in part, also by Giordano Bruno in La Cena de le Ceneri (1584). The official ecclesiastic opinion was most clearly presented by Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino who did not exclude the acceptance of the Copernican opinion at the purely hypothetical and mathematical level. What Bellarmino retained as dangerous and condemnable was that at the purely rational level a theory concerning the constitution of the world, and not just a mere hypothe-

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sis, was posited. The Cardinal wrote on 12 April 1615—to the Carmelite theologian Paolo Antonio Foscarini who, early in 1615, had written a booklet that attempted to produce the reconciliation between Copernicanism and the Bible—these words: To say that, by assuming that the earth moves and the sun stands, all appearances are better explained than by admitting eccentricities and epicycles, it is a thing well said and in it no danger exists for anyone. In addition, this is sufficient for the mathematician. To want to affirm that the sun really stands at the center of the world and that it revolves on itself without going from orient to occident and that the earth in the third sky turns in great speed around the sun, it is indeed a dangerous thing. It would irritate not just the scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also it would be obnoxious to our Holy Faith by rendering the Holy Scriptures false (Il dire che supposto che la terra si muova et il sole stia fermo si salvano tutte l’apparenze meglio che non porre gli eccentrici et li epicicli, è benissimo detto, e non ha pericolo nessuno; e questo basta al mathematico: ma volere affermare che realmente il sole stia nel centro del mondo, e solo si rivolti in se stesso senza correre dall’oriente all’occidente, e che la terra stia nel 3.zo cielo e giri con somma velocità intorno al sole, è cosa molto pericolosa non solo d’irritare tutti i filosofi e teologi scholastici, ma anco di nuocere alla Santa Fede con rendere false le scritture Sacre). Bruno in La Cena de le Ceneri had already fought for the thesis that the Copernican concept was not purely a mathematical hypothesis but a vision of reality. The consequence of this position was that human reason was free to affirm whatever the result was from its inquiries in the field of science, without obligation of submission to any authority. This was a principle more serious than what Galileo could admit, but of which Bellarmino became very well aware, since truth is one alone. Consequently, that clear distinction between science and faith, or at least between the sciences and philosophy, and through philosophy, between sciences and theology, was accepted with much difficulty. Galileo’s argumentations are known. He too accepted the thesis that “two true things cannot be contradictory” (due veri non possono mai contrariarsi). He recognized that different orders of truth existed: the loftiest ones, which are the objects of theology (altissime contemplazioni divine) and the truths of the particular sciences. According to Galileo, the two orders must remain autonomous: We know now that theology occupies itself in the loftiest divine contemplations and resides for its dignity on the royal throne because it is all made of supreme authority, and does not descend to the lower and humble speculations of the inferior sciences, and, as we declared

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY above, prefers not to care about them, since they do not regard the final happiness. Like theology, ministers and professors of theology should not take into their own hands the authority to make judgments in the professions that they did not study or practice. This would be the same as if an absolute prince, knowing that he could freely command and be obeyed, were to order that health care and buildings planners ought to operate and build according to his own orders, although he was not a doctor or an architect, with grave danger of the lives of those miserable patients and manifest ruins of those buildings (Ora se la teologia, occupandosi nell’altissime contemplazioni divine e risedendo per dignità nel trono regio, per lo che ella è fatta di somma autorità, non discende alle piú basse ed umili speculazioni delle inferiori scienze, anzi, come di sopra si è dichiarato, quelle non cura, come non concernenti alla beatitudine, non debbono i ministri e professori di quella arrogarsi l’autorità di decretare nelle professioni non esercitate né studiate da loro; perché questo sarebbe come se un principe assoluto, conoscendo di poter liberamente comandare e farsi ubbidire, volesse, non essendo egli né medico né architetto, che si medicasse e fabricasse a modo suo, con grave pericolo della vita de’ miseri infermi, e manifesta rovina degli edifizi).

Theology must exclusively occupy itself with questions concerning the beatitude of the soul with morality and religion; in all the rest, human reason is self-sufficient. God has given us a book written for the purpose of supporting us on the pathways for which our human forces would not have been sufficient. But God has given us also an evident codex, the clearest book of nature, and the means to understand it, reason and experience: By denying completely the sciences, would that not be like rejecting hundreds of passages of the Sacred Letters, which teach how the glory and the greatness of God Supreme are admirably manifested in Its creatures, and can divinely be read in the open book of the heavens? (Il proibir tutta la scienza, che altro sarebbe che un reprovar cento luoghi delle Sacre Lettere, i quali ci insegnano come la gloria e la grandezza del sommo Iddio mirabilmente si scorge in tutte le sue fatture, e divinamente si legge nell’aperto libro del cielo?). Campanella, in Apologia pro Galileo, insistently returned to this point, “The world is the book in which the eternal mind wrote its own concepts” (Il mondo è il libro dove il senno eterno / scrisse i propri concetti). Nature is the living book, the visual language of God; it is the word that sounds for us, and that is not posited in texts completed once for all. Nature is the living word, not dead; it comes to us not through others but directly. Reason too is direct light and an immediate sign. If the concept of God opens itself like a book in the universe, and the

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Word still speaks intimately to us, what is the need for revelation and theology, Sacred Scriptures and Holy Fathers? Galileo cares enough to advise us that the book of nature tells us not only about the splendor of the sun and the stars but also reveals profound mysteries to scientists as the human body reveals the secret of its structures to “an exquisite and most diligent anatomist and philosopher.” He said: No one should believe that the reading of the loftiest concepts that are written in the pages [of the book of the heavens] would end with the contemplation alone of the splendor of the Sun and the stars, their birth and hiding, which is as much as the eyes of the brutes and the uncouth would see. This is not at all so. There are mysteries inside that book so profound and concepts so sublime, that vigils, labors, and the application of hundreds and hundreds of the most acute minds have not been capable of penetrating entirely with inquiries that have gone on throughout thousands and thousands of years (Né sia chi creda che la lettura degli altissimi concetti, che son scritti in quelle carte [del libro del cielo], finisca nel solo veder lo splendor del Sole e delle stelle el loro nascere ed ascondersi, che è il termine sin dove penetrano gli occhi dei bruti e del vulgo; ma vi son dentro misteri tanto profondi e concetti tanto sublimi, che le vigilie, le fatiche e gli studi di cento e cento acutissimi ingegni non gli hanno ancora interamente penetrati con l’investigazioni continuate per migliaia e migliaia d’anni). The reading of these concepts, and the construction of science, are they possible without the consideration of another order? This nature, this speaking language of God, this reason, perennial revelation of God, don’t they annihilate and exclude any kind of theology? Is it truly possible to maintain separate the two orders of truth? Which thing would establish this separation, the limit of the validity of the two fields, if not reason itself? Reason, on the other hand, facing so many problems, may well be hindered in telling in what manner and in which measure these problems would weigh on moral life and on what regards the salvation of souls. It is easy to say that the people who wrote the Scriptures did not hesitate to express in an erroneous manner scientific concepts because their texts were aimed at the education of human beings for goodness and in their way to the true God. When reason would have the duty of critically examining the Scriptures, then reason would perform such duty to perfection: it would not limit itself to indications at the borders of moral truths, in which revelation is valid, without calling revelation itself before its own tribunal. Galileo’s distinction was not easily tenable at the level of a faithful orthodoxy. Bellarmino coherently saw the consequences of Galileo’s theory and wrote that, once Galileo’s science would be accepted, “we would have to proceed with much consideration in explaining the Scriptures when they appear contrary; we should say that we do not understand them instead of say that it is false what is demon-

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strated” (allhora bisogneria andar con molta considerazione in esplicar le Scritture che paiono contrarie, e piú tosto dire che non l’intendiamo, che dire che sia falso quello che si dimostra). Galileo—by limiting himself to the examination in the phenomena of their conduct, the how and not the why, happy to learn about their affections or modifications, without “penetrating the true and intrinsic essence of the natural substance”—was in reality limiting the field of scientific research outside of any theological or philosophical complication. Is this truly exact? Galileo, who proudly and consciously demanded to be called “natural philosopher” and not only “mathematician,” was asked to justify his own science, to posit the foundations of the inquiry itself. The reason is that though it is true that “the physical and natural sciences are not philosophy, because they are empirical and mathematical constructions … nonetheless it should not be forgotten that these constructions are not standing without a conception or philosophical orientation, and consequentially without a presupposed or implicit philosophy” (le scienze fisiche e naturali non sono filosofia, perché sono costruzioni empiriche e matematiche … conviene non dimenticare che queste costruzioni stesse non stanno senza una concezione o un orientamento filosofico, e perciò, senza una presupposta o implicita filosofia). This was a philosophy that Galileo was induced to delineate, no matter how accidentally. By this philosophy, he came to affirm that the human mind was capable of those truths of which also the divine mind is capable. Both minds come together in the field of the mathematical sciences, which, having been the basis on which God constructed the world, form the knot that ties together human beings, world, and God. It was a grave and significative assertion, which Galileo may also have derived from the Ficinian Neo-Platonism, as Gentile sustained, but that reveals anyway the need in the scientist of proceeding beyond the mere description of the phenomena and the formulation of explicating hypotheses. Galileo taught that two are the possible modes of considering the understanding: intensively and extensively. By the consideration of the extensively understanding, he meant that one intellect could be more widely capable than another, in the sense that it could accept a greater number of intelligible things. Under this aspect the human intellect would be like nothing when compared to that of God: By intensively understanding, as such term signifies to seize intensively, or perfectly, some proposition, I mean that the human intellect understands some propositions so perfectly, and has of them such absolute certainty, that is as much as nature itself has of them. This happens in the pure mathematical sciences, in geometry and math, of which the divine intellect knows an infinite series of propositions because it knows them all. Of the few propositions understood by the human intellect, I believe that the knowledge of them is equal to the divine one, in regard to objective certainty, because the human intellect

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arrives at the comprehension of necessity, of which no greater certainty is given (Ma pigliando l’intendere intensive, in quanto cotal termine importa intensivamente, cioè perfettamente, alcuna proposizione, dico che l’intelletto umano ne intende alcune cosí perfettamente, e ne ha cosí assoluta certezza, quanto se n’abbia l’istessa natura: e tali sono le scienze matematiche pure, cioè la geometria e l’aritmetica, delle quali l’intelletto divino ne sa bene infinite proposizioni di piú, perché le sa tutte, ma di quelle poche intese dall’intelletto umano credo che la cognizione agguagli la divina nella certezza obiettiva, perché arriva a comprendere la necessità, sopra la quale non par che possa essere sicurezza maggiore). God comprehends by simple intuition; we do by hard discourse or ratiocination: “The truth’s cognition derived from mathematical demonstrations, is cognition identical to the one known by divine wisdom” (quanto alla verità, di che ci danno cognizione le dimostrazioni matematiche, ella è l’istessa che conosce la sapienza divina). If Galileo agrees with Ficino and Vico about the evaluation of human knowledge within the ambiance of mathematics, he certainly goes beyond the Vichian position in valuing mathematics. Galileo is tied more strictly to those Pythagorizing tendencies, which at times he overcame, but from which he could never be completely free. The problem of the value of mathematics in physics’ inquiries is often discussed by Galileo who in the second day of the Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi made Simplicius present the following serious objection, “These mathematical subtleties … are true in the abstract, but when applied to sensible and physical matter they don’t fit” (queste sottigliezze mattematiche … son vere in astratto, ma applicate alla materia sensibile e fisica non rispondono). On the contrary, Sagredo sustained, “It is necessary to confess that to want to treat questions concerning nature without any knowledge of geometry is like to try to do what is impossible” (è forza confessare che il voler trattare le questioni naturali senza geometria è un tentar di fare quello che è impossibile a esser fatto). In the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, Sagredo again affirmed: What would we say, Mr. Simplicius? Is it not convenient to recognize the virtue of geometry as the most powerful tool to sharpen the intellect and dispose it to perfect discourse and speculation? Isn’t it true that Plato wanted his students to be first of all well founded in mathematics?” (Che diremo, Signor Simplicio? Non conviene egli confessare, la virtú della geometria essere il piú potente strumento d’ogni altro per acuir l’ingegno e disporlo al perfettamente discorrere e specolare? E che con gran ragione voleva Platone i suoi scolari prima been fondati nelle matematiche?). The root of all these affirmations is found in the concept that was proper of Leonardo and Cusanus and of all the Florentine Neo-Platonism: God is the

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geometer and the universe is composed by numero, pondere et mensura. The words of Il Saggiatore (The Assayer) are well known: Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless a person first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth (La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi agli occhi—io dico l’universo—ma non si può intendere, se prima non s’impara a intender la lingua e conoscer i caratteri ne’ quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, i caratteri sono triangoli, cerchi e altre figure geometriche, senza i quali è impossibile intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro labirinto). Galileo expressed himself no differently, but more efficaciously, in a letter to Fortunio Liceti on January 1641: If philosophy were what is contained in the books of Aristotle, then Your Lordship, to my opinion, would be the greatest philosopher in the world…. I truly believe that the book of philosophy is that of nature, which is perpetually open before our eyes. It is written in characters different from those of our alphabet, reason why it cannot be read by everybody. The characters of such book are Triangles, Squares, Circles, Spheres, Cones, Pyramids, and other mathematical formulae much suitable for such a reading (Quando la filosofia fosse quella che nei libri di Aristotele è contenuta, V.S. per mio parere sarebbe il maggior filosofo del mondo; … ma io veramente stimo il libro della filosofia esser quello della natura che perpetuamente ci sta aperto innanzi agli occhi; ma perché è scritto in caratteri diversi da quelli del nostro alfabeto, non può esser da tutti letto, e sono i caratteri di tal libro Triangoli, Quadrati, Cerchi, Sfere, Coni, Piramidi e altre figure matematiche attissime per tal lettura). The mathematical structure of the cosmos uniquely justifies the scientific constructions that are mathematically performed. The human being, by reasoning, arrives at a truth absolutely valid—necessary—in mathematics, and mathematics is precisely the means through which God, or absolute rationality, has created the expression of Itself in the universe. In the Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi, Galileo showed all his admiration for this Pythagorizing Platonism, “I know very well how much the Pythagoreans held in the greatest esteem the science of numbers and that even Plato admired human intellect and consid-

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ered it a participant in divinity only because human beings understand the nature of numbers. I myself am not too far from formulating the same judgment.” Galileo had faith in an original agreement between mind, nature, and God; three forms of rationality that are strictly connected. Nature and humankind, as they are the expressions of it, are the evident and concordant incarnation of the supreme divine reason. It is excluded that God operated in an irrational manner or beyond any rationality. Galileo already posited the absoluteness of human reason that coincides, although in a reduced proportion, with that of God. The possibility that God operated beyond the reach of reason is null. Perhaps there may be the problem of whether God has actuated possible rational systems, but to this question sensate experience should respond. The Cardinal Agostino Origo, in his De Deo uno (Rome, 1629), mentioned a discussion of which there remains an ironic trace in the Dialogo between Urban VIII and Galileo. In that dialogue, Urban sustained that divine power could have determined itself in the creation outside of any design that the human being could now reconstruct. The answer for Galileo is written in the world, “We do not search for what God could have done, but for what It has done” (noi non cerchiamo quello che Iddio poteva fare, ma quello che Egli ha fatto). This is the function of the sensate experience: among the possibilities, rationally organized, God has selected some; experience alone would show which ones they are, “God could have made birds flying with bones of massive gold, with veins full of mercury, with flesh heavier than lead, and with the smallest and heaviest wings. In this way, God would have greatly shown Its potency. … But God wanted birds with bones, flesh, and very light feathers” (Iddio poteva far volare gli uccelli con le ossa d’oro massiccio, con le vene piene d’argento vivo, con la carne grave piú del piombo e con ale piccolissime e gravi, e cosí avrebbe maggiormente mostrato la sua potenza … ma Egli ha voluto far quelli d’ossa e di carne e di penne assai leggere, in Opere, vol. 7, p. 465). We know that among the possible systems this one, and not any other whatever equally possible, is real only through sensible cognition, which on the other hand is organized and expands by means of the subsidies of mathematics. In agreement this time with Salviati, Simplicius declared: Aristotle did not esteem his ingenuity, though most perspicacious, more than it was convenient, and in his philosophizing taught that sensate experiences have to precede any discourse built by the human intellect. He also stated that those who deny any of the senses were deserving punishment with the removal of that organ of sensation from them (Aristotele, come quello che non si prometteva del suo ingegno, ancorché perspicacissimo, piú di quello che si conviene, stimò, nel suo filosofare, che le sensate esperienze si dovessero anteporre a qualsivoglia discorso fabbricato da ingegno umano, e disse che quelli che avessero negato il senso meritavano di esser castigati col levargli quel tal senso).

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With this, we have found the formation of the Galileian method: a method, whose origin is and has been found in the Paduan Aristotelianism, but with the insertion of the influence of Archimedes on the development of the natural inquiry of Aristotle. It is analysis and solution, which begins from the experimental datum in order to arrive at the mathematical construction that constitutes the backbone (ossatura) of reality. Once here, thought with an autonomous process would proceed to the formulation of universal laws, which experience at its own turn would come to confirm. In this way, mathematics and sensate experience join together and unite perfectly through faith in the human intellect, or better, in the divinity of the human intellect, capable of opening up for itself the way of grasping the divine processes. 2. Evangelista Torricelli In Lezioni Accademiche (In lode delle matematiche, sect. 9) Evangelista Torricelli exclaimed: What fruit of intense consolation do you think that a spirit truly philosophical—dedicated to the cultivation of a science whose teachings are not human opinions of experts or fantasies, but divine manifestations and indubitable and eternal truths—will gather? You will not find a single proposition of geometry that would not exquisitely satisfy the spirit that understood it…. But in regard whether the mathematics are profitable also to other professions, and primarily to religion and the Sacred Scripture, let us hear St. Augustine, who gives a judgment in our favor … [when] he asserts that because of the ignorance of numbers and arithmetic many things could not be understood that with metaphors and in mystical figures were found in the Sacred Writings (Che frutto d’intensa consolazione stimate voi che raccolga un animo veramente filosofico, dedito alla coltura d’una scienza, gl’insegnamenti della quale non sono opinioni di dottori o fantasie d’uomini, ma beneplaciti divini, e verità indubitabili ed eterne! Non troverete una sola proposta della geometria, la quale non lasci esquisitamente appagato l’animo di chi l’ha intesa…. Ma che le mattematiche sieno profittevoli ancora per le altre professioni, e primieramente per la religione e per la Santa Scrittura, odasi S. Agostino, il quale dà la sentenza favorevole per la parte nostra … [quando] asserisce che per l’ignoranza de’ numeri e dell’aritmetica non erano intese molte cose le quali, con traslati e in sensi mistici, venivan posti nelle Sacre Carte). Sforza Pallavicino could not find agreement with these statements. Though he accepted Galileo’s method because concordant with his own Aristotelianism, Pallavicino lamented that the pure mathematician would generally incur two serious errors concerning religion, “On one hand, the mathematician does not consider true the things that imagination cannot seize, and these are the spiri-

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tual substances; on the other hand, he does not reckon probability, which is not found in imaginable things, but evidence alone. Now, all this is contrary to faith, and even to any moral discipline.” The essence of the world—shaped by numero, pondere et mensura—is the that of being counted and measured (matematicità and misurabilità). What can be seized through calculus and intuition forms the intimate truth of things. All other qualities provided by the senses are only the surface (scorza). Galileo confessed in Il Saggiatore, Corporeity must be by necessity white or red, bitter or sweet, sonorous or mute, of a pleasing or unpleasant odor, and that I have to apprehend it necessarily accompanied by such conditions, I cannot convince myself. I would even say that if the senses were not there to help us, perhaps reason or imagination by itself would never arrive at it (Che la corporeità debba essere bianca o rossa, amara o dolce, sonora o muta, di grato o ingrato odore, non sento farmi forza alla mente di doverla apprendere da cotali condizioni necessariamente accompagnata: anzi, se i sensi non ci fussero scorta, forse il discorso o l’immaginazione per se stessa non v’arriverebbe già mai). These are real aspects only in the one who senses them, meanwhile the object in itself is figure, size, situation, motion, relation, and number, which are qualities always mathematically measurable and calculable. We can see how much importance in the Galileian school the Pythagorical-Platonic concept of a geometric structure of the universe enjoined among Galileo’s disciples, among whom we find Vincenzo Viviani, who wrote the following paragraph: Speculative geometry is the unique teacher of the honest acquisition of what is useful, delightful, beautiful, and good. Geometry is the only true science because it produces knowledge from itself without mediation of causes. Geometry alone teaches how to achieve knowledge and even reminds the human intellect—which is a spark of the divine one—that as a knower through the principles most known with the light of nature it can, if it so wishes, without deceiving itself or others, know the existence and the properties of all things concerning the created universe and the order disposed by God, in number, weight, and measure (La Geometria speculativa è l’unica maestra dell’onesto acquistare l’utile, il dilettevole, il bello e il buono; ch’essa è l’unica scienza, perché “per se scire est non per causam cognoscere”; ch’ella sola insegna a conoscere, anzi ricorda all’intelletto umano—che è una scintilla del divino—ch’egli come sciente per i principii col lume di natura ad esso notissimi, può volendo sapere e conoscere, senza ingannare sé né gli altri, l’esistenza e la proprietà di tutte le cose riguardanti il creato e il disposto da Dio, in numero peso e misura). More interesting from the point of view of philosophy is what Carlo Roberto

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Dati, from the region of Cimento, wrote. He was a great admirer of Galileo and represented his teacher in a colloquium with Braccio Manetti concerning geometry, a colloquium that supposedly happened in Arcetri: The true and proper usage of Geometry—Galileo said—confers to our intellect a certain wonderful power for the contemplation of the universe.… Without Geometry, it is impossible to apply oneself to the inquiry of that great problem concerning the architecture, the distances, the movements, and the manifestations of the universe. Geometry provides us with the wings to move throughout the sky and—after having demonstrated on earth many truths about the characteristics of plane figures and solid bodies, and reduced to a demonstrative method many effects and operations of the perspective of mechanics and many speculations of natural philosophy—would bring us above the stars on a chariot more impressive than the one of Astolph (L’uso vero e proprio di lei si è—avrebbe detto Galileo—il conferire al nostro intelletto una certa forza meravigliosa per la contemplazione dell’universo…. Senza la Geometria è impossibile applicarsi al ritrovamento di quel gran problema riguardante l’architettura, la fabbrica, le distanze, i movimenti e l’apparenze dell’universo. Ella ci presta le ali per trascorrere il cielo e dopo averci in terra dimostrate tante verità circa le passioni delle figure piane e dei corpi solidi, e ridotto a metodo dimostrativo tanti effetti e operazioni della prospettiva e della meccanica, e tante speculazioni della filosofia naturale, sopra un carro viè piú meraviglioso di quello d’Astolfo ci porta sopra le stelle). Dati, in order to give another illustration of his position, introduced a myth in accordance with the Platonic tradition. The Soul, becoming incarnate, lost the truth and was greatly lamenting its being “within the darkness of the body,” anxiously searching for a guide to the re-conquest of truth. It so happened that the Soul encountered a solemn philosopher who began … with syllogisms, distinctions, and logical terms to try to show the Soul the Truth, but the Soul, disgusted by such kind of discourses that arrived at nothing, realized that the poor man had never seen the Truth. Thus, he certainly could not show the Truth and, in his good reputation, was going around trying to describe it with those phantasies of abstract and concrete nouns, matter and form, substance and accidents, qualities and occult virtues, antiperistasis, antipathies and sympathies. Let us now realized that all these terms are artificial synonyms of the “I do not know” sincerely professed by Socrates (Cominciò … con sillogismi, distinzioni e termini loicali a voler mostrare all’Anima la Verità, ma l’Anima stomacata da sí fatti discorsi, che niente concludevano, s’avvedde che il buon uomo non l’aveva giammai veduta, non ch’egli potesse mostrarla, e che per riputazione andava circo-

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scrivendola con sí fatte chimere d’astratti, concreti, materie, forme, sostanze, accidenti, qualità, virtú occulte, antiperistasi, antipatie e simpatie, che son tutti alla fine artificiosi sinonimi del “non lo so” usato sinceramente da Socrate). After leaving the philosophers, the Soul happened to meet Experience, “venerable matron with the greatest grace” (venerabil matrona di grandissimo garbo). With the suitable instruments, Experience showed “some admirable effects of nature” (alcuni affetti della natura) but at the same time revealed “she had no feet on which to rest and move” (che le mancavano i piedi, sopra cui doveva posarsi e muoversi). Then, the Soul went on further searching, “discontented with this verisimilar, which, though certain in its effects, it is not resting on certain principles, and which can show causes only in a dubious fashion” (non si appagando di questo verosimile, il quale, benché negli effetti sia certo, non si posa sopra principii certi, e perciò non può recare se non dubbiosamente le cagioni). The Soul, by now desperate, broke into tears and lamentations, “I now recognized that it is the decree of the heavens that I on this earth would never see again the beauty, which is impressed on my heart, although I do not know how to perfectly describe it” (ben comprendo esser decreto del cielo, che io in questa terra non rivegga quella bellezza, la quale mi sta impressa nel cuore, ancorché io non sappia altrui perfettamente descriverla). But suddenly Geometry, “the lovely maid” (leggiadra donzella), showed herself and revealed “the infinite beauties” (bellezze infinite) of Truth, “She alone in this life can show to our spirit the truth, a good truly divine, the principle of all goodness, as Plato said.” 3. Orazio Ricasoli Rucellai. Vincenzo Viviani. C.R. Dati. Carlo Rinaldini. Antonio Nardi. Giuseppe Zambeccari. Lorenzo Magalotti Our case has no need of following Galileo in the most scientific part of his inquiries, particularly where by investigating motion he definitively freed himself from the Aristotelian concept of the medium considered as efficient cause and not instead as the source of the perturbations of movement. This meant a reverse of the problem, an overturn that was destined to have a decisive influence in the development of mechanics. It is in this overturn that we have a lucid application of Galileo’s method: Of the accidents … that are variable in infinite modes, no certain science can exist. To be able to treat such matter scientifically, we need to abstract from them [the accidents] and to find and demonstrate the conclusions abstracted from the impediments, use these conclusions in practice, becoming aware of the limitations that experience would gradually teach us (Dei quali accidenti … come variabili in modi infiniti, non si può dar ferma scienza: e però, per poter scientificamente trattar cotal materia, bisogna astrar da essi e ritrovare e dimostrare le

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY conclusioni astratte dagl’impedimenti, servircene, nel praticarle, con quelle limitazioni che l’esperienza ci verrà insegnando).

Our case does not necessitate a consideration of those attempts at an inquiry about the ultimate essence of reality, of which traces are found in the late Platonism of Orazio Ricasoli Rucellai. His work interests us for the joining, not rare or new, of the scientific inquiry of nature with Platonic tendencies. He opined: If all things through their rarefaction change themselves into light; if light is the simplest substance; if the common proposition that the beginning of all things is that into which all of them equally transform is true; then we can conclude that Master Galileo like Anaximander considered light to be the universal principle of all sensible things (Adunque se nella luce tutte le cose con la loro rarefazione si risolvono, e se ella è la sostanza piú semplice; mentre è vera quella proposizione commune, esser cominciamento di tutte le cose quello in cui tutte parimente si disciolgono, puotesi dunque inferire, che il signor Galileo tenesse con Anassimandro la luce per lo principio universale di tutte le cose sensibili). Elsewhere, insisting, although in a doubting form, on this motive typically Ficinian, Rucellai observed: By seeing this inferior light always alive, always in motion, and always agile, it is not unreasonable that Dante would speak of it with such refined sentiments and that Galileo, peradventure, would think that it was the principle of all things. The reason is that it is believable that Divine Providence has impressed on light, more than on any other natural quality, that activity, that movement, and that spirit, which can be found dispersed and diffused in passive matter, and in greater abundance assembled in the sun (Veggendo dunque questa luce inferiore sempre viva, sempre in moto, sempre agile, non è fuor di ragione che Dante ne favellasse con sentimenti sí alti, e che il Galileo per avventura opinasse, questa essere il cominciamento di tutte quante le cose, imperocché in essa pare che la Divina Provvidenza abbia impresso, sopra ad ogni altra qualità naturale, quell’attività, quel movimento e quello spirito, che si trova essere sparso e diffuso nella materia passiva, e in maggior dovizia raccolto nel sole). To this he would add, always in a Ficinian fashion, the Biblical fiat lux, as if he would exactly signify the derivation of all mundane reality from light. The connection of this Neo-Platonism with the Galileian method is proper not only to Rucellai, but also to Antonio Nardi, known among Galileo’s disciples as a significant thinker. In the field of scientific inquiry, the

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disciples of great importance were Benedetto Castelli, Bonaventura Cavalieri, Vincenzo Renieri, Evangelista Torricelli, Carlo Rinaldini, and all those who gathered in the Academy of Cimento, from Francesco Redi to Giovanni A. Borelli, Lorenzo Bellini, Carlo R. Dati, and Vincenzo Viviani. Theirs was an experimental method resting on a mathematical intuition of reality, often of Platonic origin. These natural experiences were always making the great book of nature more readable. The ancient science was falling gradually and inexorably under the blows of the new researches. This was not excluding the reverent respect for antiquity, the necessary basis of the new experimentations, if it is true that truth is the daughter of time. The Galileian Rinaldini while renouncing Aristotle affirmed again the value of his inquiry: When you realize that I have partially moved away from the old Aristotelian path and have rejected the opinion of the years past and accepted a different one, do not wonder about it. You know how very true the ancients were when they said that truth is the daughter of Saturn, of time (Dum interim intelligis aliquando me paululum ab Aristotelico calle declinasse, et abiecta qua superioribus annis tenebar opinione, longe diversam sumpsisse, non est cur de hoc tibi admiratio incessat; neminem enim praeterit scire admodum ab antiquis veritatem Saturni, hoc est temporis, filiam habitam esse). As he returned to this argument, he repeated that even when a more mature research would bring him to reject the salebrosam philosophandi viam, he never, not even during the years when he was swearing on the words of Aristotle, “he ceased to neglect authority and to examine all solid inquiries, so that he could as much as possible follow them if he found them conforming to reason” (omnem auctoritatem negligere, solidasque rationes inquirere ut iis denique suffultus, quod magis rationi consentaneum est, amplecti possem). With Rinaldini and Giovanni Andrea Albizzini, Galileo’s thought began to dominate the education properly philosophical in Pisa. In Antonio Nardi, the results of Renaissance Neo-Platonism framed the inquiries into nature conducted with Galileian method. He spoke about the cosmic harmony with a Pythagorean inspiration, “Certainly that optimal and sovereign Artificer is not only a geometer but also a musician” (certo che geometra non solo, ma anche musico è quell’ottimo e sovrano Artefice). Then, reflecting, he suggested: Let us stop and listen to such suave harmony as that of the world…. Who has introduced in this malleable earthly matter so many worthy forms in so many different degrees? Who has assigned a goal with firmness and wisdom to things blind and unstable? Many around me are the people who dreamingly say that the world was done and preserved by chance. They are fools like those who madly imagine the world to be necessary, eternal, and divine…. I don’t wish at this moment to expand my words on the marvelous conveniences that the dif-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ferent parts of the world offer to the different part of each animal species. Neither I want to research on how this concert of the world has been fabricated by its Artificer with the more and the less, the great and the small, the strait and the curve, and the finite and the infinite (Fermiamoci un poco ad ascoltar armonia cosí soave qual è la mondana…. Chi fu dunque colui che in questa cosí facil terrena materia tanti diversi gradi di piú e di meno degne forme introdusse? Chi fu colui che fine con ordine cosí fermo e saggio alle cieche e instabili assegnò? Tanto appresso di me sono stolti coloro che a caso il mondo esser fatto e conservarsi sogniando dicono, quanto quelli che necessario, eterno e divino delirando se lo fingono…. Non voglio ora distendermi nell’accennar le meravigliose convenienze che le parti del mondo hanno con quelle di ciascun animale, né meno ricercherò come del molto, del poco, del grande, del piccolo, del dritto, del curvo, del finito, dell’infinito sia questo mondano concerto fabbricato dal suo Artefice).

God in Itself is an infinite act, beyond any distinction and definition. To God only the Plotinian approximations to the One are convenient, because Divinity resides above motion and quietude, above the same and the different, above the great and the small, above the similar and the equal. Divinity is outside time and place; is beyond measuring and numbers. The ocean of the infinite majesty is beyond the borders of the good, of the one, of the true, and of the being we know.… It raises itself so much above the baseness of the attributes … because they by their own nature signify definition and limitation (Poiché la Divinità sopra il moto e la quiete, sopra lo stesso e ’l diverso, sopra il grande e ’l piccolo, sopra il simile e l’uguale alberga; sdegna il luogo e ’l tempo, le misure trapassa e i numeri; anzi oltre il termine del buono, del uno, del vero e dell’ente istesso a noi noto ondeggia della maestà infinita il pelago, e molto piú sopra la bassezza degli attributi … s’inalza, imperò che questi per loro natural definizione significano e limitazione). In all the elegant dialogues of Rucellai, a thinker of modest proportions, it is possible to find large Ficinian influences connected with the Galileian science. Rucellai is not without some interest particularly as he renewed motives taken from the philosophy of love and united them with the new philosophy of nature, or when, as in the dialogues Della provvidenza (dialogue num. 16), he illustrated the bond between the order of the world and that of the divinity: We move from the corporeal light to the incorporeal, which is made with small sparks that are resplendent in us by reason, and from here ascending to the intellectual light and, then, to the intelligible, which is

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the sun that among the best exemplars of the archetypal world is shining in the divine mind. Going from clarity to clarity in this fashion we would approach the uniquely most perfect and argue what it is, unable to discern it. Through this sublime ladder, from one light to another more perfect, which ends in the One that by being limitless is infinite, and we would acknowledge that It exists…. Then, if we reflect that all things that began could not be cause and principle of themselves since before being they were not, it is necessary to admit that the universe originated from somewhere else. Passing from cause to cause up to the first one, which had no beginning and necessarily exists, we would conclude that this one is God. Now, if some person, though with subtle reverence, would turn the daring eye of the mind in the effort to know God’s form and substance, presuming to obtain such knowledge, it would lose it completely. It is what St. Augustine says in this sentence: “Help me to find God without searching, instead of searching without finding God” (Per tal modo dal corporeo lume all’incorporeo facendo passaggio, ciò è alle piccole faville che risplendono in noi di ragione, e da questo all’intellettuale lume salendo, e quindi all’intelligibile, che viene a dire quel sole che tra’ piú belli esemplari del mondo archetipo nella divina mente risplende, di chiarezza in chiarezza a quel perfettissimo senza pari ci verremo appropinquando, se non a scernere, ad argomentare quel ch’egli è: e sí parimente per questa scala sublime di luce via via piú perfetta, la quale termina in lui che interminato si è infinito, riconosceremo ch’e’ ci è…. Di qui, se noi porremo in mente come le cose che incominciarono non furono esse cagione e principio a se stesse, perché niuna cosa esser potea avanti che ella fosse, egli è forza che l’universo abbia avuto altronde cominciamento, cosí di cagione in cagione levandoci fino alla prima, la quale non ebbe mai principio e che necessariamente è, conchiuderemo questa essere Dio, nella cui forma e sostanza chiunque con sottile riguardo l’ardito occhio della mente sospinge e di rinvenirla presume, del tutto la perde. “Amet, dice sant’Agostino, non inveniendo invenire, potius quam inveniendo non invenire Deum”). This Christian Platonism, similar to that of Ficino and Pico, would continuously resurface in Galileo’s school even when the mechanicistic tendency would appear and progress almost to the point of becoming materialistic. An interesting document of all this is the letter on sleeping and awakening, Del sonno e della vigilia (1685), of Giuseppe Zambeccari, a student of Alessandro Marchetti and Lorenzo Bellini, in rapport with Redi for scientific purpose. In Zambeccari, beside a pre-Lockean sensism, we have the entire Platonic doctrine of reminiscence.

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 4. Defense of Atomism. Lucretius and Gassendi. Berigard of Pisa. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli. Alessandro Marchetti and Gassendism

The constant reference within the Galileian school to a rational absolute plan of the universe is not to be considered as something merely secondary or accidental. On the contrary, it is the same Pythagorean presupposition on which so much Renaissance science rests. It is precisely because the world is the work of a God who is absolute rationality, an immeasurable unity that continuously multiplies itself, the synthesis of identical and diverse, of limitless and limited, of which with much insistence Rucellai and Nardi spoke, precisely for this and only for this reason, a mathematical science of nature is possible. Only if the world is written in mathematical characters, only if to mathematics is assigned the value of a divine language, only at this price one could pretend to interpret nature with mathematical tables of an objective validity and corresponding to the ultimate structure of things. This is not only uniquely similar to the generic veracity of the Cartesian God; this is a God who creates numero, pondere et mensura; a God who is mathematical reason, who places in the womb of nature infinite living reasons. This God is admitted, even when a soul of the world would be denied, as Nardi and Rucellai did, after a long inquiry on the problem. They had not denied that God created through the Logos and that the Logos was God. A valuable observation remarked how Lorenzo Magalotti, secretary of the Studio in Cimento, who collected and published in 1666 the Saggi di naturali esperienze (Essays on natural experiments), in Lettere familiari—in which so insistently he moved against atheists and materialists, those who sustained chance or necessity and wanted a world that is eternal—reaffirmed the Galileian position of the rapport between the human and the divine minds, between cognition in human beings and God. The conclusion was the well known one: although on different levels, reason is always reason and is equally valid and equally capable of opening itself to the truth of things (Lettere, vol. 1, p. 26): Our understanding of truth is perfection in us and it is suitable to God and we should not deny an understanding in God. What is not suitable to God is our own mode of understanding truth, which it happens to be perfection in us instead but would be a great imperfection in God. Our way of understanding a geometric truth, one step at the time, and with a timely motion would be imperfection in God, whose perfection of understanding is that It understands a geometric truth in an instant (La nostra intelligenza della verità è una perfezione in noi, e questa non disdice a Dio né occorre levargliela. Disdice bensí a Dio il nostro modo d’intendere la verità, il quale avvegnaché non lasci di valutarsi per un’altra perfezione in noi sarebbe una massima imperfezione in Dio. Il nostro modo d’intendere una verità geometrica di passo in passo, e con moto temporaneo sarebbe un’imperfezione in Dio, a cui intanto è perfezione l’intenderla in quanto Ei l’intende in istante).

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At the human level there is discursive knowledge and in God intuitive cognition; the truth is the same and, in the diverse rapport, reason is equally valid. Two equally important consequences derived from the above paragraph: first, the validity within the limits of scientific knowledge of everything that can be found scientifically based even in materialistic systems, such as the one of Democritus and those of atomists in general are; second, the possibility of ascending rationally to a God understood as the absolute reason, capable at Its own turn of giving a foundation to the construction of knowledge. If in regard to the second point it is possible to fall into a vicious circle, in regard to the first it is fundamentally important to maintain the characteristic exigency, which is present also in Thomism, of making the scientific inquiry autonomous. Magalotti meaningfully observed: I would say that as St. Thomas, overcoming the fear of the previous disorders, succeeded in the restoration of that beautiful statue of the Aristotelian philosophy with the reconstruction of its head, in that same way one day it may appear not to be a bad idea to reconstruct the head of the statue of Democritus…. No person should dare to say, because the theory of the atoms has being so good and useful for explaining nature, that it is possible to formulate the idea of using such a theory to explain the supernatural. We would answer to this by saying that this danger is no greater than this other, that an individual, having found the immateriality of the separate forms of Aristotle so good and useful for portraying the supernatural to the mind of Aristotle himself, would presume to use that notion in the manner … to portray the supernatural in accordance with the mind of the Scriptures and the Gospel (Ora dico io siccome San Tommaso, senza farsi paura de’ passati disordini, ha saputo restaurar questa bellissima statua della filosofia aristotelica con rifarle la testa, nell’istesso modo a rifar la testa a quella di Democrito potrebbe forse un giorno apparire di non cosí cattiva maniera…. Né si dica che, riuscendo il materiale degli atomi cosí buono, cosí comodo a ritrar la natura, potrebbe venir voglia a taluno di servirsene a ritrarre anche il soprannaturale, perché si risponderà che questo pericolo non è maggiore di quest’altro, che uno, trovandosi l’immateriale delle forme separate d’Aristotele cosí buono, e cosí comodo a ritrarre il soprannaturale alla mente del medesimo Aristotile, pretenda di farlo servire a quel modo … a ritrarre il soprannaturale alla mente della Scrittura e dell’Evangelio). Of little value would also be the theology of Lucretius and even that of Aristotle. Perhaps, Magalotti would add, it is less dangerous because less insidious, “meanwhile those philosophies that bring, or seem to bring, more than others, to Theology, are those that at the end oblige one to make a few steps backward” (quelle filosofie che conducono, o par che conducano, piú innanzi dell’altre nella Teologia, son quelle che obbligano da ultimo a tornar piú

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passi indietro). In conclusion, science should refrain from theology and from all scholastic (and Aristotelian) contaminations of physics and theology and proceed on its route, which is a route of natural experiments. The ready critics should remember that “as the philosophy of Aristotle does not save his theology, so also the theology of Epicurus does not corrupt his philosophy” (siccome la filosofia d’Aristotele non risana la di lui teologia, cosí la teologia d’Epicuro non vizia la di lui filosofia, in Lettere familiari, vol. 1, p. 11). This was not an unbecoming thesis for a disciple of Malpighi, Borelli, and Viviani. This was the thesis of Marchetti and of the new atomists, who were already multiplying on the footsteps of Gassendi and Lucretius, as in 1673 we can see from the Pisan Giovanni Maffei’s Responsiones ad accusationes Petri Gassendi … adversus Aristotelem et Aristoteleos (Replies to the accusations made by Pierre Gassendi against Aristotle and Aristotelians); from the violent critiques in hexameters by Father Tommaso Ceva; and from the replies of Guido Grandi. In reality, the mechanicism of the Galileian School could very well accept the atomistic hypothesis and at the same time show coherence with the teaching of Galileo concerning the limits and the tasks of science. It has to be physical science and not metaphysics, as Newton alerted, though he was the first to violate with admirable constancy his advice. But was atomism truly limiting itself to being a physical hypothesis, or was it not necessarily ending as metaphysics? Were they simply physics, as the authors pretended, the theories of Telesio and Bruno? What about the theories of Galileo? To say that the world is written in mathematical characters, that God mathematizes, and that our knowing, when valid, coincides with divine knowing, is all this pure science or also metaphysics? Even the natural experiences, when they are not purely a confirmation of facts, but a vent actively opened on the mysterious world of the Madri, are they physics depurated from any metaphysics, or instead the fruits of magic? Was not Bellarmino somewhat right, when he discounted the affirmations of Bruno and Galileo and claimed that their pretended “pure” physics, completely independent from theology, was in reality also metaphysics affecting the theological plane? Magalotti could not tolerate that “some imprudent brains … would, ahead of the Church, pronounce the anathema against Democritus” (che alcuni cervelli avventati … pronunziassero l’anatema contra Democrito prima della Chiesa). He insisted that it was physics, pure physics; but afterward, precisely with his physical and mathematical reason, he was trying to demonstrate the God without which the extension to the “real” laws of natural experiences would have remained lame. In regard to this, it was not difficult to convince Magalotti, the untiring hunter of atheists, of equivocation. He was the worthy continuator of his great teacher in sustaining the possibility of an autonomous science, though fully permeated by philosophical intuitions. He confessed that he was getting angry especially when some simpletons would say, “I see nature but I don’t see God” (io veggo la natura e non veggo Dio); when some-

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one unlearned would repeat the Epicurean thesis of the world originating by chance. His affirmation of the presence, work, and influence of God, the possibility of always reaching God rationally from things, was not perhaps eo ipso destroying in a certain way the autonomy of nature and science? An implicit but still efficacious critique of this kind came from Claude Guillermet de Bérigard (Berigard of Pisa), professor in Paris, Pisa, and Padua. Though he was not a Peripatetic, he defended Aristotle against Galileo or better he wrote a demonstration of the fact that the “simplicity” of Simplicius in defense of Aristotle was exaggerated. In his most famous work in dialogues following the style of Plato, the Circuli Pisani, published in Udine between 1643 and 1647, and then again in Padua in 1661, Guillermet opposed to Aristotelianism the Pre-Socratic philosophy. He did this so well that he merited from past historians the title of restorer of the Ionic philosophy. Berigard was adverse to all forms of the principle of authority, to all kinds of ipse dixit, and confessed: I leave acclamations and applauses to those who explain the doctrines and methods of Aristotle syllable by syllable.… I remain content with the fact of presenting doctrines that, whether or not in agreement with Aristotle and others would help bringing in some ways truth out of darkness. Indeed, from the time I was at the universities of Paris, Pisa, and Padua, while I dedicated myself to the study of philosophy, I always paid attention to what was said instead of to the person speaking (Acclamationes et applausus illis relinquo qui syllabatim Aristotelis expendunt verba and artificium…. Ea contentus sum in medium proferre quae, sive Aristoteli, sive aliis sint consentanea, conferant aliquo modo ad veritatem e latebris eruendam: nam eo tempore quo in Academiis Parisiensi, Pisana et Pataviona, rei philosophicae operam dedi, semper attendi quid diceretur, potius quam quis diceret). His criticism of Aristotle appeared immediately at the beginning of his commentary on the first books of Physics and, in a dialogic form, he opposed to Aristotle the results of the Pre-Socratic philosophy. In the dialogue between Carilaus, the Aristotelian flatterer of the populace, and Aristeus, the defender of the better position, Berigard does not appear to keep himself faithful to the critique already addressed to Galileo in 1632 for his too simple Simplicius in Dubitationes in Dialogum Galilei, ubi notatur Simplicii vel praevaricatio vel simplicitas, quod nullus efficax superesse argumentum ad terrae immobilitatem probandam tam facile concesserit (Doubts about the dialogue of Galileo, in which we noticed the simplicity or defeat of Simplicius, who could not give an effective counter-argument to the prove of immobility of the earth). Set up against Aristotle he wants to place not the Atomists or Empedocles but an eclectic naturalism, deduced from their total teachings:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY I have not considered opportune to confront Aristotle with one of the ancients, whether Empedocles, Anaxagoras, or Democritus, because each one of them presents something that Aristotle with his argumentations would easily defeat, especially if we take their expressions as they are rendered by Aristotle. I have preferred to select from all the excellent sayings of the ancients those sayings that are very coherent and from them formulate a doctrine that Aristotle would not be easily capable of defeating with his techniques, and that at their turn would dare to attack the Peripatetic citadel itself (Neque putavi quemquam antiquorum opponi debere Aristoteli, non Empedoclem, non Anaxagoram, non Democritum, quoniam singuli aliquid habent quod Aristoteles argumentis suis facile evertit, maxime si eorum sententias accipiamus ut ipse refert: quin potius ex omnibus quae ab antiquis praeclare dicta videri possunt, malui seligere placita inter se magis coherentia, unde doctrina conficeretur, quam Aristoteles non ita facile suis machinis labefactaret, et quae vicissim arcem peripateticam aggredi auderet).

Here we immediately face the point of view that Magalotti a few years later began to sustain: in respect to theology, Aristotelian physics is more or less as impious as the atomistic. Physics must be kept clearly distinct from theology; every problem should be posited on a strictly scientific plane: It remains therefore that we see whether the principles of natural things could be some subtle corpuscles created by God, from whose simple aggregation and disaggregation the beginning and end of all things could be performed. Furthermore, we should see whether the attraction and repulsion of these corpuscles which seems not repugnant to the sacred doctrine could be preferable to the first matter of Aristotle (Quare superset … an principia rerum naturalium possint esse corpuscula tenuia a Deo creata, quorum sola congregatione et secretione omnium ortus et interitus … perficiatur, et an ille corporum consensus atque dissensus nihil repugnans doctrinae sacrae, praestabilior sit quam materia prima Aristotelis). Berigard went to the bottom of the problem and, appealing to Piccolomini, Campanella, and Zabarella, began to ask whether on the rational level it was possible to ascend to God, and by excluding a process ad infinitum to admit a Creator God. The question was serious, but more serious was the solution provided by Berigard, “It appeared that Campanella followed Zabarella … when he said that true religion and God cannot be known without faith. He even added that among philosophers faith has more value than reason” (Zabarellam autem sequi videtur Campanella … ubi ait religionem veram, ac proinde Deum, citra fidem cognosci non posse: quin etiam apud philosophos plus valere fidem quam rationem). The creation of the world, the characters of

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this creation, the rapports between the world and God, and the rationality of God’s plans, are all things beyond the reach of reason, “If they possess the cognition of the true God, it is from the help of the divine instinct alone, not because of the success of any natural reason” (Si illi habent Dei veri cognitionem, id fit ope solius divini instinctus, non efficacitate ullius rationis naturalis). Referring to the pagan thinker, in whom a pure rationality is concretized, but without subsidies of revelation, he concludes, “Without being animated by a divine inspiration, no one would ever arrive at the conception of one supreme and distinct God” (nisi afflatus divino animetur, ad cognitionem Dei unius supremi et distincti numquam assurget). The divorce between God and the world, physical natural experiences and metaphysics, is here accomplished. This event also ruined the efforts of Telesio and Galileo to connect the machina mundi, mathematically rational, with a rational and rationally justifiable God, ultimate foundation of the regularity of phenomena, of the “uniformity” of nature, and of the validity of science. Vico would consciously arrive at the crisis of this concept, and he will also evince all its consequences. Rightly so, the contemporaries accused Berigard of pantheism and atheism, while he entrenched himself behind prudent reservations, “In regard to things of the divine philosophy, we cannot sufficiently and in an explicit way speak” (in iis quae pertinent ad divinam philosophiam numquam satis explicate loqui possumus). But we are disposed to agree with the bitterness of Samuel Parker more than with the candid defenses of the Celestine friar Appiano Buonafede. Within the fervor of these discussions, which were the result of the Telesian, Campanellian, and Galileian speculations, a common patrimony of culture was forming, on which the most fecund ferments of the European thought would be implanted. Nardi, an ardent critic of Campanella, was an admirer of Telesio, whose research he considered very similar to that of Galileo, and, among the Southerners, praised also Stelliola. Borelli, an academician of Cimento, would be part of the Academy of the Investiganti, to whose founder, don Andrea Concublet, Marquis of Arena, he would address himself in the De motu animalium (On the motion of animals): In the noblest city of Naples, my native country, you have created in your Museum a society or academy, in which, by way of fervent discussions, philosophical truths could be researched for the good of the Republic of Letters. You did this with great solicitude and generosity, gathering together the most famous and most learned men … the like of Tommaso Cornelio, Francesco D’Andrea, Leonardo Di Capua, Luca Antonio Porzio, and innumerable others (Tu ipse es qui in praeclara Urbe Partenopea, mea parente, societatem seu Academiam in tuo Museo erexisti, in qua rixosis disputatiunculis, philosophicas veritates ad Reipublicae litterariae bonum indagarentur, idque summa cura ac munificentia praestitisti, in unum collectis clarissimis doctissimisque

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We have already arrived at the first appearances of the Cartesian influence, to which at least in part Borelli was hostile, whereas Luca Antonio Porzio would use Descartes to criticize in De motu corporum (On the motion of physical bodies) Galileo and Torricelli. Vincenzo Viviani was profoundly impressed in 1660 with the reading of the Discours de la méthode, while he was translating into Italian the writings of Cornelio, who introduced in Naples the philosophy of Descartes. Contemporaneously, Gassendism, by resurrecting the Democritean atomism, met with the tendencies of the new scientists of the Galileian School. The diffusion of atomism followed the personal relationships between Galileo and Gassendi. It is a Galileian, Marchetti, who between 1664 and 1669 completed the version of Lucretius that was going to constitute almost the manifesto of the new tendency of thought; a tendency that, before following this or that opinion, studied all opinions, not in order “to follow one more than another, as the Peripatetics do,” but in order to freely judge on the truth of each. As we will see, this would be the only and proper motive of the fortune in Italy of both the Gassendist and Cartesian currents: to conquer the freedom of inquiry in the face of many traditional difficulties. Atomism was often nothing but a standard of battle against Peripateticism, and as such was judged in 1713 by a Paduan professor, Alessandro di Borgo. Pietro Giannone saw it invading Naples and Rome where the books of Gassendi were passing from hand to hand, everywhere free. Cantelmo in the Parthenopean cathedral on 15 February 1693 branded it with infamy, recalling the faithful back to “the indispensable necessity of avoiding like poisonous monsters the books infected with heresy and with the infamous atheism, and especially the impious Lucretius translated by the art of the devil into an Italian meter, unfortunately well praised, and many other authors of similar kind” (necessità indispensabile di fuggire come mostri velenosi i libri infetti d’eresia, e dell’infame ateismo, e specialmente l’empio Lucrezio traslato per arte del Demonio in metro italiano, putroppo applaudito, e altri autori di simil farina). On the occasion of the scandal for the process of atheism against some Neapolitans, the Rome of the Cardinals and the Pope was “rising up in arms against mathematicians and physico-mathematicians,” thinking of “adopting general prohibitions of all the authors of modern physics,” among whom they were placing first in line “Galileo, Gassendi, and Descartes, as the authors most pernicious to the Republic of Letters and to the sincerity of Religion.” Cosimo III, Grand Duque of Tuscany, two years before, had already forbidden the professors of the University in Pisa to teach “publicly or privately, in written form or voice, the philosophy of Democritus, the philosophy of the atoms, and permitted only the teaching of the Aristotelian system.” It was in Florence, in 1724, that the complete edition of Gassendi’s works appeared, edited by Niccolò Averani.

Twenty-Four THE NEW CULTURE AND ITS DIFFUSION 1. Reasons for the Diffusion of Cartesianism in Italy. Francesco D’Andrea. Camillo Colonna Louis Berthè de Besaucèle, the historian of the Cartesian movement of Italy, said that the reason why the Cartesian influence was diffused throughout Italy was that the Italian culture had been prepared to receive it by Campanella and Galileo, and the realization that the powers hostile to the new thought and united with the mysticism of Platonic nature made pungent the awareness of the need of a solid and clear philosophy that would furnish weapons of defense and offense against the danger of a suffocating return to the tradition. He also stated, “If Italy gave something to Descartes, Italy in return received much more.” The most evident aspect of the Italian Cartesianism, at least as it appeared in many of its major exponents, like Michelangelo Fardella, was the exigency of inserting the new concepts on Augustinian and Galileian bases, reconnecting them with the Renaissance tradition. Descartes, in some of his motives, helped to re-think Augustine, or brought comfort to the Galileian science. The appeal to interiority and the ascension to God enriched with new terms the Platonic-Augustinian tradition, while the method and the mechanical concept of the universe agreeably met with Galileian instances. These two motives did not necessarily oppose each other, in the same way that they were not in opposition in Galileo himself. The interest originally caused by Descartes was overall scientific, and medical doctors and naturalists were among the first to study him. In the new philosophy they could especially see a polemical instrument against the tradition, the means to affirm and defend the new ideas. To try to oppose Galileian, Cartesian, and Gassendist motives within the culture of the times would be to move away from the truth because we see them in general all united in the same effort. Francesco D’Andrea, the good man Ciccio D’Andrea as Francesco Redi used to call him, referring to an actual situation, rightly wrote: The manner of philosophizing of Galileo was afterward adopted by all the other philosophers and mathematicians of our century, of whom the catalogue would be both uninteresting and useless. It would be enough

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY to mention the two systems of Descartes and Gassendi, both admirable in their own different ways, both nevertheless agreeing that the operations of nature cannot be better explained than with the union and disunion of parts, with their situation and figure, at the exception of the human soul…. This is the so-called atomistic philosophy (La maniera di filosofare del Galileo è stata poi seguita da tutti gli altri filosofi e matematici del nostro secolo, de’ quali sarebbe non men noioso che inutile il volerne tener catalogo. E basterà per tutti nominare i due sistemi di Renato e di Gassendo, l’uno e l’altro benché per diverse strade ugualmente ammirabili, ma tutti però conformi in che le operazioni della natura non posson meglio spiegarsi che per la sola unione o disunione delle parti, e per la lor situazione e per figura, eccetto l’anima umana…. E questa è quella filosofia che si chiama atomistica).

As we can see, Descartes and Gassendi were combined with Galileo, and together they were said to renew the tradition of Telesio, and of that Renaissance naturalism that already animated the philosophy of Camillo Colonna, founder of a philosophical academy, in which he exposed “some of his speculations about a new philosophy that he intended to formulate and that would not be too dissimilar from the one that today is known as atomistic” (alcune sue speculazioni circa una nuova filosofia, che intendeva formulare non gran fatto dissimile da quella che oggi si chiama atomista). And to Telesio, Campanella was added, “Among us, Campanella is loved a lot” (Campanella qui piace tanto). The metaphysics of Platonic tendency was joined with the new physics, opening the way for the successive acceptance of the doctrine of Nicolas Malebranche. Ludovico Muratori, referring to the words of Malpighi, clearly synthetized the generic roots and the negative instead of constructive polemics of the Cartesian movement of Italy in the following paragraph: In regard to this matter, Marcello Malpighi, glory of our times, narrated that from many centuries before and until Descartes the philosophers were locked within a wide room, or a museum, or a prison—in which one exactly the historians do not agree—where they continuously took walks, fought, at times even coming to blows, but here always remaining as slaves of Aristotle, without knowing whether any other place existed in the world. Descartes, one day, became madly desperate because of some matters he could not understand; at one point the good man was so furious that he went to hit the wall with his head. Wonder of wonders, the wall was made of paper! It broke, making visible at the outside vast territories never seen before. Consequently, a large part of those gentlemen escaped from that noble detention, although others preferred better to remain in their ancient and native niche (E in questo proposito narrava Marcello Malpighi, Gloria dei nostri tempi, che tutti i filosofi da molti secoli sino al Cartesio erano stati rinchiusi dentro un’ampia o sala, o galleria, o prigione—che

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in ciò non been s’accordano gli Storici—dove continuamente passeggiavano, combattevano, talora eziandio venendo davvero alle mani, e sempre quivi standosene schiavi d’Aristotele, senza sapere che altro paese ci fosse al Mondo. Caduto un giorno in disperazione il Cartesio per non saper intendere certi punti, diede il buon uomo infuriato del capo nella parete; ed eccoti—cosa nuova—la parete era di carta, e rottasi questa, apparvero al di fuori vasti paesi non prima veduti; laonde gran parte di que’ galantuomini fuggirono della nobil prigione, quantumque altri amassero meglio di fermarsi nell’antico e nativo lor nido). Even Alessandro Marchetti, translator of Lucretius, disciple of Borelli, and praised by Malpighi for his teachings in experimental philosophy, moved within this ambiance. Addressing himself to Bernardo Trevisano, the friend of Muratori and Leibniz, and the author of Immortalità dell’anima (The immortality of the soul), Marchetti once exclaimed: Be silent, O Epicurus! Within the human breast a celestial spirit lives, a vital breath, to shame the fools and the temerarious sayings. In vain you tried to prove it infirm and frail (Taccia Epicuro: entro gli umani petti Vive spirto celeste, aura vitale De’ folli ad onta e temerari detti, Ond’ei tentò provarla inferma e frale). In the Protesta, premised to the version of Lucretius, he had energetically affirmed of wanting to bring back the materialistic metaphysics of Epicurus and to make splendidly known “many lights of the most solid and sensate philosophy” (molti lumi della piú salda e sensata filosofia) or even “the most vivid rays of an ingenious and most solid philosophy.” Marchetti was speaking of a new method and of a new direction of inquiry more than of a program radically determined, “since I am truly proud to be a philosopher, but I am ever more proud to be a Christian” (avvenga che io mi pregi veramente d’esser filosofo, ma piú mi glorii d’esser cristiano). 2. Tommaso Cornelio. Niccolò A. Stigliola. Leonardo Di Capua. Carlo Buragna According to the declaration of D’Andrea that Giannone repeated, the person who introduced the knowledge of Descartes in Italy was Tommaso Cornelio of Roveto near Cosenza, “He asked that the works of Descartes be sent to Naples. Up to this time the name of this author was almost unknown in Italy” (fece venire in Napoli le opere di Renato delle Carte di cui sino a questo tempo n’era stato pressoché ignorato il nome presso noi). Cornelio, among

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his contemporaries, was known as being “a Cartesian and a great defender of new things” (cartesiano e gran difensore delle cose nuove). He himself narrated that the first education at the Jesuits’ schools was an unhappy one; it was literary and contrary to his scientific interests, which he satisfied studying geometry and philosophy in Naples and then in Rome. A historian claimed that Cornelio must have met Bonaventura Cavalieri; he certainly met the Galileians and Torricelli, whom he mentioned in regard to the experiments about air pressure. Returned to Naples, he was called by Francesco D’Andrea to teach at the famous University where D’Andrea provided Cornelio with the writings of Descartes. Of Cornelio D’Andrea would say, “The first information we had concerning the true philosophy was given to us by our Cornelio, who taught it publicly in our university [in 1649]” (la prima notizia che ebbimo della vera filosofia la riconosceremo dal nostro Cornelio, che l’insegnò pubblicamente ne’ nostri studi [nel 1649]). At first, Cornelio taught mathematics, then medicine and astronomy. His colleague was Marco Aurelio of Tarsia, a disciple of Campanella, an individual wholly adverse to the servile followers of Galen and such an ardent innovator to the point of having to escape from the city after suffering for a time in prison. Even though attacked previously for his strong criticism of Galen, during the last years of his life Cornelio enjoyed tranquility, thanks to the protection of D’Andrea. At the Academy of the Investiganti, he commented on the Progymnasmata Physica (Experiments in physics) published in Venice in 1663. Together with Galileo and Descartes, Cornelio supported the opinion of the usefulness of the mathematical method, and of Descartes wrote a valid eulogy: Far most ingenious than all other peoples is Renée Descartes who on the basis of his own principles has succeeded in constructing a complete system of physics, a better one I dare to say no one else before him has constructed. His system is so very near the truth that it is apt to describe the order of nature. After having thought out this new method for the help of reason, he urged that nothing be blindly admitted in philosophy and taught that the virtues and the effects of natural things should be defined by analogy with artificial things, according to the laws of mechanics (Unus longe omnium ingeniosissimus Renatus Descartes integrum syntagma physicum e propriis principiis ita concinnavit, ut dicerem neminem antea in describenda naturae ratione ad similitudinem veri propius accessisse. Is ergo, cum novam dirigendae rationis methodum tradidisset, atque inculcasset nihil in philosophia temere admittendum, docuit rerum naturalium vires ac effectus ex artificialium analogia iuxta mechanicae leges definiendas esse). Cornelio derived from Descartes a large part of his hypotheses in physics and physiology, which he could combine with the inheritance from Telesio’s naturalism and the doctrines of Stelliola, Campanella, and Galileo, whom he cele-

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brated as the founders of the new philosophical freedom. A rigid mechanicist, Cornelio saw in life nothing but “a certain most tenuous breath, artificer and author of all vital operations” (tenuissimus quidam halitus, omnium plane vitalium operum effector et auctor). He did not accept the Cartesian theory on animals as automatons, being aware of the difficulty of reducing physics to geometry. Cornelio reaffirmed his mechanicism in the De sensibus, progymnasma posthumum (On the senses, new experiments in physics) which appeared in 1688, and to which he could not bring definitive touches. After distinguishing the objective qualities of the bodies, extension and motion, he may have admitted some original differences among the atoms, differences that, in addition to position, were needed for the explanation of chemical phenomena. With his theory on heat, born from the agitation of the particles, to which all physical and physiological phenomena could be reduced, he sustained the necessity of the soul to explain how to put in motion a machine like our body. The ideas of Telesio and Galileo were in this way conjoined with those of the science of Descartes. Renaissance naturalism was connected consciously with the new philosophy, in the intuition, so dear to the Galileians, of a universal mathematicism of nature. To this regard, we cannot forget to remember Niccolò Antonio Stelliola (or Stigliola) of Nola, a Lyncean academician, mentioned by Campanella in the Metaphysics as a follower of the Copernican theory. Cornelio placed Stelliola, together with Bruno, in a short dialogue that introduces the Progymnasmata where he was said to be a supporter of the new medicine as Bruno was of the new philosophy. In 1577, Stelliola had published an opuscule on medicine against Galen’s followers and Paduan Peripatetics, but already at that time, he confessed of having turned to the study of more secret disciplines (ad secretiorum disciplinarum studia). His new research provided Stelliola with enough material to produce a monumental Enciclopedia pitagorica, an index of which was published. Cornelio lamented the loss of the complete work and in his imaginary dialogue Stelliola says, “About my Encyclopedia let me say nothing else than in it I have considered the full complex of all the sciences, whose results I have gathered in this work—let here be no envy—which is worthy all those that have been previously published in the field of theology, physiology, and mathematical disciplines” (Ut nihil de mea Encyclopedia dicam, in qua scientiarum omnium syntaxim complexus sum, ut unum hoc opus—absit dicto invidia—sit instar omnium quaecunque de Theologia, Physiologia mathematicis artibus vulgata fuere). Pythagorean is what Stelliola called his philosophy because it was all pervaded by the faith in the mathematicism of reality on which the Galileian science was founded. On the basis of his studies on the published Index of Stelliola, Fiorentino justly underlined that in it are also found Brunian and Campanellian motives, and concluded in favor of a syncretism that parallels that of Cornelio. Truly, this work of fusion was possible because of the common ground of the various Renaissance conceptions, which could also be seen

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in some aspects of the Cartesian philosophy, so that Descartes and Campanella came to converge in some aspects, though remaining divergent in many others. Carlo Buragna, a Sardinian from Alghero, lived in Naples and was a poet of Platonic beliefs and an imitator of Della Casa. With his best friends Cornelio and Leonardo Di Capua, Buragna exchanged scientific talks and philosophical dissertations on Plato’s Timaeus. He, a Platonic metaphysician, was the one to write the introduction to the second edition of the major work of Leonardo Di Capua on the uncertainties of medicine and the sciences of nature in general. His intention was to fight all those “who cudgel their own brains on what either does not exist or cannot be found, and, as our Dante said, ‘treating shadow as a solid thing’” (si vanno stillando il cervello pur dietro a quello che, o non ci è, o pur non si ritrova, e, come disse il nostro Dante, “Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda”). We cannot separate the name of Leonardo Di Capua from those of Cornelio and Buragna. Di Capua was born at Bagnuolo in 1617 and died in 1695. He too was a physician and a conspicuous representative of the Academy of Investiganti, the goal of which was, as Leonardo proclaimed, “after removing all kinds of authority of mortal human beings, and with the aide of experience alone and of rational discourse, [we intend] to move to the search of the causes of natural events” (postergata ogni qualunque autorità d’huomo mortale, alla scorta della esperienza solamente, e del ragionevol discorso andar dietro per ispiar le cagioni de’ naturali avvenimenti). His motto was, “To freely philosophize against the tyrants of philosophy.” The motive of “truth is the daughter of time” (veritas filia temporis) is the soul of his works, and he once cried out loudly: By heavens, why should it be that we always stubbornly let ourselves be guided by the most reverend opinions of the ancients? … We should really be considered old and ancient, we who are born in the old world, not those born in the world still infant and young and who with their experimenting have known less than we do (Ma perché dobbiam mai sempre noi con folle ostinazione lasciarci trarre al reverendissimo parer degli antichi? … Noi veramente siamo da dire i vecchi e gli antichi, i quali nel vecchio mondo siam nati, e non que’ tali che nel mondo infante e giovane men di noi sperimentando conobbero). For Di Capua, the celebration of the greatness of the human being goes together with the affirmation of the rights of free research: Nature has certainly not elevated human beings above other animals with the advantage of being capable of raising their forehead toward the sky and abundantly enriching them with such generous, sublime, and free spirits, so that afterward they like paludal mergansers skimming always the surface would never dare to generously flap their

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wings and move upward in order to be able to investigate those so multifarious and strange manifestations that make this Universe so beautiful and admirable (Non alzò certamente natura con singolar vantaggio sovra tutt’altri animali all’uomo inverso il cielo la fronte, di sí generosi, e sublimi, e liberi spiriti abbondantemente fregiandolo, perché egli poi, qual palustre mergo, radendo sempre mai il suolo non avesse ardimento di battere generosamente in alto le penne, per potere da sé medesimo investigare quelle sí varie, e sí strane apparenze, onde bello si rende, ed ammirabile l’Universo). In his eyes, medicine and philosophy were agreeable because medicine was nothing but the practice of philosophy. It is easily understandable how from such a point of view one would fatally arrive at a devaluation of the aspect merely theoretical of philosophy and to a systematic uncertainty concerning metaphysics. Leonardo Di Capua intentionally connected this uncertainty with Galileo’s assertion that the full science is solely in the possession of God. In Parere del Signor Lionardo di Capua divisato in otto ragionamenti, nei quali, partitamente narrandosi l’origine e il progresso della medicina, chiaramente l’incertezza della medesima si fa manifesta (An eight parts reasoned opinion of Mr. Leonardo Di Capua, in which clearly is found in its origin and progress the uncertainty of medicine), published in Naples in 1681, and reprinted in 1689, the author did not limit himself to the criticism of Aristotle and of all those who presumed to reach the supreme causes leaving out the intermediate. He extended his condemnation also to more recent hypotheses, like those of Campanella, whose primalities and sense of things he rejected as fictions that live only in the brain of their creator (la loro esistenza tutta nel cervello solo dell’autore): Friar Tommaso Campanella, though he practiced accurate understanding and free philosophizing, from time to time speaks about natural things in a manner that showed how easier it was to recognize the errors into which others fell than to find the truth. What did hurt him more than anything else in finely philosophizing especially about medicine was his exaggerated acceptance of the opinions of Telesio his teacher, then his astrology and other vain tricks and riddles, with which he child likely amused himself (Fra Tommaso Campanella, comeché d’accuratissimo intendimento e libero filosofare e’ si fosse, pur sí fattamente tratto tratto favella delle cose naturali, che ben ne dà a divedere quanto piú agevole impresa sia lo schivare quegli errori ove gli altri incorsi sono, che il ritrovar la verità. Nocquegli piú che altro sommamente il ben filosofare nella medicina, l’aver lui troppo credenza voluto portare alle opinioni di Telesio suo maestro, per tacer della strologia, e d’altre vane ciurmerie e indovinelli, ov’egli fanciullescamente dilettavasi).

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Of all the ancients, of whose cult he is insistently a critic, Leonardo appreciated Democritus alone, “the incomparable Democritus … with truly natural sensible principles, so marvelously reasoned about each thing” (con principi veramente naturali, cioè a dir sensibili, cosí meravigliosamente ragionò di ciascuna cosa). For him experience, though accompanied by reason, always remains in the field of the probable. “Since we muddle the verisimilar with verisimilar, and the uncertain with uncertain, no matter whether we add long arguments and proofs, from them would never be derived a thing securely certain and incontestable” (conciossia che verisimile a verisimile accozzando, e non certo a non certo, per lunghi argomenti e pruove che vi ci aggiungano non potrà mai cosa che certa e incontestabil sia sicuramente risorgerne). This position is interesting because it revealed the conclusion of a science that tended to be completely founded on experience, and because it evinced the tendency of looking at Galileo and Descartes only as scientists, omitting in them those philosophical roots that alone in both could support a scientific knowledge. At the root of the Cartesian science stood the doctrine of the veracity of God. At the basis of the Galileian doctrine stood the idea of a correspondence between human and divine minds, and the solid certainty that the world was written in mathematical letters. To separate the one vision from the other would fatally determine a fall into skepticism. The uncertainty of Leonardo Di Capua was the effect of having absorbed Galileo and Descartes as scientists together with the refusal of their philosophical, or if one wishes, metaphysical, declared or implicit, presuppositions. 3. Giovanni A. Borelli. Giuseppe Valletta. The Debates on Jansenism. Costantino Grimaldi The most conspicuous representative of the convergence of the Galileian and Cartesian sciences, at times involuntary, free from any more profound metaphysical preoccupations, without any doubt was Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679), the presumed illegitimate son of Campanella. Borelli was a disciple of Benedetto Castelli and a professor at Messina, where he studied malaric fevers, and from where he was called to Pisa to teach mathematics. In Pisa, Borelli had Malpighi as a student, and also became a member of the Academy of Cimento. In 1667, he suddenly left Pisa to return to Messina, where he implicated himself in the political quarrels that were tormenting the city. As an exile he went to Rome to ask for the protection of Christina of Sweden and in Rome he died in poverty on the last day of 1679. Among the many scientific works of Borelli the most famous is the De motu animalium, posthumously published in two parts, in Rome, between 1680 and 1681. It was Borelli’s intention to present an integrally mathematical explanation of the animal life. About this, Berthè de Besaucèle wrote: For Borelli, the body of the animals is like a hydraulic machine. The bones are like leverages and the muscles are like pistons. The function

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of the pressurized water is accomplished by the animal spirits, to which the nerves would serve as the channels, the heart and the brain as the reservoirs (Il corpo dell’animale per Borelli è una specie di macchina idraulica. Le ossa sono leve, i muscoli i congegni; la funzione dell’acqua motrice è compiuta dagli spiriti animali a cui i nervi servono da conduttori, il cuore e il cervello da serbatoi). The opposition to Aristotelianism was evident and the Aristotelian doctrines were confuted “with the evidence itself of sensation, from which results that the muscles are instruments and mechanisms” (ab ipsa sensus evidentia, qua constat muscolos esse organa et machinas). Borelli intended to present the whole economy of the living organism in terms rigidly mechanical, reducing physiology to geometry and mechanics. He founded a rigid scientific discipline, which did not remain without followers. As we can see, what triumphed here was not only Galileo, but also the spirit of Descartes. Although Borelli was vividly opposed to the Cartesian physics and to the theory of the vortices from which the whole physics depended, he was in agreement with another Galileian, Niccolò Stenone. In the reduction of the organism to a machine, Borelli faced the concept of the animals as automata, “the most perfect machines that we have in nature” (le macchine piú perfette che si abbiano in natura), as Giorgio Martini, oriented in a Cartesian sense, will say in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, Borelli was more inclined toward the hypothesis of Gassendi and accepted a definite form of atomism. Atomist and Gassendist was his disciple Marchetti, the translator of Lucretius, hence showing once more how in the “moderns” Cartesian physics and EpicureanLucretian-Gassendist movement had the tendency to be concordant in their goal of coming together with Galileo’s heredity and, perhaps, of absorbing finally the conclusions of the philosophy of nature of Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella. This is so true that Vico could establish a comparison that brought Descartes and Epicurus closer, since in his own opinion the physics of the former “is elaborated on the outline similar to that of the latter” (machinata sopra un disegno simile a quella di Epicuro). Furthermore, Matteo Giorgi in Disputa intorno a’ principii di Renato delle Carte (Genoa, (1713) would in his accusations bring together Descartes and Gassendi, in a way not dissimilar from the one of the Jesuit poet Tommaso Ceva of Milan who in his not so elegant hexameters of Philosophia novo-antiqua (1704) brought together in a bunch Cartesians, Gassendists, and atomists. These were all followers of the monstrous aberrations sprung from Lucretius, the first, the fiercest enemy of God: O Father omnipotent, allow me to abate to the ground and hit in the forehead the giant raising his head to the sky, the giant who tried to remove

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY the divine mind from its throne and place on it instead a blind artificer (Da, Pater omnipotens, coelo capita alta ferentem Sternere humi, media percussum fronte, gigantem, Conantem e solio divinam extrudere mentem, Et coecum artificem suprema in sede locare).

It was an attitude of narrow traditionalism, which in 1724 provoked, always in Latin verses, the refined reply of Guido Grandi with the short poem Diacrisis (Q. Lucii Alphei Diacrisis, in secundam editionem Philosophiae NovoAntiquae R. P. Cevae cum notis Iani Valerii Pansii). Grandi, a member of the Order of the Camaldulites, was professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa. The new physics was the symbol of modernity, the standard of battle against tradition. Cornelio showed it in the introductive dialogue of the Progymnasmata through the speeches of the two philosophers from Nola, Bruno and Stelliola. A strong paladin of the modern culture was Giuseppe Valletta. Valletta wrote Historia filosofica toward the end of the century and then revised it between 1696 and the beginning years of eighteenth century. Its printing was interrupted, but widely circulated. In this work, Cartesianism and Gassendism were presented as the continuation of the PythagoreanPlatonic line, and Atomism was defended at the same time, with words that are humorous, “These are particles, or small bodies, which have generated so much fear and horror in some people, almost as if they were ferocious elephants, or giants bearing a whip”(particelle, ovvero corpicciuoli, che han recato tanto spavento ed orrore ad alcuni, quasi che fossero feroci Liofanti, o i Giganti di Flegra). Valletta, some few years before the Historia filosofica, had finished a Discorso filosofico in materia di Inquisizione et intorno al correggimento della Filosofia di Aristotele (A philosophical discourse on the inquisition and the correction of the philosophy of Aristotle), which begins in the same way as the Historia, of which it can be considered a first draft, though with many differences and an vibrant exaltation of Descartes, whose “principles” are declared to be “the same as those of a Holy Father” (principî … gli stessi di un Santo Padre). On the other hand, the link between Renaissance Platonism and “free philosophy” was mostly asserted. This same Discorso, with a different title (Lettera … in difesa della moderna filosofia e de’ coltivatori di essa), appeared in Rovereto in 1732, through the mediation of that Girolamo Tartarotti, who would be the cause of vigorous polemics of anti-ecclesiastical color concerning witches. Valletta, whose library in Naples was most celebrated, and Costantino Grimaldi bring us completely in the midst of the polemics that the new physics, Cartesian and Gassendist, had originated. As it is known, Vico, in the Autobiography, narrated that when in 1684 he left Naples for Vatolla, “the philosophy of Epicurus had begun to be cultivated in Pierre Gassendi’s version; and two years later news that all

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young men have become its devotees made him wish to study it in Lucretius” (si era cominciato a coltivar la filosofia d’Epicuro sopra Pier Gassendi, e due anni dopo ebbe novella che la gioventú a tutta voga si era data a celebrarla). Nine years later, after “his period of solitude … he heard that the physics of René Descartes had eclipsed all preceding systems” (verso il fine della sua solitudine … ebbe notizia aver oscurato la fama di tutte le passate la fisica di Renato delle Carte). Such great diffusion of new ideas caused the reaction of the Scholastics. In the second tome of his Philosophia peripatetica, containing the physics and published in Naples in 1687, the Jesuit Giovan Battista De Benedictis attacked in the same instance Gassendi and Descartes, both the sons of the same mostly deprecated father, Epicurus. In 1694, under the name of Benedetto Aletino, De Benedictis printed five Lettere apologetiche in difesa della Teologia scolastica (Apologetic letters in defense of scholastic theology). They were dedicated to Carlo Francesco Spinelli, and in them, while defending Aristotle and Scholasticism he attacked Gassendi, and much more violently Descartes, to whom the third letter was dedicated, and Descartes’s herald in Naples, Leonardo Di Capua. Aristotelianism alone was allowed to defend itself from libertines and atomists, among which Descartes was to be counted. These polemics were not remaining merely on the scientific-literary level; they concretized themselves in such prosecutions, menaces, and arrests, which at a certain point began to touch even the most illustrious of these innovators, Francesco D’Andrea. The philosophical dispute became complicated because of its branching out into religious perspectives. This happened not only because in the Cartesian physics, which was not less dangerous than the Lucretian-Gassendist Atomism, an expedient found for getting rid of God, but also because Cartesianism began to be seen as the spiritual father of Jansenism. Against the extraordinary diffusion of the Provinciales (Lettres Écrites par Louis de Montalte à un Provincial de ses Amis, 1656), De Benedictis published in Italian as Ragionamenti di Cleandro e di Eudosso (Pozzuoli, 1694) the work in French of the Jesuit historian Gabriel Daniel, who remarked that Pascal’s letters were to be found everywhere, in the hands of all people, “They are read; they are praised; they have become the ornament of libraries, the flavor in entertainments, the uniform of the erudites” (si leggono; si lodano; sono divenute l’ornamento delle librerie, il condimento de’ diporti, la divisa degli eruditi). In Jansenism De Benedictis saw the direct filiation of Descartes. Publishing his version of the Viaggio per lo mondo di Cartesio (A voyage through the world of Descartes), published in Venice, in 1739, of the same Daniel, the translator De Benedictis who, “as a friend of truth is not taken by the genius of the current century” (ch’amico sopratutto della verità non si fa trasportar via dal genio corrente del secolo), affirmed that his intention was to attack Jansenism at its own roots, for the reason that Descartes was not only the founder of the sect, but also the first to start to understand erroneously Augustine’s thought:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Today Jansenism and Cartesianism are strictly related and thus Monsieur Arnauld who made himself head of Jansenism has become a most bitter protector of the esteem of Cartesianism, for no other reason than he could in two ways hit the Jesuits at their heart, which was the truly unique goal he had. We can thus conclude that anyone professing to be a disciple of Cornelius Jansen and his false Augustine, willingly or unwillingly, without any farther examination of his conduct, must be said to be necessarily a Cartesian as well, given that the intended goal for both movements is the same (Essendo oggi col Giansenismo imparentato strettamente il Cartesianismo, da che il Signor Arnaldo, che si fe’ capo di quello, divenne un agrissimo mantenitor dell’estimazione di questo, non per altro fine, se non perché l’una e l’altra via andava dritto a ferire nel petto de’ Gesuiti, ch’era l’unico bersaglio; ne viene che qualunque fa professione d’essere scolaro di Giansenio, e del suo falso Agostino, vogli o no, senza altrimenti farsi a disaminare pria la condotta, debba esser Cartesiano, come che il fine inteso sia sempre lo stesso).

However, without minding the accusations of De Benedictis against Grimaldi, as after him the Jesuits often repeated, of a true and proper diffusion of Jansenism in Naples it is not possible to speak before the second half of the eighteenth century, when against such rigorism Alfonso de’ Liguori would raise his probabiliorism in Theologia moralis, which was published in its first edition precisely in 1753. No matter what, the religious preoccupations are at the heart of the Lettere of De Benedictis, as well as in Difesa della scolastica Teologia and in Difesa della terza Lettera Apologetica, all published in Rome in 1703 following the replies of Grimaldi. Descartes is Epicurean, no less than Gassendi; one admits the atoms, the other the corpuscles, but both are substantially in agreement, as Daniel sustained, when he imagined that Gassendi, “though some times suffered some contrasts in regard to Descartes, he is civilly accepting all day long and with much deference the Cartesians who come to pay him visit” (avvegnaché abbia altre volte avuto qualche disturbo col Sig. Delle Carte, accoglie non pertanto civilmente tutto il giorno e con assai distinzione i Cartesiani che vanno a visitarlo, in Viaggio, p. 76). With Daniel, De Benedictis charged Descartes with the denial of providence and of making impossible Christ’s presence in the sacramental species, given that he reduced matter to pure space. As we mentioned, Grimaldi had replied to de Benedictis in three writings published between 1699 and 1703, in which he showed that the true enemy of religion was Aristotle, and that Cartesian thought was far from being contrary to the principles of Christianity because it was extremely pervaded by a profound spiritualism. The adherence of Malebranche to Cartesianism was the confirmation. Now, if one look at things seriously, Descartes was truly the

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providential restorer of Catholicism. On the other hand, the Aristotelians should have noticed that theories existed common to both the ancient and the modern thinkers. In this, what would be the objection—of those who, though admitting some value in Descartes, reduced his physics to that of Aristotle— against the originality of Descartes was reversed: “It can be said that Aristotle is modern, or that the moderns in their best are Aristotelian” (Quindi si può dire che Aristotele è moderno, o che i moderni nel loro meglio sono Aristotelici). This is the conclusion to which the Franciscan Stefano Pace arrived in his Fisica de’ Peripatetici, Cartesiani, ed Atomisti al paragone della Vera Fisica d’Aristotele (The physics of Peripatetic, Cartesians, and Atomists in comparison with the true physics of Aristotle), printed in Venice, in 1729. De Benedictis died in 1706, but the Jesuits succeeded to denounce Grimaldi when in 1725 he reprinted the accrued collection of his Discussioni Istoriche Teologiche e Filosofiche. This work was prohibited by Cardinal d’Althann, Viceroy of Naples, put to the Index, and thrown into the sea. Ulterior interventions of many individuals among whom Giannone, at the Austrian Court in Vienna, were of no avail for the removal of that interdict. 4. The School of Caloprese. Francesco M. Spinelli. Tommaso Campailla. Michelangelo Fardella. Matteo Giorgi It was an obstacle, but it did not suffocate the diffusion of the Cartesian thought. In 1713, the Italian translation of a short biography of Descartes by Adrien Baillet, dedicated to Doria, who was considered the column of Neapolitan Cartesianism, appeared; in 1719, in Naples, the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia edited by Gioacchino Poeta; in 1722, in Turin, the translation into Italian of the Principia Philosophiae by Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, known among the Arcadians as Mirista, who premised the work with a defense of the orthodoxy of Descartes, and where also was mentioned the erudition and the great doctrine of Vico, whose positions however were strangely misinterpreted. Teaching Cartesian philosophy in his own natal town was Gregorio Caloprese della Scalea, “a great Cartesian philosopher, who held Vico very dear” (gran filosofo renatista, a cui il Vico fu molto caro), and of whose teaching Metastasio left a vivid remembrance: I was still hearing the venerable voice of that remarkable philosopher Gregorio Caloprese who was taking upon himself the task of instructing my tender age, conducting me almost by hand through the vortices of the then reigning ingenious Descartes, of whom he was a very fierce advocate. He was alluring my childish curiosity, now by showing with wax, as if by playing, how striated particles formed among small spheres; then, keeping me astonished with the enchanting experiences of the doctrine. It seems as if I’m still seeing him breathless in the effort of persuading me that a small dog was nothing but a clock, and that three-dimensionality is sufficient definition for solid bodies. I’m

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY seeing him still laughing when, after having kept me for a long time immersed in a somber meditation, making me to doubt everything, he became aware of my sighing as he pronounced the “I think, therefore I am.” It was the invincible argument of a certainty that I was despairing of ever finding again (Io sentiva di nuovo la venerata voce dell’insigne filosofo Gregorio Caloprese, che, adattandosi, per istruirmi, alla mia debole età, mi conduceva quasi per mano fra i vortici dell’allora regnante ingegnoso Renato, di cui era egli acerrimo assertore, ed allettava la fanciullesca mia curiosità, or dimostrandomi con la cera, quasi per gioco, come si formano fra i globetti le particelle striate; or trattenendomi in ammirazione con le incantatrici esperienze della dottrina. Parmi ancora di rivederlo affannato a persuadermi che un cagnolino non fosse che un orologio; e che la trina dimensione sia definizione sufficiente di corpi solidi: e lo veggo ancora ridere quando, dopo avermi per lungo tempo tenuto immerso in una tetra meditazione, facendomi dubitar d’ogni cosa, s’accorse ch’io respirai a quel suo “Ego cogito, ergo sum”: argomento invincibile d’una certezza ch’io disperavo di mai piú ritrovare).

In the Risposte to Francesco Maria Spinelli della Scalea, printed in Naples in 1723, Paolo Mattia Doria will refer to the school of Caloprese, where “the philosophy of Descartes, the doctrine of Monsieur Arnauld, Monsieur Pascal, and the other gentlemen of Port-Royal” were taught. With some malignity, Doria would insinuate that at the school of Caloprese, Spinelli had absorbed all together Cartesian errors and Jansenist heresies, “I still remember the amazement that your rare talents generated when at your age of no more than fourteen or fifteen, you were heard explaining like a teacher the philosophy of Descartes and narrating with incomparable grace the morality of the Jansenists of Port Royal” (Sovvienmi ancora della meraviglia, che i vostri rari talenti in tutti destavano quando nella vostra età di non piú che 14 o 15 anni vi udivano spiegare da Maestro la Filosofia di Renato, e narrare con grazia incomparabile la morale de’ Giansenisti di Porto Reale). If we were to compare the program of studies followed by Spinelli under the guidance of Caloprese, we would be able to form a concrete idea of that kind of scientific teaching “that freezes even the most ardent inclination of the youth, blinds the fantasy, exhausts the memory, flattens ingenuity, and slows down the understanding” (il quale assidera tutto il piú rigoglioso delle indoli giovanili, lor accieca la fantasia, spossa la memoria, infingarddisce l’ingegno, rallenta l’intendimento), according to the bitter Vichian disapproval. Compared with the mnemonic-literary scholastic tradition, the new teaching came to be a revelation and liberation. The autobiographic letter of Spinelli is a complete hymn to the Cartesian school of Caloprese where in addition to the reading of Descartes, there was that of Epicurus, “In philosophy, though Descartes alone was the one we almost always were reading, nonetheless Caloprese after having well founded us on Cartesian philosophy, wanted also to explain the com-

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plete Lucretius” (nella filosofia poi quantunque non si leggesse quasi che il Cartesio, pure il Caloprese dopo di averlo been fondato su la filosofia Cartesiana volle spiegargli tutto intero il Lucrezio). From Giannone we know that Caloprese, in a fashion typically Cartesian, “did not omit to be present at the anatomical observations” (non tralasciava d’esser presente nell’osservazioni anatomiche) performed by Luca Antonio Porzio. Descartes was always the core of that teaching, even though the Cartesian consideration of the spiritual life was not completely disjointed from the Lucretian view of nature: The meditations of Descartes obliging the mind to stay fixed on the inquiry of nature and its properties … take it to walk on the path of discovering in those two objects, firstly, their own existence to be independent from bodies; secondly, the nature of the universals (Le Meditazioni di Renato obligando la mente a star sempre fissa nell’indagamento della natura e proprietà della medesima, e da questa all’essenza di Dio … la fanno incamminar da sé medesima a scoprire in que’ due obbietti primieramente la loro esistenza indipendente da’ corpi, poi la natura degli universali). Exactly on this accentuation of the value of the mind will Spinelli later found his fusion of Cartesianism and Platonism, proclaiming that “a good and true Cartesian should not blame Plato, and should necessarily follow this philosopher in order to enter the penetralia of a profound philosophy” (un buono e vero Cartesiano non dee biasimar Platone: ma per entrar negli intimi penetrali della profonda filosofia dee seguitar necessariamente questo filosofo). The opposition to Cartesianism of Doria and Vico seemed to be justified, at least in part, by the separation between Cartesian physics and metaphysics and by the preeminence assigned exclusively to the first so that the second, instead of occupying an essential position, descended to a secondary place and seemed to have become an artifice badly added thereafter. This was the opinion professed by Vico, when he wrote in the Autobiography: René, over-ambitious for glory, as on one hand he tried to make himself famous among professors of medicine with a physics contrived on a pattern like that of Epicurus and presented for the first time … a few first outlines of metaphysics in the manner of Plato … in order one day to reign in the cloisters (Renato, ambiziosissimo di gloria, sí come con la sua fisica machinata sopra un disegno simile a quello di Epicuro … affettò farsi celebre fra i professori di medicina; cosí poi disegnò alquante prime linee di metafisica alla maniera di Platone … per avere un giorno il regno anche tra’ chiostri). Instead of presenting itself as a unitary system, Cartesianism was appearing broken into the mechanicist physics and the appendix of Platonizing metaphysics. This was due to the way in which a Cornelio or a Leonardo Di

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Capua, as scientists, accepted and diffused the new theories in an ambiance ready to absorb scientific doctrines instead of metaphysical hypotheses. But this conclusion was intentionally rejected by Spinelli when, although connecting Descartes and Epicurus, sustained afterward “the necessary union of Platonism and Cartesianism.” The Cartesian metaphysics began to impose itself especially after Malebranche covered it with a vest of Platonic piety that must have made it more acceptable to the heirs of Ficino. Among the Cartesians, Michelangelo Fardella would be the one who brought Cartesianism back to Augustinian Platonism, though still maintaining contact with the sciences. Campailla sang: After Fardella admired those insuperable minds through those superb pages, we could see that the philosophic arguments were dressed up with mathematical thoughts. Finally, of the true science he will teach the dogma and express them in prudent maxims. And on the footsteps of the great Augustine, Fardella will dictate the norms for reaching true knowledge (Poi del Fardella, entro quei fogli alteri, mira gl’impareggiabili talenti. Vestir di Matematici pensieri vedrassi, i Filosofici argomenti. De la vera Scienza i dogmi veri insegnerà con massime prudenti. E del grande Agostin seguendo l’orma al verace Saper darà la norma). Don Tommaso Campailla, a patrician from Modica, was the author of L’Adamo ovvero il Mondo creato, poema filosofico (Adam or the created world, a philosophical poem) of which the first canto was printed in Mazarino and Catania in 1709, thereafter in twenty cantos in Messina in 1728. This work merited a comparison by Ludovico Muratori to the work of Lucretius. In his poem, Campailla presented the Cartesian philosophy in its completeness. Adam, the man, with the guidance of Raphael, the angel, rediscovered all the truths of Cartesianism in the reconstruction of the universe and in the ascension to God through the steps of Descartes’s inquiry. To these Cartesian doctrines, Campailla raised a constant hymn, in Canto 5: Adam, having turned his inquisitive eyes to another place, is taken by a new wonder. Among hundreds of philosophical volumes, he sees an obelisk facing him high

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on which almost as a trophy a great volume, shining and jeweled, eminently rests. The obelisk is sustained by a pyramid of books that seems to hold it high with obsequy and with friendly force pushes it toward the starry vortex. On the spine of that beautiful volume written in permanent diamantine letters these words are seen: This is the immortal René de les Cartes, who, reborn from these pages, immortal should remain (Ma, volti altrove Adam gli avidi lumi, da nova meraviglia è frastornato: di cento filosofici volumi e cento ei vede un’obelisco alzato: su cui , quasi trofeo, siede eminente gemmato un gran volume e risplendente. Quella che lo sostenta in su le terga, di libri alta piramide costante, sembra che l’alzi ossequiosa ed erga con sforzi amici al vortice stellante. Il dorso al bel volume un scritto verga a lettere d’indelibile diamante: L’immortale Renato è de le Carte, Che Rinato Immortal fia da le Carte). The cogito, in octave rhyme, is exposed in this manner in Canto 1 (vv. 53ff.): If my thought is sufficient to deceive me when it deals out its thoughts to the body, whom should I trust more sincerely, who would not deceive himself in thinking when he rethinks? And the thought of thinking, when thinking the false or the true, should not deceive itself in thinking, what does it think? But let it deceive me, anyway! If I rethink this, thinking of deceiving myself, I do think the certain indeed! (Se basta ad ingannarmi il mio pensiero Allor ch’al corpo i suoi pensier dispensa: De’ chi m’affida almen, che piú sincero, Non s’inganni in pensar, ch’a ciò ripensa? E di pensar, pensando al falso, al vero,

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Non s’inganni il pensier, pensar, che pensa? Ma m’inganni egli pur; s’a ciò ripenso, Pensando d’ingannarmi, al certo io penso).

The faithfulness to Descartes is continuous and constant, so that even Gerdil, who used to call him “excellent poet and philosopher,” loved to refer to the Cartesian proof of the existence of God with the verses of Campailla in Canto 1 (vv. 60ff.): In the mind I have impressed a simulacrum of the most perfect and infinite Being. This too may come from myself, from the idea of myself in myself engraved. But I am finite. And the reflex of a finite being cannot produce an infinite Being. Therefore outside of me there is an infinite substance, if the semblance of an infinite Being is found in me (Pur nella mente ho il simulacro impresso D’un Ente perfettissimo, infinito. E forse questo ancor vien da me stesso, Dall’idea di me stesso in me scolpito: Ma finito son io; né può riflesso Causar d’Ente finito Ente infinito: Dunque infinita è fuor di me sostanza Se in me d’Ente infinito è la sembianza). Campailla did not limit himself to celebrate Descartes. In Apocalisse dell’Apostolo S. Paolo, Poema sacro, in octave rhyme (Rome, 1738), he versified the mysteries of grace, opposing to the false contemplation, to quietism, the active virtue and the true contemplation, bringing back in his rigorism the echo of the Jansenist discussions. He also wrote widely on scientific questions criticizing Borelli and Isaac Newton, whose works he received in gift from George Berkeley, with whom he had epistolary exchange. In 1723, Berkeley sent Campailla from London “the book of this most famous philosopher as well as mathematician [Newton] … as a pledge of sincere friendship,” for which you may look in Considerazioni sopra la fisica d’Isacco Newton. Campailla finalized his doctrines in Filosofia per príncipi e cavalieri (A philosophy for princes and knights), which remained unpublished until 1841. Certainly one of the most interesting parts of L’Adamo ovvero il Mondo creato is the fifth canto, in which Campailla outlined a kind of critical history of philosophy. There he attacked Aristotle, turning toward him the accusations of impiety that commonly were thrown against the Cartesians, “He would stain his reputation with the impious unfaithful shade of Atheism” (ma i freggi ei macchierà del suo gran nome con empia d’Ateista ombra infedele). Aristotle is the one denying divine providence “when he tries to remove from

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God the task of caring for the world with his omnipotent arm, argumenting that the eternal, uncreated, and divine world is equal to God supreme” (tor tentando dal braccio onnipotente / la cura del Mondo a Dio conviene,/ uguale argomentando a Dio superno, / increato e divino il mondo eterno). Coming to modern philosophers, Campailla exalted Telesio, “the gentle Telesian system,” which not only would destroy Peripatetism but also would encourage a free philosophy. No differently than Telesio, Campanella “… would make easier ways for science and / reveal to the world with free speech / the serious errors of Aristotle” (spianerà de la scienza i calli / e scoprirà con libera favella / d’Aristotele al mondo i gravi falli). He praised Gassendi “who would be able to expose the ancient Epicurean system free from errors,” even though afterward he blamed Marchetti for having translated Lucretius into Italian. His praise was truly fully for Descartes the “perfect,” in Canto 5 (vv. 70ff.): On the wings of his great ingenuity he would found in his mental factory a perfect philosophical system of the world. He would be the first to imitate the sacred architect, creating with an ideal hypothesis a new universe in his intellect. Instead of extensive his knowledge would be profound, and his ingenuity would be the greatest of the world (Del grande ingegno ei fonderà sull’ale sistema filosofico perfetto d’un mondo ne la fabbrica mentale il primo imiterà sacro architetto creando con ipotesi ideale un novello universo il suo intelletto: anzi ch’estenso un suo saper profondo sarà l’ingegno suo maggior del mondo). And with Descartes the Cartesians of Italy are praised as well: His critical mien would attract a Leonardo Di Capua and Fardella with an erudite logic would defend his special principles. The egregious Costantino of the Grimaldi would defend him from the calumnies of the Aletino (Il critico suo sguardo di Capua gli consacra un Leonardo … ne difende il Fardella i singolari principî suoi con logica erudita. Ne impugna le calunnie a ll’Aletino egregio de’ Grimaldi un Costantino).

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The greater eulogy remains that for Michelangelo Fardella of Trapani who taught Cartesianism at the University of Padua from 1693 to 1709. Fardella knew Borelli in Messina. In Paris he frequented the Cartesian Circles, taught in Rome, Modena, and finally in Padua. He was called to teach in Barcellona, and in 1718 returned to Naples to die there. He published in 1691 the first tome of a philosophical system that he thought to subdivide in various volumes, whose general title was Universae philosophiae systema, in qua nova quadam et extricata Methodo, Naturalis scientiae et Moralis fundamenta explanantur A system of universal philosophy, in which new and difficult principles of natural science and mathematics are explained) Tomus primus, Venetiis, 1691. The treatise Utraque dialectica rationalis et mathematica (On rational and mathematical dialectic) was published in Amsterdam in 1695; another treatise, Animae humanae natura ab Augustino detecta (On the nature of the human soul, exposed by Augustine), came out in 1698 in Venice. Of Fardella there is also a prolusion of 1693 and several various articles in epistolary form that were printed in the Galleria di Minerva. He was quite well known in the cultural circles of Europe, was in rapport with Leibniz, and was also mentioned by Berkeley. Being a Sicilian, he could find in his own fatherland a constant Platonic tradition, within which Leibniz’s influence would take a place during the eighteenth century through Niccolò Cento and Tommaso Natale. In Fardella the influence of Malebranche was the one mostly felt, even though what was interesting was the conscious insertion of Cartesianism into Augustinian Platonism. The scientific mentality of the Galileians is not strange to him, but he fought against the Gassendist atomism. He did not profess pure Cartesianism, preferring instead to hide himself behind the authority of Augustine, but he was ready to react when Giorgi asserted that Descartes had no originality and novelty. The treatise of Logica of 1691, inspired for the most part by the logic of Port Royal, affirmed the need of bringing the light of reason to the darkness of faith and of overcoming the exaggerate veneration for the ancients (immodica erga antiquos reverentia). The adequate way of doing this has been suggested by Descartes, “To tell honestly the truth, Descartes is the only one who, among the ancients and the moderns, has thought of a certain right and natural method of philosophizing” (ut sincero animo fatear ex antiquis et recentibus solus Cartesius rectam et naturalem quandam philosophandi methodum excogitavit). The structure of the world is mathematics; mathematics must therefore be the science of nature, “Once you remove mathematics, there would be no natural science” (tolta la matematica precipita la scienza naturale). The art of God is mathematics (ars Dei mathesis est); mathematics is the key to penetrate the secrets of God. It is the manner in which the human mind is joined with the divine, “God has created all things according to weight, number, and measure, according to the laws of statics, arithmetics, and geometry” (Dio ha creato tutte le cose secondo il peso, il numero e la misura, e cioè secondo le leggi della statica, dell’aritmetica e della geometria). The philosophi-

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cal process must be a rigid mathematical deduction, and for this precise reason, in the second appendix to the logic, Fardella was inclined to doubt about the assumption of a material and trans-objective substance. In 1694, in Genoa, Matteo Giorgi, a physician of Albenga, published an opuscule that had some considerable diffusion, in which he examined the “new philosophy” of Descartes, making evident how difficult it was to maintain in Cartesianism the objective existence of bodies, when it is manifest that, if we possess ideas, the reality of things would add to or remove from them nothing at all. Only by accepting the testimony of the senses is the reality of the world admissible. Giorgi was fighting the identity posited by the Cartesians between extension and matter in order to vindicate for the latter a resistance to the sense of touch. On the other hand, he was preoccupied with maintaining also the presence of God everywhere in the universe and arrived to admit in God an infinite expansion (stendimento infinito): Though God is immobile and indivisible, we necessarily understand that in this immensity an infinite stretching out exists. In this regard, I recall that beautiful definition that was, I believe, taught by Trimegistus: God is an intelligible sphere whose center is in every place and its circumference in no place at all. This same thing was expressed in verses by a noble genius, “In the same way that one mind penetrates all members of the body, so one God is in the one mass of the world, and still more vast than the world itself.” (Perché Dio è immobile, ed indivisibile, e pur necessariamente intendiamo in questa immensità uno stendimento infinito; onde sovvienmi a proposito quella bella definizione insegnata, cred’io, da Trimegisto: che Dio è una sfera intelligibile, il cui centro è in ogni luogo e la circonferenza in nessun luogo, espressa da un bell’ingegno in questi versi: ut tota per artus / corporeos mens una subit, sic unus in una / mundi mole Deus, mundo tamen amplius ipso). In the divine unmoved extension, according to Giorgi, the innumerable material particles, extended and tangible, moved. Fardella, instead, was speaking of a Democritus in which the empty space is divinized and was underlining the confusion into which Giorgi fell; beginning with the idea of defending the existence of bodies, Giorgi believed to be able to demonstrate it by revealing their nature. But Fardella was insisting that the two questions were different and that at the logical level, that is philosophical, there was no possible demonstration of the existence of things in themselves. As for the other problem concerning the structure of reality, Fardella, relying on mathematical analogies, asserted that the true first element of the whole was the point: in punctum veluti numerus in unitatem, resolvitur extensio (extension resolves itself in the point, as the number does in the unity). In the treatise on the soul, he insisted that “the point is the simplest thing, without mass, size, parts … totally indivisible and inextended …; but though inextended and indivisible the

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Point is nevertheless the source whence every extension takes origin” (il punto è cosa semplicissima, priva di mole, di grandezza, di parti … del tutto insecabile e inestesa …; ma benché inesteso e insecabile il Punto è tuttavia la sorgente onde trae origine ogni estensione). Leibniz made Fardella aware that he was holding on an equivocal position, bringing his attention on the necessity of defining the nature of these points: they were not material, because where there is matter there is extension and divisibility, but neither were mathematical, because the mathematical point is not real and it cannot constitutes the continuum (unde continuum ex punctis non constat). The orientation of Fardella appeared clear when, speaking of the nature of the soul, after having repeated with Descartes that it is not extension, or corporeity, he added that therefore it is a point, a metaphysical point. It would seem a Leibnizian position, but Fardella never went to the bottom of the problem, he instead stopped his short period of correspondence with Leibniz, who was insisting on the fact that Fardella should deepen the knowledge of the infinitesimal calculus that had been Leibniz’s key to the comprehension of the structure of reality. If, therefore, the souls are points; if the world is an idea of extension, what reality have things outside of us? On this Fardella embraced the motive of the incommunicability between spirit and matter. Things remain cogitationes (thoughts), in respect to which a real existence is groundless and useless, because it would represent nothing else than a doubling of the idea: Why isn’t it possible that, when there is no sun out, in one instant the sun could be seen by the eye, as if it were present? This experience teaches that very often in dreams we perceive objects that truly in reality we don’t admit that they exist. In fact, at night, when I sleep, I see the sun shining over the horizon, I see many monstrous bodies move in many different ways; all things that are nothing outside of the idea. Therefore, the existence of the represented object cannot be derived from the fact that I sense and see (Cur enim contingere nequit ut, sole nunquam existente, in uno instanti ab oculo sol, ut vere ipsi praesens, videatur? Hoc autem experientia ipsa docet, etenim saepissime in somniis obiecta percipimus, quae vere a parte rei existere non concedimus. Quotiens enim noctu, dum dormio, solem supra orizontem effulgere video et monstrosa plura corpora diversimode moveri, quae nihil extra ideam sunt? Ergo ex hoc praecise, quod sentio et video, nullo pacto obiecti raepraesentati existentia colligi potest). What would be so strange in assuming that the reality of wakening up would be nothing else than a coherent dream? There is no contradiction in the admission that the same created mind, for a mysterious cause, would be now disposed to perceive objects in a

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confuse and obscure way in such a manner that it would seem dreaming, that is seeing things that are not; and at another moment, the mind could instead be solicited in a way so different to be able to perceive the objects with greater clarity, distinction, and order, though still they are nothing outside that perception (Non c’è ripugnanza alcuna ad ammettere che la stessa mente creata, per una causa misteriosa, sia ora disposta in modo da sentire gli oggetti confusamente ed oscuramente in modo tale che le sembri di sognare, di veder cioè cose che non sono; in un altro momento invece essa potrebbe esser sollecitata in modo tanto diverso da sentire gli oggetti con maggior chiarezza, distinzione ed ordine, ancorché nulla essi siano fuori del senso). Fardella in no way would find refuge in the distinction between primary and secondary qualities because sense per se in no way would secure their objective validity. With this position Fardella did not intend to doubt the reality of the world but only to discuss the source of the evidence of things, which would only be Cartesianly found in a God who does not deceive, “I agree concerning the real existence of the World; of this I have no doubt at all” (convenio quidem circa realem existentiam Mundi, de qua nullo pacto dubito). Being in favor of the position of the spirituality of the soul, Fardella Augustinianly sustained with increasing force the intimacy of the soul with God, and derived from Malebranche the motives for the revival of the doctrine of illumination. He will also find in Augustine the suggestions for the opposition to the Epicurean-Lucretian materialism that Gassendi has revived. 5. Father Giovenale. Bernardo Trevisano. Paolo M. Doria. The Controversy with Francesco M. Spinelli The Cartesian doctrine, known at the beginning in its scientific aspect and, as such, in conjunction with the Galileian science and Gassendism, once it was deepened in its metaphysical value, was often reduced to Platonism. It would be precisely through Platonism that the Cartesian doctrine would again conciliate itself with the interest for the experimental sciences, when Antonio Conti, a scientist, philosopher, and poet with a European fame, would propose to bring together empiricism and rationalism, “The method of philosophizing of Galileo was to begin from the senses, and in this he was agreeing with Bacon … the method of philosophizing of Descartes instead, as I learned it from Fardella, was to begin to philosophize from the ideas and God: I intend to conciliate the two” (il metodo di filosofare del Galileo era di cominciare dal senso, in che conveniva con Bacone … laddove il metodo di filosofare del Cartesio, inculcatomi dal Fardella, era di cominciare a filosofare dalle idee e da Dio: io penso di conciliarli). Conti was almost the ideal line of union between contrasting currents and tendencies, putting together in his vast work as a popularizer instead of as a constructor the experience of a whole century. He had taken his first steps in philosophy with the help of Fardella and at his

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deathbed he was comforted by Jacopo Stellini. In the Augustinianism of Fardella already the presuppositions existed of the reduction of Cartesianism to Platonism that if in someone, as in Doria, was posited in light of an opposition, in others it was a concordance made easier by the mediation of Malebranche. Perhaps without being under the direct influence of that mediation, in some ways the characteristic representative of it was Father Giovenale, Giovan Battista Ruffini, born in1635 in Brez in the Val di Non. In 1685, the work that Antonio Rosmini praised, the Solis intelligentiae, cui non succedit nox, lumen indeficiens ac inextinguibile … seu immediatum Christi crucifixi internum magisterium (The interior immediate teaching of the Crucified Christ or the effective and inextinguishable light of the Sun of intelligence to which night will never succeed) was published in Augsburg by Simon Utzschneider. In the appendix, this work included the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum of St. Bonaventure, in the third chapter of which it is found the theory of illumination that Vincenzo Gioberti would counter-oppose to Rosmini during the well-known polemical debate between the two philosophers. Father Giovenale observed that the cognitive act implies the rapport of the powers of the soul and of the object. In order that the cognitive act be effective it is needed that the object and the soul assume a certain proportionality: the object must assume the capability of being understood. This intelligibility is like a dress that the world must wear in order to be acceptable to the soul, to be able to unite with the soul. God is the one who dresses things up with intelligibility, “God is the power marrying my mind” (Deus est virtus maritans mentem meam). God is the power permitting the mating between the soul and the object by illuminating the world and making intellection possible; God is the “vision of the mental eye” (visio oculi mentalis). The light of truth that descends from God makes the world comprehensible to us. It was a doctrine that, in a suggestive and powerful form, since the midst of the seventeenth century the Capuchin Valeriano Magni had sustained. Magni was widely remembered by Pascal in the Provinciales for his anti-Jesuitical polemics, Apologia contra imposturas jesuiticas s. i. (An apology against the Jesuitical impostures of the Society of Jesus), for his Anti-Aristotelianism (Philosophiae pars I, in qua tractatur de Peripatu, de logica …Varsavia, 1648), but was charged for plagiarizing Torricelli. Magni kept correspondence with Marin Mersenne, but was most famous for a short essay on the light of minds and its representation, De luce mentium et eius imagine (Rome, 1642), in which Augustinian and Bonaventurian doctrines returned with an efficacy worthy of Malebranche or Rosmini. God, understood as Ens totale (The Wholeness) is the light of the mind, and this light gives intelligence to the human nature and intelligibility to things, “The Perfect Being is light to the minds” (Perfecta Entitas est lux mentium). For the reason that everything is known in reference to the perfection of the finite quality taken into consideration—the finite beautiful when we think the absolute Beautiful; the single goods when we think the Good in Itself—it is evident that the condition of being intelligible would

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be the Being in its wholeness. In De luce mentium (p. 27), Magni explained: As the person who knows for instance perfect beauty can at the light of that beauty definitely know the participated beauty of other persons, so the person who understands the perfect being, can definitely understand the kind of perfection in existence that each thing possesses or does not possess (Ut enim is qui novit e.g. pulchritudinem perfectam, potest in luce eius secum ipse definite cognoscere cuiusque personae participatam pulchritudinem; sic is, qui intelligit ens perfectum, potest definite intelligere cuiusque rei eam entitatis perfectionem, quam et habet et non habet). Being, in its eminent perfection is the region of intelligibility (regio intelligibilium), the supreme intellectual life, the Logos, the Ratio. In De luce mentium (p. 58), we read: O Reason, to me sweeter than any life … what is there clearer than Reason? What is Reason? It is something eternal, immutable, which determines in every thing what is true, false, just, unjust, possible, and impossible. What is Reason? It is the eternal, immutable law of being, light of the understanding, and the norm of the will (O Ragione per me piú dolce d’ogni vita … cosa c’è piú chiaro della Ragione? E la Ragione cosa è? È qualcosa di eterno, immutabile, che in tutto determina il vero, il falso, il giusto, l’ingiusto, il possible, l’impossibile. Cosa è la Ragione? È eterna, immutabile legge dell’essere, luce dell’intendere, norma del volere). The doctrine of Father Giovenale, professor at Innsbruck, did not have much influence in Italy, when instead the work of Bernardo Trevisano was quite diffused. Trevisano was a Venetian patrician, friend of Muratori, and he was perhaps the one person who in the Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia criticized Vico. He authored an introduction to the Riflessioni sul buon gusto and in 1704 published his own Meditazioni filosofiche, in which Cartesianism and Platonism were strictly connected. Of him Campailla poeticized: See the work of Trevisano, who makes clear the solid truths of the disciplines. His mind would go higher than any human mind, so much intent is he in the divine ideas: extolling his sovereign nobility, he was ready to marry the nobility of doctrines. The Venetian Athens would see in him the spirit of Socrates and Plato reborn (Del Trevisan ve’ l’opera, che spiana

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The point of departure is Descartes, and the point of arrival is Plato. From doubt, he Cartesianly arrives at the “I”: “I cannot be nothing, while I think of being something. And though it could be that I am not the one who doubts of not being, nonetheless—as Descartes added—I am the same one who already doubts” (non posso esser niente, mentre penso d’esser qualche cosa. E se ben può essere ch’io non sia quello che dubito di non essere, pure—aggiungeva lo stesso Descartes—ego ipse sum qui iam dubito). But, having discovered existence in the “I,” he sees now a complex of innate ideas implicit in it: Of this being that I now know, is the idea coming from elsewhere than from myself? In such a case, my being has been the only exemplar, and it was inseparable from those faculties through which, I think, I recognized the notion of the being for whose reason I am…. Certain of being, I right away inevitably knew consecutively and inseparably from that same truth the unity, and with the unity the infinite (Di questo essere da me conosciuto, hassi forse l’idea da altra parte che da me stesso? L’essere mio fu in tal caso il solo esemplare, ed inseparabile da quelle facoltà per cui, penso, riconobbi la nozione di quell’essere per cui sono…. Certo dell’essere, già conobbi inevitabilmente consecutive e inseparabili dallo stesso il vero, l’unità, e con l’unità l’infinito). In the certainty of the discovered “I,” in existence, and in existence with its own “primalities,” our life would balance between the finite and the infinite, which in its own fullness of reality would include the infinite richness of the intelligible world: Concluding, we want to say that the unity is a vain idea—a thing that we will never be able to say with reason—or we want to admit that outside of us there is a true and absolute principle…. This [principle] contains in itself all those ideas that afterward as they are shared with our minds become also constitutive of our own thinking (Dunque, o vogliamo dire che l’unità è un’idea vana—cosa che non potremo mai dire con ragione—o ammettere che fuori di noi vi sia un vero e assoluto principio.... Questo raccoglie in sé tutte quelle idee che poscia partecipate alle nostre menti sono costitutive del nostro pensare).

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Is this presence of God, not overwhelming our personality? Is it not annihilating, radically, our will? God disposes, but does not predispose; It destines, but does not predestine. It cannot be said that It wants things to be, but that It always wants that they would presently be. If the vision or cognition that therefore God has of my being is what causes my being, and causes it as it actually is and It wants it to be, then we must also say that God wants us to possess being with the ornament of freedom. Indeed, I would repeat with Descartes that we experience freedom from the fact that we can always abstain from accepting all the things that are completely certain and tested (Egli ordina, non preordina; egli destina, non predestina. E non può dirsi ch’egli vuole che le cose siano, ma, sempre che voglia presentemente, che siano. Se la visione o cognizione adunque che Dio ha del mio essere, cagiona il mio essere, e lo cagiona qual’è in effetto e vuole che sia, mentre —dirò con Renato—libertatem experimur, ut semper ab his credendis, quae plane certa sunt et explorata, possumus abstinere, bisogna dire etiamdio che Egli voglia che possediamo l’essere stesso ornato di libertà). God’s veracity, God’s presence in our conscience, far from suffocating liberty, is a proof that we have liberty. Descartes and Malebranche could agree with Plato, and Tommaso Russo himself, so profoundly Platonic, would not assume an attitude of radical opposition to Descartes as Paolo Mattia Doria and his friend Vico would take. The mention that Vico in the Autobiography (p. 138) made of his friendship with Doria and Doria’s Platonism is known: At this time both Vico and Don Paolo Doria were frequent visitors in the home of [Nicola] Caravita, which was a rendezvous for men of letters; and Doria, as fine a philosopher as he was a gentleman, was the first with whom Vico could begin to discuss metaphysics. What Doria admired as sublime, great and new in Descartes, Vico remarked to be old and common knowledge among the Platonists. But in Doria’s discourse he perceived a mind that often gave forth lightning-like flashes of Platonic divinity, so that henceforth they remained linked in a noble and faithful friendship (E in questi tempi praticando spesso il Vico e ’l signor don Paolo Doria dal signor Caravita, la cui casa era ridotto di uomini di lettere, questo egualmente gran cavaliere e filosofo fu il primo con cui il Vico poté cominciare a ragionare di metafisica; e ciò che il Doria ammirava di sublime, grande e nuovo in Renato, il Vico avvertiva che era vecchio e volgare tra’ platonici. Ma da’ ragionamenti del Doria egli vi osservava una mente che spesso balenava lumi sfolgoranti di platonica divinità, onde da quel tempo restaron congiunti in una fida e signorile amicizia).

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Their friendship was sealed by Vico with dedicating his book on metaphysics, the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians), to Doria. Vico’s words tell us that Doria at the beginning was not adverse to Descartes but an admirer at least of the Cartesian metaphysics. This must have been public knowledge because in 1713 Don Paolo Francone, Marquis of Salciso, dedicated to Doria a compendium of the life of Descartes that Adrien Baillet had written. According to Spinelli, at the school of Caloprese, Doria learned and professed a Cartesianism inclined to Spinozism. Paolo Mattia Doria, though a Genoese by birth, lived almost always in Naples, where he came when still very young. At that time, he was interested in questions of physics and mathematics that he afterward collected in two volumes and published in Venice between 1722 and 1726. But already in 1710 he had published in Augsburg the treatise Della vita civile (On civil life), in whose appendix the second edition appeared of the more famous pedagogical treatise Dell’educazione del principe (On the education of the prince) where the initial Cartesianism, that before was so much valued, was tempered with manifest Platonism. Doria’s first proposal was to free the intellect “from the haze of the senses and of fantasy” (dal fosco dei sensi e della fantasia) in order to find those “seeds of truth, which as Plato said have been inserted by nature in all human beings” (semi del vero, che al dir di Platone, in tutti sono dalla natura inseriti). For this reason, little importance is given to poetry, because “fantasy is the one that should prevail over the other faculties in the poets, who are very often people less inclined to the strict and geometric method that brings to the true” (nei poeti dovendo sempre prevalere sopra l’altra potenza la fantasia, accade spesso che questi uomini sono impazienti di quel metodo stretto e geometrico, che alla conoscenza del vero conduce). The teaching of the Platonic Republic was united, in the eyes of Doria, to that of Descartes: arithmetic, geometry, and algebra would not only be the vestibule to physics and metaphysics, but also the aides to morality, illustrating and sustaining the principles themselves of justice. The doctrines of the Republic were reflected in Doria’s social theory: Civil life is the harmony of efforts toward goodness; it is an interior harmony that inserts itself in a reciprocal support of natural virtues and capabilities, which human beings learn to share with the intention of achieving human happiness. Again civil life is a harmony formed by all the particular virtues, when each virtue is practiced at the aide of other virtues, in order to compose the body of a perfect state suitable for the production of human happiness in its individual parts (Uno scambievole soccorso delle virtú e delle facoltà naturali, che gli uomini si danno l’uno all’altro affine di conseguire l’umana felicità, oppure un’armonia che si forma di tutte le virtú particolari, adoprate l’una al soccorso dell’altra, per formare un corpo di stato perfetto, atto a produrre nei particolari l’umana felicità).

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The supreme goal in life is “to abstract our mind from all sensitive things and apply it completely to the contemplation of God” (astrarre la mente da tutte le cose sensibili e fissarla tutta nella contemplazione di Dio), whose vision is the vision of the supreme goodness. This vision is the foundation of politics because “it is true that to found politics on the ideas of human beings as they are, and not as they should be, would be to put completely out of sight the virtues, the just, and the honest” (è troppo vero che il fondar la politica sopra l’idea degli uomini quali sono, e non quali debbono essere, sia un perdere al tutto di veduta la virtú, il giusto e l’onesto). Doria in 1724, publishing in Venice his Discorsi critici filosofici, was declaring that in those discourses he had reviewed all the doctrines previously held: After considering that these too short and too easy logics, these kinds of geometries reduced to calculus, and these abbreviated philosophies do not make the mind capable of knowing the truth in philosophy, but on the contrary, by making the mind superficial in its ratiocinations, ruin and corrupt it so that no other fruit can be derived from these logics, geometries, and philosophies than the one of forming a superficial philosopher (Avendo considerato che queste logiche troppo brevi e troppo facili; queste specie di geometrie ridotte a calcolo, e queste filosofie in accorcio, non solo non rendono la mente atta a conoscere il vero in filosofia, ma all’incontro, rendendola nei suoi raziocini superficiale, la guastano e la corrompono per modo che da quelle altro frutto non si può trarre, che quello di formare un filosofo superficiale). After these considerations, Doria decided to “think out a metaphysics, in which a veracious and intimate wisdom could be contained” (pensare una metafisica, nella quale la verace ed intima sapienza si contenesse). With the construction of his new metaphysics, Doria proposed the confutation of Descartes, “who was the first to corrupt the purity of the geometric demonstration” (il quale è stato il primo, che ha corrotta la purità della dimostrazione geometrica), and with Descartes that of Spinoza, who is the unnecessary but handy consequence from Descartes. Doria in 1733 was writing these lines to Spinelli, “I did not say that every Cartesian must necessarily become a Spinozist; I only said that a temerarious Cartesian wishing to have a clear and distinct idea of every thing would stumble against the error into which the impious and temerarious Spinoza fell.” But like Spinoza, Doria also fell—the malign critics added. Doria’s opinion was that Descartes could always remain a useful critical prologue to Platonism, “To all people of good faith and sincere heart, Descartes can be useful as an introduction to the Platonic philosophy” (Renato agli uomini di buona fede e di cuor sincero può servire per una introduzione alla filosofia platonica). The Cartesian experience must have been for Doria precisely of such nature: an initiation to Platonism, toward which Vico may also have contributed. In the Ragionamenti of 1737, Doria

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would proclaim instead that Descartes was the philosopher responsible for the fact that “Plato became known as a strange fellow, a Poet, and Aristotle as a simpleton” (Platone [è stato ritenuto] uno stravagante, un Poeta, Aristotele uno sciocco). In the introduction to the Discorsi critici filosofici, treading in the clearest of ways in Descartes’s footsteps in the first part of the Discourse on method, Doria reconstructed the ideal history of his own formation. Disappointed because of mathematical studies, he had turned “to the philosophy that was commonly taught to the young at that time, to a science that was erudite instead of reasonable” (a quella filosofia, che comunemente a i giovani s’insegnava in quel tempo, cioè a una piú erudita che ragionevole scienza). It was in this science that he learned to understand the opinions of Epicurus, Gassendi, and Descartes “concerning our sensations, the origin and composition of the sensible things external to us,” but unfortunately even with all of this “the knowledge of the more internal and truer reasons of things” could not be obtained. With these words Doria underlined quite clearly the prevalent scientific character that brought together in their first circulation Cartesianism and Gassendism, presenting them as two physical hypotheses, completely separated from those metaphysical bases without which they could not sustain themselves in any way. Doria added that the conscious refusal of metaphysics was contradictory because it was not rooted on one justifying construction, but wore itself out with an unjustified refusal, “Now then, if Skeptics and Epicureans cannot reach through meditation the lofty and immense spaces of eternal verities, where the metaphysicians affirm that they see the origin of all things, how can they assert that the metaphysicians could not see such verities?” (Ora dunque se i Scettici e gli Epicurei non salgono colla meditazione fin’ a quei immensi spazi delle verità eterne, dove i metafisici asseriscono di vedere l’origine delle cose tutte, come possono eglino asserire che i metafisici non le vedano?). In his search for metaphysics, Doria asked for the help of “the most grave and venerable individuals,” and among them was Caloprese, who diverted Doria from the ancients and introduced him to the reading of the Cartesian Meditations, which were not vain and obscure like Aristotle or poetic and useless like Plato. For Caloprese, the Meditations were confirming, Only this philosophy is capable of bringing us to the knowledge of the most recondite truths of metaphysics, the properties of sensible things, and in addition to this of freeing us from those prejudices that the ancients have implanted in the human minds. In the new guise human beings would become all at the same time wise, erudite, and completely free from the errors of the ancients (Questa sola filosofia è quella, ch’è valevole a farci conoscere le verità piú riposte della metafisica, le proprietà delle cose sensibili, e con ciò a liberarci da quei pregiudizi che gli antichi filosofi han piantati nelle menti degli uomini; ed in questa guisa l’uomo ne diviene tutto ad un tempo sapiente, erudito, e spregiudicato degli errori degli antichi).

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This goes hand in hand with the narration of Vico in the Autobiography (p. 138) concerning the philosophy of this time, when “the highest praise of a philosopher was: He understands the Meditations of Descartes” (l’elogio di gran filosofo era: Costui intende le Meditazioni di Renato). Doria was not disappointed by the Cartesian meditations, of which he particularly praised the first three: In the first three meditations I felt that my spirit was having a full and unusual enjoyment, because I saw that in his speculations Descartes wanted to proceed by means of a good method of reasoning. I felt obliged to confess then, as I am confessing also now, that he has been the first who has awakened in us this desire for reasoning with a geometric method in Philosophy (Ed invero nelle prime tre meditazioni sentii riempirsi d’insolito piacere il mio animo, imperciocché vidi ch’egli nelle sue speculazioni voleva procedere con buon metodo di ragionare, per modo che fui costretto a confessare, come confesso ancor ora, ch’egli è stato il primo, il quale ha risvegliato in noi questo genio di ragionare con metodo geometrico in Filosofia). The problems came when Doria, having moved out of the Cogito, realized that with Descartes he could not arrive at the knowledge concerning the nature and the essence of real things, “or at the particular essence of the soul and the mind, or at the origin and the essence of the body, or, to tell it in one word, at the knowledge of the smallest light of God’s productions.” On the other hand, when Doria attempted at a development of Cartesianism in some of his dialogues, he arrived at the portal of Spinozism and was charged with being a Spinozist, “Soon after, calumny brought its attack against me, because some people were saying that I was a Spinozist” (in appresso poi non mancò la calunnia di esercitar contro me le sue forze, perché alcuni andavan dicendo che io ero spinosista). In the Discorsi critici filosofici, Doria’s metaphysics, constituted as it were by a method rigidly geometric, all concerned with the deduction of the whole from the unity, could justify some approaches to Spinoza, and, before Spinoza, to Bruno. It is enough to think about the method with which he justified reality: Speaking of God’s productions, I would also show that by natural reason we could say that God must be the creator of infinite forms, and because It possesses infinite ideas, Its ideas must be productive of infinite forms…. I proved then by natural reason that from these substantial forms souls and extension were formed, which among themselves are different in their mode of being but not by reason of substance (Venendo poi alle produzioni di Dio, io dimostro che anco per lume naturale Iddio dee essere creatore d’infinite forme, e ciò perché avendo egli infinite idee, le sue idee non possono non esser produttrici di forme infinite…. Dimostro poi come per lume naturale da queste

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In a Cartesian fashion he added, “concerning some particular productions of God, it is necessary to be satisfied with the Revelation” (che intorno alle particolari produzioni di Dio sia necessario acquetarsi alla Rivelazione). The book La filosofia di Paolo Mattia Doria, con la quale si chiarisce quella di Platone (The philosophy of Paolo Mattia Doria through which the philosophy of Plato is also clarified), was published in 1728, followed in 1732 by the Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro il signore G. Locke ed alcuni altri autori moderni (Defense of the metaphysics of the ancient against John Locke and other modern authors). His positions, always more oriented toward Platonism, always more critical of the innovators, gave way to the violent reaction of Francesco Maria Spinelli who in 1733 published in Naples some very extensive Riflessioni on Doria’s Discorsi critici filosofici, to which Doria replied in the same year with no less ample Risposte. Spinelli, having come into possession of the unpublished youthful dialogues of Doria, openly accused him of Spinozism and atheism, charges that Doria retorted against this adversary. It was an accusation of old, confirmed by the insistence of Doria on the concept of unity as the root of everything, a unity eternally productive more than temporally creative. Even before the appearance of the Riflessioni of Spinelli, in the Difesa della metafisica, Doria had felt the necessity of warning: Why should we wonder about the fact that Democritus accused Socrates of the crime of being a sophist, if I who … am the least among the followers of the sect of Plato, have met in Naples some ridiculous followers of Democritus, who, being unable to understand even the easiest of the Platonic doctrines, have confused Plato with the impious Benedict Spinoza, and then claimed that my philosophy is similar to that of Spinoza? (Ma qual meraviglia è mai, che Democrito abbia incolpato Socrate del delitto di sofista, se io, che … sono il minimo fra i seguaci della setta di Platone, ho ritrovato in Napoli alcuni ridicoli Democriti, i quali non essendo capaci d’intender nemmeno le cose piú facili della dottrina platonica, confondendo poi Platone coll’empio Benedetto Spinosa, han detto che la mia filosofia sia simile a quella di Spinosa). Doria was imbued with the Platonic doctrines of the Renaissance and had largely absorbed Plotinus’s positions and those expressed in the Neo-Platonic commentaries on the Parmenides, moving from the One, to which he ascended through the Augustinian process of interiorization that he found in Descartes. Then, from the One, by “employing the method of geometric logic,” Doria deduced the attributes and the productions of God, teaching the

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same things, which “obscurely Plato taught in the Parmenides, Timaeus, and his other dialogues.” As Doria’s Plato had much of Plotinus, his Spinoza had very little of the true Spinoza, and this was the reason why he and Spinelli could not understand each other. Doria lamented: Your Lord, your great error consists all in the fact that you do not distinguish between Plato and Spinoza. Hence when discussing the eternal production, you confuse the Platonists with the Spinozists, who are as different between themselves as the day is from the night. The reason for this is that Plato posits a matter eternally produced and coeval with God, but he posits it as produced by the divine ideas of the divine intelligence, and admits it to be different in essence from God, but still participant of the Oneness, that is, God. On the contrary, Spinoza, by removing from God ideas and intelligence, makes God an infinite extension which he names substance, and affirms that matter exists by itself and in itself. Thus Spinoza does not teach as Plato does that divine intelligence and love are the prime productive cause of matter (Signor Principe, tutto il vostro grande errore consiste in ciò, che voi non distinguete fra Platone e Spinosa, onde poi sotto il nome di produzione eterna confondete i platonici co’ Spinosisti, e questi sono tanto fra lor diversi come il giorno è diverso dalla notte, perché Platone dà la materia eternamente prodotta e coeva a Dio ma la dà prodotta dalle divine idee, o sia dalla divina intelligenza, la dà diversa da Dio nella sua essenza, ma partecipante dell’Uno, cioè di Dio. All’incontro Spinosa togliendo a Dio le idee e l’intelligenza fa Dio un’estensione infinita sotto il nome di sostanza, e fa la materia esistente per sé, senza però dimostrare come quella possa esister da sé e per sé, mentre non insegna, come Platone, la divina intelligenza e ’l divino amore per causa prima e produttrice della materia). After this curious, but not too rare transfiguration of Spinozism, Doria sharpened his arrow for Descartes: Your Lord, it would be better for you to continue to navigate in the small lake of the Cartesian philosophy, throughout which you only and always have navigated, than to dive into the vast ocean of the Platonic philosophy in which you are having too many shameful shipwrecks (Signor Principe, meglio areste fatto a continuare a navigare nel piccolo laghetto della filosofia cartesiana, nel quale solo avete sempre navigato, che ingolfarvi nel vasto oceano della filosofia platonica, nel quale fate troppi vergognosi naufragi). The polemic continued and against Doria came Cartesians and Platonists, until the authorities imposed silence on the contestants. Doria continued to elaborate his Platonism in some of the Ragionamenti published with various

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poems in 1737 in Venice, and finally in the Narrazione di un libro inedito di P. M. Doria, fatto a fine di preservare e di difendere le numerose sue opere da quell’obblio nel quale tentano di seppellirle gli suoi contrary (Narration of an unpublished book of P. M. Doria written in order to preserve and defend his numerous writings from the oblivion into which his enemies are trying to keep them), printed in Naples in 1745. In this last book, you would be surprised to find a commentary on the Philebus and to discover the tendency of its author to reduce even Thomism to Platonism! 6. Tommaso Russo. The First Critique of Locke In Doria we saw the journey of return of Italian thought from Cartesianism to the Platonism of the Renaissance tradition through the reduction of Cartesianism itself to the Augustinian motives that were present in it. Another more composed Platonic system, more archaic and less exuberant with polemics than that of Doria, we find in a contemporary, who was also in touch with Vico, the abbot Tommaso Russo of San Giorgio of Montefusco, near Benevento. Russo, in 1736, published in Venice a work titled Dell’animo dell’uomo, disputazione unica nella quale si sciolgono principalmente gli argomenti di Tito Lucrezio Caro contro l’immortalità (On the human spirit, a disputation in which the arguments of Titus Lucretius Caro against immortality are confuted), and again in 1743 in Naples the Della mente sovrana del Mondo (On the sovereignty of the mind over the world). In a letter of 7 November 1729, Vico revealed having read and highly appreciated the manuscript of Dell’animo dell’uomo, opposing it to Descartes and Malebranche, who could never reach, Vico said, the vision of a pure spirituality, whereas “you in a manner truly divine … at the light of the things of the spirit have illuminated the things of the body, and with the splendor of the idea have illustrated the darkness of matter” (Voi con una maniera veramente divina … al lume delle cose dello spirito rischiarate quelle del corpo e dallo splendore dell’idea illustrate l’oscurezza della materia). The two treatises, on the human spirit and on the universals, for Russo are intimately conjoined because “the mind of the world and that of human beings are the two first principles from which all science depends” (la mente del mondo e la mente dell’uomo sono due primi capi onde tutta la scienza dipende), and because the mind is the unity that gathers the multiplicity within itself, giving meaning and value to it. The rhythm one-many, illustrated by Plato in Philebus and Parmenides, constitutes for Russo the path of access to philosophy. Unity and multiplicity are seen as a synthesis in which no term can be separated from the other, because the contradiction lives in the eternal contrast of reality and is precisely alive in the perennial opposition, “Truth cannot be found in the dissolution of the enigmas in one of the contradictory terms, but must be searched in the tempering and according of the contradictions, and in the development of enigmas and wonders” (Il vero non può trovarsi nel discioglimento degli enimmi in uno dei contradittori, ma dee

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ricercarsi nel temperamento e nell’accordo delle contraddizioni, e nel sviluppo degli enimmi e delle meraviglie). The one and the many should be indissolubly united, and Lucretius who disperses the unity of human beings in the corporeal atoms is as wrong as Spinoza who annihilates the unity of the whole in the multiplicity of the universe, because the world is one in its maker, the body is one in the soul, reality from one grade to another is unified in the spirits, and the spirits are one in the absolute Spirit. The world is one, and it is regulated by one mind: The sovereign and magisterial ingenuity of the magnificent construction of the world, adorned with so much constancy, order, harmony, abundance, variety, splendor, and beauty more than which cannot be imagined, impresses the senses of the human beings so strongly that already at the first vision of world they are persuaded that it is the work of a sovereign wisdom. For these reasons, every nation and every individual, at the first light of reason, without effort and without any argumentation, knows that the world is a well-ordered production, formed by an intelligent principle (Il sovrano ingegno e magistero dell’amplissima opera mondana, con tanta costanza, ordine, armonia, con tanta ubertà, varietà, luce, bellezza, quanto piú non può essere, fortemente ferisce il senso dell’uomo e il convince, e al primo aspetto il persuade, esser lavoro di sovrana sapienza. Per queste ragioni ogni popolo ed ogni uomo, nel primo barlume dell’intelligenza, senza sforzo e senza alcuna argomentazione, sa che il mondo è prodotto ordinato e formato da un principio intelligente). It is a unity obtained through a multiplicity of progressive unifications, in which from matter the process of ascension reaches the throne of God, “in the same way that on the contrary, departing from the sovereign perfection of the divine mind … through the steps of diverse minds the descent reaches the full absence of mind in matter” (siccome all’incontro, dalla sovrana perfezione della mente divina dipartendosi, … per vari scalini di menti diverse si discende fino all’amentia della materia). In this rhythm of one and many the human being is the summarizing typical form because in it come together the world of matter and that of spirit. The human being is almost the exemplary type of the unity of the world, a soul that keeps together a body, a mind that unites the world and that “gathers all times and places in one single wide duration and spatial measure” (tutti i tempi e i luoghi aduna in una sola ampia durazione e spaziosa contenenza). The fact that Vico would exalt Russo as “the greatest pure metaphysician,” ideal son of Ficino and Pico, disciple of those metaphysicians that Vico opposed to the philosophers of his own time, should not astonish us. Russo was following the metaphysicians who had proclaimed human centrality before Descartes; they had thought of a human being who was not a pure cogitatio, but a being of flesh and spirit, the center of

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a world kept in unity by it; a world that could still transcend it, not because it was infinite, but because it was the horizon between two infinities. The Platonism so profoundly rooted in the Renaissance tradition was reappearing everywhere. Even Spinelli, who always remained a convinced Cartesian, felt the need at a certain moment for returning to the four principal dialogues of Plato, Parmenides, Phaedo, Timaeus, and Sophist, which awakened in him the thoughts of moving more and more away from the Peripatetic universals. The Parmenides particularly gave him motive enough for finding the true distinction, real and substantial, between the minds and the bodies, that the minds should always be One, indivisible, whereas the bodies would always be but many more (… a’ quattro principali dialoghi di Platone, cioè al Parmenide, al Fedone, al Timeo, e al Sofista, i quali gli risvegliarono i pensieri d’allontanarsi sempre piú da quegli universali peripatetici, e sopra tutti il Parmenide gli diede motivo di ritrovar la vera distinzione reale e sostanziale tra le menti e i corpi, cioè che quelle debbon esser sempre Uno, indivisibile, laddove i corpi non posson esser che sempre perpetui piú). If the Platonic-Cartesian synthesis did not seem impossible, and instead it appeared to Spinelli that “a necessary union of Platonism with Cartesianism and the dependence of Cartesianism from Platonism were part of the first foundations of philosophy,” much less easier appeared the assimilation of the Lockean empiricism that started to become known and toward which moved all those who on the scientific level had against the ancients favored the Galileian-Cartesian-Gassendist union. Document of this development of the Italian thought is the characteristic page of the Difesa della Metafisica degli antichi Filosofi (A defense of the metaphysics of the ancient philosophers) of Doria (bk. 1, ch. 2): Truly the philosophizing of our contemporaries is like a continuous error and a continuous revision, without ever being capable with their mind of asserting some kind of certainty…. When I began my studies as a young man, everybody was a follower of the philosophy of Pierre Gassendi and the only song you could hear was that famous verse of the poet Lucretius, “There is nothing else than the body, which can touch and be touched,” and the sect of the philosophers who sustained as true the intellectual knowledge were ridiculed. In order to attract the unlearned to the support of their sensist sect these [Gassendists] were singing also the following verse of a certain Florentine preacher: “Come and believe in me for all the rest is nonsense.” … In short, at that time sense and matter alone had value and everything that was the object of spiritual and pure intellect was rejected. But this furor did not

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last long. Not long afterward the sect of Epicurus was banished and the doctrine of René Descartes was embraced, and then nothing else was preached but confused, adventitious, and clear and distinct ideas…. For a few years this second kind of philosophy was applauded, but then the modern philosophers got tired of it as well and the search for other new sciences was renewed. They attached themselves first to the doctrines of Signor Newton, whom thereafter they abandoned because this great mathematician and philosopher did not meddle much with metaphysics. Thus many of the modern philosophers stopped at the philosophy of Signor Locke … and this is the sect that in Rome, Naples, and other parts of Italy is today taught by many teachers, and why it has a great number of followers (Invero e’ sembra, che il filosofare de’ nostri moderni altra cosa non sia, che un continuo errore, ed una continua emenda, senza che mai la lor mente giunga alcuna cosa di certo ad assentire…. Nel cominciamento de’ miei studi, tutti erano della filosofia di Pier Gassendi seguaci, né altro si cantava che quel verso del poeta Lucrezio—Tangere vel tangi praeter corpus nulla potest res—e si derideva la setta di que’ filosofi che sostengono per vere le conoscenze intellettuali, ed acciocché il volgo potesse ancora intendere ed applaudire alla loro setta sensista cantavan i seguenti versi d’un certo fiorentino: Credete a me ch’elle son tutte fole…. Alla perfine in quel tempo non si vantava altro ch’el senso e la materia e si rifiutava tutto ciò ch’era l’oggetto dell’intelletto spirituale e puro. Ma durò poco questo furore, perché poco appresso si bandí la setta di Epicuro e si abbracciò la dottrina di Renato delle Carte, ed allora niun’altra cosa si andava predicando, che idee confuse, idee avventizie, idee chiare e distinte…. Durò pure alcuni anni l’applauso di questa seconda filosofia, onde i filosofi moderni stanchi ancora di questa, sono andati altre nuove scienze cercando. Si sono appigliati prima alle dottrine del Signor Newton, ma perché quel gran matematico e filosofo non molto s’impaccia della metafisica, molti fra’ moderni si sono poi fermati alla filosofia del signor Locke … e questa ora è quella setta la quale in Roma, in Napoli e nelle altre parti d’Italia da molti maestri s’insegna, ond’è ch’ella abbia buon numero di seguaci). These considerations were done in 1732, and they clearly showed that, although Doria was himself taking by now a position among the ancients, the new ideas have been widely spreading themselves. The recriminations of deserters like Niccolò Stenone, ex-Protestant and ex-Cartesian, or the Latin poems of the Jesuit Tommaso Ceva, first published in 1704 and reprinted as propaganda material in 1723 and many more times afterward, could never oppose the dangerous fascination of the new ideas. The verses of Ceva were translated into Italian by his colleague Olpio Acheruntino, commented by “the Academic among the Signori Ottusi di Spoleti called Rinvigorito,” and dif-

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fused from Venice beginning in 1730. From Pisa, a vibrant center of studies, Grandi replied to Ceva, again in verses, and with such a strong passion that his Superior at the College of Florence lost all peace and could not find rest for at least a month. The dangerous Lockean ideas had already started to be diffused in Italy since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Conti had found An Essay concerning Human Understanding (published in 1690) in a bookstore in Venice before 1713 and read it with great pleasure—“I read it and it pleased me that the author treated the question on extension” (lo lessi e molto mi piacque ch’egli trattasse dell’estensione, ecc.)—thus nourishing in his developed empiricism the problem he had proposed for himself, to bring together in agreement both experience and reason. Muratori, on the other hand, who in his youth had animatedly condemned the Scholastics, confessed in a letter of 1733 to Girolamo Tartarotti that “he had been horrified by Locke, a most subtle English philosopher, when he heard him saying in a printed and widely dispersed book that he was convinced that matter can think” (raccapricciare il Locke sottilissimo filosofo inglese, allorché l’udí dire in libro stampato e che ha molto spaccio, esser egli persuaso che la materia può pensare). 7. Antonio Conti. Gian Vincenzo Gravina. Ludovico A. Muratori The Paduan Antonio Conti, who will obtain a European fame and was in contact with Malebranche, Newton, and Leibniz, began with the studying of Scholastic philosophy. In Prose e Poesie (vol. 2, pp. 3–4), he confessed: Being annoyed with the scholastic philosophy and theology that at that time I understood very little or nothing at all because of the obscurity of its method and the composition of principles that are abstract and incomprehensible, it happened that one day in Venice in the year 1706 at the bookstore of Luigi Pavini, where it was the custom of the literati to meet and enjoy conversation, I heard them praising the philosophy of Descartes. Among others, there was the Signor Tommaso Cattaneo who had been a lecturer in philosophy at the university of Padua [and appreciated Leibniz very much], who said using a French sentence that Descartes was the first who has taught how to think…. His saying impressed me very much since I was anxiously in search of truth. Thus, I looked for the abbot Fardella, who was in Venice at that time, and I spoke to him with great fervor of spirit about Descartes and he without any hesitation offered to explain to me the metaphysical meditations of that same philosopher…. I accepted the offer of Fardella who with much clarity and ease made me to savor, if not to well understand, the power and the spirit of the Cartesian meditations. In addition, in order to make even more comfortable my intelligence in this new search, he provided me with one of his writings, which he had composed after his journey to France, where he met Malebranche and Arnauld (Annoiato

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della filosofia e della teologia scholastica che poco o nulla allora intesi per l’oscurità del metodo e per la composizione de’ principî astratti ed inestricabili, udii un giorno lodar la filosofia del Cartesio nella bottega di Luigi Pavini libraio a Venezia, ove nell’anno 1706 si solevano radunare verso la sera molti letterati per ricrearsi. Fra gli altri il Signor Tommaso Cattaneo, che avea letto filosofia nello studio di Padova [ed aveva molto apprezzato Leibniz], disse, secondo una frase francese, che il Cartesio aveva il primo insegnato a pensare…. Il suo discorso fece molta impressione sull’animo mio impaziente del vero, e cercato l’abate Fardella, ch’era allora in Venezia, gli parlai del Cartesio con tale fervore di spirito, ch’egli senz’altro rispondermi mi esibí di spiegarmi le meditazioni metafisiche dello stesso filosofo.… Io accettai l’offerta del Fardella; ed egli con molta chiarezza e facilità mi fece assaggiare, se non bene intendere, la forza e lo spirito delle cartesiane meditazioni, e per piú agevolarmene l’intelligenza mi comunicò uno scritto da lui composto dopo il suo viaggio in Francia, dove conobbe il Malebranche e l’Arnaldo). Conti did not limit himself to the study of Descartes; he read Malebranche, and assimilated Malebranche’s vision of God to that of Averroès; he studied, as we have seen, Locke, and intended, following a suggestion from Fardella, to find a reconciliation between empiricism and rationalism, “The method of philosophizing of Galileo was to start from the senses, and in this he agreed with Bacon of Verulam and Locke, whereas the method of philosophizing of Descartes, which Fardella taught me, was to start from the ideas and from God. I thought that I could blend the two methods” (Il metodo di filosofare del Galileo era di cominciare dal senso, nel che conveniva con Bacone di Verulamio, col Locke, laddove il metodo di filosofare del Cartesio, inculcatomi dal Fardella, era di cominciare a filosofare dalle idee e da Dio. Io pensai di conciliarli). To bring together the experience of the senses that is proper of science with the innatism of Platonic tradition was an old preoccupation of the Cartesians of Italy. Conti truly juxtaposed the two instead of conciliating them; he exposed them, but did not go beyond that. His two poems, Globo di Venere (The orb of Venus) and Scudo di Pallade (The shield of Pallas), are of an expositive nature. His 1743 study of the Platonic Parmenides is at the same time an exposition and a comment, in which Conti to the “absolute darkness [or incomprehensibility]” (buio pesto) of Ficino wanted to oppose a critical suitable analysis, “I … would try to find out with reason if it is possible to understand well the ‘one’ of Parmenides, leaving to others the effort of explaining it in a sublime manner, applying those theological things, of which I do not intend to attack or destroy not even the least one” (Io … ricercherò con la ragione, se si possa bene intendere l’uno del Parmenide, lasciando agli altri la fatica di spiegarlo in modo sublime, applicandoci le cose teologiche, delle quali non intendo d’attaccarne, o di distruggerne la minima).

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Conti among his own various interests cultivated particularly aesthetics, and his attitude can be easily comprehended if we remember that he intended to diffuse healthy philosophical theories by the means of poems and sonnets. For him poetry’s goal was that “of proposing in a delightful manner both philosophy and science” and through “fantastic images of capturing the intellect and moving the will.” Unfortunately, because he was preoccupied with the transference of the universality of the concept into the universality of art, Conti had to reappraise the question of the verisimilar in relation to the true, the question so much discussed in the sixteenth century. Conti never understood of what the imaginative universal consisted and in a last analysis he reduced it to an allegory. Of his contemporaries, Conti misunderstood Vico and discussed Gravina’s concept of imitation. Gravina, too, was moving in an atmosphere in which Platonic motives and Cartesian inspirations were woven together, but his Ragion poetica is not too different from the poetics of the sixteenth century with which Conti rightly connected Gravina, “Poetry is a sorceress, but benevolent, and a delirium that clear away all madness” (È la poesia una maga, ma salutare, ed un delirio che sgombra le pazzie). Poetry has a therapeutic function, but its function derives from an anterior critical consciousness that makes use of the image in order to operate powerfully. In the clearest conclusion to his essay Della tragedia this precise goal is declared, “To bring to the people the fruit of philosophy and eloquence so that custom and language be corrected” (rendere al popolo il frutto della filosofia e della eloquenza, per correzione del costume e della favella). Though a critic of Gravina, Conti was instead an admirer of Muratori, whose Perfetta poesia was printed in 1709, in which the central preoccupation was that of stating precisely the poetic universal. Muratori offered this exemplification: The universal consists in the power, in the laws, or in the universal ideas, which nature possesses in order to operate. Nature indeed universally wants, is used to do, and must do, for example, that the strong Man would not feel fear when facing dangers.… This is the idea of the strong Man when we consider only power and the law of nature. Therefore, the universal true is nothing else than possible truth that also is credible and probable (Consiste l’universale nella potenza, nelle leggi, o idee universali, che la natura ha per operare. Questa nella sua idea e universalmente vuole, suole e dee fare, per esempio che l’Uomo forte non si sgomenti in faccia ai pericoli.… Questa è l’idea dell’Uomo forte, considerando la sola potenza, e legge della natura, e perciò il vero universale altro non è che il vero possible, credibile e verisimile). However, the task of poetry remained the same as the pedagogical one already determined during the sixteenth century.

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Muratori, with all his many works in philosophy, brought us back to the discussions on the moderns and on the danger that they represented. Although he was profoundly influenced by the new currents of thought, he looked with suspicion at Descartes and Locke, well remembering “the point to which during the sixteenth century the Pomponazzis and the Cremoninis arrived” (dove nel secolo 1500 fossero giunti i Pomponazzi e i Cremonini). This did not mean that he intended the restoration of the ancient, but that he dreaded the consequences of modern darings. In many cases, it is possible to notice his initial adhesion followed by a prompt withdrawal. He loved Pascal but in face of Jansenism he soon withdrew. In 1697, he wrote to Antonio Magliabechi: I, too, am presently reading the Réponse aux Lettres Provinciales, ou Entretiens de Cléandre et d’Eudoxe, printed last year in Cologne. Certainly I have valued very much that work of Monsieur Pascal and I read it a few years ago with a special pleasure. Now, however, I found in it a bad faith and several calumnies that cannot be tolerated in a Christian (Io pure leggo presentemente la Réponse aux Lettres Provinciales, ou Entretiens de Cléandre et d’Eudoxe, stampata l’anno scorso in Colonia. Sicuramente io stimava assaissimo quell’opera di M. Pascal, da me anni sono letta con gusto particolare; ma ora vi ho scoperto una mala fede e parecchie calunnie, che non si denno sopportare in un cristiano). In 1703, when Lamindus Pritanius outlined I primi disegni della Repubblica Letteraria d’Italia (The first plans for the formation of the literary republic of Italy), he addressed himself to “the generous and kind literati of Italy” with a true attack against the tradition, “I do not hesitate to affirm that Scholasticism, in addition to being today a sterile field of praises and fame, is still like a forest hindered by a thousand useless questions, dreadful because of too many metaphysical thorns” (Io non ho scrupolo d’affermare, che la Scolastica, oltre all’essere oggidí un infecondo campo di lodi, e di fama, è ancora un bosco intralciato da mille questioni disutili, orrido per troppe spine metafisiche). He equally disdained all vain logical disputations and resounding rhetorical perorations, “To spend so much time in the learning of a thousand useless logical formulas, to spend a full year in pedantic analyses of so many metaphysical distinctions and opinions, cannot but be an intolerable abuse to anyone who has a grain of good sense” (quello spendere tanto tempo nell’imparar mille disutili contese logicali, quel sottilizzare un anno intorno a tante distinzioni ed opinioni metafisiche, non può non parere un abuso intollerabile a chi à fior di senno). He went against rhetoric, “style is a luminous overcoat, too often gladly used to adorn truth” (lo stile è una sopravvesta luminosa, di cui troppo volentieri s’adorna la verità). The royal way to knowledge is something else: it is through experience and reason, “I am here not to blame the doctrines of Aristotle or those of his commentators, or to convince you in the doctrine of the modern school. It is enough for me to tell you that the true

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philosophizing, outside of matters of faith, consists in following the guide of reason, and in physics in following again that of experience” (Né sono io qui per biasimare le dottrine d’Aristotele, e de’ suoi Commentatori, o per persuadervi quelle della scuola moderna. A me basta solo dirvi, che ’l vero filosofare fuori delle materie di fede consiste nel seguire la scorta della ragione, e nella fisica ancora quella della sperienza). In front of the rising Cartesian polemics, Muratori took a clear stand in Epistole (num. 727): It is not in good taste or acceptable to Christian charity, without having first well examined the opinions of Descartes and without having any acquaintance with his reasons and defenses, to throw against him and his followers all kind of insults or even to arrive to charge openly of heresy the teachings of this philosopher and to name as heretic and at times worse than heretics those who follow him.… It may seem that I said these things because I began to favor the school of Descartes. The truth is that I spoke for love of truth and good taste, because I believed that I could not remain silent on this matter. In fact, as far as Descartes is concerned, I value not a thing and I embrace no opinion of his, of which he with sound reasons cannot readily persuade me (Non è buon gusto, né alla carità cristiana mostrerà di dar ricetto, chi senza aver prima ben disaminato le opinioni del Cartesio, e senza aver prima ben pratica delle ragioni e difese sue, scaglia contro di lui e de’ suoi seguaci ogni villania, o giugne fino a spacciar francamente per eresie gl’insegnamenti di questo filosofo, e per Eretici, e talvolta ancor per peggio che Eretici, i di lui partigiani…. Parrà forse che ciò sia detto da me per qualche lega od impegno, ch’io abbia con la scuola di Cartesio. Ma io solamente per l’amore della verità e del buon gusto, ho creduto di non dover qui tacere. Perché in quanto a Cartesio, nulla stimo, nulla abbraccio del suo, fuorché quello, ch’egli colle ragioni robuste alla mano mi persuade). When he gathered together the writings of 1703–1705 in Riflessioni sul buon gusto nelle scienze e nelle arti (Reflections on the good taste in science and art), Muratori suppressed these direct attacks. The conclusions made by the innovators found him often diffident, if not hostile. All the cultural European renewal from the Renaissance onward appeared to him as the possible source of grievous errors, “The renaissance of letters, so very useful, praiseworthy, and glorious has unfortunately degenerated in some excesses far more pernicious than those of the ignorance of the barbarous centuries” (il risorgimento delle lettere, tanto utile, tanto commendevole e glorioso, pure è degenerato in eccessi, di lunga mano piú perniciosi, che quei dell’ignoranza dei secoli barbari). On the lands inundated by the Protestant Reformation the worst philosophical heresies were born, and they were the source of every moral corruption, “When religion is no longer in the world, when credence in God and

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Its providence is extinguished, when the soul of the human being has been condemned to the condition of brutes, then the strongest tie of human society has been broken and there cannot be any longer any distinction between the just and the unjust, between virtue and vice” (Tolta dal mondo la religione, estinta negli uomini la credenza di Dio e della sua provvidenza e condennata l’anima dell’uomo alla vil condizione dei bruti, viene a rompersi il piú forte legame dell’umana società, non resta piú distinzione tra il giusto e l’ingiusto, tra la virtú e il vizio). The occasion for this violent attack against the moderns was the publication after 1723 of the Italian version of Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain of Daniel Huet as Trattato filosofico della debolezza dello spirito by Antonio Minunni, who, presenting the work, repeated, “It could be accepted with great certainty that our mind, hampered by the variety of objects that are represented in it, good or bad as they may be, at times would depart from the path of knowing how to discern the good from the evil and the true from the false” (cosa piú che certa, che la nostra mente, ingombrata dalla varietà degli oggetti o buoni o rei che se le appresentano, devia talvolta dal sentiero di saper discernere il bene dal male e il vero dal falso). Then Muratori in 1745 wrote Delle forze dell’intendimento umano o sia il pirronismo confutato (On the power of human understanding or a confutation of Pyrrhonism), in which, without being aware that a devaluation of reason meant an exaltation of faith, he put together all skeptics, Gassendists, Lockeans, deists, atheists, and libertines. It was in this work that he attacked the author “of an Italian translation of the impious Lucretius done with the intention that the ignorant populace could be instructed as well in the elements of impiety” (traduzione italiana dell’empio Lucrezio, affinché anche l’ignorante popolo si possa istruire dei fondamenti dell’empietà). This, on the other hand, did not keep him from using the Cartesian argumentations and from being touched by the thorns of doubt. In 17 March 1733, while writing to a friend, he affirmed that “he had been horrified by Locke, a most subtle English philosopher, when he heard him to say in a printed book … that he was convinced that matter can think” (Mi fece raccapricciare negli anni addietro il Locke sottilissimo filosofo inglese, allorché l’udii in libro stampato … esser egli persuaso che la materia può pensare). In 1727, writing to Antonio Vallisnieri, he confessed, “By meditating on the dependence that the soul has from the body for our actions and customs, I encountered such horrid spots that made me tremble, especially when thinking about the conduct of mad men. But, for the grace of God, I always return to the Credo, on which I would stand secure” (mi sono incontrato in grotte, che mi han fatto tremare, e massimamente pensando all’operar dei pazzi. Ma, per la Dio grazia, ricorro sempre al Credo, e qui starò saldo). It was exactly at that time that Vallisnieri was sharing with Conti some of his most disturbing reflections. Beginning from the concept that nature does not proceed by jumps, “but imperceptibly by grades” moves “from one species to another … with uniformity of forms,”

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he excluded the Cartesian leap from the animals to the human being to conclude that “all organic bodies that have sense, are born, grow, and develop … would have their own soul as we do,” from the oyster to the dog, the monkeys that “often show in their operations more wisdom than us.” If this is the chain of the livings, why should immortality be predicated only of human beings? It was a very serious conclusion that Vallisnieri jokingly imagined as suggested by the devil. It was a return to Pomponazzi’s thesis that all spiritual life could be reduced to nature, or to the concept of the parity of the soul in all that lives and to the idea more or less explicit of a transmigration. In 1732 Muratori would tell Girolamo Tartarotti that the immortality of the soul is an indemonstrable truth of faith (Epistole, num. 3184). Muratori would show that he was aware of the difficulty of the rapport between body and soul when in Filosofia morale, after reaffirming the supremacy of the soul, would thereafter recognize its total impotence outside corporeity, to which he would grant in many cases the supremacy over the spirit. The Filofia morale appeared in Verona in 1735. In 1737, Vico, writing to the Archbishop of Bari, Muzio Gaeta, while comparing the work to the treatises of Sforza Pallavicino, Malebranche, Pascal, and Nicole, would also add that Muratori did not succeed in providing that kind of moral Christian system that was originally intended. This judgment of Vico, which intentionally places the name of Muratori with those of the leaders of Jansenism, has brought a recent historian to assume a decisive Vichian intention of connecting Muratori with them. In speaking of Italian Jansenism, we must accept “the term in its wider significance, and consider all anti-Jesuits of theology, of morality, of the one-hundred questions of details in which the religious life is concretized, then we could say that Muratori not only is part of this movement, but he is, if not the most belligerent figure, certainly the most outstanding.” Was the implicit depreciation of Vico justified? Was Muratori’s concept truly unlike Christian morality, which is charity? Already in 1723, Muratori had published in Modena the “moral treatise” Della carità cristiana, in quanto essa è amore del prossimo (On Christian charity, which is love for the neighbor), wishing to sustain with it on the theoretical level an institution of civil assistance, of which he was the initiator, The Compagnia della Carità. This was true neighborly love, then, a love alive and active in the love for God or a love of God that becomes concrete and true in the love for the neighbor. Human solidarity is the direct consequence of the love for God; the charity, within which this love explains itself, is at its own turn the foundation of justice and the manifest basis for social activism. This vision of the civil world supported by active charity is at the center of the Filosofia morale. The good is to follow the law of the order that descends from God and such order is for us a human order, a social discipline, which on one side is a bond of charity directed to others, while on the other side it is justice, as the rule or the commands that moderate reciprocal rapports between human beings.

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Civil charity as industrious love for the neighbor for human motives should be distinguished from Christian charity as love for God and for the human beings in God. It is a distinction that does not exclude civil charity from the wider sphere of Christian charity but wishes only to determine its nature and efficiency in the world of humankind: A general love is demanded from every human being toward any other human being. This love is more particular and strict as the union of interests between the two human beings increases. Consequently we must wish the good to anyone to whom nature has assigned our common destiny. When a person has obtained a good, we should be happy for it, rejoice, and have no envy. We must help any person in serious and extreme necessities. We should maintain peace and good relationship, as much as possible, with everyone, following the opinion of the ancients who wrote, “War must be engaged against the vices of the people, not against the people with vices.” It is easy to recognize here—even without appealing to the admirable and clear teachings of the Law of Christ—that the supreme artificer by placing us on earth to live together with many other individuals of the same kind, or let us say of the same nature and species, wished and wishes that in addition to the essential order of justice, also the other beautiful order of love among ourselves be preserved (Un Amor generale si richiede in ogni uomo verso l’altro uomo; e inoltre un più particolare e stretto secondoché cresce l’unione de gl’interessi fra i medesimi uomini. E per conseguente dobbiamo desiderare del bene a chiunque ha sortito comune con esso noi la natura; ottenuto che abbia questo bene, goderne, e non invidiarlo; nelle gravi, e piú nelle estreme necessità aiutarlo; mantenere la pace e concordia, per quanto mai si può, con tutti, seguendo il parere degli antichi che scrissero: … La Guerra s’ha da avere, non con gli uomini, ma coi vizi. Facile è il conoscere qui—anche senza produrre i mirabili e chiari insegnamenti della Legge di Cristo—che il supremo artefice in mettendo noi sulla terra a convivere con tanti altri d’uno stesso genere, o vogliam dire della medesima natura e specie, ha desiderato e desidera, che si conservi, oltre all’ordine essenziale della giustizia, anche quell’altro bell’ordine d’amore fra noi). is given in love is humanly intended, and the neminem laedere (do not injure others) is transformed in “love others, as you love yourself.” Perhaps it is not in these many and often lengthy texts in philosophy that we must search for the great Muratori, but in his fecund and vigilant inquiry on the concreteness of the civil world of humanity. This is an attitude and an interest the greater reflection of which can be found in those Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto nelle scienze e nelle arti that started with Primi disegni della Repubblica letteraria of 1703 and completed in 1715. In this work, the conscience is alive of the

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new world that began with the Renaissance: “When our Italians were the first to break the shackles, to rebel against such voluntary and vile slavery, and when other philosophers thereafter united moved against the unfounded at times false opinions of Aristotle and proposed other systems, other opinions more verisimilar or safe, according to a better and faster method of philosophizing” (I nostri Italiani furono i primi a spezzare i ceppi, a insorgere contro cotale schiavitú volontaria e vile, ed altri nobilissimi filosofi susseguentemente collegati mossero contro le opinioni malsalde e talora apertamente false di Aristotele e proposero altri sistemi, altre opinioni o piú verosimili o piú sicure, secondo un metodo migliore e piú spedito di filosofare). Interesting is the particular distinction that Muratori introduced into the complex of literary knowledge, as he separated philosophy understood as the cognition of causes from the cognition of data or erudition, insisting precisely on the value of erudition. 8. Pietro Giannone Muratori represented a position that was conscious of the rights of the moderns, but preoccupied at the same time with tradition, Pietro Giannone instead offered an ardent polemic that unfolded historical facts under the direction of personal needs. It was a polemic animated by a fervid “religious spirit of a reformer who tried to serve God and truth as he could and the times dictated, in the defense of Princes, and their deeds and responsibilities” (spirito religioso di riformatore che cercò di servire Dio e la verità come seppe e come i tempi volevano, nella difesa del principe, della sua opera e responsabilità). His spiritual formation brings us back to the already examined vicissitudes of the Neapolitan culture at the beginning of the century. He was at first a Gassendist because “the first philosophy that came from France to Naples and dismantled the Scholasticism professed in the cloisters was that of Pierre Gassendi” (in Napoli la prima filosofia, che di Francia venne ed atterrò la Scolastica, professata ne’ chiostri, fu quella di Pietro Gassendi). While the Augustinian philosophy, too much Platonic, appeared to him to be excessive in subtle metaphysics, he learned from Descartes that it is convenient, during an inquiry, to follow no thinker, “but, after a mature examination and an exact scrutiny, to stick to the doctrine that one would find more conforming to reason and experience” (ma, dopo un maturo esame ed esatto scrutinio, appigliarsi a quella dottrina, che troverà più conforme alla ragionee all’esperienza). To the renewed polemic of Jansenistic flavor against the casuistry of the Jesuits, to which can be referred also the Hydra mystica, sive de corrupta morali disciplina (Mystic Hydra, or on the corrupt moral discipline) published in Naples in 1691 by Gravina under the pseudonym Priscus Censorinus Fotisticus (the Illuminator) and the writings of Grimaldi against De Benedictis, must be connected the proclamation of faith, the Professione di fede, of Giannone against the Jesuit Giuseppe Sanfelice who, attacking Giannone’s Istoria civile del regno di Napoli of 1723, accused him of Epicureanism. In Istoria

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civile, while reaffirming his faith in reason joined with experiene, “his only guide and commander” (suo solo duce e condottiero); while reaffirming his attachment to religion, Giannone condemned fiercely the Jesuitic morality, derided harshly the friars, and again reaffirmed his own sense of concrete adhesion to the earthly reality of which all his work was permeated: I like to suggest that you [Jesuits] do not become involved in this fight … concerning points of history, because what people think of you is that you know nothing about it. Because of your life of seclusion when you speculate and reflect on your Moral and Theological systems, of the material and sensible world and of what has happened in it you know nothing. You are in this world only to leave excrements on it (Io vi consiglierei a non entrare in briga … sopra punti d’Istoria, perché il concetto che si ha di voi è che non ne sappiate verbo e che, stante la vostra ritiratezza in speculare e riflettere sopra la vostra Morale e Teologia, di mondo materiale e sensibile e di quanto in quello sia accaduto non ne sapete nulla, e ci state dentro sol per lasciarci letame). The Istoria civile of Giannone did not look at the actual events but at the juridical and political institutions, and it was preoccupied about the urgent need of freeing the State from any ecclesiastical interference. In the Triregno, ossia del regno del cielo, della terra e del papa (The three kingdoms, or on the kingdoms of heaven, earth, and pope), all the rationalism of the century was brought into the polemic and turned to its feeding. The Lockean thesis of the “reasonableness of Christianity” about immortality was derived from the heretical conceptions, but not only from the heretical ones, of the sleeping of the souls from the time of death to the time of the final judgment, and thus arrived at the vision that the First Fathers of the Church had of the unity of human being, who is not just a soul, but unity of soul and body. The disdain for the spiritualism of Platonic origin burst out in Giannone but hit also Descartes, who did not know “how to avoid or escape the impetuous river by which all the world was submerged and that deafened everyone with its high and deafening noise.” In the work of Giannone there is a powerful exaltation of the earth and of the earthly humankind intended against a Platonism understood as ascetism and transcendence: I began to apply myself to studies directed uniquely toward the human condition, within which I, too, was, and to study again philosophy, which I had previously abandoned. With the aide of history I decided to inquire more accurately the fabric of this world and of its ancient inhabitants, of human beings, and their condition and goal in life. I wanted to find out when human beings on this earth, with their reason and reflection, began to surpass all other mortal species, and originated the civil society, henceforth the cities, the kingdoms, the cult, and the

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Here a flavor exquisitely Vichian is found, a flavor accentuated again by the goal intended for the research: All this knowledge, physical as well as metaphysical, and everything else humankind was learning concerning this great fabric of the world, were to be directed toward morality … and to be used for no other goal than for the right guidance, in their moral life, of their actions and customs (Tutte le conoscenze, non meno metafisiche che fisiche, e quanto gli uomini apprendevano, riguardando questa gran fabbrica del mondo, dovevano indirizzarle alla morale … e servirsene non per altro fine, se non per ben dirigere, nella lor vita morale, suoi andamenti e costumi). But, in addition, there was also a bitter polemic against the Church in its growth within history: I saw with amazement how on the foundations of a religion very genuine, humble, and contemptuous of earthly things, a structure so sublime and vast was elevated such that no other religion of the world, although mundane and with no other end than an earthly happiness, could ever desire, even less achieve or match (Vidi con istupore come, sopra tali fondamenti d’una religione sí schietta, umile e sprezzatrice di cose terrene, si avesse potuto innalzare una macchina cotanto sublime e vasta, quanto niun’altra religione del mondo, ancorché mondana e che non avea altro fine che felicità terrene, poté aspirarvi nonché giungervi o pareggiarla). In Giannone the defense of modern thought is done for love of the earth, of the concrete limit; it is anti-Platonic and, at the same time, anti-Cartesian, even though deriving a robust illuministic inspiration from the Platonizing currents, heirs of the Renaissance and allied with Descartes. We have already mentioned Gravina, the Illuminator, and the Hydra mystica, sive de corrupta morali disciplina. Croce has demonstrated that the Platonizing Descartes, the exalter of light, criticized by Giannone, was the probable first inspirer of such work. Once more the rebellion against the tables of the law and the Phari-

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saism of the formulas was feeding itself with the concept of an interior illumination, a presence of the divine Logos in the human being. Gravina, commenting in 1692 on the Endimione of Guidi, affirmed, “Everyone carries in himself the flint-stone from which to be able to obtain sparks” (ciascuno porta in sé la selce da poterne trarre scintille). A commentator on Ludovico Sergardi would even speak, in the age of Enlightenment, of a Neapolitan sect of the luminosi, who would venerate a universal light capable of giving the truth to humanity, at the outside of any tradition. The metaphysics of light, not for the first time, was joining a weakened illuministic attitude in order to establish the triumph of reason. On the other hand, Gravina, the jurist, in Originum juris libri tres (Naples, 1756, ch. 13), had tones not unworthy of the first humanism in the exaltation of jurisprudence as the exemplary expression of human activity in the earthly reign of humankind: Everything … that the Greek philosophers have put forth concerning the honest and the just, the boundaries of the good and the bad, the ruling customs of nations, the laws and the republic, with never-ending questions and disputations that were more ambitious than useful, all of this has been collected and preserved by our jurisconsults.… Thus, what among the Greeks was purely an exercise of the mind and a distraction from the long leisurely time, in Rome, once preserved in parchments, became the seed of private and public usefulness. In this way, our people made the idle and leisurely contemplation of the Greeks industrious and fruitful (Quidquid … a Graecis philosophis de honesto et iusto; de finibus bonorum et malorum; de regendis populorum moribus, de legibus et republica, quaestionibus infinite propositis, et ambitiosis magis quam utilibus disputationibus effundebatur; totum collectum fuit a juriconsultibus nostris … ut quod apud Graecos exercitatio erat ingenii, longiorisque ocii levamen, Romae, in corpus iuris civilis conversum, publicae et privatae semen esset utilitatis. Itaque contemplatio Graecorum ociosa et iners, a nostris operosa reddita est atque frugifera). The Illuminator had also lamented in the beginning of his work on the importance and origin of jurisprudence that the new generations have looked down on the study of jurisprudence, unaware of its worth in the context of human society: There are times when I am restlessly upset and asked myself why in these dangerous moments for our society jurisprudence is stupidly excluded from the conversation of the educated and the refined interaction with the other arts and sciences, of which, on the contrary, some recent ones have been discovered, some others have been revived or even brought to more radiant light (Irari aliquando soleo, et mecum

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ipse reputare cur extremis hisce temporibus, quibus ceteroque scientiae, vel recens exoriuntur, vel veteres exuscitantur, vel adhuc incolumes ad clariorem lucem extolluntur, ita ut communis et nova quaedam reddatur vita doctrinis; una tamen Jurisprudentia, veluti damnata barbarie, sensim repudietur ab eruditis, et elegantiorum artium commercio paulatim excludatur).

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 “Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in the year 1670 of upright parents who left a good name after them” (Il Signor Giambattista Vico nacque in Napoli l’anno 1670 da onesti parenti, i quali lasciarono buona fama di sé). This is the way that the author began the most unique document, Autobiografia, which is a reconstruction of his inner formation and the heroic battles he fought within his mind in order to bring clarity to his tormented thought, instead of his external life, empty of great events. Vico was actually born on 23 June 1668 as the sixth of eight children to a bookseller, Antonio Vico of Maddaloni, the son of a family of farmers. The mother, Candida Masullo, was the daughter of a family of workers who specialized in making carriages. Giambattista was “a boy of high spirits and impatient of rest,” and the greatest event of his early youth was the fall from a ladder badly hurting his head, “As a result of this … he grew up with a melancholy and irritable temperament such as belongs to men of ingenuity and depth, who, thanks to the one, are quick as lightning in perception, and thanks to the other, take no pleasure in verbal cleverness or falsehood” (Autobiography, p. 111). Having an exceptional mind, he anticipated the school teachings and learned the most just through his efforts. After hearing that his teacher in philosophy, the Jesuit Antonio del Balzo, a nominalist philosopher, praised Petrus Hispanus and Paulus Venetus, he studied them by himself, “But his mind still too weak to stand that kind of Chrysippean logic, was almost lost in it, so that to his great sorrow he had to give it up. His despair made him desert his studies … and he strayed from them for a year and a half” (Ibid., p. 113). Having been present peradventure at an academic lecture at the academy that he erroneously called Academy of Infuriati, he was fired again by the love of learning and returned to the Jesuits’ school to audit Giuseppe Ricci da Lecce, “a Scotist by sect but at bottom a Zenonist. From him he was greatly pleased to learn that ‘abstract substances’ had more reality than the ‘modes’ of the nominalist Balzo. This was a presage that he in his time would take most pleasure in the Platonic

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philosophy, to which no scholastic philosophy comes nearer than the Scotist does” (Ibid., p. 114). It was not by accident that Scotism during the whole seventeenth century flourished in Naples, where the Chair of Scotist Philosophy existed at the University. Vico thereafter was pleased to compare his own metaphysical reflections of 1710 to the Scotism and dynamic monadism of Ricci. But the young Vico soon abandoned Ricci and, again on his own, approached the Metaphysics of Suarez and applied himself to the meditation of this work for one year. It was the year 1685 and Vico, in spite of all, was feeling more like a poet than a philosopher. His father wished he would take jurisprudence at the university, in which he was not yet registered, but was following the private courses given by Francesco Verde of Sant’Antimo, “With him he spent but two months, attending lectures full of cases on the minutiae of the practice of civil and ecclesiastical courts,” but he could not see in those cases the principles on which they were based. Undoubtedly, he “had already begun to acquire the universal mind from metaphysics” (Ibid., p. 115). For the third time, he decided to study by himself and, though he were registered in the courses of the university from 1688 to 1691, he never attended except for once, and ended his studies with a doctorate, perhaps in Salerno, between 1693 and 1694. When he heard that Felice Acquadia was praising Hermann Vulteius, he asked for the works of this author together with those of Henricus Canisius from the lawyer Nicola Maria Giannettasio, “It was in this way that through the good word of Acquadia and the good deed of Nicola Maria Vico was set on the good road to both the laws” (Ibid., p. 116). After all this, he came to sense that the forensic practice could not be his, even though in the first case in court he carried off a victory and many congratulations (Ibid., p. 117). He accepted then the offer of Monsignor Geronimo Rocca of Catanzaro, Bishop of Ischia and a distinguished jurist to become the tutor of his nephews, the children of the Marquis Domenico, in a castle of the Cilento (Ibid., p. 118). Between the end of 1686 and the beginning of 1687 Vico started his new occupation, spending the successive nine years in Naples, Portici, and especially in the solitude of Vatolla, at the castle, where his health threatened by tuberculosis was restored and his preparation was consolidated. As he recognized, “So it happened that living in the castle for nine years, he made the greatest progress in his studies” (Ibid., p. 119). Vico gave a minute account of his readings in Vatolla, but he did the same also for the Neapolitan culture of those years. While he projected into his youth judgments and experiences of his mature age, he loved to accentuate his solitude and estrangement from his contemporaries, “Vico lived in his native city … as a stranger” (Il Vico viveva da straniero nella sua patria). Vico was feeling profoundly resentful for the renewal of the anti-Scholastic reaction that was corroding all of the most alive experiments of the European thought and making out of them a kind of moderate eclecticism. This eclecticism was agreeing on the unanimous anti-Aristotelian and anti-Scholastic movement against the philosophy of the cloisters, knew how to temper the

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Gassendist sensism with Cartesian and Malebranchean spiritualism, and the Cartesian mathematicism with Galileian experimentalism, wrapping up the whole in a propitious cloud of a generic Platonism. This was manifest even in the literary sympathies for Giovanni della Casa of a sincere Cartesian like Caloprese. Vico, whenever in the city, had contacts with the cultural world of Naples, let himself to be taken by the current of the moderns and was not the anti-Cartesian that he portrayed in the Autobiografia. The studies of Fausto Nicolini and Antonio Corsano have made more clear how anachronistic was the spiritual portrait that Vico presented of himself in the autobiography. By reading the poem Affetti di un disperato, composed in 1692 and published in 1693, one would become aware of how many Lucretian influences, certainly not developed in a Christian religious sense, were operating on the spirit of the young man. The fashion of the European thought, renewed by Gassendi and diffused by way of the Lucretian version of Alessandro Marchetti, fascinated Vico who, assimilating the great Latin poet, made for himself the most somber and desperate pessimism. In Affetti di un disperato (vv. 22–34), we read Vico’s lament: Now that this age of iron runs to ruin, and calculating fate prepares our fall; even as our crimes our miseries increase over the sum of those of ages past in fatal surfeit, for beneath the weight of new afflictions our frail, weary flesh grows pale and pines, and our own lives meanwhile fly with wings ever swifter toward the tomb and all the woes our evil stars have wrought are fecund with new ills unknown before our time, so rare and strange, so far removed from human understanding, that he who feels them keenest knows them least (Cadente ormai è ’l ferreo mondo e son già instrutti a farci strazio i fati. Di pari con le colpe i nostri mali crebber sugli altri delle prische etati troppo altamente, poiché sotto il pondo di novi morti i gravi corpi e frali gemono smorti, ed a la tomba l’ali il viver vostro ha piú preste e spedite, e son sempre feconde le sventure di sí fatte sciagure non piú per nova o antica fama udite). In those years, far from being the anti-Cartesian and anti-innovators as he pictured himself in the Autobiography, he was instead joining the supporters

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of the new ideas. Proof of this is the fact that while the Autobiografia would represent him almost always as an adversary of Descartes and of his physics, which would conclude with the doctrine of the eternity of the world and a mechanicist conception of the universe, in reality until 1708, he was basically a convinced disciple of Di Capua and an enemy instead of Domenico Aulisio who had assumed attitudes anti-Cartesian. It is most probable that Vico began from a spiritual position that assimilated him with D’Andrea, Caloprese, and Di Capua. But an ulterior deepening of his positions, due perhaps to the cases and the persecutions that, between 1691 and 1693, the Neapolitan innovators suffered, forced him to enrich his preparation with different elements that turned him toward the humanistic tradition. We see him studying Valla and the Renaissance Platonists from Ficino to Agostino Steuco, appreciating within certain limits the Latin of the Progymnasmata of Tommaso Cornelio, and beginning an intense reading of the classic poets and prose-writers. We see him returning to Naples and approaching “the world of priests and friars,” especially Jesuits and Theatines, who were the intransigents against whom the innovators were moving their most ardent polemic. Hereby, we have his critical remarks concerning those that at the beginning had been his spiritual companions, men like Don Carlo Buragna, Tommaso Cornelio, and Leonardo Di Capua (Autobiography, pp. 132–133). In 1695, then, Vico returned to Naples and, staying with his father, began to frequent the circle of literati around Don Nicola Caravita, consolidating his fame as a man of letters and poetry more than as a thinker, writing verses, epigraphs, and speeches for different occasions, and obtaining in 1710 the membership to the Arcadia. In the meantime, when the chair of rhetoric at the University fell vacant, he applied though “it yielded not more than a hundred ducats annually, with the addition of another smaller and varying sum derived from fees on the habilitation certificates which the professor gives his students for their admission to the law course.” On January 1699, he was declared the winner and started his long life of teaching, a life divided between the most austere meditation and the care for his numerous family—he had eight children—in a never-attenuated poverty, but in such a heroic fidelity to himself truly worthy of being compared to that of Spinoza. Of how he taught, one of his auditors, Francesco Solla, gave us some insights: At the Royal University of Naples innumerable was the participation of the young students, who, instead of the rhetorical precepts alone, could drink from his lips the milk of all the knowable. In fact, as any occasion presented itself, he [Vico] was ready to express on any science the most instructive reflections. At home, he was so humbled to explain Plautus, Terence, and Tacitus; but in such a humble condition, he maintained all the greatness of his character. In passing, he could comment on the habits of language, the origin and proprieties of words, and the beauty and elegance of expressions. When the images of our passions, so miraculously described by Plautus and Terence,

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were surging in his mind, then he would penetrate in the most remote secrets of our heart, and remain there for a long time in order to discover the springs of human actions. Hence, moving from one duty to another, according to our relationship with God, ourselves, and other human beings, he would begin to expose the outline of moral philosophy and of the universal right of nations that thereafter he would expand with greater light and demonstrate in practice using the acutest observations of Tacitus in his stories (Nella reale università infinito era il concorso de’ giovani, i quali, anziché de’ soli precetti rettorici, bevevano dalle sue labbre il latte di tutto lo scibile; facendo egli, ovunque l’occasion si presentasse, spiccare in ogni scienza le riflessioni piú istruttive. In casa abbassavasi fino a spiegare Plauto, Terenzio e Tacito. Conservava nondimeno, in questa sua stessa umiliazione, tutta la grandezza del proprio carattere. Erano da lui, come di passaggio, avvertiti i vezzi della lingua, le origini e le proprietà delle voci, la bellezza e signoria delle espressioni. Ma nell’affacciarsi alla sua mente le immagini delle nostre passioni, a miracolo dipinte in Plauto e Terenzio, penetrando egli ne’ piú segreti recessi del nostro cuore, intrattenevasi lungamente a scoprire le sorgenti delle umane azioni, e quinci scorrendo di dovere in dovere, secondo le varie relazioni che noi abbiamo con Dio, con noi medesimi e con gli altri uomini, passava a descrivere le prime linee della moral filosofia e del diritto universal delle genti, condotte poscia a maggior lume e dimostrate in pratica sulle acutissime riflessioni di Tacito). Vico was developing the rhetorical part of his course using those Institutiones Oratoriae (The Art of Rhetoric) which are known to us through the notebooks of his disciples, and he was developing them with such a care and singular dedication in order to remain faithful to the principle exposed in the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time, p. 78), “What is eloquence, in effect, but wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common opinion of mankind?” (quid aliud est eloquentia, nisi sapientia, quae ornate copioseque et ad sensum communem accommodate loquatur?). In 1737, for the inauguration of the Academy of Oziosi at the home of Nicola Salerno, he would say that there is no eloquence without truth and dignity, “by which two parts wisdom is made…. We said that tongue and heart are tied together because to every idea there is its naturally attached word, so that eloquence is nothing but wisdom in the act of speaking” (delle quali due parti componesi la sapienza.… Noi dicemmo essere stretti insieme la lingua, e ’l cuore; perocché ad ogni idea sta naturalmente la sua propria voce attaccata, onde l’eloquenza non è altro, che la sapienza che parla). Part of his duties was to utter the oration for the opening of the academic year. There were seven so-called inaugural orations, and they were recited between 1699 and 1706; the last one, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, pronounced on 18 October 1708 and published in 1709, was

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first for importance. The anti-Cartesian polemic had already started and so was the elaboration of his own thought. To the dearest authors, Plato and Tacitus, he had added Francis Bacon, though Bacon did not always satisfy him. Vico was dreaming for a systematization of his own ideas about God, the world, and man (de Deo, de mundo et de homine), concerning which he had occasion to speak with Doria and others among his friends. It was during these discussions with Doria in the home of Caravita that had made him aware that “what Doria admired as sublime, great and new in Descartes … was old and common knowledge among the Platonists.” On 15 July 1710, writing to Gian Mario Crescimbeni, Vico was communicating, in Epistole (num. 8, pp. 82–83): If my adverse fortune and indispositions will allow me, I will apply myself … to see if I will ever be able to complete a work that I have meditated in honor of the venerable nation of Italy. It is at the example of the Cratylus of Plato that I am trying to discover from the origin of the Latin words the wisdom of the ancient Italians. This wisdom would bring in a new system the three Philosophies that especially the ancient Etruscans and the Ionians practiced, from which two nations the Latin language originated (Se la mia avversa fortuna, e le mie indisposizioni me’l permetteranno, mi adoprarò … se potrò mai ridurre a fine una opera che mi ritruovo haver meditato in honore della veneranda nazione d’Italia, nella quale ad esempio di Platone nel Cratilo vado rintracciando dalle origini delle voci latine la sapienza degli antichi Italiani, la quale cospira in un nuovo systema di tutte e tre le Filosofie, che professarono gli antichi Toscani principalmente, e gli Ionj, dalle quali due nazioni ha le sue origini la Latina favella). This work was the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex latinae linguae originibus eruenda (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, deducted from the origins of the Latin language), published in November 1710, and it was dedicated to Doria. It was the liber metaphysicus to which were supposedly to be following the liber physicus and the liber moralis, which were never written or completed. From the drafts of the liber physicus, in 1713, he derived the De aequilibrio corporis animantis (On the equilibrium of the animated body), given today for lost, but was known to Vincenzo Cuoco, who may have read it in a Neapolitan journal of the end of the eighteenth century. A review of the De antiquissima in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia gave occasion to two interesting Risposte of Vico between 1711 and 1712. Between 1714 and 1716, on invitation of his disciple Adriano Carafa Duque of Traetto, Vico wrote in Latin the life of Marshall Antonio Carafa, which “brought to Vico the esteem and the friendship of a most illustrious member of the literati of Italy, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, with whom he maintained correspondence until he died.” It was precisely for this task that Vico found himself obliged to read Hugo Grotius, as we can read in Autobiography (p. 155):

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And here he found a fourth author to add to the three he had set before himself. For Plato adorns rather than confirms his esoteric wisdom with the common wisdom of Homer. Tacitus intersperses his metaphysics, ethics and politics with the facts, as they have come down to him from the times, scattered and confused and without system. Bacon sees that the sum of human and divine knowledge of his time needs supplementing and emending, but as far as laws are concerned he does not succeed with his canons in encompassing the universe of cities and the course of all times, or the extent of all nations (E qui vide il quarto autore da aggiungersi a’ tre altri, che egli si aveva proposti: perché Platone adorna piú tosto, che ferma la sua sapienza riposta con la volgare d’Omero; Tacito sparge la sua Metafisica, Morale e Politica per gli fatti, come da’ tempi ad esso lui vengono innanzi sparsi e confusi senza sistema; Bacone vede tutto il sapere umano e divino che vi era, doversi supplire in ciò che non ha; ma intorno alle leggi, egli co’ suoi canoni non s’innalzò troppo all’universo delle città, ed alla scorsa di tutti i tempi, né alla distesa di tutte le nazioni). Grotius opened for Vico the way to combine the best philosophy, “that of Plato made subordinate to the Christian faith,” with philology, for the research in the course of events of the immanent law that govern them. The primitive idea that his friends in youth had derived impiously from Lucretius of a humanity that rises from its own ferine origins, would gradually transform and transfigure itself in Vico’s thought through the meditation on jusnaturalism, not only of Grotius, but also of Samuel Pufendorf and John Selden. In this way, the first nucleus of the Scienza Nuova, some few notes, now lost, on the first two books of Grotius, were put down in 1717. In this line of thought, the inaugural oration of 18 October 1719 was written, which was followed by a treatise in three books. All of these works did not reach us, but it brought us gradually to the first true and proper draft of the Scienza Nuova constituted by the Diritto universale, which is made of a brief manifesto of the work, the Sinopsi del diritto universale (June 1720); of a first book, De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno (Naples, July 11720); of a second book, De Constantia iurisprudentis (August 1721), divided into two parts, De constantia philosophiae and De constantia philologiae; then, what followed was a long series of Notae (August 1722). The almost tragic, but certainly heroic battle with himself in order to reach an exposition of his own ideas that would be at the same time clear and concise began to be accentuated in Vico. For this, we see him work indefatigably for fifteen years “in the midst of the noise made by his children, and nevertheless continuing always to read, write, and meditate,” among pains, disappointments, and resentments for not being acknowledged for his true worth, and for not winning the Chair of Roman Law (1723), for which he longed so much, and that would have provided an economic advantage. Though losing all hope “of obtaining in the future a more honorable place-

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ment in his own fatherland,” he was still proud of having been “born for the glory of his native city and therefore of Italy since, being born there and not in Morocco, he became a scholar” (Autobiography, p. 165). Between 1723 and 1724 he remade the Diritto universale, writing the Scienza Nuova in forma negativa, which also was lost, dedicating it to Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini, hoping that the prelate would publish it at his own expense. But the future Pope Clement XII, although accepting the dedication, did not wish to carry the expense. Thus, Vico decided to reshuffle his manuscript and rearrange it according to “a positive and more concise method” and produced the Scienza Nuova prima or Principi di una Scienza Nuova d’intorno alla natura delle nazioni (The First New Science, or the principles of a New Science on the nature of nations). In 1725, Vico published the book in Naples at his own expense, “parting for the purpose with a ring I had which was set with a five-grain diamond of the purest water” (Autobiography, p. 201). In 1725, Vico wrote the Autobiography, to which, on invitation of Muratori, in 1731, he attached a new part. When the Acta eruditorum of Leipzig published in 1727 a note by Johann Burchard Mencken on the Scienza Nuova, based on some misleading information Mencken received from an unknown Neapolitan correspondent among the literati, Vico reacted angrily with a text titled Vici Vindiciae, in which he “finds many excellent reasons for applying the term ‘unknown vagabond’ to the author of this tissue of falsehoods … [and] penetrates to the bottom of the ugly calumny” (Autobiography, p. 189). Vico’s shy and resentful character made him irritated at the proposal of a Venetian librarian, who, on the initiative of Conti among others, wanted to republish the Scienza Nuova and asked for a volume of Annotazioni, now lost, to accompany such a new edition of the work. It was the period of time between 1728 and 1729; a little later, in one hundred and seven days, between 25 December 1729 and 9 April 1730, “with an almost fatal fury” (Autobiography, p. 194), the philosopher wrote his masterpiece, the Scienza Nuova seconda, published in October 1730. His labor did not end with this. After adding at the time of printing another twelve pages in the format of errata-corrige, he wrote a booklet in the form of “Lettere allo Spinelli.” Immediately afterward, he widely reworked the masterpiece, which he completed in August 1731, and also attached to the edition of 1730 some additions and glosses. Finally, between 1735 and 1736, when he was almost seventy years old, Vico brought together all these materials and molded them into what would be the Scienza Nuova terza, which came out in 1744, the same year of his death. The philosopher could not have the pleasure of seeing at last in a beautiful typographical form the work that had been his whole life. Doubts and discussions existed concerning the first formulation of Vico’s thought before 1710, which consolidated in the six inaugural orations and in the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. In the eyes of Vico, at least at a certain point, the seven documents written between 1699 and 1708 formed one literary corpus, under one title, the De studiorum finibus naturae hu-

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manae convenientibus (On studies, and their suitable to human nature goals). The problem originated exactly from this: how could Vico—“the most dynamic Vico,” as Nicolini observed—maintain through a decade a thought so statically coherent? In addition, the content of these inaugural orations confirmed precisely the formation fully Platonizing that is found in the Autobiography, which we know not to conform completely with the truth. 2. Formation of Vichian Thought. Descartes and Plato. Analysis of the Inaugural Orations. De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione. Institutiones Oratoriae Gentile, who was the first to make from the philosophical point of view a minute analysis of the Inaugural Orations, underlined their nature as being a Renaissance Platonism. Nicolini, taken by the mentioned doubts, suspected that these works had been re-arranged and altered by their author, who we know to have the habit of repeatedly modifying his works. More recently, Corsano, in opposition to Gentile and discarding the theory of a radical revision of Nicolini, has tried to demonstrate that the orations’ character is not one wavering between Platonism and Cartesianism, but one representing instead a fervid Ciceronian humanism. In this way, without admitting an intended revision of the work, we identify the first Vichian position as being more consonant with the new historical inquiries on the particularities of his life, even though less corresponding to the spiritual formation indicated by Vico in the Autobiography. Is this ingenious solution fully justified? In reality, an analytic examination of the orations would bring us closer to the position of Gentile, especially because of the incompatibility sustained by Corsano between Cartesianism and Platonism, which is not only denied by the text of the Vichian works, but also by a large part of the southern thought contemporary to Vico. Spinelli with efficacy sustained “this necessary union of Platonism with Cartesianism and the dependence of this from that in the first foundations of philosophy,” and in his work, as he declared, “He wanted … to demonstrate … that a good and true Cartesian not only should not blame Plato, but should necessarily follow this philosopher in order to enter into the intimate penetralia of profound philosophy.” The first oration of 1699 asserts that true wisdom must begin from the knowledge of oneself, “The knowledge of oneself is for each of us the greatest incentive to the compendious study of every branch of learning” (sui ipsius cognitio ad omnem doctrinarum orbem brevi absolvendum maximo cuique est incitamento). In this, something more than just Cicero is present; the whole Augustinian Platonism is present, with its insistent appeal for the search of truth faraway from the senses, in interiority. It is in interiority that the human being encounters its root and finds at the same time the meaning of its divinity. The humanistic parallel between human beings and God extends itself widely with an oratorical emphasis meanwhile the substance of the doctrine in the oration goes well beyond Ciceronianism. See, for instance, in the first oration (par. 5):

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY The spirit is the most manifest image of God. As God is in the world, so the spirit is in the human body. As God is diffused in the elements of the world, so the spirit is diffused throughout the members of the human body. … God is continuous activity, the spirit is continuous productivity. The world is because God is; if the world should end, God will still be. The body experiences because the spirit activates it. You may kill the body, but the spirit is immortal (Expresissimum Dei simulachrum est animus. Ut enim Deus in mundo, ita animus in corpore. Deus per mundi elementa, animus per membra corporis humani perfusus. … Deus semper actuosus, semper operosus animus. Mundus vivit quia Deus est; si mundus pereat, etiam Deus est. Corpus sentit quia viget animus; si corpus occidat, animus tamen est immortalis).

What is most surprising, because it would be truly the link between the thought of Ficino and Campanella and the Scienza Nuova, is the parallel between God, the artificer of nature, and the human being, the creator of the human world, “Finally, God is the master artist of nature; the mind, we may say, is the god of the arts” (tandem Deus naturae artifex; animus artium, si fas dicere, deus). In the Dedalean human activity the power of fantasy that transcends the barriers of fire of the world is revealed, as in the first oration (par. 6): It was this [fantasy] that imagined the gods of all major and minor nations; it was this that imagined the heroes; it is this that now differentiates the forms of things, sometimes separating them, at other times mixing them together. It is fantasy that makes present to our eyes lands that are very far away, that unites those things that are separated, that overcomes the inaccessible, that discloses what is hidden and builds the road through trackless places (Haec finxit maiorum minorumque gentium deos; haec finxit heroas; haec rerum formas modo vertit, modo componit, modo secernit; haec res maxime remotissimas ob oculos ponit, distinctas complectitur, inaccessas superat, abstrusas aperit, per invias viam munit). Through thought, the soul achieves an infinite dignity. The certainty of the “I” overcomes every doubt and opens the path to God in the interiority of oneself. Vico repeats almost literally the Cartesian reasoning in order to affirm in the “I” the germinal presence of every branch of knowledge, “Let us stir up so many important ideas, which are hidden in our minds like sparks under the ashes, implanted, and as it were, grafted on us by the First Truth, that we will kindle a great burning for all learning” (excitemus illas nobis tot rerum atque tantarum a prima veritate insitas et quasi consignatas notiones, quae in animo, tamquam igniculi sepulti, occluduntur; et magnum cunctae eruditionis incendium excitabimus, in the first Oration, par. 13). It is a Stoic-Platonic motive very alive in Cicero, but it is here perfectly united with Cartesianism.

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Completely Platonic, and inclined to Stoicism, is the second oration of 1700. It determines how the fool, in the interior torture of his foolishness, is the fiercer enemy of himself. Only the wise, in peace with himself and in the unity with the whole, would follow nature, “If a fool, whether through malice or luxury or laziness or even by mere imprudence, acts otherwise, let him, guilty of treason, wage war against himself” (Si quis stultus, sive per malam fraudem, sive per luxum, sive per ignaviam, sive adeo per imprudentiam, secus faxit, perduellionis reus sibi ipse bellum indicito, in second Oration, par. 2). With vivid rhetorical colors Vico insists in describing this internal war concerning which in the Oratio de hominis dignitate Pico had already efficaciously spoken, “The weapon of the fool is his own unrestrained passion. The power that overcomes him is his conscience. The homeland of which he is deprived is the whole world. The wealth that he loses is human happiness. The dungeon into which he is thrown is his own body. The tyrant to which he surrenders himself is adverse fortune” (Stultorum arma sunt effrenes animi affectus; vis quae superatur, conscientia; urbs qua spoliantur, mundus; fortunae quibus exuuntur, humana felicitas; carcer ubi traduntur, corpus; domina cuius imperio subiiciuntur, Fortuna, in second Oration, par. 8). Under some aspects the third oration is among the most interesting ones. The famous thesis of Pico that the human being is human because of liberty, is turned almost upside down: the source of every evil is in our free will; because of free will human beings have risen to heaven, from which they experienced the fall; they penetrated the ocean and suffered the shipwreck. Humankind has perverted every thing. This is also the source of all confusions in the world of learning, in which instead of a tranquil consideration in every thesis of truth, we become aware of a bitter and sterile polemic spirit. The right way is found in the serene knowledge that would allow the seizing of those seeds of truth that every author has somehow intuited, “Praise the authors for what in them is to be admired. But for that in which they fail, attribute it to human frailty and have compassion for the shortcomings of our common human nature” (Authores, qua parte spectandi sunt laudate; qua vero peccant, id humanae imbecillitati tribuite, in the third Oration, par. 6). The conclusion concerning philosophy reminds us not only of Pico’s position, but also of a tendency proper to the Neapolitan culture of the time: the proclivity to accept, fusing them together, a variety of thinkers, from Plato to Galileo, from Democritus and Lucretius to Gassendi and Descartes: If you have dedicated yourselves to philosophy, listen then to Plato as he considers the immortality of spirit, the eternal and inexhaustible power of divine ideas, of Genii, of God, who is the Supreme Good, and of love free from passion.… Listen to the Stoics, how seriously and authoritatively they teach about the steadfastness of the wise.… Listen to Aristotle and discover with how great a skill he has described the universal human faculty of logical argumentation.… Listen to Democritus, how he speculated upon the true similarities in the principles of

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The preoccupation more definitely humanistic manifests itself with noticeable vivacity in the three last orations, in which the letters understood as the study of practical prudence are elevated to be the supreme formative agency of the human world. Vico speaks to the young adults, “Therefore, having been imbued with the knowledge of divine things, may you learn prudence in human affairs, first, the moral, which forms man, then the civil, which forms the citizen” (Quare divinarum rerum scientia imbuti, humanae prudentiae studeatis, primum morali, quae hominem, tum civili, quae civem format, in the sixth oration, par. 14). The De nostri temporis studiorum ratione of 1708, in the form of a discussion between the ancients and the moderns, reveals always more characteristically delineated the humanistic penchant of Vico, who in the vindication of the studia humanitatis perceived the fecundity not yet identified. He criticized the teaching of the logical disciplines to the young and insisted that, instead, they must be proposed and taught at the very last. The scope of logical disciplines is the precise determination of the true, disregarding completely the verisimilar, and with it all that is the fruit of fantasy and memory, as for instance, poetics, oratory, and the arts in general. Vico said, “It is a positive fact that, just as knowledge originates in truth and error in falsity, so common sense arises from perceptions based on verisimilitude” (Ut autem scientia a veris oritur, error a falsis, ita a verisimilibus gignitur sensus communis, in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, ch. 3). Common sense, besides being the criterion of prudence, is also the guiding standard of eloquence. We know that youth is fantasy, old age reason (ut senectus ratione, ita adolescentia phantasia pollet). Is there any greater error than to begin by teaching the discipline of logic? Considering thereafter the application of the geometric method to physics, Vico underlined with total clarity its limitation, repeating a point already developed in an equal sense by Campanella:

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The principles of physics which are put forward as truths on the strength of the geometrical method are not really truths, but wear a semblance of probability. The method by which they were reached is that of geometry, but physical truths so elicited are not demonstrated as reliably as are geometrical axioms. We are able to demonstrate geometrical propositions because we create them; were it possible for us to supply demonstrations of propositions of physics, we would be capable of creating them ex nihilo as well. The archetypal forms, the ideal patterns of reality, exist in God alone. The physical nature of things, the phenomenal world, is modeled after those archetypes (Ista physicae, quae vi methodi geometricae obtenduntur vera, nonnisi verisimilia sunt, et a geometria methodum quidem habent, non demonstrationem; geometrica demonstramus, quia facimus; si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus. In uno enim Deo Opt. Max. sunt verae rerum formae, quibus earumdem est conformata natura, in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, ch. 4). Vico does not limit himself to the showing of the insufficiency of geometry; he more explicitly points out the precise field of study from which the interest for physics has kept human beings away, but which is, on the contrary, the first field of interest for the life of the human race: the human world, moral and political: But the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics. Our chief fault is that we disregard the part of ethics that treats with human character, of its dispositions, its passions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence. We neglect that discipline that deals with the differential features of virtues and vices, with good and bad behavior-patterns.… As a consequence of this neglect, a noble and important branch of studies, that is, the science of politics, lies almost abandoned and unattended (Sed illud incommodum nostrae studiorum rationis maximum est, quod cum naturalibus doctrinis impensissime studeamus, moralem non tanti facimus, et eam potissimum partem, quae de humani animi ingenio eiusque passionibus ad vitam civilem et ad eloquentiam accommodate, de propriis virtutum ac vitiorum notis, de bonis malisque artibus…. Atque adeo amplissima praestantissimaque doctrina nobis deserta ferme et inculta iacet, in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, ch. 7). We can see from these lines that already the ideas that would be the themes in the later speculation of Vico are beginning to take a precise form: reaction against logicism and geometrism, separation of the human world from the physical, valorization of the verisimilar, and of poetry and eloquence. In the Institutiones Oratoriae (ch. 9), in which he explicitly referred to the De nostri

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temporis studiorum ratione, his most important oration, he said, “I have examined elsewhere in what manner this disadvantage in the method of our studies might be corrected,” and summarized his principles, “But to apply the geometric method to civil oratory is, in fact, like an effort to remove passion, impulse, the unpredictable, and chance from human affairs. In one word, it would be to act in the assembly like the teacher rather than the orator.” Not too much arithmetic should be taught, because “The science of numbers is the driest of all, and dry things are hurtful to eloquence whose body must be cared for so that it is firm, radiating well being, full of blood, and glistening with robust color.” In respect to philosophy, he added, “neither the Cartesians nor the present day Aristotelians can bring anything much of advantage to oratorical matters. The Aristotelians are drab and behind the times, and the Cartesians are emaciated, dry and arid.” 3. Metaphysics. Mathematics. Philology In the meantime, in his colloquies with Doria and, in a parallel way in the frequent “reasoning” with Luca Antonio Porzio, “the last Italian philosopher of the school of Galileo,” the Vichian metaphysics was assuming its own shape in the De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda, which was published in 1710. The work is strictly tied to both the Renaissance thought and that of Vico’s time, and definitively reveals those motives that, after their transfiguration, would become the themes of the Scienza Nuova. We have seen already how all the southern speculation, from the time of the Cartesian influence, had struggled between the inheritance of the Galileian physics and the inheritance of the Platonism of the Renaissance. The insertion of both Cartesian and Lucretian-Gassendist currents did not change the situation. The physical part of the Cartesian thought, united with Gassendism, came to mix with the Galileian scientific exigency, whereas the Cartesian metaphysics joined the Platonizing metaphysics. Thereafter, without much difficulty, the field was open to Malebranche’s theories. What remained was the scission between physics and metaphysics, between the world of nature and that of the spirit, between Galileian science, or even better, Telesio’s instance, and Platonic heritage. If we wanted to express ourselves in the Renaissance historical antithesis, then the problem always remained of reconciling Plato and Aristotle; if we preferred the Cartesian terms, then the imposed question was that of the rapport extensio-cogitatio. Galileo, in its way, resolved the problem with appeal to God, the conciliator between the two terms. It is a valid solution until we adhere to the idea of a mathematizing Demiurge. The solution is no longer solid when we would be touched by the doubt of the incommensurability between human rationalizing processes and creating divine act. Descartes is the one who renewed that doubt. The Neapolitan culture all around Vico, with the frail composition of Lucretian-Gassendist-GalileianCartesian physics and Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian-Malebranchean meta-

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physics, was feeling always more and more the contrasts of that difficulty. The polemic Doria-Spinelli, between Platonists and Cartesians, was offering weapons to one thesis against the other, but in reality the two theses could agree in respect to the substantial metaphysical need, although they clearly opposed each other in their various accentuation of the physical problem. Vico, in 1710, would face this cross-road; he, too, did not overcome the difficulty, no matter how often he referred to it, since he was taken by the way of thinking of the Neapolitan Cartesianism. Yes, Vico refuted such Cartesianism but still maintained its aporias, and ended conclusively in a semi-skeptic position concerning the science of nature, a position no different than the one held by, for example, Leonardo Di Capua. The world of humanity offered no help to Vico at this time, except for the spider web of mathematics that, disengaged at its own turn from the ontological weight that was instead maintained by Ficino and Galileo, and that remains like a pure fiction, elegant and coherent, but nevertheless always a fiction, “a science most tenuous.” The problem from which Vico starts is of a gnoseological nature; the solution is no different from the one already given by those Platonists whom he mentioned with praise in Autobiography (p. 132): Ficino, Pico, Steuco, and Mazzoni. Ficino and Steuco particularly had insisted on true knowledge as creative capacity. Ficino referred to mathematics as that through which man is equal to God and also could find the plan of divine production. Steuco spoke on the science of Adam, who had conscience of the activity itself that created him, “Just as divine truth is what God sets in order and creates in the act of knowing it, so human truth is what man puts together and makes in the act of knowing it” (Quaemadmodum verum divinum est quod Deus, dum cognoscit, disponit ac gignit, ita verum humanum sit, quod homo, dum novit, componit item ac facit, in De antiquissima, ch. 1, sect. 2). The true and what is made are convertible (reciprocantur, convertuntur). Croce commented: This, he explained, is precisely what is meant by saying that science is to know by causes, per causas scire. Since a cause is that which has no need of anything external in order to produce its effect, it is the genus or mode of a thing: to know the cause is to be able to realize the thing, to deduce it from its cause and create it. In other words, it is an ideal repetition of a process, which has been or is being practically performed. Cognition and action have to be convertible and identical, just as in God intellect and will are convertible and form one single unity (Non altro che codesto si vuol dire, quando si afferma che la scienza è per causas scire, perché la cagione è quella che per produrre l’effetto non ha bisogno di cosa estranea, è il genere o modo di una cosa: conoscere è saper mandare ad effetto la cosa, provare dalla causa è farla. In altri termini, è rifare idealmente quel che si è fatto e si fa praticamente. La cognizione e l’operazione debbono convertirsi tra loro, come in Dio intelletto e volontà si convertono e fanno tutt’uno).

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From this, the limits of human knowledge, which does not create reality and thus has no science about it, are evident. When Descartes believed to be able to confute the skeptics with the cogito, he moved away from truth, not being aware that, even though he was certain of thinking, even though he had conscience, he had no science, cognition of the causes of his own thought, “But although the skeptic is conscious that he thinks, he nevertheless is not conscious of the causes of thought or of how thought originates” (Quamquam conscious sit scepticus se cogitare, ignorat tamen cogitationis causas, sive quo pacto cogitatio fiat, in De antiquissima, ch. 1, sect. 3). This objection did not separate Vico from Descartes because on one hand Vico did not notice that the Cartesian cogitare, as an act transparent to itself, a thought always thinking, is perfectly clear to itself, it is capable of seizing the processes of which it is the cause because it is thinking activity. On the other hand, the abyss that was excavated within Cartesianism between thought and extension was reflecting the impossibility that thought has of seizing something of which it is not the cause. In this truly was inserted a more serious Vichian objection: “But I who think am mind and body, and if thought were the cause of my being, thought would be the cause of the body” (ego, qui cogito, mens sum et corpus: et si cogitatio esset caussa quod sim, cogitatio esset caussa corporis, in De antiquissima, ch. 1, sect. 3). It was precisely for this reason that Descartes manifestly separated thought from extension while Vico himself in ulterior developments would risk the fall into the same objection. The Cartesian influence is continuously visible in the exaltation of mathematics. For humankind to which science is denied in its being a construction, to which it would appear that nothing but the particular ascertainment of experience is possible, a field is open in which, like God, humankind too is creator and capable of reaching the true that is identified with the making. This field is mathematics. Our mind, Vico observed, unable of reaching the things external to itself, turns to what it has within, and produces by mediation of the point and the line, an admirable world of forms: For these reasons, then, when man embarks on the investigation of the nature of things, he realizes at length that he cannot arrive at that nature by any means, because he does not have within himself the elements from which composite things are constituted, and that this lack arises from the limitations of the human mind, to which everything is external. Man then turns this fault of his mind to good use and creates two things for himself through what is called “abstraction”: the point that can be drawn and the unit that can be multiplied.… By this device, man has created a kind of world of shapes and numbers which he can embrace entirely within himself, and by lengthening, shortening, or putting together lines, by adding, subtracting, or reckoning numbers, he achieves infinite effects because he knows infinite truth within himself (Per haec igitur, cum homo, naturam rerum vestigabundus, tandem animadverteret se eam nullo assequi pacto, quia intra se ele-

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menta, ex quibus res compositae existant, non habet, atque id fieri ex sua mentis brevitate, nam extra se habet omnia; hoc suae mentis vicium in utiles vertis usus, et abstractione, quam dicunt, duo sibi confingit: punctum, quod designari, et unum, quod multiplicari posset. … Atque hoc pacto mundum quemdam formarum et numerum sibi condidit, quem intra se universum complecteretur; et producendo, vel decurtando, vel componendo lineas, addendo, minuendo, vel computando numeros, infinita opera efficit, quia intra se infinita vera cognoscit, in De antiquissima, ch. 1, sect. 2). Thus, while the human being seized by curiosity researches in nature the truth that is denied to it, by returning within its limits it reflects upon itself, and produces two precious sciences, “most useful to human society”: arithmetic and geometry. The only problem, and Vico makes us aware of it, is that mathematical formulas do not penetrate reality, “Let me explain with an example: the divine truth is the solid reproduction of things, like when you make something with clay; the human truth is only a monogram, a flat figure, bidimensional like a picture” (quae ipsa ut similitudine inlustrem verum divinum est imago rerum solida, tamquam plasma; humanum monogramma, seu imago plana, tamquam pictura). Through a symbolic way, Vico constructed all his metaphysics in which in reality, more than it may seem, he remained faithful to the old reliance on the ars numerandi. In the same way that the elements of the human world are the abstract points from which lines and planes derive, so in the reality that is the divine work, the roots are points of force, metaphysical atoms, inextended, conatus generator of the universe. It is a doctrine that obliged us to think of Leibniz and Hobbes, but Vico probably did not derive the inspiration from them. Not even Fardella, for an analogous theory, derived it from them. Vico referred to a mythical Zeno, an arbitrary synthesis of a Stoic (ca. 264 B.C.) and an Eleatic Zeno (ca. 464 B.C.), whom in reality he drew from Renaissance Pythagoreanism and Platonism, at the light of which he spiritualized the atomism of his own time, of those Epicureans who, being “ignorant of geometry and hostile to metaphysics, devised a simple extended body for use as matter” (geometriae ignari et metaphysices hostes, simplex corpus extensum in materiae usum adornarunt, in De antiquissima, ch 4, sect. 2). The combination of disparate motives, proper of his own time, continued in Vico who, probably under the influence of Doria, was transcribing the Gassendist atomism that after being assimilated to Cartesian physics was expressed in terms of Platonic metaphysics. This was done quite incoherently, because Vico was giving to the abstract symbols of mathematics the possibility of transfiguring themselves into real entities, obeying once more to the Galileian faith concerning the objective value, physical, of mathematics. And this was that same faith of Descartes who, having reduced matter to extension, identified physics and geometry. Vico, who justly accused Descartes with the equivocation between an abstraction and a reality, was making out of a mental fiction a meta-

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physical entity. An interesting direction of Vichian thought, which had not yet freed itself from Cartesian and also Platonizing presuppositions in the manner of Doria, was here revealed. The De antiquissima was dedicated to Doria, who was worthy of it. It has been observed that this work is lacking interior unity; gnoseology, metaphysics, and psychology are juxtaposed without meeting in a unifying focus, which is manifest instead in the part where while discussing mens a diis data, immissa (mind is given or imparted to humans by the gods, in De antiquissima, ch. 6), a form of innatism is accentuated. Some central elements of Vico’s thought were already clearly mentioned: first of all, the true as the making, a principle of which he was not yet seizing the fecundity by limiting it to mathematics. Later, it will have the effect of turning upside down the thesis illustrated until now, when returning to the world of poetry, of words, within which he moved in the inaugural orations, he will discover the true kingdom of the human being (regnum hominis), the human world produced by human beings, in which the human being lives and moves, and that human beings fully know. The road to this discovery had been opened for Vico by the philological method that he so curiously adopted in the De antiquissima, concerning which we should add something more. Under the influence of the Platonic Cratylus, Vico initiated his search for the Latin words in their etymology, being convinced that “the Romans spoke a language of philosophers without being philosophers” and without being aware that the terms they were using contained shadows and corruptions of sublime concepts. The origins I am investigating are not those that concern the grammarians, who consider only the derivations of words, as others have done hitherto for other purposes.… I have tried to figure out the reasons that the concepts of these wise men became obscure and were lost to sight as their learned speech became current and was employed by the vulgar. This is the secret way by which I thought I could discover what the wisdom of the most ancient philosophers of Italy was (Cosí l’origini, che io vo investigando, non sono già quelle de’ grammatici, come gli altri ad altro proposito finora han fatto, che considerano la derivazione delle voci…. Ma mi sono dato a contemplare le ragioni come i concetti de’ sapienti uomini si oscurassero e si perdessero di vista, divolgandosi ed impropriandosi dal volgo i loro dotti parlari. Questo è l’arcano che ho stimato poter iscoprire qual fosse il sapere degli antichissimi filosofi italiani, in Seconda risposta, p. 157). In the Autobiography (Part A, 1725, p. 153), Vico observed: But the dissatisfaction with grammatical etymologies which Vico had begun to feel was an indication of the source whence later, in his most recent works, he was to recover the origins of languages, deriving them

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from a principle of nature common to all on which he establishes the principles of a universal etymology to determine the origins of all languages living or dead (Il disfacimento delle etimologie grammatiche, che era incominciato a farsi sentire nel Vico, era un indizio di ciò onde poi, nell’opere ultime, ritrovò le origini delle lingue tratte da un principio di natura comune a tutte, sopra il quale stabilisce i principi d’un etimologico universale da dar l’origine a tutte le lingue, morte e viventi). If this common need of centering the investigation on the word in its original value existed, then Vico was remaining within the ambiance of those conceptions against which the Scienza Nuova moved. These conceptions were that in the original nucleus of language it was possible to recognize profound verities, which were afterward dispersed in the tradition for reason of the progressive human barbarization. With this it is not meant that without doubt a successive reversal of the position happened. To accept that in the analysis of language is found an essential element to penetrate the human spirit is a valid and permanent idea. Such an element should not be considered as a conceptual content that was subsequently obfuscated and dispersed, but a form or spiritual guise that manifests itself as the constant element through every variation and was genuine in its first origins. 4. Diritto Universale. The True and the Certain. First New Science. Philosophy and Philology. Poetic Theology. Fantasy. Poetry. Religion. Language The problem became twofold: to determine the original genuine forms and their relations with their variations. Vico’s attention soon polarized at this point, on which his meditation of a philosophy of humanity, of a metaphysics of the human mind, became always more intense. The discussions of the jusnaturalists, Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf, in a word the Stoic tendencies, induced Vico to face the problem of the origin of institutions and of moral and juridical concepts: What is human nature? Which ones are the constant structures on which are implanted in their mutability all determined laws? The Latin writings centered on the Diritto universale (De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno, 1720; De constantia iurisprudentis, divided into two parts, De constantia philosophiae and De constantia philologiae, 1721) constitute “the rough-draft” of the Scienza Nuova. Croce observed: His ideas on poetry are still perplexed, the mythological canons are less unified than those he developed later on, the theory of recourses (reflux) is feebly shadowed, and, in short, both the eternal ideal history and the cognitive method (gnoseology) on which it is based are still immature (Le idee sulla poesia vi sono ancora perplesse, i canoni mitologici sono meno unitari di quel che divennero poi, la teoria dei ri-

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It has been said that the Vichian problem centers on the rapport between essential guises, “natural” and historical manifestations, between natural right and positive law, between philosophy and philology, between the true and the certain, and between reason and authority: All jurisprudence depends upon reason and authority, and depends on both of them when it applies established rights to facts. Reason follows nature’s necessity, but authority follows the will of those who give orders. Philosophy inquires the necessary causes of things. History attests to the will of those who command (in Universal Right, Work’s Prologue, par. 2) (Iurisprudentia omnis ratione et auctoritate nixa est: atque ex iis condita iura factis accommodare profitetur; ratio naturae necessitate, auctoritas iubentium voluntate constat: philosophia necessarias causas vestigat: historia voluntatis est testis, in Diritto universale, Proloquium, par. 2). The problem focused exactly on the finding of the agreement between reason and authority, ratio and auctoritas. This agreement is impossible when the auctoritas is merely a caprice, “as if authority would originate from ill-will, and have no part in reason” (quasi auctoritas ex libidine nasceretur, nec rationis pars quaedam esset). Once admitted the contrast, we have the insuperable obstacle of connecting philosophy (the true) with philology (the certain): This has been the cause of the persistent dissent between philology and philosophy. The philosophers have never investigated the reasons of authority, and the philologists, when referring to the philosophers’ doctrines, have considered them mere stories (in Universal Right, par. 16) (Ex qua ipsa caussa universim Philologiae et Philosophiae dissidium factum est, neque philosophi auctoritatum rationes unquam investigarunt, et philologia vel ipsa philosophorum dogmata tanquam historias spectant, in Diritto universale, par. 16). The Vichian task was set on finding the way of returning the certain within the true, of connecting the one with the other for the reason of reaching the true of the certain. But if the definition of the two terms was agreeable, not equally agreeable was their rapport: The mind’s conformation with the order of things gives birth to the true, and the conscience secure from doubting gives birth to the certain. The conformation with the order of things is called “reason.” … As the true subsists in our reason, so the certain rests on authority, the

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authority of our own senses … or that of the sayings of others, which is specifically called authority, and from both is born persuasion. Authority itself, however, is a part of reason. In fact, if the senses are not false and the words of others are true, persuasion will be true (in Universal Right, par. 31) (Verum gignit mentis cum rerum ordine conformatio: certum gignit conscientia dubitandi secura. Ea autem conformatio cum ipso ordine rerum est et dicitur ratio…. Ut autem verum constat ratione, ita certum nititur auctoritate, vel nostra sensuum … vel aliorum dictis, quae in specie dicitur auctoritas; ex quarum alterutra nascitur persuasio. Sed ipsa auctoritas est pars quaedam rationis: nam si sensus non falsi sint, vel aliorum dicta sint vera, persuasio vera erit, in Diritto universale, par. 31). In reality, Vico wanted something more. He wanted to determine the law by which the certain, that is to say, the historical manifestations follow each other and come to determine the ideal eternal history on whose rhythm run in time the history of the nations. In order to do this it was necessary to return to an analysis of the foundations of gnoseology, to a deepening of the conversion of the true and the made, to an overcoming of the antithesis between objectivity (the true) and subjectivity (the certain), to the breaking down in short of the position holding that, after having established realities per se—innate ideas, natural principles—projected them in an original transcendence, without explaining their manifestation in the course of the nations. Concrete history, philology as historia verborum (history of words) and historia rerum (history of things), if brought back to philosophy, would take away the transcendence from the separate universals and would seize them alive within humanity, “Philology would assume the character of being the norm of science” (et ita philologiam ad scientiae normam exigere), which is what is written in the first chapter of De Constantia philologiae, which carries the title, “A New Science Is Essayed” (nova scientia tentatur). Between 1723 and 1724 Vico drafted the lost Scienza nuova in forma negativa that seemed to have dropped the juridical character proper of the Diritto universale and assumed instead the philosophical-historical character that is peculiar to the Scienza Nuova prima. Printed in 1725, Scienza Nuova prima was profoundly and continuously reexamined and edited, finally culminating in the published editions of 1730 and 1744. In the Scienza Nuova prima, Vico appeared to have by now consolidated his conception of the true (verum) and the made (factum), thanks to the meditations on the rapports between the true and the certain (certum). The reflection on jurisprudence, and in general on the human world, has opened a path in a different direction than mathematics. In the human products, Vico was finding that the richest reality is the work of the human spirit, and because made by human beings this work was open to human knowledge. Through the comprehension of the data, one would ascend to the norm, that is, the essence. It was thus possible to have

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science. Philology, coming together with philosophy, opened, in the new science, the knowledge of a concrete reality, which was precisely human reality, the human world: But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind (in New Science of 1744, par. 331) (Ma in tal densa notte di tenebre ond’è coverta la prima da noi lontanissima antichità, apparisce questo lume eterno, che non tramonta, di questa verità la quale non si può a patto alcuno chiamar in dubbio: che questo mondo civile egli certamente è stato fatto dagli uomini, onde se ne possono, perché se ne debbono, ritrovare i principî dentro le modificazioni della nostra medesima mente umana, in Scienza Nuova terza, p. 114). Here, the given, the object, instead of being impervious to knowledge, revealed its origin in the human activity from which it sprang. What appeared an obstacle imposed as nature was reduced in its essence to the rationality of which it was a manifestation. When the philological consideration in itself lost us in fragmentary data, and philosophy closed itself within abstract hypothetical forms, then the new science, showing to us that we are the authors of our reality, found in the constant human guises the reasons of the events, and in the ideal eternal history the measure and the sense of our mundane stories. Vico commented: The unfortunate reason for all these problems is that we have hitherto lacked a science that is both a history and philosophy of humanity. For on the one hand the philosophers meditated on a human nature already civilized by the religions and laws from which, and nowhere else, they themselves arose, but failed to meditate on the human nature that gave rise to these religions and laws amidst which they had risen. And on the other hand … the philologists received vulgar traditions so disfigured, torn, and dispersed, that, unless their proper appearance, composition and place is restored to them, it would seem quite impossible to anyone who applies any degree of serious thought to them that they could have been thus born (in The First New Science, par. 23) (Ci è mancata fin ora una Scienza, la quale fosse insieme Istoria e Filosofia dell’Umanità. Imperciocché i Filosofi han meditato sulla natura umana incivilita già dalle religioni e dalle leggi … e non meditarono sulla natura umana, dalla quale eran pervenute le religioni e le leggi. I Filologi per lo comune dell’antichità, che col troppo allontanarsi da noi si fa perdere di veduta, ne han tramandato le Tradizioni Volgari cosí svisate, lacere e sparse, che se non si restituisce loro il proprio

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aspetto, non se ne ricompongono i grani, e non si allogano a’ luoghi loro, a chi vi mediti sopra con alquanto di serietà, sembra esser stato affatto impossibile aver potuto esse nascere tali, in Scienza Nuova prima, bk. 1, ch. 6). In order to arrive at this connection of philosophy and philology, of universality and particularity, it was necessary to reach a view capable of making intrinsic to each other the universal and the particular. This view would go beyond the antithesis implicit in the conceptions both of the Renaissance and of jusnaturalism, which were separating the true universal so to cast it back in its archetypal origins, in an independently standing “nature,” before which the world would be nothing more than an obscure decadent shadow, the shadow of that lost light. In other words, it was necessary to go beyond Ficino and Pico, who, “in order to give credit to their doctrine with antiquity and religion,” attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster all wisdom, in the same way than Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf, who could not join together the natural principles of jurisprudence with its historical development. This was also the only way to overcome the Cartesian position so very indifferent to every historical process. In a Cartesian fashion, Vico announced that he would restart his inquiry from the profoundest foundations (ab imis fundamentis): Hence, in meditating upon the principles of this Science it is necessary, not without the most violent of efforts, to clothe ourselves to a degree in such a nature and, therefore, to reduce ourselves to a state of the most extreme ignorance of all erudition, human and divine, as if there had never been either philosophers or philologists to help in this research. For it is essential that anyone who wishes to profit from this Science should reduce himself to such a state, in order that, in meditating upon it, he should neither be confused nor distracted by preconceptions long held in common (in The First New Science, par. 40) (Cosí noi in meditando i principî di questa Scienza, dobbiamo vestire per alquanto, non senza una violentissima forza, una sí fatta natura; e in conseguenza ridurci in uno stato di una somma ignoranza di tutta l’umana e divina erudizione, come se per questa ricerca non vi fussero mai stati per noi né filosofi né filologi: e chi vi vuol profittare, egli in tale stato si dee ridurre, perché nel meditarvi non ne sia egli turbato, e distolto dalle comuni invecchiate anticipazioni, in Scienza Nuova prima, bk. 1, ch. 11). At any rate, even though by antithesis, Vico had always in mind the Platonists of the Renaissance who had also investigated poetry, which they considered most ancient, of Zoroaster or of the Chaldean Oracles with the hope of seizing in it, the essential root of truth, of which tradition would be only veil and shadow. Vico, who possesses the full sense of history, inverts the static rapport of the original true and of the successive and corrosive course of the

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events, in order to identify the certain of the historical happening with the truth of the eternal laws. Having posited this, no archetypes existed initially, but rough beginnings. Primitive poetry would not give us, as Ficino believed, profound metaphysical truths clothed in allegories, but the stupefied intuition of the infant human spirit: But the first possibility is denied us by the very nature of origins: that in all things they are simple and rough. Thus, simple and rough must have been the origins of the gentile humanity in which the like of Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Orpheus arose.… Hence … there is no need whatsoever to maintain … that the founders of the gentile nations were sages in some recondite wisdom. Consequently, it is impossible to think about the origins of the humanity of nations in terms of the reasons hitherto adduced by the philosophers (in The First New Science, bk. 1, ch. 9, pars. 27, 30) (Però c’impedisce venire nella prima oppinione essa Natura de’ Principi, che in tutte le cose sono semplici, e rosei; e tali devono essere stati i Principi dell’Umanità Gentilesca, dalla quale provennero … i Zoroastri, i Mercuri Trimegisti, gli Orfei…. Onde … non vi è alcuna necessità di affirmare … che i fondatori delle Nazioni Gentili sieno stati di Sapienza riposta: e ’n conseguenza ci si niega di ragionare de’ Principi dell’Umanità delle Nazioni con le ragioni, le quali ne hanno arrecate finora i Filosofi, in Scienza Nuova prima, bk. 1, ch. 9). In the Scienza Nuova prima, Vico continued to doubt about the travels of Pythagoras and the wisdom of Orpheus, the Brahmins, and Gymnosophists, in whom so very pleased were instead the philosophers from Ficino to Steuco. Vico, too, previously believed in them until, finally, in a famous “dignity” concluded that this assumed most ancient wisdom was to be attributed to the boria dei dotti, who were interested in protecting, with the reverence due to what is ancient, their own discoveries: To this conceit of nations is added that of scholars, who will have it that what they know is as old as the world. This axiom disposes of all the opinions of scholars concerning the matchless wisdom of the ancients. It convicts of fraud the oracles of Zoroaster the Chaldean, of Anacharsis the Scythian, which have not come down to us, the Pimander of Thrice-great Hermes, the Orphica (or verses of Orpheus), and the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, as all the more discerning critics agree. It further condemns as impertinent all the mystic meanings with which the Egyptian hieroglyphs are endowed by the scholars, and the philosophical allegories which they have read into the Greek fables (in The New Science of 1744, pars. 127–128) (Alla boria delle nazioni s’aggiunge la boria de’ dotti, i quali ciò ch’essi sanno vogliono che sia antico quanto che’ l mondo. Questa dignità dilegua tutte le oppinioni

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de’ dotti d’intorno alla sapienza inarrivabile degli antichi; convince d’impostura gli oracoli di Zoroastro caldeo, d’Anacarsi scita, che non ci sono pervenuti, il Pimandro di Mercurio Trimegisto, gli orfici (o sieno versi d’Orfeo), il carme aureo di Pittagora, come tutti gli piú scorti critici vi convengono; e riprende d’importunità tutti i sensi mistici dati da’ dotti a’ geroglifici egizi e l’allegorie filosofiche date alle greche favole, in Scienza Nuova terza, bk. 1, sect. II). On the footprints of Proclus, Pico delineated a poetic theology in order to uncover, under the veil of verses believed to be most ancient, the original revelation of every mystery. Vico, who at first believed the same, through the subtle meditation upon the rapport between the true and the certain, at the light of history, reduced that original primitive revelation within the limits of a fantastic intuition, which did not presuppose the true in the past, but aimed at it as to a far removed goal. Through this path, the idea of a pre-logical and pre-moral spiritual activity, proper of the primitive human beings, was born and was thereafter taken as the characteristic manifestation of an infant humanity. With his reversal, Vico posited fantasy as anterior to ratiocination and claimed that it was most robust wherever reason was most fledgling. While a good part of the Renaissance poetic had reduced the beautiful to something merely ornamental in respect to the true, and therefore useful for a delightful learning of the truth, or even was considered as the pleasurable, Vico saw in aesthetics “the first operation of the human mind” that because still incapable of penetrating the logical reasons of things transfigured them translating them into phantastic images. Giuseppe Ferrari (Opere, 2nd ed., vol. VI, p. 296) had this imaginative and summarizing reaction: Fantasy, after gathering from the senses the most sensible effects of the natural appearances, fuses them into a whole and magnifies it to the extreme. Of this new product, fantasy would make luminous images that with their lightnings would rapidly dazzle the minds, and then would fire the human affections in the midst of the uproars and thunders of its wonders. Reason would inquire the causes of all this and would both give explanation for the wonders and with science clear the understanding. Thus, the eternal pure light of truth would shine on the human heart the tranquil serenity of virtues ([La fantasia] raccoltili da’ sensi, compone ed ingrandisce all’eccesso i piú sensibili effetti delle naturali apparenze, e ne fa immagini luminose, per abbacinare ad un tratto co’ loro lampi le menti, e quindi accendere gli affetti umani entro lo strepito ed i tuoni delle sue meraviglie. Il raziocinio investiga esse cagioni le quali, soddisfacendo la meraviglia, rendono con la scienza schiarito lo ’ntendimento, e quindi con l’eterno puro lume del vero spiegano sul cuore umano il tranquillo sereno delle virtú).

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Between sensibility, fantasy, and reason, an indirect proportionality exists: robust sensations prosper and triumph on the grounds of a dull intellect, and vice versa. In The First New Science (par. 252), Vico concluded, “Finally, when there is either little or no use of reasoning, the senses are robust; when the senses are robust the imagination is vivid; and a vivid imagination is the best painter of the images that [the] objects of the senses imprint” ( (Il niuno o poco uso del raziocinio porta robustezza de’ sensi: la robustezza de’ sensi porta vivezza di fantasia; la vivida fantasia è l’ottima dipintrice delle immagini che imprimono gli oggetti de’ sensi, in Scienza Nuova prima, bk. 3, ch.1). The solution of the Renaissance problem of the primitive poetic wisdom would conduct Vico, through a radical overturn, to the solution of the problem of the structure of the human mind. Having clarified that the products of the most ancient poetry were not the conscious disguise of a profound truth but only the dawn that the presentiment has of the day to come, Vico turned all his inquiry to the effort of identifying the characters of this dawn. The first poetry was not born from a rational meditation, but from a divine furor (ex quodam divino furore), and it was the creation of a fantastic world, which primitive human being molded in fullness of life to its image and similarity, at the imitation of God, but as profoundly different as the diverse creatures of dreams are different from those of flesh. Hence, poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them—for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations—born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men, who were ignorant of everything. Their poetry was at first divine, because … they imagined the causes of the things they felt and wondered at to be gods.... At the same time they gave the things they wondered at substantial being after their own ideas, just as children do, whom we see take inanimate things in their hands and play with them and talk to them as though they were living persons. In such fashion the first men of the gentile nations, children of nascent mankind, created things according to their own ideas. But this creation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called “poets,” which is Greek for “creators” (in The New Science of 1744, pars. 375– 376) (La sapienza poetica che fu la prima sapienza della gentilità,

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dovette incominciare da una metafisica, non ragionata ed astratta qual è questa or degli addottrinati, ma sentita ed immaginata, quale dovett’essere di tai primi uomini, siccome quelli ch’erano di minor raziocinio, e tutti robusti sensi e vigorosissime fantasie. Questa fu la loro propria poesia, la qual in essi fu una facoltà loro connaturale— perch’erano di tali sensi e di sí fatte fantasie naturalmente forniti— nata da ignoranza di cagioni, la qual fu loro madre di maraviglia di tutte le cose, che quelli, ignoranti di tutte le cose, fortemente ammiravano. Tal poesia incominciò in essi divina, perché nello stesso tempo ch’essi immaginavano le cagioni delle cose, che sentivano ed ammiravano, essere dèi, alle cose ammirate davano l’essere di sostanze dalla proprio lor idea, ch’e appunto la natura de’ fanciulli. In cotal guisa i primi uomini delle nazioni gentili, come fanciulli del nascente genere umano, dalla loro idea criavan essi le cose, ma con infinita differenza però dal criare che fa Iddio. Perocchè Iddio, nel suo purissimo intendimento, conosce e, conoscendole, cria le cose essi, per la loro robusta ignoranza, il facevano in forza d’una corpolentissima fantasia. E perch’era corpolentissima, il facevano con una meravigliosa sublimità; tal e tanta che perturbava all’eccesso essi medesimi che, fingendo, le si criavano, onde furon detti “poeti,” che lo stesso suona in greco che criatori, in Scienza Nuova terza, bk. 2, sect. 1). At the side of philosophizing and ideally previous to it, Vico posited the poeticizing: “People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with a troubled and agitated spirit, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind” (gli uomini prima sentono senz’avvertire, dappoi avvertiscono con animo perturbato e commosso, finalmente riflettono con mente pura, in Scienza Nuova terza, bk. 1, par. 53). The human beings, since the day they heard the burst of the thunder, when “suddenly frightened and thunderstruck by this inexplicably great phenomenon, raised their eyes and observed the heavens” (ibid., par. 377). Then, they began to express themselves in forms that were impervious to human intellect for the reason that it was incapable of entering into the vast imaginative powers of the earliest people. Their minds were in no way abstract, refined, or intellectualized; rather they were completely sunk in their senses, numbed by their passions, and buried in their bodies (ibid., par. 378) (Naturalmente niegato di poter entrare nella vasta immaginativa di que’ primi uomini, le menti de’ quali di nulla erano astratte, di nulla erano assottigliate, di nulla spiritualizzate, perch’erano tutte immerse ne’ sensi, tutte rintuzzate dalle passioni, tutte seppellite ne’ corpi). Because they were all body, sense, and fantasy, and nothing at all of reason, intellect, and reflection, they were translating everything in a poetic fashion; everything for them was poetry, fantastic transfiguration and interpretation:

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poetic physics was their metaphysics; poetic was the politics and every way of their social living. Because of the need properly human of arriving to something valid in every case, and because the still-young humanity could not arrive at the universal, it started to mould some types (poetic characters or fantastic universals) born by “necessity of nature, because they were incapable of abstracting forms and properties from objects.” Achilles was the strong fighter, Ulysses the sage counselor, Homer the poet; the myth substituted the concept, the fantastic universal took the place of the logical universal. The poetic characters were heroic characters, which were also imaginative universals to which they reduced the various species of heroic things, as to Achilles all the deeds of valiant fighters and to Ulysses all the devices of clever men. These imaginative genera, as the human mind later learned to abstract forms and properties from subjects, passed over into intelligible genera, which prepared the way for the philosophers (in The New Science of 1744, par. 934) (Furono certi universali fantastici, dettati naturalmente da quell’innata proprietà della mente umana di dilettarsi dell’uniforme. Lo che non potendo fare con l’astrazione per generi, il fecero con la fantasia per ritratti. A’ quali universali poetici reducevano tutte le particolari spezie a ciascun genere appartenenti, come ad Achille tutti i fatti de’ forti combattivi, ad Ulisse tutti i consigli de’ saggi. I quali generi fantastici, con avvezzarsi poscia la mente umana ad astrarre le forme e le proprietà da’ subbietti, passarono in generi intelligibili, in Scienza Nuova terza, bk. 4, sect. 6). The Vichian conception of myth, mixed and confused with his poetics, implied already a solution of the religious problem, since the religions of the gentiles were nothing but poetic fables with which the primitive giants, who were all stupor and fear, expressed their sensations. When on the great sylvan area of the world, “the heavens for the first time produced the most frightening thunderclaps and lightning bolts” (il cielo per la prima volta folgorò, tuonò con folgori e tuoni spaventosissimi), then the primitive few giants, suddenly frightened and thunderstruck by this inexplicably great phenomenon, raised their eyes and observed the heavens ... they imagined the heavens as a great living body, and in this manifestation, they called the sky Jupiter.… And they thought that Jupiter … was trying to speak to them through the whistling of his bolts and the crashing of his thunders (ibid., par. 377) (Spaventati ed attoniti dal gran effetto, di che non sapevano la cagione, alzarono gli occhi ed avvertirono il cielo; e si finsero il cielo essere un gran corpo animato, che per tal aspetto chiamarono Giove, che col fischio dei fulmini e col fragrore dei tuoni volesse loro dir qualche cosa, in Scienza Nuova terza, p. 140).

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Thus, the religions, with the exception of Christianity, are nothing but the “invention of a poetry totally … fantastic” (ritrovati di una poesia tutta … fantastica) founded on an essential and sublime metaphor: The world and the whole of nature constitute a great intelligent body, which speaks with real words and, with such extraordinary-madevoices, advises human beings about things for which it wants to be heard with more than religion. In this is found the universal principle of sacrifices in all gentile nations (Il mondo e tutta la natura è un gran corpo intelligente, che parli con parole reali e, con estraordinarie sí fatte voci, avvisi agli uomini cose di che con piú religione voglia essere inteso. Che si truova il principio universale de’ sacrifici appo tutti i gentili). In poetics, Vico found also the solution of the problem of language that is born out of the necessity that human beings have to express themselves and which is always concomitant with the human mental development. Human beings, “having arrived at a common conception of a deity” (convenuti in un pensiero commune di una qualche divinità), coming out of the ferine condition, constituted societies, began to speak to each other, first through “a mute language of signs” (una lingua muta per cenni); then, through a language spoken “by means of heroic emblems, or similitudes, comparisons, images, metaphors, and natural descriptions” (ibid., par. 32) (per imprese eroiche, o sia per somiglianze, comparazioni, imagini, metafore e naturali descrizioni); finally “through words of a settled meaning by the people” (per voci convenute da’ popoli). Vico resolved the initially proposed question with the discovery of fantasy as a spiritual autonomous instance that would allow him to outline the development of humanity in a rhythmic process accentuated by the different phases of sense, fantasy, intellect of the primitive giants, ferine and mute, of the poetic and religious heroes, and of human beings that finally understand and by means of reflection philosophize. 5. “Corsi” and “Ricorsi.” Revelation This discovery of the origin of poetry does away with the opinion of the matchless wisdom of the ancients, so ardently sought after from Plato to Bacon’s De sapientia veterum. For the wisdom of the ancients was the vulgar wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the human race, not the esoteric wisdom of great and rare philosophers (in The New Science of 1744, par. 384) (Per la qual discoverta de’ principi della poesia si è dileguata l’oppinione della sapienza inarrivabile degli antichi, cotanto desiderata di scuoprirsi da Platone infin Bacone da Verulamio, De sapientia veterum, la quale fu sapienza volgare di legislatori che fondarono il genere umano, non già sapienza riposta di sommi e rari filosofi, in Scienza Nuova terza, p. 55). Vico defined these three moments (ferine, heroic, and human) both at the

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practical and theoretical levels, when he showed how the primitive bestioni forced by their enormous passions, under the fulminating sky, were taken by the fear of the divinity and by the shame of their own bestiality, of which for the first time they were becoming aware. Religion, then, a relegando (from “to gather again”), generated in them the conatus proper to the human will, to hold in check the motions impressed on the mind by the body, so as either to quiet them altogether, as becomes the wise man, or at least to direct them to better use, as becomes the civil man (in The New Science of 1744, par. 340) (La moral virtú del conato, il qual è proprio dell’umana volontà, di tener in freno i moti impressi alla mente dal corpo, per o affatto acquetargli, ch’è dell’uomo sappiente, o almeno dar loro altra direzione ad usi migliori ch’è dell’uomo civile, in Scienza Nuova terza, p. 119). While before they roamed “like beasts over the great sylvan areas of the earth” and moved by their enormous lust had frequent intercourse, now they stopped “for the shame of a divinity” for which reason, Vico observed, Jove was called Stator, which means the one who establishes. With the conatus—or freedom of the will finally awakened with consciousness achieved by the human being when it raised its eyes to the sky and acknowledged a superior power: With this conatus the virtue of the spirit began likewise to show itself among them, restraining their bestial lust from finding its satisfaction in the sight of heaven, of which they had a mortal terror. So it came about that each of them would drag one woman into his cave and would keep her there in perpetual company for the duration of their lives (Col conato altresí incominciò in essi a spuntare la virtú dell’ animo, contenendo la loro libidine bestiale di esercitarla in faccia al cielo, di cui avevano uno spavento grandissimo; e ciascuno di essi si diede a strascinare per sé una donna dentro le loro grotte e tenerlavi dentro in perpetua compagnia della lor vita, in ibid., p. 213). When Providence “from the sense of bestial lust colored the face of those lost men with blush” (da esso senso di libidine bestiale incominciò a tingere nel volto degli uomini perduti il rossore), with the beginning of recognized union, law, and altars, humanity advanced to the phase of civil life, in which the same primitive passions are alive, but now bridled and directed in such a way to contribute to the establishment of the civil consortium: Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of

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commonwealths. Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness (ibid., par. 132) (La legislazione considera l’uomo qual è per farne buoni usi nell’umana società; come della ferocia, dell’avarizia, della ambizione, che sono gli tre vizi che portano a traverso tutto il genere umano, ne fa la milizia, la mercatanzia e la corte, e, sí la fortezza, l’opulenza e la sapienza delle repubbliche; e di questi tre grandi vizi, quali certamente distruggerebbero l’umana generazione sopra la terra, ne fa la civile felicità, in Scienza Nuova terza, pp. 74–75). The transition from the ferine world to the civil one is nothing but an adaptation of those fundamental bestial impulses to the new emerging civil orders, under which always the primitive passion, the fundamental egoism of the human nature remains: Human beings, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief guide. Seeking everything useful for themselves and nothing for their companions, they cannot bring their passions under control to direct them toward justice. We thereby establish the fact that human beings in the bestial state desire only their own welfare; having taken wife and begotten children, they desire their own welfare along with that of their family; having entered upon civil life, they desire their welfare along with that of their city; when its rule is extended over several peoples, they desire their own welfare along with that of the nation; when the nations are united by wars, treaties of peace, alliances, and commerce, they desire their own welfare along with that of the entire human race. In all these circumstances the human being desires principally its own utility (in The New Science of 1744, par. 341) (Gli uomini per la loro corrotta natura essendo tiranneggiati dall’amor proprio, per lo quale non sieguono principalmente che la loro propria utilità, onde eglino volendo tutto l’utile per sé e niuna parte per lo compagno non posson essi porre in conato le passioni per indirizzarle a giustizia. Quindi stabiliamo: che l’uomo nello stato bestiale ama solamente la sua salvezza; presa moglie e fatti figliuoli, ama la sua salvezza con la salvezza delle città; distesi gl’imperi sopra piú popoli, ama la sua salvezza con la salvezza delle nazioni; unite le nazioni in guerre, paci, allianze, commerci, ama la sua salvezza con la salvezza di tutto il genere umano: l’uomo in tutte queste circostanze ama principalmente l’utilità propia, in Scienza Nuova Terza, p. 120). This stupefying transfiguration of raw material egoism demonstrates, according to Vico, the existence of a guiding principle that actualizes a plan that would tend toward amelioration:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY This axiom proves that there is divine providence and further that it is a divine legislative mind. For out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, it has made the civil institutions by which they may live in human society (ibid., par. 133) (Pruova esservi Provvedenza divina e che ella sia una divina mente legislatrice, la quale delle passioni degli uomini tutti attenuti alle loro private utilità, per le quali viverebbono da fiere bestie dentro le solitudini, ne ha fatto gli ordini civili per gli quali vivano in umana società, in Scienza Nuova terza, p. 75).

Providence alone brings justice to its birth, when it disposes the way that human beings, being unable to pursue what they want, would at least achieve what they need, “and this is called just. That which regulates all human justice is administered by divine providence to preserve human society” (ibid., par. 341) (quel che dicesi giusto. Onde quella che regola tutto il giusto degli uomini è la giustizia divina, la quale ci è ministrata dalla divina Provvedenza per conservare l’umana società, in ibid., p. 121). The eternal guises that the new science determines, within which run in time the histories of the nations, those guises that in their triadic rhythm, perennially returning in a perennial development (corsi and ricorsi), mark the ascension of humankind from the primitive barbarism, through the new barbarism, toward the loftiest wisdom. All these ideal moments, that run and rerun, are the manifest articulation of the Divine Providence, which operates without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has ordered this great city of the human race. For though this world has been created in time and particular, the institutions established therein are universal and eternal (Senza verun umano scorgimento o consiglio, e sovente contro essi proponimenti degli uomini ha dato a questa gran città del gener umano; ché, quantumque questo mondo sia stato criato nel tempo e particolare, però gli ordini ch’ella v’ha posto sono universali ed eterni, in ibid., p. 121). It is Providence that has given eternal orders. And this Providence, while it convinces of folly the Epicureans, theoreticians of chance, shows the truth of the Stoics revealing how “their eternal chain of causes, to which they will have it the world is chained, itself hangs upon the omnipotent, wise, and beneficent will of the best and greatest God” (ibid., par. 345) (la loro catena eterna delle cagioni, con la quale vogliono avvinto il mondo, ella penda dall’onnipotente saggia e benigna volontà dell’ Ottimo Massimo Dio, in Scienza Nuova terza, p. 123). The world is like one city under the rule of God (Orbis terrarum una civitas sub Dei imperio). These words in the De Constantia iurisprudentis could become the epigraph of the Scienza Nuova. In the Scienza Nuova prima, Vico proclaimed, “The Divine Providence is the Archi-

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tect of this World of Nations” (Divina Provvedenza ella è l’Architetta di questo Mondo delle Nazioni). Not chance or fate, but a divine providential principle is the soul of the universal principle, which gives a meaning and guides it to a goal: “Hence Epicurus, who believes in chance, is refuted by the facts, along with his followers, Hobbes and Machiavelli; and so are Zeno and Spinoza, who admit fate. The evidence clearly confirms the contrary position of the political philosophers, whose prince is the divine Plato, who shows that providence directs human institutions” (ibid., par. 1109). The contemplation of this Providence would bring us, as to a conclusion, to the admiration, veneration, and desire of God, “To sum up, from all that we have set forth in this work, it is to be finally concluded that this Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise” (ibid., par. 1112) (Insomma, da tutto ciò che si è in quest’opera ragionato, è da finalmente conchiudersi che questa Scienza porta indivisibilmente seco lo studio della pietà e che, se non siesi pio, non si può davvero esser saggio). In the manifest chaos of the succession of events Vico has underlined an eternal principle, an ideal direction, which brought him back necessarily to Plato, the “divine” Plato, who also dreamed of that Republic, but who separated it completely from the course of nations, without ever finding a link to it. For Vico, that ideal is operative within the heart of things, but not identifiable with them, as something that expresses a wisdom superior to that of the singles, an order that obliges and guides everything. It is not a being but a duty: it is not an idea separate and posited in the heaven, but operating in the world of humankind. It is not the “historical course in whole its phases, from the great beasts to Plato” (corso storico in tutte le sue fasi, dai bestioni non esclusi a Platone compreso), but the ideal eternal history, “on which run in time the histories of all nations” (sopra la quale corrono in tempo le storie di tutte le nazioni). The difference is not small or negligible. Above and beyond the course of events, a principle exists that naturally becomes intrinsic to things, which does not exhaust itself in them but remains eternal beyond and above them. Religion is not simply a human product, active in the world of men, and nonetheless their fable or fiction. Religion, for Vico, is founded on the reality of a principle per se subsistent. When he, at the end of his work (par. 1110) reproached Polybius and Bayle for their devaluation of the religious phenomenon and charged Bayle with admitting the possibility of a moral and civil society of atheists, Vico did not limit himself to underscore the fact: “Religions alone can bring peoples to do virtuous works by appeal to their feelings, which alone move human beings to perform them; and the reasoned maxims of the philosophers concerning virtue are of use only when employed by a good eloquence for kindling the feelings to do the duties of virtue” (ibid., par., 1110). He insisted in saying that the New Science, by revealing Providence, by showing the reality of an ideal order that operates as an immanent order within history, capable of transcending history in its value, for this precise reason confirms the faith in God, or better in the God

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revealed by Christianity. The fact that ideas constitute the texture of the world does not impede with their being, as values, perfect in themselves and implying the reality of an absolute perfection. On the contrary, it was more difficult for Vico to maintain the historical fact of the Revelation, the veracity of the Biblical narration, and the particular significance of Hebrew history. How could one reconcile the wisdom initially already manifest with the laborious ascension of humankind from the great primitive beast (bestione) to the maturity of the wise? It was a serious problem, even though not new; it had been already audaciously touched in the medieval thought by Roger Bacon and then reconsidered by the Renaissance Platonists so dear to Vico. The most general solution accepted posited an obnubilation (obfuscation) generated by sin, from which humanity was thereafter called to the task of conquest or better reconquest of its previous condition. This was a very Platonic concept that assumed the ascension being conditioned by a previous descent, which constitutes its necessary presupposition. Humanity goes on redeeming itself; it does not create itself, but reaffirms what from being a gift can become a laborious conquest. Vico made his own, at least in part, such a vision, when, for example, he affirmed that the historical acquisition of language, a gift already given to Adam by God, was the finding anew of a good lost in the crisis of the dispersion of humanity throughout the earth. Here, again, the problem of human liberty had to be met: the problem of the human spirit before God and the problem of providence and grace. It was again the serious problem of grace that Vico studied in Vatolla when he meditated on Antonius Richardus’s works, the Jesuit Étienne Deschamps, famous for his disputations with the Jansenists, and who “by a geometrical method shows that the doctrine of St. Augustine is midway between the two extremes of Calvin and Pelagius, and equidistant likewise from the other opinions that approach these two extremes” (Autobiography, p. 119). This intermediate position seemed to Vico “to agree with the sound doctrine of grace in respect of moral philosophy.” Being adverse to Jansenism that was too much disavowing divine Providence, Vico had to conclude the last Scienza Nuova (1744) with the reaffirmation of the human liberty in which grace and providence concur. The human being possesses “free will, but feeble, in order to change passions into virtues; but … God helps naturally with divine Providence and, supernaturally, with divine grace.” This perhaps is not a descent of grace toward nature, but the tendency of nature toward grace.

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 II 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

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Cover Design: Studio Pollmann Cover photo: © Clara Natoli The Last Judgment, Lorenzo Maitini (1255-1330), marble bas-relief (detail), Duomo, Orvieto, 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

Part Five FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO RISORGIMENTO (*) (Chapters 26–29)

(*) Risorgimento: the period of the movement for liberation, reform, and unification of Italy, from the latter part of the eighteenth century to ca. 1870.

Twenty-Six THE ENLIGHTENMENT 1. Jansenist Motives. Diffusion of Locke’s Doctrine We saw how, in the ambience itself in which Vico flourished, the motives that would constitute the characteristic aspects of the Enlightenment came to be diffused: Lockean empiricism, criticism of religion, and ferments of political thought. These themes, if we reflect on the movement of ideas that had a fecund development since the fifteenth century, were certainly destined to find a suitable soil. The conditions themselves of Italy were inciting the spirits to meditation and criticism. While the Galileian science could never free itself from Platonic inspiration, while Vico was feeling the need of joining Plato with Bacon, the influence of the Enlightenment beyond the Alps was manifesting itself in the direction of a break from this traditional equilibrium. What was accepted of the empiricism was its sensist aspect, and the French School of rationalism was preferred over the English School of sentiments. It was probably precisely for this reason that for many decades the work of Vico had little impact, and very few read the essays of the Count of Shaftesbury, who came to die in Naples. Perhaps these works began to bounce back through Denis Diderot, once they lost in part their original force and were lacking in bite. What contributed to all of this was also the Italian political situation that induced more and more a polemic and a combative attitude. The English Enlightenment, permeated as it was by a thoughtful moral and religious necessity, scarcely could contribute to the cultural battle beginning to develop at every level against ancient ecclesiastical privileges and old civil tyrannies. Certainly, the Pascalian pages of Joseph Butler or the subtlest analyses of David Hume could not offer a point of departure against ecclesiastic abuses or laic prepotencies. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and, afterward, Helvétius and d’Holbach were accepted with all their destructive violence, while very often it was asked from Jansenism, not the long theological discussion on the Augustinian theme of the grace, but the polemic vivacity in the name of free critique. Precisely for this reason, as the recent historian Ernesto Codignola noticed, Illuminists and Jansenists, in their diverse language, appeared at times to come together in the unique battle intended for the destruction of any oppressive agency. It was a common attitude “mental and sentimental,” and perhaps more sentimental than mental, that tied together in

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a strange but significant agreement the Jansenists and men like Antonio Genovesi, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, and Carlo Antonio Pilati. The new thought was not yet fully engaged in this polemic. In order that the fecund germs that came to be maturing from the Renaissance could profoundly operate in the time of Vico, an intermediate crisis was necessary that would break the equivocations that from the Counter Reformation on found a niche in the conscience of all peoples. The illuministic instance, though less profound than the surviving traditional currents and even of the Vichian novel reflection, contributed to this crisis and was capable of freeing culture from what was by this time already surpassed and dead. At the end of this polemic we will find Vincenzo Cuoco and Giuseppe Mazzini, Gian Domenico Romagnosi and Carlo Cattaneo, Vincenzo Gioberti and Antonio Rosmini, Raffaello Lambruschini and Gino Capponi. It was a tradition and, perhaps, a tradition not free from a stout conservatism, but renewed and purified of much debris. Locke, “the precise analyzer of the spirit, the luminous genealogist of our ideas,” as Pietro Verri used to call him, began to be known and diffused in Italy since the first part of the eighteenth century. Muratori, though remaining diffident before Locke’s conclusions, studied him; Conti examined him; Doria and Gerdil, the two major representatives of the Platonizing metaphysics, between 1732 and 1748, fought him. This did not create an obstacle to the diffusion of Locke’s writings, though at times they were received with diffidence and suspicion. On 2 February 1745, Francesco Maria Zanotti wrote to Francesco Algarotti, “I am afraid that in some countries the philosophy of Locke has the worst reputation, and is looked upon as contrary to religion, and to be called ‘Lockean’ is like to be called ‘atheist’.” Among others, Muratori had already underlined such impiety in reference to Locke’s book “that has the illusive title of The Reasonableness of Christianity,” adding somewhere else that its author always loved some ambiguity “in order to have a way out, whenever he would be obliged to defend himself from the accusation of impiety.” In that book, Muratori referred most particularly to Locke’s question of whether matter can think, a question that gave origin to a hornets’ nest of discussions in England with Edward Stillingfleet, Henry Dodwell, Samuel Clarke and many others, and whose curious echo can be found even in the Mémoires of Giovanni Giacomo Casanova. It was this point that generated in England the accusation of Spinozism against the author of The Reasonableness of Christianity, which in Italy made Conti suspicious, having sniffed “one half of atheism” in such a title. From this came the frequent discussions concerning the immateriality of the soul, to which also Giovanni Alberto De Soria, Professor in Pisa, a strong supporter of Galileo and Newton against Descartes, “the one who crippled many laws of physics … the fabricator of an imaginary universe” (storpiatore di tante leggi fisiche … macchinatore di un universo immaginario), dedicated himself. Gabriel Maugain listed De Soria among the critics of Locke, and put his name

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together, in addition to that of Muratori, with that of Vincenzo Moniglia, also a teacher in Pisa and a vivacious adversary of “Fatalists … Materialists … and other Incredulous Individuals.” Gentile, instead, examining the principles of a rational philosophy of De Soria’s Rationalis philosophiae institutiones, sive de emendanda regendaque mente (Amsterdam, 1741), established a direct dependency of De Soria from Locke through Jean Le Clerc, and found in the radical critique of De Soria to the use of syllogism a step ahead of Locke and the Lockeans. It is interesting to notice how Muratori, in the treatise Della forza della fantasia umana (On the power of human fantasy, ch. 18), counted among the books on logics the one of De Soria as the preferable one, placing De Soria beside Descartes and Malebranche, and, among the Italians, Fardella and Corsini. Muratori said, “Those who have not studied these books when they were young, even if now they are old, they would use their time well by reading them and learning their maxims” (chi non gli ha studiati da giovane, anche vecchio impiegherà bene il suo tempo in leggerli ed impararne le massime). Verily, De Soria, who on the footprints of the Galileian experimentalism was ready to accept the exigencies of concreteness intrinsic in empiricism, was anything other than a Lockean for what concerns the problem of God and creation. His work on the existence of God and the immateriality and immortality of the human spirit, Della esistenza di Dio e della immaterialità ed immortalità dello spirito umano secondo la mera filosofia (Lucca, 1745), was even attacked and discussed by Giovanni Lami precisely with some Lockean arguments. Francesco Maria Zanotti was of the opinion that no necessary tie between Lockeanism and impiety existed, and was consoling Francesco Algarotti who had been accused of being a Lockean, informing him that in Bologna even some ladies were pleased to follow Lockean doctrines: Not one person in the schools of Bologna follows Locke, but also not a person can be found who would frankly declare that his philosophy is contrary to religion. Here, any person can proclaim itself a Lockean without fear of shame and without falling for this reason under suspicion of being an infidel. We do know of some Ladies who boast of having studied and learned Locke, and for this neither they are looked upon with scorn nor the one who taught them has been charged with faithlessness (Nelle scuole di Bologna niuno è che segua Locke, ma niuno è ancora il quale sia per pronunciar francamente che quella filosofia ripugni alla religione; e potrebbe qui uno dire di essere lockista senza avere da vergognarsene, e senza cadere per questo in sospetto di essere un infedele; ed abbiam qualche dama, che si vanta di aver studiato il Locke ed apparatolo, né è riguardata per questo con ribrezzo, né è caduto in sospetto d’infedeltà chi glielo spiegò). In Lucca, an Italian version of Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) had been published by E. Marchini since 1735. The Italian version

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followed the French version of Pierre Coste, and one year after its publication Giulio Cesare Becelli, a writer on pedagogical matters, who had previously translated Some Thoughts concerning Education, reduced it to an anthology of aphorisms that thereafter he published. In 1773, an Italian version of On Civil Government (1691) was also published. Angelo Tavanti and Luca Antonio Pagnini, both from Tuscany, also translated Lockean writings, while during the second half of the century translations from Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Maupertuis, Mably, Helvétius, D’Holbach, in addition to those from Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot as well began to be diffused. The Encyclopédie of the French Encyclopedists with notes was gradually printed first in Lucca from 1758 to 1771, and then reprinted in Livorno from 1770 to 1779, and a revised third edition with cuts of all texts offending religion came out from Veneto from 1784 to 1794. The disputes concerning the new thought and the newly originated problems were fervent, while the motives recently introduced were inserting themselves into the preexistent ones. The religious criticism of the free thinkers had already found its exponents, not only in Pietro Giannone, but also in Nicola Caravita, whose anti-papal dissertation would find a translator in Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, as well as in Count Ignazio Alberto Radicati of Passerano, who, errant in England and Holland where he died, would exalt a faith free from all ecclesiastical over-structures in his collection of curious essays on the most interesting matters, Recueil de pieces curieuses sur les matières le plus intéressantes (Rotterdam, 1736). The Ritratti poetici (Poetical portraits) of Appiano Buonafede were allusive to this wide liberating influence connected to Lockean conceptions. Buonafede led Locke to say these things: Our age was running through the tortuous road, badly informed by stimuli and badly guided by stings, when I offered my hand to help it out of error and indicated the way, the goals, the footprints to follow. Full of pride, man was speaking of the abyss, the sky, and the infinite forms, and I showed him the sources of ignorance and opened new courses, so he could see in how much slumber he was. In the name of faith, Christ’s children were divided. I opened for all the eternal portals and had compassion for the vile souls. First I conquered reason and then faith.. (Per torta via correa l’etate informe mal da stimuli e mal retta da’ morsi; quand’io la mano in quel error le porsi, e le strade segnai, le mete e l’orme.

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L’abisso, il cielo e l’infinite forme l’uom superbo volgea ne’ suoi discorsi; ed io le fonti d’ignoranza e i corsi gli apersi, e vide in qual grand’ombra ei dorme. Dietro l’eccelsa fede eran divisi di Cristo i figli; ed io l’eterne porte schiusi a tutti, e le serve alme derisi. Pria la ragione e poi la fe’ conquisi). The good Celestine monk was horrified at the impiety that sprang from the Lockean sources (“a little light joined to deadly horrors”). Instead of the Christianity of the Fathers of the Church, he saw the imposition of a bloodless religion reduced to a simple cult of humanity. Among the populace, it was probably true everywhere, what Cuoco observed about Naples, “The religion of the people was nothing but a feast, and, as long as they could keep the feast, they would care for nothing else” (la religione del popolo non era che una festa; e, purché la festa se gli fosse lasciata, non si curava d’altro). The thinkers, instead, when they did not profess themselves openly as atheists as the first Francesco Lomonaco, the translator of Gabriel Mably, dreamed with Cesare Filangieri a “religion of the State and of the government”; with Giuseppe Maria Galanti, a Christianity reduced to pure morality, “To adore God, … to cultivate the land, … and come to the help of each other during the short time of our life” (adorar Dio, … coltivar la terra, … soccorrerci ed aiutarci l’un l’altro nel breve spazio della nostra vita); with Vincenzo Russo, one only political religion cemented by the sense of brotherhood and by the belief in mystery (sentimento di fratellanza nel centro di un’idea sublimemente tenebrosa). This religion, democratic and humanistic, was going to meet with the Masonic religiousness, to which the Neapolitan abbot Antonio Jerocades, who had appropriated, not without misunderstanding them, some Vichian motives, would elevate hymns of praise. 2. Francesco M. Zanotti. Polemics on Maupertuis. Isidoro Bianchi. Carlo A. Pilati. Francesco Algarotti. Ruggero G. Boscovich The individuals who prepared the ground for the diffusion of the Enlightenment were those who, on the footprints of the Galileian science, had turned their attention to the speculation of Newton, and who, by following his method, thereafter concerned themselves with the sciences of the spirit. Among these individuals, was Francesco Maria Zanotti from Bologna, a friend of Bernard Fontenelle and Voltaire, and a famous scientist who proclaimed Descartes in Bologna during the second decade of the eighteenth century; he abandoned the physics of the vortices to follow Newton and then, taken by the law of attraction, composed and published in 1747 a famous essay “on the attractive force of ideas,” pretending to have translated it from the French of Monsieur de la Tour. No differently than Hume, who in 1739 dis-

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sertated “on the gentle force” that links our ideas, Zanotti applied to the psychic world what Newton stated concerning the world of matter. The mechanism of association that after Hartley would become the deus ex machina for the explanation of the most complex aspects of the life of the spirit was presented by Zanotti in a brilliant way: Who is the person who did not observe that one event can recall others in our memory? This means that between the one and the others there is a reciprocal attraction. How can it be that individuals of mature age demonstrate to have more memory than those who are younger? This is a fact analogous to that of bodies, which because of the long usage are charged better with electricity (E chi non osserva che un fatto ne richiama altri a memoria? Ciò significa che tra l’uno e gli altri c’è un’attrazione reciproca. E come avviene che gli uomini maturi hanno maggior memoria che i giovani? È un fatto analogo a quelli dei corpi che per il lungo uso si caricano meglio d’ elettricità). The impression that many had of this mechanical vision of psychic life was that Zanotti wanted to reduce to the absurd the exaggerations of Newtonianism. Of this impression of the contemporaries, shared also by some recent interpreter, Zanotti himself gave notice in writing to Antonio Conti: The booklet on the attractive force of the ideas has being accepted among us in two different manners. Some have assumed that the author is very serious in what he says and that he must be a Newtonian on the edge of becoming a fanatic. Others, on the contrary, believed that the author was making a joke out of the whole thing and ridiculed philosophy (Il libretto sopra la forza attrattiva delle idee è stato qui tra noi preso in due maniere. Alcuni pretendono che l’autore dica davvero, e sia un newtoniano che dà ormai nel fanatismo; altri credon che burli e si rida di tutta la filosofia). With all probability, Zanotti was serious in his opinions, if not in all, at least in the greater part of them, even though afterward, when discoursing on morality and explaining Aristotle, he leaned so much toward Plato to despise “the brief happiness of this life and leave it to the Peripatetics” (la breve felicità di questa vita e lasciarla ai peripatetici). The Essai de philosophie morale of Pierre-Louis Maupertuis appeared in 1749, and in that essay the author sustained that in life there is a natural excess of sufferance over pleasure. In order to obviate this reality, the morality of the ancients had supported with the Epicureans the need of augmenting pleasure, and with the Stoics the need of minimizing pain. Christianity alone, with the promise of a future happiness, overcame all difficulties. Zanotti, in a Ragionamento of 1754, which he attached to his book on the Nicomachean Ethics, denied the hedonistic premise of Maupertuis distinguishing between

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pleasure and virtue and insisting on the heterogeneity of pleasure, which invalidates the calculus purported by Maupertuis. In addition, Zanotti did not accept the opinion that between Christianity and Stoicism there could be the distance proposed by Maupertuis because he was convinced that Christians would not follow virtue for love of the goods in afterlife, but for the value of virtue itself. The question, rooted in the ancient and never resolved problem of the useful, did not end here, because in defense of Maupertuis the Dominican Casto Innocente Ansaldi, professor at the University of Turin, intervened with his Vindiciae Maupertuisianae (Venice, 1754), in which he violently attacked Stoicism. Zanotti replied first with his own name, then with the fictional name of Giuseppe Antonelli of Messina. Those who came in Zanotti’s support were Lami, the Cardinal Querini, and the Dominican Tommaso Schiara, a friend of Ansaldi. Others, like Clemente Baroni of Cavalcabò, took the side of Ansaldi. During this period, moral, economical, and political questions were the ones that generated the greater interest, and Genovesi was right in claiming, “Any study that is not intended for the sure advantage of human beings is a vain and noxious occupation” (occupazione vana e nocevole, ogni studio che non mira alla soda utilità degli uomini). These were inquiries that, on the model of those more famous of the English and French peoples, intended to delineate an autonomous morality, founded on experience. Isidoro Bianchi of Cremona, who wrote on Verri and against Miceli, took inspiration from the French, and in a discourse on the Morale del Sentimento (1779), celebrating Montaigne, Charron, Pascal, Nicole, Malebranche, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Montesquieu, placed the root of the whole moral life in self-respect, the principle of every sentiment, the basis of society, the origin of sympathy that would bring us beyond the narrow borders of selfishness. The illuminist from Trento, Carlo Antonio Pilati, who was all concerned with the delineating of a morality independent from theology and founded on the natural law as it would be revealed through the sentiments, relied on the English philosophers of the school of Shaftesbury. He observed: The natural instinct is the true and proper instructor of the human being in this matter…. However, by instinct we do not mean the stimuli of the body, because the body should have no part at all in this. This instinct is properly nothing else than a moral sentiment, which originates from the spirit, and it comes by itself, without the interference of the human reflection on it. This instinct derives from the natural disposition of the human being, not from its power of ratiocination (L’istinto naturale è in questo punto il vero e proprio istruttore dell’uomo…. Per istinto non vuolsi già intendere gli stimuli del corpo, ché il corpo non deve in ciò avere parte veruna. Pertanto questo istinto propriamente altro non è che un sentimento morale, che dall’animo nasce, e che vi-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ene da se stesso, senza che l’uomo vi faccia riflesso: poiché dalla natural disposizione dell’uomo, non dal raziocinio deriva).

In this affirmation, the need of finding beyond abstract reason what Butler used to call sentiment of the intellect is quite clear. In the anti-ecclesiastic polemic, Pilati connected himself directly with Voltaire, who esteemed him greatly, more than with Rousseau or Radicati of Passerano. Pilati like Voltaire was never tired of depicting with the worst colors the nefarious influence of the clergy, and especially of the monks, who were the corruptors of the precise sources of social life with their ascetic principles. The vicissitudes of the fabulous “American Kingdom of Cumba” that Pilati described in the premise to the reflections of an Italian on the church in general, the secular and religious clergy, the bishops and the Roman pontiff, and on the ecclesiastical rights of princes, in Riflessioni di un Italiano sopra la Chiesa in generale, sopra il Clero sí regolare che secolare, sopra i Vescovi e i Pontefici romani e sopra i diritti ecclesiastici de’ Principi (Borgofrancone [Coira], 1768), constitutes the mirror of his thought so similar to that of Voltaire. The life was good in Cumba until the Catholic missionaries arrived. With the arrival of the missionaries, superstition, asceticism, and social breaking up, factious and intolerant spirit, factional fights, and anarchy began to be spread through. No advantage exists in enumerating the long list of dissertations, essays, and articles, which contain nothing noteworthy except the tone and the intention, in their common tendency to break the last scholastic obstacles to a free research, which appeared to be celebrated in the whole complex of inquiries that started from Newton and Locke, and which came to propose always new problems against the ancient systems. We can find this antithesis between old systems and new problematic in the Dialoghi sopra l’ottica newtoniana of Francesco Algarotti, a dear friend and disciple of Zanotti, who possessed a clear vision of the possibility of welding together the Galileian tendency with the new orientations of thought. Algarotti observed that the new philosophy was approaching Galileo more than Descartes, against whose systematic abstractness he was in total contrast and in bitter polemic. His friend Voltaire was assimilating Cartesianism to Scholastic Peripatetism and was sustaining the necessity of completely getting rid of it. And this was to be done, not as the appeal of Algarotti to Galileo may have suggested for the profound interest for a naturalistic inquiry, but for an interest exclusively toward humankind, no longer considered in its universality, but in its earthly life, in the city of human beings. While the fantastic philosophy, erroneous in its conclusions as well as in its presuppositions, is totally useless in the practical operations, the sensate and mathematical philosophy, whose certainty of principles assures the possibility of invention, is admirably fecund for its uses in life. From the school of the daring Descartes what has ever come out if

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not empty sayings and the noise of vain words? What kind of utility, what commodity has ever come to civil society from the cycling of the vortices, from the compression of the globuliferous or thin matter? On the contrary, the moderate Newton, thanks to the new proprieties he has seen within light, has with a new telescope perfected our senses; thanks to the attraction he discovered within matter, has truly submitted planets and comets to our computations, and made them in a certain way citizens of the sky. Thus, Newton has made our ways through the ocean safer and easier, being this the one element from which it seemed that nature wished to exclude us. By means of this one element, his countrymen indeed have extended their traffic, arms, and empire in every corner of the world (Dove la filosofia fantastica, erronea nelle sue conclusioni come ne’ suoi supposti è totalmente disutile nelle operazioni della pratica; la filosofia sensata e matematica, a cui per la certezza de’ suoi principi è dato d’indovinare, si trova esser mirabilmente feconda per gli usi della vita. Di tutta la scuola dell’ardito Descartes che altro è mai uscito, se non che dicerie e strepito di vane parole? Quale utilità, qual comodo è derivato mai alla civile società dal giro de’ vortici, dal premere della materia globulosa o della sottile? Laddove il moderato Newtono, mercè le nuove proprietà da lui viste nella luce, ha con un nuovo cannocchiale perfezionato i nostri sensi, mercè l’attrazione da lui discoperta nella materia ha veramente assoggettato a’ nostri computi i pianeti e le comete, ne ha fatti in certa maniera cittadini del cielo, ed ha reso agli uomini piú sicure e piú facili le vie per uno elemento, da cui pareva gli avesse esclusi la natura, e per cui i suoi compatrioti distendono il traffico, le armi e l’imperio in ogni lato del mondo). This was the significant conclusion of the Dialoghi sopra l’ottica newtoniana of Algarotti. On the contrary, the Dalmatian Jesuit Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich wanted to assume an intermediate position between Leibniz and Newton, a position all closed in the field of scientific inquiry. Already in De viribus vivis (On the alive forces) of 1745, and then returning to the same concepts in the dissertation of 1754, De continuitatis lege et eius consectariis pertinentibus ad prima materiae elementa eorumque vires (On the law of continuity and its consequences pertinent to the first elements of matter and their forces), Boscovich accepted Leibniz’s idea of the simple and inextensible first elements and Newton’s concepts of attractive and repulsive forces that are active in the whole universe. Against Leibniz, Boscovich “refused to accept a continuous extension that would derive from inextensible contiguous elements in reciprocal contact” (nullam extensionem continuam admittit, quae e contiguis et se contingentibus inextensis oriatur), but would admit “in the elements a certain homogeneity and would derive any specification of the masses from

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the variety of configurations and combination” (homogeneitatem admittit in elementis, omni massarum discrimine a sola dispositione et diversa combinatione derivato). Against Newton, in Theoria philosophiae naturalis (vol. 1, chs. 2–4), Boscovich accepted attraction as the sole force and did not posit “in the minimal distances forces that are positive, attractive like Newton did, but forces that are negative, repellent” (in minimis distantiis vires non positivas, sive attractivas, uti Newtonius, sed negativas sive repulsivas). In this way, he could proclaim himself victorious against the resurgent difficulties of Zeno. 3. Antonio Genovesi We have already cited some characteristic words of Antonio Genovesi. Those words can constitute the epigraphy of this movement of thought, and we may say that they were dictated by one, who, with all probability, was its most noteworthy exponent. In 1754, Genovesi wrote again: I ask you to begin by uniting yourselves more and more with the Human Society. Do not tell me how important and praiseworthy are the Metaphysics and the Critique. I agree with you that the spirit of these disciplines is necessary for every philosopher, but I will always sustain that because the Philosophers are participant members of the human race, they must as well think more of the human being, instead of the things that are above the human being (Cominciate, vi prego, ad unirvi piú alla Società degli Uomini, e non mi state a commendar tanto la Metafisica e la Critica. Converrò, che lo spirito di queste facoltà sia necessario per ogni Filosofo; ma sosterrò sempre, che poiché i Filosofi sono della razza umana, convenga anche loro pensare meglio agli uomini, che alle cose che sono sopra di noi). It was an appeal rigidly humanistic to a science of humankind, a science operating among human beings, which appeared as a sign of little vigor of gnoseological and metaphysical thought. It was, on the contrary, the conscious beginning of a more decisive philosophy of humankind, which had to begin, in the same way as in Vico, with a polemic phase against the various forms of the dogmatism too much inclined to the omission of concrete experience. From this came the dislike that Genovesi had for the old metaphysics, “If I must tell the truth, I have looked at metaphysics, but from far away, and as if in a fog. The blazing rays of its divine countenance have dazzled me” (Se ho da dire il vero, ho veduto la metafisica, ma da lontano, e come involta in una nebbia. Gli sfolgoranti raggi del suo volto divino m’hanno abbarbagliato). In the Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienze (A discourse on the true aim of letters and sciences), addressed to Bartolomeo Intieri, in 1757, Genovesi was eloquently explicit:

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Because human beings are more simple, more used to greatly esteem what they understand less, the dialecticians and the metaphysicians— the Don Quixotes of the Republic of Letters, fighting the indestructible giants of the Chimeras for the most vain glory of the most subtle ingenuity, their Dulcinea of Toboso—have achieved high estimation and have usurped the prize that was due to true knowledge. This was the fatal bait that filled with indiscreet sophists Greece in the ancient times and the greater part of Europe in the centuries nearer to us. The first and most ancient philosophy of the nations considered ethics, economics, and politics. The first philosophers were simultaneously legislators, fathers, catechists, and priests of the nations. Their philosophy was all practical and their life was the life of citizens persuaded that since they were participating in the advantages of society they also had to take part in the responsibilities and labors of society for the public good or for the private (Poiché gli uomini quanto son piú semplici, tanto sogliono piú stimare quel che meno intendon, i Dialettici ed i Metafisici, i Don Chisciotte della Repubblica delle Lettere, combattenti con gli indestruttibili giganti delle Chimere per la Gloria vanissima di sottilissimo ingegno, loro Dulcinea del Toboso, salirono in alta stima ed usurparono il premio dovuto al vero sapere; ciò che fu l’esca fatale che riempí ne’ vecchi tempi d’indiscreti sofisti la Grecia e ne’ secoli a noi piú vicini buona parte dell’Europa. La prima e piú antica filosofia delle nazioni non fu che etica, economia, politica. I primi filosofi furono in un tempo stesso i legislatori, i padri, i catechisti, i sacerdoti delle nazioni. La loro filosofia era tutta cose, e la vita era vita di cittadini persuasi che come partecipavano a’ comodi della società cosí dovevano aver parte alle cure ed alle fatiche o per lo ben pubblico o per lo bene privato). The impulse itself that vibrated in the pages of the writers of the Renaissance vibrates here as well: philosophy must be all directed to the comprehension of the world of nations, and to reform it, added Genovesi, “The past centuries in Europe were centuries of errant knights, fantastic knights. The sciences suffered the same disgrace: they were subtle, thorny, fantastic, and full of strange ideas. Today peoples are more human, and think practically” (I secoli addietro erano in Europa di cavalleria errante, cioè fantastica. Le scienze ebbero la stessa disgrazia: sottili, spinose, fantastiche, ghiribizzose. Oggi i popoli sono piú umani, e pensano al sodo). They want a practical philosophy, interested in things, tutta cose, which is what Genovesi wanted. According to Genovesi, the initiator of the new times was Bacon, who “removed the rusty shackles, and cut the bandages with which the reason of the philosophizing crowd was all covered. Europe then changed its face. Each of its generous nations saw its own Hercules, the killer of the monsters that dominated each nation, and the one who demonstrated the true knowledge.” The Italian Hercules was Galileo, whom Genovesi placed beside Bacon

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among the fathers of new thinking. From this union originated the good method for the progress of science, reason united with experience, in a science that is the power of remodeling the world. With the illuminati, Genovesi raised a hymn to the Reason that elevates man higher than any other creature, but he is careful in freeing it from any abstractness that would make it sterile and empty. Reason is “universal art”; experience is “reason reasoning in one of the diverse times and about the different events” (ragione ragionatrice in uno de’ diversi tempi e de’ diversi fatti), “Reason is useful only when it has concretized itself in practice and reality.” One can never say, “reason in a nation has reached its maturity when it resides in the abstract intellect more than in the heart and in the hands” ([né può dirsi] che la ragione sia in una nazione giunta alla sua maturità dove ella risiede piú nell’astratto intelletto, che nel cuore e nelle mani). While delineating, in the anonymous Disputatio physico-historica premised to the Neapolitan edition of the Physics of Pieter van Musschenbroek (1745), the development of the European thought, Genovesi rebuked the metaphysics of the followers of Christian Wolff for getting lost in emptiness and darkness, “You have embraced abstract notions with your effort of bringing philosophy from a practice among human beings once more to the intelligible world and have filled everything with contrasts, vain questions, and obscurities” (abstractis adscitis notionibus, dum philosophiam ab hominum commercio iterum ad mundum intelligibilem revocare student, omnia rixis, vanis quaestionibus, tenebris oppleverunt). He showed the same attitude when outlining the antithesis between Cartesians and Newtonians, “Descartes teaches only uncertain and vague hypotheses, while Newton only those that are from the demonstrations obtained from experiments or reasons. The hypotheses of the Cartesians have no end, and Europe, leaving behind these uncertain hypotheses, has moved to a more solid science of physics” (nihil nisi hypotheses vagas incertasque docet Cartesius; nihil nisi quod aut experimenta, aut rationes demonstrant, adoptat Neutonus. Ergo disterminate Cartesianorum sunt hypotheses, ex quo ad solidiorem physicae scientiam aab incertis hypothesibus revocata est Europa). The task of human philosophy is certainly more than that. In his lectures on civil economics, Lezioni di economia civile, Genovesi declared: Though all the sciences are most useful and deserving of being fervently cultivated since they are all intended for the growth and the perfection of the basis of reason, which is the prime and principal instrument of human life and its every good, nonetheless … I think that those sciences should be rather commended, followed, and cultivated that more directly touch and concern our present advantage and tranquility. For the common agreement of the wise, among these sciences, in the first instance and most honorably, those that the Greeks called ethics and we moral sciences should be collocated. These are the sciences that more than all the others come closer to the looking at and providing for our customs and needs (Comeché tutte le scienze sieno

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utilissime e degne di essere fervorosamente coltivate conciossiaché tutte sieno ordinate ad accrescere e perfezionare il fondo della ragione, primo e principale istrumento della vita umana e d’ogni suo bene; quelle nondimeno … sono, stim’io, piú da commendare, e seguire e coltivare, le quali piú da vicino risguardano e intendono alla presente comodità e tranquillità nostra. Tra queste per comun sentimento de’ savi in primo luogo e maestrevole sono da collocar quelle che Etiche i Greci, e noi Scienze morali chiamiamo: imperciocché elleno piú dappresso che l’altre non si fanno, l’occhio tengono e provveggono ai nostri costumi e bisogni). Thus, scientific knowledge has a practical task of moral reformation that develops, in a Galileian mode, within the rhythm of the two moments of analysis and synthesis. Through the analytic process we would find within the multiplicity the rational bases, the fundamental ideas from which synthetically the true and proper scientific construction will develop. Genovesi again observed: The greater difficulty in making science out of a certain matter is that of extracting from the confused mass of the whole nature the first, simple, and universal ideas from which it is necessary that the synthesis begins, around which all the sciences, no differently than a machine running around its axis, turn up (La maggior difficoltà nel ridurre una materia a scienza è quella di estrarre dal confuso ammasso di tutta la natura le prime, semplici e universali idee, dalle quali è forza che cominci la sintesi, e che tutta la scienza, non altrimenti che macchina su certi perni, si avvolga). These sciences, at their own turn are nothing but “intellectual worlds,” constructions of the human mind, its ordering of the phenomena, because all our knowledge is always, irremediably, about phenomena. In a letter of 1776 to Jean-Baptiste Robinet, a letter whose importance Fiorentino has underlined, Genovesi wrote: It would be necessary to give up from being even a mediocre philosopher if we deny that the world is for us nothing but a series of phenomena. This world begins from the consciousness of oneself, which is a phenomenon. Then, it extends itself through the consciousness of the sensations that come from outside, which are nothing but phenomena. It is established in every good philosophy that those qualities and proprieties of the bodies like light, color, flavor, hardness and softness, extension, and motion, etc., are nothing else than our sensations of which, because they are so perceived by the internal sensation, we can say that they are merely phenomena. Aristotle would ask, “Who has lifted up the skirt of nature in order to discover what is underneath?” We work with these phenomena and fabricate those intellectual worlds

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No different expressions we can find in Metafisica and Logica, whether or not we consider the Latin editions of 1743 and 1745, or their Italian versions of 1766, between which, as Gentile has amply demonstrated, we cannot see the great discrepancy that the Neapolitan philosopher Davide Winspeare in his historical introduction to philosophy, published in 1843, said to have observed. Winspeare believed that Genovesi came progressively closer to the Lockean premises, abandoning his previously held (at least in part) Cartesian position. On the other hand, this radical phenomenalism was indeed developing from Lockean premises, and Genovesi intended to reconcile it with a species of Leibnizian monadism in a combination that makes us think of Berkeley. In the question of the rapport between soul and body, in a letter of 1768, Genovesi pointed out that it is necessary to focus on the notion of body, the complex of the most minute unities or entities, not sensible but comprehensible mentally, intelligible. These entities are activities and only in so far as they are active they can be comprehended and grasped, “Every entity for us is an activity, and we do not know its substratum and how its foundation is; in itself it is nothing but activity. An inactive entity in the universe is an isolated zero” (Ogni ente è per noi un’attività, senza che ne possiamo sapere il substratum e come il fondo; e oltre a ciò in sé non è altro che attività. Un ente non attivo è nell’universo un zero isolato). Having admitted that the structure of the universe consists in dynamic centers of different grades, the so called problem of the rapport between substances is resolved in the concept of an aggregate, within which an activity clearly conscious of itself is present. Genovesi gives no explanation of how the phenomenalism could connect with this monadological vision, that is, how the world could be present in the representations of these active centers, at

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their own turn resolved in this representational activity. He did not clarify the problem of the origin of ideas, in relation to which he admitted as originating in our conscience, and therefore innate, certain sensus or primitive sentiments, or directions and articulations of the internal sense understood in a Lockean way. Through these sensus, we apprehend our existence, truth, and moral distinctions. It is in these sensus that the functionality constitutive of the human mind is found; in them we find that “perennial action of the mind” (azione perenne della mente) of which he speaks in the letter of 1745 to Conti, concerning the Elementi di logica. Here too, Genovesi does no digging into the concept. His interests were elsewhere and would make him an acclaimed professor of economics in the Neapolitan Chair of Economics established in 1754 by Bartolomeo Intieri of Florence. It was the first chair throughout Europe in that discipline. It was in this kind of studies that Genovesi was totally dedicating himself, seeming to him to be the more concrete and advantageous because “they aimed at the public good, made customs more humane, inviting to the love of society and humanity.” He was fond of the inquiries of Montesquieu, to whose translation he contributed and in whose spirit he was writing in 1765 with an accent worthy of Cuoco: My feeling is that we wish to learn what the other wise nations have thought out in the matter of economics and politics, but also that the rules of other nations have to be used as the prescriptions given by doctors, that is, paying attention to the climate, location, and strength of the states, the nature and power of ingenuity of the inhabitants. There would be systems suitable to England that certainly would not be profitable to France, and some suitable to Tuscany that could instead be disadvantageous to the State of Milan (Il mio sentimento è che si vuol sapere quello che hanno escogitato le altre nazioni savie sull’economia e la politica, ma le loro regole sono da adoperarsi come le ricette dei medici, cioè avendo riguardo al clima, al sito, alla robustezza degli stati, alla natura e alla forza degli ingegni degli abitanti. Vi saranno certi sistemi acconci per l’Inghilterra, ma che non gioverebbero alla Francia, e certi alla Toscana che potrebbero nuocere allo stato di Milano). Although he was sincerely religious and did not accept the iconoclastic audacities of illuministic extremism, he vivaciously opposed all arbitrary ecclesiastical interference in the field of free inquiry and on the ground of civil rights. A priori, he did not preclude any field of research to rational examination: “When good philosophy does not illuminate human minds on the nature of the deity and on the true interests of man, religion would be nothing more than a wild fantasy, and government would be nothing but a totality of mad and inhuman caprices” (dove la buona filosofia non rischiara le menti umane sulla natura della divinità, sopra i veri interessi dell’uomo la religione non può piú

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essere che fiera fantasia, e il governo che capricci matti ed inumani). However, considering the work of Voltaire, Genovesi wrote ideas that well characterize his own position: I don’t like and I never liked bigotry and imposture, but I do love a little virtue. If virtue is to love your neighbor, then I adore the Gospel, whose substance is love. How sweet is this word: love! How happy indeed our life would be, if love alone could reign! If this is the spirit of Christianity, if this is what the apostles have preached, if this is the precept of Christ, then Christianity is divine because the first being cannot be but good and love that we love each other. If in order to love each other it is necessary that we know and love this sovereign mind that made and preserves this world, then these two loves must be essentially linked together. Punishable by death is he who undermines them. I do not like a philosopher who tries to snare virtue: his ingenuity may appear brilliant, his eloquence alluring, but his faith wicked (Non mi piace, né mi è piaciuta mai la bigotteria e l’impostura, ma amo un poco la virtú: e se la virtú è amare il prossimo, adoro l’Evangelio la cui sostanza non è che amore. Quanto ella e dolce questa parola amore! E quanto ne sarebbe la vita nostra felice se non regnasse ch’egli solo! Se questo è lo spirito del Cristianesimo, se questo hanno predicato gli apostoli, se questo è il gran precetto di Cristo, il Cristianesimo è divino, perché l’essere primo non può non essere buono, non amare che ci amiamo. Ma se per amarci è necessario che conosciamo e amiamo questa mente sovrana facitrice e conservatrice di questo mondo, questi due amori vanno essenzialmente congiunti. Capitalis dunque chiunque tenta d’indebolirgli. Non mi piace un filosofo che tende lacciuoli alla virtú; mi parrà brillante il suo ingegno, lusinghevole la sua eloquenza, ma malvagia la fede). When he was accused of pantheism and was confused with Spinoza and with “l’empio Tolando,” John Toland, he declared his attempt to reduce “all the maxims of natural law to these most beautiful three ones: the human being must be a friend of God, of itself, and of its neighbor.” When they categorized him with the “strong spirits” (spiriti forti) he reacted in Diceosina: Some persons who declared they have a strong spirit would like to get rid of Deity and Religion. However, all humankind and all nature want Deity and Religion, not just for a capricious desire, but for an essential sense of nature itself. How can we get rid of nature? Those who called themselves strong spirits are crazy, and they would become even crazier if they could succeed in their intent (Alcuni sedicenti spiriti forti vorrebbero sbandire la Divinità e la Religione: ma tutto il genere umano, tutta la natura la vuole, non per elezion capricciosa, ma per un senso della natura medesima, il quale è l’essenziale. Come sveller la

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natura? Son dunque matti i sedicenti spiriti forti: e piú ancora matti sarebbero, se vi potessero arrivare). This sincerity in religious beliefs did not exclude in Genovesi a similar sincere disdain for the political interferences of the clergy and, in general, for the fruitless disputations of theologians. For him, even theology had a practical function of education and moral reformation; otherwise, he would reject it. In Logica per giovanetti (Logic for young people, bk. 5, sect. 15), he wrote: To announce simply the voice of the Universal Church, without discussions, without partisanship, it seems to be the most beautiful and the only useful Theology. When Theology does not intend to make human beings more just … more humane … when it does not intend to unite all humankind through love, not through force, Theology would be either useless or dangerous (Annunziare semplicemente la voce della Chiesa Universale, senza dispute, né parti, parmi la piú bella, e la sola utile Teologia. Perché quando la Teologia non tende a far gli uomini piú giusti … piú umani … quando non tende ad unire non per forza, ma per amore, tutto il genere umano, è, o inutile, o nocevole). Truly, the Christian religion for him could be reduced to love God and do well; for him, that was the education of humankind. In Christian charity, he saw the seal of the Christian Deity. In 1765, he was still writing, “I adore the Gospel, whose substance is love…. If this is the precept of Christ, then Christianity is divine.” No different inspiration is found in Elementa theologiae, written in 1748, but posthumously published in 1771, in which his antiCurialism is very evident, but not capable of modifying the candor of his moral and religious faith. In 1769, he wrote devoutly in his last will, “With my writing I thought to defend Religion for our Creator, and justice and love for all human beings” (Ho creduto nei miei scritti di difendere la Religione verso il nostro Creatore, e la giustizia, e l’amore verso gli uomini). The philosophy of Genovesi, so profoundly human, modified with the color worthy of the land of Vico the illuministic influence and the clear Lockean inspiration universally acknowledged in his thought. Genovesi lived his philosophy and valued it with the profound moral sense that Locke manifested with great efficacy in his religious and political writings. For this reason, Genovesi had many famous disciples, but all of them famous in the field of economical studies instead of in that of problems more strictly philosophical. It was not by chance or a roll of dice that the spirits were turning toward economics and jurisprudence that, as Genovesi was observing, is not “the art of litigation and idle talk” (l’arte di litigare o di ciarlare) but “the science of the public duties of honest citizens” (la scienza de’pubblici doveri d’un onesto cittadino). Rightly Galanti could exclaim in his famous eulogy, “His name will define a memorable period in our history of philosophy” (Il suo nome formerà un’epoca memorabile nella nostra storia della filosofia). All Italy,

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but particularly the Neapolitan area was troubled by serious disastrous economical factors, by the necessity of a new legislation to heal ancient wounds and a recent malaise. It was a world that needed total renewal from its foundations, and Genovesi, in an interesting judgment of 1765 on the book Dei delitti e delle pene (On crime and punishment) of Beccaria, let himself be overcome by a moment of discomfort in regard to humanity in general and wrote, “I, too, do not believe that an exaggerated severity would bring any benefit, and would like to assert a sage and serious education instead. However, in a country, corrupt and dissolute for so long a time, how and in how much time from now would we be able to introduce a good education?” (Neppure io credo che la soverchia severità giovi molto, e vorrei piuttosto appoggiarmi sopra una savia e seria educazione. Ma in un paese corrotto e dissoluto per lunga stagione, come e in quanto tempo introdurre una buona educazione?). These thoughts became the center of the interests and works of Filangieri, or Pagano who not by chance will climb the scaffold as a martyr for liberty. 4. The School of Genovesi. Ferdinando Galiani. Gaetano Filangieri. Nicola Spedalieri. F. M. Pagano. Melchiorre Delfico. Francesco Salfi Disciples of Genovesi were Domenico Caracciolo, Giuseppe Palmieri, and Domenico De Gennaro. In addition, there were Francesco Antonio Grimaldi who tried to combat Rousseau from a materialist point of view; Giuseppe M. Galanti who wrote the funeral eulogy of Genovesi; and Filippo M. Briganti who in Esame economico del sistema civile (1781) wanted to deepen the mechanics of pleasures (la meccanica dei piaceri). Of all these, we will say nothing more. More particular attention, on the contrary, we will give to Galiani, Filangieri, Pagano, and Delfico, or as Croce called them the martyrs, apostles, and confessors of the religion of rationalism. Ferdinando Galiani, a well-known economist, a subtle writer of political matters, a brilliant converser in the salons of Lady d’Epinay and Baron d’Holbach, intended to relive within his sharp spirit all the more graver problems debated in his own times. He neglected purposely the great metaphysical problems and knew that we know too little of the world in order to study the system of nature. In our research it is better to stop at the human being, at his mutations in time and space, accepting in regard to God the hypothesis that the complicated and inexplicable play before us certainly has an unknown player up there. For what concerns life, wisdom consists in knowing how to combine our greater personal advantage with the minor damage to others, or the greater good of others with our smaller disadvantage, opportunely inserting and adapting our action in the factual situation in which we find ourselves. Galiani wanted to be Socratic and, through his esprit, he often reached an uncommon profundity, whether he spoke concerning the best of impossible worlds, or God our father, or the nothing our mother, or the tragic and evil

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absurdity of the human being, “The human being is an absurd animal…. However, the absurdity of the human being is not like any other absurdity” (L’homme est un animal absurde…. Cependant l’absurdité de l’homme n’est pas une absurdité quelconque). It is a constant absurdity that has its own rules without reasons and without good sense, but not without principles. The human being is constant in its inconstancy, which is a determination of chance, necessity and justice of chance, “There is nothing less fortuitous than chance, nothing is as just as chance is” (nulla è meno fortuito del caso, nulla è cosí giusto come il caso). The esprit of abbé Galiani was certainly not superficial. If Galiani possessed all the brilliant morbidity of the enlightenment of the salons, Filangieri loved to conjoin the revolutionary intransigence, beside Montesquieu and Rousseau, with Platonic and Plutarchean classic models. Gaetano Filangieri confessed in the Scienza della legislazione (Naples, 1780), that Montesquieu, who stopped at giving a history of what nations gradually elaborated, showed him “the way to find truth.” He, Filangieri, on the contrary, was proposing to delineate the perfect status, those absolute laws that are suitable to humankind, though acknowledging that these absolute laws would have thereafter in some way to become suitable to the different nations and would have to adapt themselves to them. He wrote in the science of legislation (vol. 1, ch. 4): I call absolute goodness of the laws their harmony with the universal principles of morality, principles common to all nations, all governments, and applicable in all climates. The right of nature contains the immutable principles of what is just and equitable in all cases. It is easy to see how fecund this fountain is for legislation. No human being can ignore its laws. These laws are not the ambiguous results of the maxims of moralists, or of the sterile meditations of philosophers. These laws are the dictates of that principle of universal reason, of that moral sense of the heart, which the author of nature has impressed in all the individuals of our species, as the living measure of justice and honesty that speaks to all human beings in the same language and prescribes in all times the same laws (Io chiamo bontà assoluta delle leggi la loro armonia co’ principî universali della morale, comuni a tutte le nazioni, a tutti i governi, ed adattabili in tutti i climi. Il diritto della natura contiene i principî immutabili di ciò che è giusto ed equo in tutti i casi. È facile il vedere quanto questa sorgente sia feconda per la legislazione. Niun uomo può ignorare le sue leggi. Esse non sono i risultati ambigui delle massime de’ moralisti, né delle sterili meditazioni de’ filosofi. Queste sono i dettami di quel principio di ragione universale, di quel senso morale del cuore, che l’autore della natura ha impresso in tutti gli individui della nostra specie, come la misura vivente della giustizia e dell’onestà, che parla a tutti gli uomini il medesimo linguaggio e prescrive in tutti i tempi le medesime leggi).

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All fixed in this absoluteness, projected beyond the flowing of time and things, Filangieri became oblivious of the consideration of relativism that he had originally proposed and admitted. It is precisely from this notion that Filangieri’s increased abstractness in respect to Montesquieu originated, and that assumed evidence in the most known fourth part of the Scienza della legislazione, “On the laws concerning education, customs, and public instruction.” In this Filangieri was strongly influenced by Rousseau, and the Greek education, as it was conceived by the ancients on Spartan models, appeared to him as an eternal paradigm, unmoved and immutable, worthy of being immersed into the course of history. Since we have mentioned Rousseau, it is to his works, though with variations and contrapositions, and by contrast, that the Sicilian Nicola Spedalieri in Diritti dell’uomo (Assisi, 1791) is connected. Spedalieri wanted to show that Christianity is the most solid rock of rights and liberties, being the religion that is all full of respect for the natural law. In addition, he pointed to the Catholic Church as being the historical adequate incarnation of the Christian idea, which he wanted again to triumph, bringing it closer to democratic ideals, against the “hypocrisy of Jansenism.” In the works of Spedalieri very little can be found of modern secularism. Francesco Maria Pagano, in Saggi politici of the period 1783–1785, tried to reconnect himself to Vico, in addition to Genovesi. The doctrines on progress of Turgot and Condorcet were influencing him with greater results, while sensism was permeating his aesthetic considerations. Melchiorre Delfico, the accurate historian of San Marino, the radical denier of any value of history, and the critic of Roman jurisprudence was doubtless “the most faithful representative in Italy of the French spirit of the eighteenth century.” He brought to its extreme consequences the motive that had already appeared in Filangieri through the crystallization of human becoming in an absolutely good constitution. Delfico considered the human perfectibility to constitute “the first article of faith in the creed of Reason” (primo articolo di fede nel simbolo della Ragione). He was used to say, “The perfectibility of the human species is by now a demonstrated truth,” and found useless to insist on it, after what Condorcet wrote in 1786 at the end of the Life of Turgot. This was a candid faith, though very little philosophical, and Tristano in the dialogue of Leopardi would comment ironically on it, “Even if I were to see the world full of ignorant impostors at my right side and of presumptuous ignorant people at my left, I would believe, as I believe, that knowledge and enlightenment are continuously growing” (quando anche vedessi il mondo tutto pieno d’ignoranti impostori da un lato, e d’ignoranti presontuosi dall’altro, nondimeno crederei, come credo, che il sapere e i lumi crescono di continuo). The dogma of perfectibility was crowned for Delfico by the faith, already manifest in Filangieri, in an absolute codex, absolutely good, uniquely for humanity, “generally applicable to the human species.” Once achieved perfection, human history could stop, “Social bodies will not nourish within their

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womb a principle of decomposition and death, and will obtain the immortality as the truth that animates and vivifies them” (I corpi sociali non nutriranno nel loro seno un principio di decomposizione e di morte, e potranno aspirare alla immortalità come verità che li anima e li vivifica). In Ricerche sul vero carattere della giurisprudenza romana e de’ suoi cultori (Research on the true character of the Roman jurisprudence and its students, 1791), Delfico expressed the ingenuous hope that the new philosophy would in a short time defeat every residue of barbarism and, in the name of this final perfection, he condemned the primitive laws of the Romans, “The justice of Rome at the beginning was as it is in periods of barbarism; then, it was as it can be in an arbitrary administration; finally, it was as it must be during an anarchic time, in the confusion of laws and in the general corruption” (La giustizia di Roma fu in principio quale può essere nelle barbarie; d’indi quale suol essere nell’amministrazione arbitraria; e finalmente quale dev’essere nell’anarchia, nella confusione delle leggi e nella generale corruzione). The most characteristic work of Delfico, and a quasi epigraph of his times, remains Pensieri sulla storia e sulla incertezza ed inutilità della medesima (Reflections on history and the uncertainty and uselessness of the same, 1806). This work was probably inspired by the Count of Volney, who maintained himself far from the extremism of Delfico who, for that reason, criticized him together with Condorcet. According to Delfico, every historical event has only mechanical or physiological causes; no spiritual roots exist of it. Morality and politics are exclusively founded on physiology and other physical cognitions. Since nature more or less remains always equal to itself, history is a mere appearance, “History can only be but the continuous or successive repetition of the same things and actions, under different names” (La storia non può esser che la ripetizione continua o successive delle stesse cose ed azioni sotto nomi diversi). In the best of all hypotheses, history is useless but can become harmful when it points, as it often happens, to examples of turpitude or deplorable facts. The dogma of human perfectibility was coming in conflict with this desperate vision of the inutility of every human effort. The philosophy of Enlightenment in the past had fought the tradition that justified tyrannies and oppressions, but now with the negation of the past the first blossoms of materialism were forming, the only ones that could support such a radical condemnation. To accept that kind of philosophy, on the other hand, meant to renounce at the same time the desired progress of humanity, which would risk being reduced to a miraculous illumination operated suddenly by reason. It is natural that Delfico’s book determined a definite reaction among those who had accepted Vico, and we will see the results of this when touching on Cataldo Jannelli. But already in 1806 Francesco Salfi, in a speech on Dell’uso dell’istoria massime nelle cose politiche (On the use of history especially in political matters), later published in Milan in 1807 on the suggestion of Romagnosi, observed:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY In the course of humanity and social living, human beings do not develop, progress, or better themselves unless they observe, gather and compare those phenomena that nature, spontaneously or because solicited, offers ordinarily to their senses or attention. What was the human being in its beginning? Or what will the human being ever be, if it were to take advantage of its experience and of that of others, of the facts and of the history that preserves them? (L’uomo nel corso dell’umanità e del viver civile non si sviluppa, non avanza, né si migliora altrimenti, che osservando, raccogliendo e confrontando quei fenomeni, che la natura o spontanea o richiesta offre per l’ordinario a’ sensi e all’attenzione di lui. E che altro era l’uomo alla sua origine? O che mai sarebbe, se della propria e dell’altrui esperienza, ossia de’ fatti, e dell’Istoria che li conserva, non si fosse di mano in mano giovato?).

It would also be necessary to speak of the conversion of Francesco Lomonaco to pure Vichian doctrines in the Discorsi letterari e filosofici (Milan, 1809). In Delfico we find the typical expression of the last mentality of the nineteenth century. Though he lived until 1835, he remained hostile to any renewal of thought. When Galluppi sent him the first volume of Saggio, Delfico on 10 July 1826 wrote back, “After my spirit accepted the modifications derived from meditating on the Trattato delle sensazioni (A treatise on sensations), I did not perturb it any longer because I found myself comfortable in that condition” (dopoché il mio spirito soffrí la modificazione del Trattato delle sensazioni, non l’ho turbato piú, perché mi vi sono trovato comodo). These words are apparently the epilogue of his work. 5. The Verris and Cesare Beccaria In the meantime the influence of Enlightenment was affirming itself throughout Italy by way of consensus as well as of contrasts. Father Francesco Antonio Piro from Calabria in Southern Italy caused a scandal when he initiated his analysis of affective life on the premises established by Locke. He also had written a strongly debated opuscule on the origin of evil, in which, again, he had identified the Lockean thesis of inquietude, or uneasiness, as the spring of human action, which finds its satisfaction in the painful overcoming of passions. The Benedictine Diamante Fuginelli, professor in Florence, accepted Lockean elements, while Cesare Baldinotti, who probably somewhat influenced Rosmini in Padua, opposed many theses asserted by Locke. When Condillac took residence in Parma from 1758 to 1767, the fact did not remain without echo in the teaching at Collegio Alberoni of Piacenza and had resonances even in the poetry of Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni and Carlo Rezzonico. Contrary to the diffusion of Condillac’s doctrines were the well known Jansenist Pietro Tamburini and Ottavio Falletti who was Malebranchean like Gerdil, his teacher.

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In Piedmont, a tenuous current of Baconian experimentalism, alive in Giuseppe Pavesio, Galeani Napione, and Tommaso Valperga of Caluso, though accepting Locke and Condillac, aimed at their integration overcoming their sensualist consequences. Ludovico Arborio Gattinara of Breme once exclaimed, “Within my own spirit I genuflected before this Bacon who has reconstructed everything to our advantage, who among all human beings is the one who has done more than others until now for the honor of our species and the divinity” (Je tombai à genoux dans ma propre conscience devant ce Bacon qui a tout recomposé davantage, qui de tous les hommes est celui qui a fait le plus jusqu’à nos jours à l’honneur de notre espèce et de la divinité). What is of interest, in all this vast but otherwise unimportant production is an attitude, a direction. With the exception of Genovesi, Filangieri, and Pagano, who were renewing their inquiry with a profound renovating exigency; with the exception of Delfico, who had the audacity of deducing every extreme consequence from the positions assumed; within the other individuals heretofore mentioned we could find often nothing but a professorial acumen and accuracy. On the contrary, one could find an atmosphere vibrant with polemics, and almost thirsty for concrete action, in the region of Lombardy, where the ideas were united with the feverish need of activity. It was not the ambition of a career, or the desire of well paid occupations that brought Alessandro and Pietro Verri together with Cesare Beccaria to constitute in Milan the “Accademia dei Pugni” (Academy of the fist), which from June 1764 to May 1766 published the Caffè, and from whose discussions works of European fame would derive, as the Dei delitti e delle pene or the Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Discourse on the instinct of pleasure and pain). Among these learned youths of Lombardy the ferment lived of a profoundly renovating and reforming exigency, even though covered by a conservative patina. The compilers of the Caffè were testifying: We live in moderate governments in which what we must abhor and fear are the revolutions. I affirm that the good citizens observe the laws of their country, respect its form of government, and abhor every idea of sedition. I say that who does not know history does not know how many damages the revolutions cause (Noi viviamo in moderati governi nei quali ciò che dobbiamo aborrire e temere sono le sole rivoluzioni. Dico che i buoni cittadini osservano le leggi del loro paese, rispettano la sua forma di governo, aborriscono da ogni idea di sedizione: dico che non conosce la storia chi non sa quanti danni seco traggono le rivoluzioni). Their thoughts on the country were profoundly revolutionary and they were preparing the ground not only for a new Italy but also for a different Europe. They spiritually collaborated with the Encyclopedists, who greeted them as companions of fight and brothers in thought. With Pietro Verri, they pro-

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claimed themselves above the frontiers of the nations, not because they wanted to deny the values of tradition, but because they saw in the fatherland, not a mere accidental fact, a given situation to be accepted, but “the quotidian and perennial conquest of a human being who wants to be a worthy citizen, and of the citizen who wants to be a honest human being” (una conquista quotidiana e perenne dell’uomo che vuol essere degno cittadino, e del cittadino che vuol essere uomo degno). For the same reason, Alessandro Verri “declined [the membership to the Academy of] the Crusca” not because he intended to refuse in language the highest national patrimony, but because he wanted to aver that language lives and must not remain deposited and immobile in the academies, but develop and adapt to express with strict and fluid adherence the genuineness of sensations. What they wanted were things, not words. Literature must be an expression of concrete and vital exigencies, not the study of an abstract formal perfection. Equal also in this to the Encyclopedists, neither Verri nor Beccaria wrote complete philosophical works, but essays, orations, articles that in a row of a few pages would focus on a question in such a way as to generate interest and discussions. Precisely because their interests were practice and reformation, they intended to circulate their thought, inserting it alive within public discussion. The famous Discorso of Verri sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Livorno, 1773) strictly connected with that of happiness, Discorso della felicità (Londra [Livorno], 1763), essentially had this meaning, “Our truer nature consists of culture and civilization, and we must conquer it with an increasing perfection of reason” (la nostra piú vera natura consiste nella cultura e nella civiltà, e noi dobbiamo conquistarla col perfezionamento progressivo della ragione). Psychological analysis reveals that what is given by nature brings to an excess of pain over pleasure. Whether we speak of moral pleasures or of the physical ones, the result is always the same, and in this Verri came to agree fully with Maupertuis. The reason is that pleasure depends directly from and is exhausted completely with the cessation of pain, meanwhile the contrary is not true, and pain or suffering has a concrete positiveness. Here is the reason why the imagination of every man can easily represent a pile of evils, and a lasting condition with pain and absolute misery, while on the contrary, not even in the most independent kingdom of our imagination, we cannot depict a condition of a life always joyful and happy, free from nausea and needs. Here is the explanation why the descriptions of Hell succeed always with more color and are verisimilar more than those of Paradise, which after useless efforts still appear approximate and lifeless, even if made by men gifted with an excellent imagination (Ecco perché l’immaginazione d’ogni uomo facilmente può figurarsi un cumulo di mali, e uno stato durevole di pene e di assoluta miseria; e per lo contrario non può nemmeno nel liberissimo regno della nostra immaginazione dipingere uno stato di vita

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sempre giocondo e felice, libero da ogni noia e da ogni sazietà. Ecco perché le descrizioni del Tartaro riescono sempre piú colorite e verisimili di quelle dell’Eliso, le quali dopo inutili sforzi compaiono stentate e fredde, quand’anche sieno fatte da uomini dotati di somma immaginazione). This essential surplus of dolor is translated into a condition of inquietude, of perennial unsatisfaction (of uneasiness, Locke was used to say), which is the spring of human action. Not by returning to nature, to the immediacy of an instinct, we become free, but by overcoming, through a series of options, our nature’s status resolving it in a civilized and cultural process, “Each of our actions seems like buying: we give money in order to get things. To deprive oneself of money is a painful thing, but when we buy, we judge that the acquisition of the thing is a greater good than the loss of money” (Ogni azione nostra mi assomiglia a una compra: si dá il denaro per avere una cosa: il privarsi del denaro per sé è male; ma quando compriamo, giudichiamo che è un bene maggiore di questo male la cosa che ricerchiamo). The physical and psychical structure of the human being continuously reveals its purpose or destination, which is not the fruition of pleasure, but the painful building of civilization. On the suggestion of Pietro Verri, and under his constant stimulation, Cesare Beccaria drafted the celebrated Dei delitti e delle pene (Livorno, 1764), which received immediately the enthusiastic praises of D’Alembert and Voltaire, while Malesherbes, Turgot, Helvétius, and Buffon were competing for having the author come to Paris, where the work had been immediately translated by André Morellet. The Encyclopedists saw in the work what of their thought was most profound, while Beccaria confessed to owing his inspiration to Montesquieu and Helvétius. Writing to Morellet in 1766, after this exclamation, “It is my occupation to cultivate philosophy in peace and to satisfy my three strongest desires: love of literary fame, love of liberty, and compassion for the evils of the human beings enslaved by many errors,” he added, “My conversion to philosophy goes back only to five years ago, and it is due to the reading of Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721). The second work that accomplished the revolution of my spirit is that of Helvétius. He is the one who pushed me on the way of truth and the first who awakened my attention on the blindness and misfortunes of humankind” (La mia conversione alla filosofia data da soli cinque anni; e la debbo alla lettura delle Lettere Persiane. La seconda opera che compí la rivoluzione nel mio spirito è quella di Helvétius. È lui che mi ha spinto con forza nel cammino della verità, e che primo ha risvegliato la mia attenzione sulla cecità e le sventure degli uomini). This development of one of the dominating aspects of the work of Helvétius—the need of social reforms—is significant, and it has been underlined by Gerdil as praise for Helvétius. Other thinkers influenced Beccaria, for instance, Locke and Rousseau, and Bacon, whom he studied intensively and for a long time. Over all, his debt goes to Montesquieu, “The indivisible truth

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has forced me to follow on the footprints of this great man” (L’indivisibile verità mi ha forzato a seguire la traccia di questo grand’uomo). Laws evolve according to the necessities and the history of nations: [It is foolish and absurd] that some of the remains of the laws of an ancient conquering nation—laws compiled by order of a Prince who reigned in Constantinople twelve centuries ago, laws mixed with rites of Lombards, drafted in confused volumes by private and unknown interpreters—would form that tradition of opinions that for the larger part of Europe have the value of laws…. It is a thing baneful as well as common that today an opinion of Carpzovius, an ancient custom mentioned by Clarus, and an angry and anxious question of Farinaccius would have the value of laws which are safely obeyed by those who in tremor should rule and guide the lives and the fortunes of humankind ([È stolto ed assurdo che] alcuni avanzi di leggi di un antico popolo conquistatore, fatte compilare da un principe che dodici secoli fa regnava in Costantinopoli frammischiate poscia coi riti Longobardi, ed involte in farraginosi volumi di privati ed oscuri interpreti formino quella tradizione di opinioni che da una gran parte dell’Europa ha tuttavia il nome di leggi…. È cosa funesta quanto comune al dí d’oggi che un’opinione di Carpzovio, un uso antico accennato da Claro, un tormento con iraconda compiacenza suggerito da Farinaccio, sieno le leggi a cui con sicurezza ubbidiscono coloro che tremando dovrebbero reggere le vite e le fortune degli uomini). The origin of laws is the contract; their end is the useful, “The greatest happiness subdivided into the greater number” (la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero). The primitive agreement or the goal of social life cannot justify certain useless cruelties. It is necessary to break the habit, to renew the legislation, “The voice of one philosopher is too weak against the tumults and the cries of so many individuals guided by blind habits, but the few sages who still live throughout this earth will echo me in the interior of their hearts” (La voce di un filosofo è troppo debole contro i tumulti e le grida di tanti che sono guidati dalla cieca consuetudine, ma i pochi saggi che sono sparsi sulla faccia della Terra mi faranno eco nell’intimo dei loro cuori). Publishing in 1770 the first and unique part of Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile (Research on the nature of style), of which another fragment was published posthumously in 1806, Beccaria went beyond the sensism of Condillac by mentioning the synthetic unity of consciousness that “harmonizes and penetrates all the dominion of the exterior senses” ([coscienza che] armonizza e penetra tutto il dominio dei sensi esterni). With deep significance, he observed: Beauty, goodness, and utility possess the greatest affinity among themselves … hereby morality, politics, and the fine arts, which are the sci-

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ences of the good, the useful, and the beautiful are the sciences that have the greatest proximity or the most extended identity of principles that one could imagine. All these sciences derive from the single primitive science that is the science of humankind. It would be hopeless for human beings to think of making profound and rapid progress in those various sciences if they first do not apply themselves seriously to search the original principles of this one (La bellezza, la bontà, l’utilità, hanno la piú grande affinità tra di loro … onde la morale, la politica, le belle arti, che sono le scienze del buono, dell’utile, del bello, sono scienze che hanno una piú grande prossimità, anzi una piú estesa identità di principî di quello che taluno potrebbe immaginare: queste scienze derivano tutte da una sola e primitiva, cioè dalla scienza dell’uomo; né è sperabile che gli uomini giammai facciano in quelle profondi e rapidi progressi se essi non s’internano a rintracciare i primitivi principî di questa). The intention was to delineate within the limits of a sensist psychology a worldly science of humanity, all oriented toward the earthly activity in all its various forms, of which it was needed to define the connections and the roots. Within this atmosphere, among many others, the psychological writings of Lomonaco, a personality in many ways very interesting, were drafted; the works on aesthetics of Leopoldo Cicognara and Melchiorre Cesarotti, to whom Vico was not unknown, and Giambattista Talia; the moral and political inquiries of Marcantonio Vogli and Ubaldo Cassina. From these ideal currents as from a source withdrew, certainly not the poetic inspiration or the generous impetus, but certainly some arguments and doctrines, Vittorio Alfieri, Giuseppe Parini, and Ugo Foscolo. At the same time, Leopardi’s desperation would be the loftiest manifestation of the crisis of this complete doctrinal position. 6. Vittorio Alfieri. Ugo Foscolo. Vincenzo Monti. Giacomo Leopardi Imbued with the culture of the Enlightenment, but already touched by the tremors of a pre-romanticism, the poets often succeeded as the most efficacious critics of the culture of the second half of the eighteenth century, taking it to its limits or by fully refuting it. The strong nationalistic affirmation that breathes within their writings contributed to the reaction against the French culture and already preannounced positions of thought of the nineteenth century. This does not mean that we will find some philosophical “systems” within this period, even in those individuals who like Leopardi applied themselves ex professo to philosophy. Essentially these writings constituted a significant indication of the ferments of thought in their authors and of the crisis of their civilization.

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The whims of Vittorio Alfieri against Rousseau, Helvétius, Montesquieu, and Voltaire should be understood in this way. For him, Rousseau was cold and snobbish in Héloïse and incomprehensible in Le Contrat Social; Helvétius was disturbing and also repugnant; Montesquieu was wonderful, delightful, and useful. From the French thinkers, Alfieri derived without doubt ideas and inspirations that, together with the reading of the classics, were nourishing his vibrant love for liberty, his most bitter hate for any tyranny, regal or popular, which transpired through his poetry instead of in the treatises of Del principe e delle lettere (On princes and letters) and Della Tirannide (On tyranny). No learned person can still sustain that Alfieri was philosopher more than poet, as Leopardi noticed in the Zibaldone. In the Misogallo, he himself confessed that study and experience of things and humankind taught him, To judge and to sense are one thing. No judgment can be without being rooted in some affection. The reason is that everything, seen or heard, must generate in the human being some pleasure, or pain, or wonder, or disdain, or envy, or something else. Thus judgment comes to rest on the received impression. It would be a correct judgment if given by those who love rectitude or an iniquitous one if given by the wretch (Il giudicare e il sentire, sono uno: né senza affetto alcuno giudizio sussiste; poiché ogni cosa qualunque, o vista, o sentita, dee cagionare nell’uomo, o piacere, o dolore, o meraviglia, o sdegno, od invidia, od altro; tal che su la ricevuta impressione si venga ad appoggiare il giudizio; e sarà retto il giudizio degli appassionati pel retto; iniquo al contrario quello dei malnati). The judgment that Gioberti gave of Alfieri says that Alfieri had great merit for having presented with clear conscience the loftiest ethical task of letters, but also that unfortunately he had no precise notion of what he wanted to accomplish with his proclamation of liberty. And this liberty—according to Gioberti in Miscellanee (vol. 2, pp. 667–672)—was a bursting forth of rebellious forces and a revolutionary despotism against which he so much inveighed after 1789: Alfieri was inflamed by the reading of Machiavelli, and learned from him the manner of studying human beings as animals regulated uniquely by their fist and chance…. Alfieri shouted “liberty” like Napoleon shouted “despotism.” Then, he attached himself to passions, whose character is that of being impetuous and destructive. He deified pride under the name of liberty, and sang in verses that were bitter and unpolished, but full of energy, a doctrine capable of stirring up the mad and ferocious passions of the multitude (E cosí l’Alfieri s’infiammava … alla lettura di … Machiavelli, e apprendeva … la maniera di studiar gli uomini come animali regolati unicamente dal loro braccio e dalla

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ventura…. L’Alfieri gridò libertà, come Napoleone dispotismo…. Si appigliò alle passioni, il cui carattere è di essere impetuose e distruggitrici; deificò l’orgoglio sotto nome di libertà, e canto’ in versi duri ed incolti, ma pieno di energia, una dottrina atta a scatenare le pazze e feroci passioni della moltitudine). Gioberti, having attacked Alfieri, accused Ugo Foscolo and Pietro Giordani together with Alfieri of naturalism. They, according to Gioberti, certainly showed “the influence of letters and arts on human action, and the obligation that the lovers of letters and arts have to direct them to the advantage of human action. They went only half way, because they spoke only of the impulses of nature and of a certain political virtue that without moral virtue is nothing but private advantage” (l’influenza delle lettere e delle arti sull’azione umana, e l’obbligo che hanno i cultori di quelle di dirigerle al bene di questa. Ma entrambi paionmi non aver trattata che metà del campo; poiché essi non parlano che delle molle della natura, e di una certa virtú politica che senza virtú morale altro non è che il privato interesse). Referring to Alfieri, Gioberti spoke of paganism and Hobbes. The same terms, the same comparison, are found about Foscolo in Saggio sulla speranza of 1822, or Saggio sopra la felicità, written by Antonio Rosmini “against some errors of Ugo Foscolo.” Rosmini reproached the poet for reducing human life to a pure play of forces, passions, to a breathless running without direction, in which every goal is exhausted in the act itself of living, sad and depressed in this absolute lack of meaning. These were the judgments of Rosmini as well as of Gioberti, and they accurately characterized some of the attitudes of the Idealist and Romantic “reaction” to the illuminist and revolutionary inheritance. Actually, not even Foscolo was a systematic “philosopher,” though he delineated some of his concepts in the Orazione Inaugurale of 1809, “on the origin and task of literature,” in which are particularly noticeable some combinations of illuminist motives and Vichian ideas: The human being is essentially an animal and a usurper, essentially social, because it tends to appropriate progressively what is useful and what could be useful. To the advantage in the present, the human being adds the advantage possible in the future and in perpetuity. Property and the necessary inequality existed. In the beginning, the individual perpetual property of things useful to us and to others was not possible without usurpation and no progressive usurpation without violence and injury could happen. Defense against the few very strong could not be found without a society of the many weak. Long concordance in society must be based on the precise communication of ideas ([L’uomo] è animal essenzialmente usurpatore, essenzialmente sociale: però ch’ei tende progressivamente ad arrogarsi e quanto gli giova e quanto potrebbe giovargli; all’uso presente aggiunge l’uso futuro e perpetuo, quindi la proprietà e la sua necessaria disuguaglianza: né poteva a

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Here is what moves human society: power that generates contrasts, greed that gives rise to commerce, and boredom that stimulates demanding inquiries. Vico in the seventh dignity (The New Science of 1744, pars. 132–133) spoke of ferocity, avarice, and ambition as the three causes of civil happiness, adding that out of that transformation, and almost we could say sublimation, came the proof of divine providence “that acts as a divine legislative mind,” without which the human world would be a battlefield, life without meaning, and human tragedies immutable. By denying “divine providence,” whether understood in the way of the Christians or of the Hebrews or the spirit that from within animates and guides the universe, all would be reduced to a useless and blind crashing together of atoms that would mechanically combine themselves. Reading this eloquent page of Foscolo, one would think of Hobbes’ Human nature and no longer of Vico: We are not allowed to know or inquire the beginnings and eternal ends of the universe, but their effects manifest themselves to us always certain and continuous.… With its apprehensions humankind undermines the enjoyment of momentary and volatile pleasures, or despises the present pleasures for greater deceiving hopes. Man laments life, fears to lose it but as he is dying he wishes to perpetuate it. Human beings are in a perennial state of oscillation between hopes and fears, agitated even more by the impetus of desires and the allures of imagination. All this pleased nature that assigned inquietude to the existence of man, who aspires always to rest because he cannot attain it. However, as the passions languish, the motion of vital faculties also decreases. Then, when motion ceases, life also ceases, and our moment of tranquility becomes the prelude to the supreme perpetual silence (Quali siano i principi e i fini eterni dell’universo, a noi mortali non è dato di conoscerli, né d’indagarli; ma gli effetti loro ci si palesano sempre certi, sempre continui…. L’umano genere turba coi timori la voluttà della ora che fugge, o la disprezza per le speranze che ingannano; si duole della vita, e teme di perderla, e anela di perpetuarla morendo: ondeggiamento perenne di speranze e di timori, agitato ogn’or piú dall’impeto del desiderio e dagli allettamenti dell’immaginazione. Cosí piacque alla natura che assegnò l’inquietitudine all’esistenza dell’uomo, il quale aspira sempre al riposo perché non può mai conseguirlo; però languendo le passioni, ritardasi il moto delle potenze vitali: cessato il moto, cessa la vita; ed ogni nostra tranquillità non è che preludio del supremo e perpetuo silenzio).

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Reason is vain and authoritative; reason is not the queen of passions, but their slave. All calculations and syllogisms are sterile: The human being has no knowledge of its life. The human being thinks, reasons, and plans only because it has feelings. Without imagination it will not feel forever. Without passions, illusions, and errors it would not sense or imagine. Philosophy will only change the object of the passions, and pleasure and pain will always be the lowest terms of any reasoning (L’uomo non sa di vivere, non pensa, non ragiona, non calcola se non perché sente, non sente perpetuamente se non perché immagina; e non può né sentire, né immaginare senza passioni, illusioni ed errori. La filosofia non cambia che l’oggetto delle passioni; e il piacere e il dolore sono i minimi termini d’ogni ragionamento). This Hobbesian coincidence is in reality more persuasive than the Vichian citation which gives us somewhat the same impression that generated (in the inaugural oration of Monti, pronounced in Pavia in 1803) the mentioning of Bruno, from whom “Gassendi supposedly copied the corpuscular system from the ruins of the philosophy of Epicurus, Democritus, and Leucippus”; Fontenelle, the concept of plurality of worlds; and Descartes, “the thin matter of the vortices.” It is not difficult to sense, at times, a profound similarity between Foscolo’s themes and Leopardi’s motives in the meditations. Leopardi too was not a systematic “philosopher,” but no one can doubt that he was a thinker of an exceptional value. In the same way than Pascal restlessly reconsidered the same problems, Leopardi measured all the consequences of a conception of the world and life in “human” terms. In Pascal, the great science of the seventeenth century and the Cartesian metaphysics were placed face-to-face with the human condition, and the philosopher was asking what they could mean in “human” terms. The answer was tragically discomforting. In Leopardi, in the pages of the Operette morali, in the Canti, and in the fragments of the Zibaldone, the conclusions of the thought of the eighteenth century, at the light of the meditations of always, were presented as the acknowledgment of the human radical insufficiency. The failure of Illuminist Humanism turned into the denial of the meaning of life and ended thereafter in the tragedy of a thought that came face-to-face with a blind and purposeless nature, while God was an illusion, the last illusion that reason dissipated, without having succeeded in filling up its immense emptiness. Reason destroyed deception, the vain and vague imagining. The human being sensed the nothing of reality, the nothing of the whole, and wished that it were never born. The illusion that faded away when facing reflection was once the significance attributed to the world and to life: it was the beauty that like a mantle covered nature. Reason, the reason of Enlightenment, destroyed the myth and left us before a meaningless reality, a meaningless life. It is true that the vague myth of the primitive nature of Rousseau corrupted by civilization was

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formed. But before the eyes of Leopardi, even this beautiful fable, which could be valid as long as a young, innocent soul joyously deluded could look at nature, vanished. Reason has now accomplished the irreparable damage, sin has now been committed, innocence has been lost, and nothing has any meaning. The meaning that he human being would assign to things, if we could reflect, would reveal itself for what it actually is, the nonsense, the extreme illusion, “It seems an absurdity, but it is exactly true that because all reality is a nothing, no other reality, or substance than the illusion exists in the world” (Pare un assurdo, e pure è esattamente vero che tutto il reale essendo un nulla, non v’è altro di reale, né altro di sostanza al mondo che le illusioni). Reasoning has eliminated every vision of the end. This is the way that Nature questions the Islander: Did you imagine by any chance that the world was done for your benefit? You must really know that in what I do, in my orders and operations, except for a few, I always have and had my intentions interested in other things instead of in the happiness or unhappiness of humankind. When I injure you in some manner and with whatever means, I am not aware of it … as ordinarily, if I delight or benefit you, I don’t even know it. I have not done and I do not those things, as you believe, for your pleasure and advantage. Finally, let me tell you that even if it happened that I would extinguish your species, know that I would not even be aware of it (Immaginavi tu forse che il mondo fosse fatto per causa vostra? Ora sappi che nelle fatture, negli ordini e nelle operazioni mie, trattone pochissime, sempre ebbi ed ho l’intenzione a tutt’altro, che alla felicità degli uomini o all’infelicità. Quando io vi offendo in qualunque modo, e con qual si sia mezzo, io non me n’avveggo … come ordinariamente, se io vi diletto o vi benefico, io non lo so; e non ho fatto, come credete voi, quelle tali cose, o non fo quelle tali azioni, per dilettarvi o giovarvi. E finalmente, se anche mi avvenisse di estinguere tutta la vostra specie, io non me ne avvedrei). This is the unique human drama: to be gifted with reason only in order to realize the vanity of our own existence; to foreview in the pleasure of the present the pain that undeniably would follow, without compensation; but particularly in order to experience the disproportion between our earthly condition and our exigency of an absolute and infinite goodness, of a convergence of being in us. Human suffering is born from the conscience of this disproportion, from discovering ourselves as nature and from experiencing the unsatisfactory possession of it. The brute suffers, but by immerging into life the brute tastes pleasure and feels pain at that precise instant; the brute does not aspire to happiness, or rebels to destiny. The conflict emerges in the human being between the blind earthly destiny and the consciousness of that destiny, which is necessity, so that the consciousness is powerless in the attempt at overcoming it: “O grazing sheep of my herd, Oh you happy ones, who your misery, I believe,

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don’t know!” (O greggia mia che posi, oh te beata, che la miseria tua, credo, non sai!). Misery is not the object of knowing, but knowing itself; the human condition is not misery, but the awareness of the human limitation is misery. The cruelty of reason is found in this: to have destroyed nature. Hume has observed that the conscience of this is the most unnatural of all things. The disproportion between mind and reality reaches the whole of us down to the bottom of our being, making us feel all the anxiety of the conflict between the finite and the infinite. This conflict is admirably expressed in the conclusion of the Cantico del gallo silvestre (Song of the sylvestrian rooster): The time will come when this universe and nature itself will be no more. In the same way that of the greatest human kingdoms and empires, and their marvelous deeds, which were most famous in other epochs, neither sign nor fame remains today of this entire world and of the infinite vicissitudes and calamities of created things not even a vestige will survive. There would be an unveiled silence and a supreme quietude that would fill the immensity of space. And, thus, this admirable and fearful arcanum of the existence of the universe, even before being declared or understood, would fade away and be lost (Tempo verrà, che esso universo, e la natura medesima, sarà spenta. E nel modo che di grandissimi regni ed imperi umani, e loro meravigliosi moti, che furono famosissimi in altre età, non resta oggi segno né fama alcuna; parimente del mondo intero, e delle infinite vicende e calamità delle cose create, non rimarrà pure un vestigio; ma un silenzio nudo, e una quiete altissima, empieranno lo spazio immenso. Cosí questo arcano mirabile e spaventoso dell’esistenza universale, innanzi di essere dichiarato né inteso, si dileguerà e perderassi). But in a note beside, Leopardi suggested, “This conclusion is poetic, not philosophical. The existence that never began would never end. This is to speak philosophically” (Questa è conclusione poetica, non filosofica. L’esistenza che mai non è cominciata, non avrà mai fine, parlando filosoficamente). The human drama finds its solution also in Leopardi. From the blind and mechanical whole, through the conflict, the poet returns to the acceptance of a nature that is not the nothing, but reality, “Do you live, do you live, O holy nature?” (Vivi tu, vivi, o santa natura?). In this wholeness, letting oneself go, it is sweet to reach annihilation: Quietude controls those loftiest banks of the river, so that I almost forget myself and the world, while I am sitting here immobile. It seems to me that already the members of my body are at rest. No spirit or sense would move them now, and it seems that their ancient quietude

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A new faith emerges from the experience of pain; the universe is transfigured from the abysmal anxiety of nothing into a benevolent fullness, “And to shipwreck in this ocean is sweet to me” (E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare).

Twenty-Seven THE TRADITIONAL CURRENTS OF THOUGHT 1. Odoardo Corsini and Iacopo Facciolati. The Historians of Philosophy Heretofore we have rapidly followed a line of thought that from the philosophy of the Renaissance brought us with a remarkable continuity, through Descartes and Locke, to the flourishing of the Neapolitan and Milanese Enlightenment. Some discordant voices, though they withdrew from different sources, were also interesting since they presented motives variously fertile in the field of thought. The picture of the Italian philosophy of the eighteenth century would not yet be complete without mentioning the name and the works of Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil, or of the minor but suggestive figure of Vincenzo Miceli. On the contrary and without any damage, we could leave unmentioned the perseverant Aristotelians and the many eclectic philosophers who from the different teaching Chairs of the Universities throughout the peninsula continued to pour into their audiences those mixtures of confused thoughts (zibaldoni), more or less respectful of the tradition. For instance, Tarquinio Galluzzi with his voluminous commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle returned to the tradition represented in the seventeenth century by Emanuele Tesauro. Muratori, although praising the noble efforts and the erudite digressions, was obliged to conclude that students would have been greatly disappointed if they were to search in Galluzzi for some orientation of doctrines besides grammatical observations or scholastic nonsense. Within the traditional art of compilation we include the philosophical manuals ad mentem Thomae or Scoti (in the spirit of Thomas or Scotus), and mention that in 1715 one of these kinds of manuals appeared in Rome ad mentem Gandaviensis (in the spirit of Jansenius Gandaviensis) by Angelo Maria Canali. Within the eclectic kind of writings, but not without Cartesian influences, we count the Institutiones philosophicae (Principles of philosophy) of Father Odoardo Corsini, a popular textbook used in the schools. Romualdo Bobba, too, observed the lack of philosophy in the history of philosophy of Giovanni Battista Capasso, published in Naples in 1728 as Historiae philosophiae synopsis (Synopsis of history of philosophy), a work rich

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in Cartesian sympathies. The spirit of erudition and the interest for history, which in other fields were going to produce conspicuous monuments, were not equally fertile in the history of thought, though some individuals like Facciolati intended to reduce to it all philosophical teaching. In one of his elaborated and refined orations (Oratio num. 4), Facciolati claimed, “No other philosophy should be taught the youth, except the historical” (Nulla est adolescentibus tradenda Philosophia, nisi historica), and referred to his many fruitless and monotonously tedious hours spent on Aristotle, “I remember, I remember indeed how many, not days, but months I spent turning tediously the pages of those immense volumes” (Memini ego, memini, quam, multis non diebus, sed mensibus quantoque cum taedio ingentia illa volumina aliquando volutarem). He touched also on his personal yearning for the usefulness and the delight of historical studies: And so I hope that the Gods would protect me as I question whether it would be better to apply oneself to the study of one philosopher alone and learn all his expressed thoughts, though tortuously presented, mixed with endless polemics, or to learn the opinions of all the philosophers exposed in a pleasurable narration. Is it not true that in order to reach the apex of all philosophy it is easier to present and expose without polemics the principles of nature as they were discovered and passed on into the cultural tradition of the various schools, instead of entirely abandoning oneself to the authority of one single human being …? (Ita me Superi ament, ut multo plus operae ac laboris insumunt, qui uni se Philosopho dediderunt, cuiusque cogitata omnia per ambages aeternasque lites proposita addiscunt, quam qui Philosophorum omnium opinions simplici narratione conclusas memoriae mandat. Ut enim principem totius Philosophiae locum attingamus, nonne facilius est naturae principia, quaecumque sunt pro sectarum varietate inventa litterisque tradita, in medium afferre, et sine ullis controversiis explicare, quam se totum ad unius hominis auctoritatem conferre …?). The same Facciolati, when teaching logic and dialectic, was concerned with a refined ars eloquendi (art of elocution) in opposition to an ars cogitandi (art of thinking), in which he distinguished, perhaps too clearly, a légein as loqui (to speak) from a légein as cogitare (to think deeply and carefully): I believe that I would be allowed to state that our Dialectic, or Logic, has taken its name from légein that is loqui that means to speak. Almost no one doubts this today, with the exception of those who prefer to call it art of thinking (Id enim mihi dari puto atque concedi, nostram hanc sive Dialecticam, sive Logicam apò toû légein id est a loquendo nomen invenisse, in eoque esse positam; qua de re vix ullus iam dubitat, nisi forte illi qui eam cogitandi artem appellare malunt).

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The allusion is to the logic of Port Royal, which was translated by the Fathers Somaschi and published in Venice in 1728. Let us return to the works of the eighteenth century on the history of philosophy, among which we wish to mention the writings of the Celestine Father Agatopisto Cromaziano (Appiano Buonafede), the Bue Pedagogo (the Pedagogue Bull) as Giuseppe Baretti used to call him, whose Istoria e indole d’ogni filosofia (History and nature of every philosophy) narrated from the origin of the world to the fifteenth century, while the Restaurazione d’ogni filosofia (The restoration of every philosophy) covered from the sixteenth century to the time of Genovesi. It is the only work that offers the vision of the whole history of thought, if we do not count the short though pithy Disputatio physico-historica that Genovesi premised to the Neapolitan edition of the elements of physics of van Musschenbroek. Unfortunately, the work of Buonafede is for the most part a compilation based on the Historia critica philosophiae of Johann Jakob Brucker, altered and badly put together, and on the history of ancient thought of Thomas Stanley. Quite ingenuously, Buonafede recognized his debts and faults: I will take advantage of the notices and discoveries of learned men … and particularly I will make use of the magnificent compilation of this courageous Brucker, showing and amending … their more serious errors, especially those concerning the loftiest matter of Religion…. I add that Italy is almost completely without historians of philosophy. Luigi Pesaro, Lionardo Cozzando, Giambattista Capasso, Eduardo Corsini, and Antonio Genovesi have drafted some essays on this argument, but they never planned to write a complete history. Capasso is an exception, but he, by mixing together much erudition and much credulity to the point of narrating that Pythagoras must have been a Carmelite Friar and that the Druids predicted the giving birth of the Virgin, has greatly diminished historical dignity and faith (Userò le notizie e gli scoprimenti de’ dotti uomini … e sopra tutti mi avvalerò della stupenda compilazione di questo valoroso Bruckero, mostrando però e emendando … i loro abbagli piú gravi, spezialmente nell’affare altissimo della Religione…. Aggiungo che l’Italia è quasi priva d’istorici filosofici. Luigi Pesaro, Lionardo Cozzando, Giambattista Capasso, Eduardo Corsini, Antonio Genovesi, diedero alcuni saggi di questo argomento, ma non ebber pensieri di scrivere una intiera istoria, salvoché il Capasso, il quale mescendo insieme molta erudizione e molta credulità, fino a narrare che Pitagora fosse stato carmelitano, e che i druidi avessero vaticinato il parto della Vergine, sminuí grandemente la dignità e la fede istorica). This did not forbid the good Agatopisto from seriously discussing the astronomical works of Abel and the philosophical writings of Cain!

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When considering Enlightenment, Buonafede functioned as a negative critic but he absorbed the mentality of the Enlightenment nonetheless. This can be easily seen in the “most celebrated treatise on Celebri Conquiste” that the Venetian editor presented with a dithyrambic tone, “Live happy and satisfied, O friendly reader. Believe that the repeated reading of the immortal works of the unique Agatopisto Cromaziano would certainly help you in that.” In the treatise, Agatopisto was violently moving against the wars of aggression and conquest that were done “for vile gains and false glory.” He recommended to universal abhorrence “the lightning of war, conquerors of cities, pillagers and plunderers of kingdoms, winners, and triumphers,” condemning the mysterious and omnipotent right of victory and conquest, for which everything becomes licit. Consequently, this one individual, who with a small sail plunders with the help of only ten men, is condemned like a corsair and a criminal, while on the contrary the other individual, who with one hundred ships and one hundred thousand companions steals lands and seas, is reputed conqueror and hero, celebrated in poems and history with the praises of political adulators and parasitic philosophers (Quel certo misterioso e onnipotente diritto della vittoria e della conquista, per lo quale è lecita ogni cosa, e colui solo che corseggia con una vela e un legnetto e fa prede con dieci uomini, è dannato come corsale e masnadiere; ma quell’altro, che con cento navi e cento mila compagni ruba le terre e i mari, è reputato conquistatore ed eroe, degno del poema e dell’istoria e delle lodi del politico adulatore e del filosofo parasito). Against such a concept, Buonafede intended to elaborate a code of nature (un regolamento e quasi un codice), based on the natural law of nations; a code, “from which conquerors would not be allowed to move away, without being accused as irrational and inhuman” (da cui forse non potranno i conquistatori allontanarsi, se non vorranno pur essere irragionevoli e inumani). 2. Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil. Eulogy of Plato. Anton Filippo Adami Returning to the consideration of those who more clearly maintained their thought free from the influence of Enlightenment and reacted openly against it, one eminent place must be assigned to the Cardinal Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil, a Savoyard, a critic of all the movement of thought that beginning from Locke lead finally to Rousseau. The philosophy of Malebranche, from which Gerdil generously drew, had already in the seventeenth century nourished the work of Father Giovenale, who, according to the judgment of Rosmini, was superior to the same Malebranche, who inspired him first. During

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the eighteenth century the doctrine of Malebranche had some sporadic revival in the works of Platonizing tendencies, even in the manuals of Corsini. At the same time Malebranche suffered the bitter opposition of the Scholastics of strict observance and of those eclectic compilers still touched by Aristotelianism, as for instance Father Fortunato of Brescia who, in Brescia, between 1735 and 1740, published a Philosophia sensuum mechanica (The mechanic philosophy of the senses) and a Philosophia mentis methodice tractata (The philosophy of mind methodically treated), in which the concepts of medieval Aristotelianism returned. The Franciscans Giuseppe Tamagna and Lorenzo Altieri, followed Fortunato’s line of thought. Gerdil, on the contrary, although confessing that he was not an orthodox Malebranchean, decided to defend the Father of the Oratory and the Platonic metaphysics against Lockeanism. In 1747 in L’immatérialité de l’âme démontrée contre M. Locke par les mêmes principes par lesquels ce philosophe démontre l’existence et l’immatérialité de Dieu (The immateriality of the soul demonstrated against Locke through the same principles used by his philosophy to prove the existence and immateriality of God) Gerdil began to examine Locke’s thorny question concerning the difficulty of whether the soul was material or better whether a material substance could think. This was the same question that originated the great violent polemic between Bishop Edward Stillingfleet and Locke, in which Locke had lucidly exposed the concept that—if we distinguish between res and cogitare, between substance and act, and radicate that act in a substance, immutable in its indifferent permanence—nothing could forbid the belief that the substance could be the matter to which God with his omnipotence has assigned also the thinking. The effort of Gerdil forced Locke against Locke in opposing what Locke said of God in regard to the thought that thinks in us, and again what Locke said about this universal matter, to which would be simultaneously attributed extension and thought at the same time. In short, Locke had to face the alternative of accepting a spiritual God, which could be reached through finite cogitatio, or a materialistic metaphysics veined with Spinoza. In 1748, always in Turin, Gerdil published the Défense du sentiment du P. Malebranche sur l’origine des idées contre l’examen de M. Locke (Defense of the sentiment of Father Malebranche on the origin of ideas, against the inquiry of Locke) openly criticizing the implicit materialism of certain Lockean theses and the explicit materialism of some aspects of the philosophy of Locke. In the premise to the reprint of the work in Bologna in 1787, Gerdil, at the time of the beginning of the Ideology, recognized that one could be Lockean without being materialist, but remembered also Helvétius’s confession, “He had aimed at nothing else than at a development of the germs already contained in Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding.” Lami, in Novelle Letterarie (num. 12, p. 29), had said that one cannot trust Locke’s decisions, “which are always too modest when they refute materialism and always too audacious when they contest Religion and the Church.”

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If in the polemic part of this essay Gerdil continued to oppose Locke to Locke referring to “the almost continuous contradictions of Mr. Locke,” in the constructive part he illustrated Malebranche’s theses with their Augustinian presuppositions and developed them in a fashion almost like that of Rosmini. The soul that possesses knowledge of itself through the internal sentiment does not know the truth, the essence, and the universals of any order, in any other way than by reaching them directly in their immutable absoluteness. “This eternal truth that presides in the soul is … a substantial truth, an immutable and intelligent nature, and superior to the human nature. This truth, in one word, is the first life, the first essence, and the first wisdom.” The presence of God in the creature is the foundation of the knowledge of truth, and it is that idea of perfection that Descartes illustrated as being anterior to any cognition of finite realities. Gerdil acknowledged that this is in the last analysis a Platonic doctrine, and of Plato he drafted an eloquent eulogy: Plato who was gifted with sublime and vast ingenuity disdained in a certain way the minute inquiry of things particular and expanded, as if from an eminent spot, his widely open eyes over the melding of shapes of the universal structure of the world. He observed the marvelous variety of all forms, which is reduced by an even more admirable virtue of proportions and order to the simplest unity. Full of wonder and delight he turned to the investigation of the exemplar and archetype in the sempiternal idea of the wisest optimal mind (Platone dotato di sublime ingegno e vasto, disdegnando in certo modo la minuta investigazione delle cose particolari, stese, come da luogo eminente, ampio lo sguardo sulla struttura universale del mondo: ed osservando la meravigliosa varietà delle forme ridotta per la virtú piú mirabile ancora della proporzione e dell’ordine a una semplicissima unità, pieno di stupore e di diletto si volse ad investigarne l’esemplare e l’archetipo nell’idea sempiterna di una mente sapientissima e ottima). Again concerning the vision of God, through the polemic ArnauldMalebranche, Gerdil was facing the problem whether the idea could be seen in God as possible or whether the divine act itself was present in the human being, whether the idea like a diaphragm intermediated between knowledge and reality or whether there was a direct contact. He observed, “The idea of God is the idea of Being without restriction, of the Being that contains all reality, in a word the idea of supreme perfection” (L’idea di Dio altro non è che l’idea dell’Ente senza restrizione, dell’Ente che contiene ogni realtà, in una parola l’idea della somma perfezione). It is an idea that eminently contains the reality of all creatures. This idea, this Being without restriction, “is the union of God with our spirit, and Its action on the spirit itself,” without intermediaries because beside God nothing exists that could be an infinite intelligible thing to which the intellect could ascend. Hereby, “God is the im-

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mediate object of the knowledge of the intellect” (Dio è l’obbietto immediato della conoscenza dell’intelletto). Among other writings of Gerdil, besides the Introduzione allo studio della religione, the Dissertazione sopra l’origine del senso morale (Dissertation on the origin of moral sense) deserves notice. In it, at the side of an objectivity of an order rooted in God, the existence is affirmed in us of “a natural criterion of approbation or reprobation, concerning the intrinsic moral difference between just and unjust. This sense in conjunction with the notion of order and of the beautiful originates from the human faculty of knowing the true.”. It is an aesthetic-moral sense and together an intellective cognition. It is the same rapport that Gerdil wants to establish for beauty in particular: an archetype of beauty, whose idea is received by the intellect; and a natural beauty that concurs in our apprehension almost like matter in respect to a unifying form. “In so far as [this form] is objectively in the intellect it may be that it impresses in the act of understanding the form in which its perfection consists; in so far as the concept corresponds to the beauty of nature and represents it, it gathers in itself the most of variety with the most of simplicity.” Surprisingly, in the analysis of moral and aesthetic concepts, in which Gerdil showed a great familiarity with all the English production, a strange unresolved contrast emerged between empirical instance and Malebranchean Platonism: in a word, sentiment and idea, subjectivity and objectivity, remained solely, and badly, juxtaposed. The same happened in regard to the Anti-Emile, for which Gerdil manifested a profound incomprehension. Nevertheless, the Discours philosophique sur l’homme considéré relativement à l’état de société (A philosophical discourse on the human being considered only in relation to the civil society) and the other essay on luxury are two remarkably acute documents. One word seems to recur quite frequently: communication. Communication is a spiritual value in opposition to contact, which is often a contrast of bodies. In this exigency of finding the individuals in a communion of persons, which the Enlightenment, in Gerdil’s opinion, was exaggeratedly inclined to consider as atoms foreign to each other, we find perhaps the most interesting word of Gerdil. If Gerdil was, as he certainly was, the most conspicuous representative of Malebranche’s thought in Italy, no lack around him of some minor voices existed, like that in some sporadic and diluted points of Institutiones (Turin, 1741) of Father F. M. Secco and Elementi (Brescia, 1762) of Giovambattista Scarella. They were soft voices, since Locke at first and the Ideologists afterward were submerging everything. Gregorio Fontana, discussing one of his lectures for a course in Pavia in the year 1764, stated that as a text he was going to adopt “the little known dissertation De methodo of Descartes.” Excusing himself for placing this new name beside Locke, Wolff, and, especially, Bonnet, Fontana was reminding his listeners that the Discours de la méthode, “with a few exceptions, was almost like the sight of an eagle over

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the various provinces of the scientific world, and by itself could be sufficient to make known Descartes as one of the greatest men of all ages” (nonostante alcune piccole eccezioni, è quasi l’occhiata di un’aquila sopra le differenti provincie del mondo scientifico, e solo basterebbe per far conoscere Cartesio per uno dei piú grandi uomini di tutte le età). This tenuous vein of a separate speculation, which did not wish to close itself within a rigid traditionalism, was not going to remain completely without echo among the thinkers of the Risorgimento. Among those who in the second half of the eighteenth century were solidly remaining anchored on ontology, together with Gerdil, Rosmini counted Giuseppe Torelli of Verona who, with his De nihilo geometrico (Verona, 1758), would have in his opinion anticipated Hegel; Cesare degli Orazi, the renewer of Eleatism in a special book on the method and duty of philosophizing, De universali methodo philosophandi officioque liber singularis (Rome, 1778); Vincenzo Chiavacci, whose essay on the greatness of God manifested through Its creatures, Saggio della grandezza di Dio manifestataci dalle sue creature, loved to make his own this thematic assertion, “The intellect would not know how to think a particular being if he did not have present the idea of being in general. Equally, the will would not know how to love a particular good if it was not inclined to love goodness in general.” A correspondence with the antiLockean motives of Gerdil is manifest in the philosophical verses of Anton Filippo Adami, verses that he placed in the appendix to his translation (published in Venice, in 1784) into Italian of Pope’s Essay on Man of 1733. With these anti-Lockean verses, the immateriality and immortality of the soul are proved “with the same arguments that Locke used”: I dispose my ideas, I combine, separate, abstract, distinguish them, and with the mind over all that is finite I build my path. A free intelligent principle, which does not take from the senses its destiny, should be a pure spirit free of parts (Io le idee mi dispongo, io le combino, separo, astrao, distinguo, e colla mente sopra tutto il Finito ergo il cammino. Un libero principio intelligente, che non prende dai sensi il suo destino, puro spirito esser dee di parti esente). To the “I’ as pure spirit corresponds the absolute reality of the First Being: “Now, if none of the composite beings have in themselves / the power to be, then it means there is a true / more simple being, from which everything proceeds. / And this must / be the perfect, unique, / First eternal Being” (Or se in

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niun dei composti Enti risiede / virtú in sé, per cui sia; dunque un piú vero / semplice vi è, da cui ciascun procede, / perfetto, unico, eterno Ente primiero). 3. Ermenegildo Pini Disdainful, certainly less than Gerdil, of any contact with the philosophy of the Enlightenment was Ermenegildo Pini, a Milanese scientist, who, in addition to a Dialogo intorno alla felicità (Dialogue about happiness) of 1812, had previously composed the Protologia analysin scientiae sistens ratione prima exhibitam (Protology or the first analysis of science based on reason) in three volumes, published in Milan in 1803. It is not a clearly drafted work, and someone compared it to Johann Gottlieb Fichte for the problems discussed and its trend. Gioberti, who was not too favorable toward Pini, had already made that comparison and judged Pini’s work “a hypothesis in the air, and a composition ingenious but vague of theological formulae.” Pini’s first goal was to begin from the sciences and construct a logic that would reduce to unity all its processes. Gradually proceeding in his work, Pini realized the need for a science of the sciences capable of clarifying the ultimate and unique foundation of all human knowledge. For this reason, his work was titled Protologia that meant a treatise concerning the first principle (Protologiam nominavi, idest tractationem de primo). This “protologia” would be a theory concerning science and will be the answer to the continuous need in any person who would peek into the profound roots of knowing, which in its variety and specifications would call for an ultimate truly universal principle capable of offering its own justification in the act of being posited. Pini confessed: From the time I started to dedicate myself to the study of the sciences, I found something obscure in their own principles. In the attempt to clarify this obscure point to myself, I was brought to inquire the first reason of the truth of their principles. In such a search I was always faced with one equal foundation for all of them, and this foundation is the one on which their truth rests as on its first reason (Ex quo studiis scientiarum dare operam coepi, aliquid suboscuri in ipsimet earum principiis deprehendi, quod, cum mihi ipsi declarare contenderem, me duxit ad inquirendam rationem primam veritatis principiorum eorundem; qua in inquisitione unum in aequalitate se mihi semper obtulit spectandum uti illud, in quo veritas ratione prima sit). In this way, we arrived at the One, absolute cognition, human and at the same time superhuman, foundation of every being and every knowledge, because simultaneously first reality and first act, “The One who is the first root of human intelligence in the first act of knowing and is present in any other act of understanding” (illud enim unum, quod primum adest homini intelligendum in primo intelligendi actu, ei adest in quolibet alio actu intelligendi). This first

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cognitive act, which constitutes the human mind to which it proposes itself as the first object, is also the first ontological entity, as being the notion that as self-notion posits itself in its absolute autonomy: This notion is an intelligent power, it is a principle of knowledge, from which the knowledge of the principle derives: knowledge of self in itself as well as in any other being that possesses intelligence. Knowledge in itself comes from its own existence, while the knowledge in us originates objectively through that notion or participated intelligence (Haec [notio] autem potentia intelligens est, principium cognitionis, a quo est cognitio principii, idest suiipsius tum in se, tum in quolibet, cui intelligentia est; in se quidem ex existentia sui, in nobis autem objective per notionem seu intelligentiam communicatam). In other words, its self-sufficiency objectifies intelligence within our finite minds, to which it gives comprehension not as mentality but as truth by itself subsistent, even if in itself truth is a self-concept. Understood in this way, the One posits itself as the first ontological being, as God. Protology becomes immediately theology. Pini concluded, “With assiduity and pertinacity I dedicated ten and more years of my life to the study of the One. And it appeared to me that while I was so occupied I penetrated the secret abode of Divinity, where I saw Truth in dazzling splendor in Mystery and Mystery within Truth. There I heard echoing all around me the resounding soothing voice of the speaking Word.” Here we have the absolute One, as auto-intelligent, multiplying itself in its unity giving way to the plurality of persons and thus to the Trinity. This is the complex, complicated, and not always clear system of Pini, at he bottom of which it is not too difficult to trace some kinship with the doctrines of Gioberti and Rosmini. 4. Vincenzo Miceli The Sicilian Vincenzo Miceli from Monreale introduces us to another ambience, another climate, but always far away from Lockean doctrines. He published almost nothing during his life, but from his teaching and from the posthumous writings, with love and care produced by Vincenzo di Giovanni, a metaphysical vein of Spinozian trend is manifest. Sicily had seen Cartesianism in the verses of Tommaso Campailla, Leibniz in the Tuscan verses edited by Tommaso Natale (Florence, 1755), on the footsteps of the thought of Niccolò Cento, and finally the doctrines of Wolff were proclaimed by Vincenzo Fleres. Miceli, then, turned to Spinoza, not without generating the amiable parodies of Giovanni Meli, who, beside composing a ricetta pri lu sistema di Miceli (a prescription for the system of Miceli), would dedicate to him a great part of the poem written in Berni’s style L’origine di lu munnu (The origin of the world). When he was 25 years old, Miceli gathered in a Specimen scien-

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tificum about two hundred propositions on nature, accompanied by demonstrations and notes, and from Monreale sent the work in a manuscript draft to the ultramontane academicians for their evaluation. Later, he composed as an introduction to the Specimen scientificum a Saggio storico o Idea di un sistema metafisico (Historical essay or the idea of a metaphysical system). In this essay, he stated: The one and infinite Being operates in a way that no other being could exist apart from itself, and I mean no other thing positive or with perfection. Apart from the unique and infinite Being there is only the pure nothing, which is the essential constituent of creatures…. Everything that is, and it is given as positive, must necessarily derive from that Being by way of an emanation that has no subsistence apart from it, but in it and through it (L’essere uno e infinito fa che non si dia alcun essere fuori di lui, voglio dire alcuna cosa di positivo e di perfezione; e perciò fuori dell’Essere unico ed infinito non si dà se non il puro niente, il quale è costitutivo essenziale delle creature…. Tutto quello però che è, e si dà di positivo, necessariamente da esso derivar deve per via d’emanazione, la quale non ha sussistenza fuori di esso, ma in esso e per esso). Miceli then faithfully sang: The substance is unique, and I am, essentially opposed to the great Nothing, because it is truly impossible that now I, while I am and exist, could be Nothing. You are many, I am a few. I want to represent myself to myself, and thus I multiply my modifications.) (La sustanza è unica, e sugn’Eu, essenzialmente opposta a lu gran Nenti; pirché è veru impossibili chi ora Eu, mentre sugnu ed esistu, fussi Nenti; pirtanti siti vui, pochi sugn’Eu; vogghiu me stissu a mia rapprisintari, multiplicu lu miu mudificari). In his “real ontology,” ontologia reale, Miceli determined the nature of Being, unique, eternal, infinite, which excludes all other beings now of its positing, “Because I observe the wave, does it mean that the substance of the wave, in the case of water, has been produced anew? Because I observe the fruit, is it for this reason that the substance, which is the true being, has produced itself anew?” (Perché nuova osservo l’onda: dunque per questo la sostanza dell’onda, qual è l’acqua, è di nuovo prodotta? Perché nuovo osservo il

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frutto, per questo la sostanza, che è l’ente vero, si produce nuova?). Being is active and alive, always new; the substance remains the same, but its terms vary continuously. Being exists, because of its nature of being most real, “Real essence and existence are identical” (essentia realis et existentia identificantur). To this original reality, always new, eternally living power, Miceli gave the name of Omnipotence (Onnipotenza), understood as the perennial production of itself in itself, while the reference to itself is Cognition (Cognizione), “I understand the whole, and it is my Being” (Iu intennu tutu, ed è l’Essiri miu), and also Love (Amore), which is the perennial spring of this eternal circularity. This absolute substance, and its eternal life, can be considered under two points of view: intrinsic, if we consider its infinite activity; extrinsic, if we admire its contingent manifestations, “It is intrinsically an active Reason … an eternal infinite power; extrinsically it is a continuous novelty, contingent novelties of a continuous status.” The extrinsic, the mutable is merely accidental, not real, apparent, and illusory, “like the water of the sea is always the same, no matter how continuously the waves are coming and going anew” (come l’acqua del mare è sempre la stessa, quantunque continue e sempre nuove siano l’onde). In every finite being the limit is deficiency, negation, and nothing; but the precise limit, the nothing, is what constitutes the being as a creature and apart from Onnipotenza. As we can see, Miceli, in his aprioristic and mathematic process and in his complex inspiration, trod in Spinoza’s steps, but he moved away from Spinoza when he insisted on the character purely phenomenal of space (“precisely of the world before us,” proprio del mondo aspettabile) and on the intrinsic liberty attributed to Being. Salvatore Mancino was used to say that Miceli approached Melisseus of Samos, not Spinoza, and at the same time was suggesting a parallel of Miceli with Friedrich Schelling. In reality, apart from some undeniable coincidences, often in Miceli something is found of the never dead Renaissance naturalism that modifies, also with a certain pretense, the terms of Spinozism. It is understandable how the teaching of Miceli caused much serious criticism, and this criticism became even more serious given the habit Miceli wore and the position he covered as a teacher at the Seminary of Monreale. The Camaldulite Isidoro Bianchi in a dissertation De existentia Dei (Palermo, 1772) attacked Spinoza and every attempt to penetrate with reason into the recesses of theology. But of reason Bianchi revealed himself as not being too sure, since he admired more than Locke Hume, of whom in 1774 he translated the Political Discourses. Dafnide Polopodia, nymph Ereina, was publishing in the Notizie de’ letterati of Palermo a Lettera intorno alla morale di D. Hume; R. Gregorio, a canon in the Duomo of Palermo, was requiring from his students in theology the reading of Hume’s Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, perhaps remembering when Al-Ghazzali could not find better apologetic bases than a radical critique of reason.

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In reality, Sicily was beginning to open itself to the reception of Lockean sensism, of which in 1781 in Catania there were public discussions, carried on even in the Cathedral. On Lockean sensism, later on, Father Soave, who dominated the schools of philosophy until the arrival of Galluppi solidly implanted his own dissimilar teaching. Consequently, in Lombardy, in Milan, the voice of Pini remained solitary and unheeded. Equally, the eclectic and at times Platonizing teachings of Cesare Baldinotti in Pavia failed to attract an audience, though he was more fortunate in Padua, where his name will be in some ways associated with that of the young Rosmini. 5. Thinkers of Piedmont Gerdil had a different kind of following in Piedmont, before he became the guide to Gioberti in his first steps in philosophy. It would be a serious error of judgment to overvalue the philosophical culture of the eighteenth century in Piedmont, apart from the Savoyard Gerdil. Not even a certain imitation of Bacon, a thinker dear to the reactionaries, though Giuseppe de Maistre raised much acid criticism against him, had wide relevance in Piedmont. The reduction of philosophy to science of nature and history that, according to the accurate analysis of Carlo Calcaterra, Gerdil, on the steps of Bacon, supposedly accomplished, brought, in reality, the destruction of true and proper philosophy. Some points of interest can still be found within this culture that tried to maintain itself independent from the Sensism that was dominating in France and becoming all pervasive in Lombardy. It was a proud position of defense that was remarkably well underlined by Melchiorre Cesarotti in his letter to Galeani Napione: Italy, indeed, owes you an extraordinary obligation. Among all our literati, you are the one deserving primarily the surname of Italic. You alone have taken upon yourself the task of defending the only residue of freedom and property that still remains to Italy: its language! You vindicated it from the insulting and invasive luxury of a rival that abuses its own luck; you brought to light its rights, its merits, the anteriority of its culture, and its general influence on the culture of Europe (L’Italia ha certamente a voi un’obbligazione straordinaria: fra tutti i letterati nostrali voi meritate per eccellenza il soprannome d’Italico…. Sostenere il solo residuo di libertà e di proprietà che avanza ancora all’Italia, la sua lingua … vendicarla del fasto insultante d’una rivale che abusa della fortuna; mettere in pieno lume i suoi diritti, i suoi pregi, l’anteriorità della sua cultura, la sua influenza generale su quella d’Europa …; questo è l’assunto che vi siete proposto). Galeani Napione truly deserved the praise. He disliked Scholasticism and in Saggio sopra l’arte storica (1773) wanted to found in Bacon an exaltation of

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history, whose task will be the exposition of philosophical findings. He used to say that “the individuals are the subject matter of History, the abstractions and the judgments are the field of Philosophy, the interpretation of the abstractions is again the task of History.” But there is no clear deepening of these two moments of history and of the single middle moment for philosophy, so that what could have been a profound thought, remained instead a shallow observation. Even Vico could begin from Bacon, but Napione seemed not to possess any particular philosophical penetration, at least if we look at certain of his judgments on contemporary thinkers. Some similar remarks could also be repeated in the case of Carlo Denina. He too was fond of Bacon, enemy of Rousseau, critic of Scholasticism, historian and caring for history, eager to know every culture, but adversary of the Encyclopedia and the Enlightenment. Analogous words could be used to describe many writers of philosophical matters, barely knowledgeable of the problems. Since their names had little resonance in the culture of the century, we may as well leave them in the dark. On the contrary, some importance should be assigned to Father Antonio Vincenzo Falletti di Casale Monferrato, who dedicated to Gerdil his Studio analitico della religione (ossia Ricerca piú esatta della felicità dell’uomo). In his critical notes and observations on Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Falletti affirmed that the human soul, conscious of its own existence, of its capability and desire to know, naturally and directly possesses an idea of being in general, an idea obtained immediately from its own existence and the infinite object of its aspirations. Falletti, most famous in his own time also for his polemical vivacity, constantly opposed Condillac’s Sensism with the Ontologism of Malebranche. Another Falletti, Ottavio of Barolo, will afterward mitigate Condillac with the Ideology. Another enemy and detailed critic of sensism was Tommaso Valperga di Caluso, whose Principes de philosophie pour des initiés aux mathématiques, which appeared in Turin in 1811, was later translated into Italian by Pietro Corte and annotated by Rosmini. Valperga’s critique of Kant, though praised by Rosmini, is a poor thing and derived from a second-hand cognition, but it is clear that he, while fighting Sensism, came to support with some elegance that our cognition has no origin from sensing, but “from noticing that we make what we sense” (dal notar che noi facciamo ciò che si sente), from a primitive judgment, “The testimony of the senses is our first teacher; but we can comprehend this teacher only by way of reasoning” (La testimonianza dei sensi è il nostro primo maestro; ma noi non arriviamo a comprenderlo che col ragionare).

Twenty-Eight VICO’S INHERITANCE AND ETHICAL INQUIRIES Cuoco, in 1801, wrote that after the works of Vico the best thing to read was, in his opinion, the political essays, Saggi politici, of Mario Pagano, published between 1783 and 1785. And to Vico, by way of the poet Gherardo degli Angeli whom he used to call “il mio maestro,” Pagano intended precisely to attach himself. We would move away from the truth if, relying on the words of Cuoco and reading Pagano’s Saggi, we were to accept the motive of the whole eighteenth century of the incomprehensibility of Vico. The acute spirit of Cataldo Jannelli, one of the most intelligent Vichians, insistently observed that the mentality of the eighteenth century, and especially of the second half of the century, was little suited to the comprehension of Vico. Jannelli was right, but only in part, because the eighteenth century through many of its exponents vividly manifested the same necessities to which Vico answered. We must agree with Jannelli for another of his observations, that what hurt Vico, as it is usually believed, was not the style, which he held admirably and most efficaciously, but a certain archaism of culture, the indecision of thought, and the multiple variety, sometimes ambiguous, of the problems he agitated. 1. Damiano Romano. Emmanuele Duni. Polemic with Gian Francesco Finetti An uninterrupted Vichian tradition, which connected Vico to Cuoco, cannot be denied in the second half of the eighteenth century, when on the Neapolitan Chair of Rhetoric Don Gennaro Vico almost impersonalized, in his teaching, an even physical continuity of the teaching of the great philosopher. Luckily, in his advanced age, Gennaro Vico could joyfully receive in the same house of his own father the young Cuoco, who was planning to offer to the resurging Italy a complete edition of the writings of its greatest thinker. The son of Vico was certainly not of a great mind, but he remained the symbol of the interest that the Neapolitan culture continually had for the doctrine of the father, whose echo resounded most alive in the words that don Gennaro pronounced in 1756, when for fifteen years he already had Antonio Genovesi as his colleague:

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It is natural that Vico would not have appreciated a science of earthly customs full of the rationalistic spirit of Descartes, as the one professed by Genovesi, who considered Vico his teacher, “a man of immortal fame for his New Science, a marvelous book, one of the few that in these matters honored Italy” (uomo d’immortal fama per la sua Scienza Nuova, libro meraviglioso e uno dei pochi che in queste materie facevano onore all’Italia). The Scienza Nuova was a book that immediately obtained resonance of praise and polemic, certainly not equal to its greatness, but still valuable and significant. Even more than the admiration of Conti or of the Dominican Nicola Concina, professor of metaphysics in Padua, who lauded the Scienza Nuova as an admirable revelation, what is of interest are the contrasts born at once between Vico’s disciples and critics, between Duni and Finetti. When Vico, who was a vivacious polemist, as his answers to the “Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia” demonstrated, was still alive, Damiano Romano raised many doubts on the orthodoxy of the Scienza Nuova in a series of opuscules published between 1736 and 1744. In these opuscules, Romano not only discussed the rapport between Greek and Roman jurisprudence, but also pointed out the impossibility of an agreement between biblical narration and Vichian theories on language, myth, and the primitive ferine condition. This profound antithesis between Catholic doctrine and Vichian teaching will support the criticism of Gian Francesco Finetti, while Lami disdainfully challenged with the weight of his enormous erudition Vico’s concept concerning the origin of the Twelve Tables, provoking the sharp Vichian reaction against those who “love erudition more than truth.” The point that gave way to

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greater suspicions was the thesis of a primitive ferine status of humanity, a thesis that Giovan Donato Rogadei was still criticizing in 1780. Among the most convinced supporters of the thesis was certainly Emmanuele Duni of Matera, professor of jurisprudence in Rome, an enthusiast admirer of Vico, whom he did not hesitate to call “teacher of all philosophers.” Duni, too, had to recognize some difficulties in Vico’s position. Difficulties are found with Vico’s lack of criticism in determining sufficiently the rapports between the universal providence and the particular cases, between the ideal eternal history and the course of nations. This Duni affirmed precisely when introducing La scienza del costume o sia del Diritto universale (The science of customs or of the universal law), which is for him “the science of humankind, as the thing that gives us the greatest, or the unique goodness of our nature.” This science of customs originates only when “the erudition concerning the most constantly received customs among the more cultivated nations” goes wisely in conjunction with the vision of a universal law. The Vichian connection of philology and philosophy is present in Duni as the fundamental norm of inquiry: The testimony of history, the constant tradition that reached us from the ancient writers, the living history of the nations of the present time, particularly of the peoples recently discovered by the Europeans, and the metaphysical intuitions obtained from the contemplation of human nature and of the natural course of the ideas and vicissitudes of human beings, are sufficient enough for the formation of a secure system concerning this human world, this humankind, and consequently these human institutions, which pertain to the law of nations (I monumenti della storia, la costante tradizione pervenutaci dagli antichissimi scrittori, la storia vivente dei popoli presenti, massime di quei che ultimamente sono stati scoperti dagli Europei, ed i lumi metafisici sulla contemplazione della natura umana, e sul corso naturale delle idee e vicende umane, bastano per formare un sistema sicuro su questo mondo degli uomini, o sia del genere umano, ed in conseguenza umane istituzioni, che appartengono al diritto delle genti). From this double source is born the certainty of a primitive feral state of humanity, from which civil life derived: The constant tradition confirmed by philosophers, historians, orators and poets, both Greek and Latin, brings us to know that the first founders of gentile nations have moved from a lawless condition, errant and ferine, to the establishment first of the society of families and thereafter gradually to that of the civil society. This status of a lawless and ferine condition has been discovered at our time also in some parts of the earth that have been recently reached by our European explorers (La costante tradizione attestata dai filosofi, istorici, oratori e poeti,

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY cosí greci che latini, ci fa sapere che i primi fondatori delle nazioni gentili, dallo stato eslegge, vago e ferino, passassero a stabilire prima le società di famiglia, ed indi di grado in grado le civili. Questo stato eslegge e ferino d’uomini si ravvisa oggi giorno anche in alcune parti della terra, venute in cognizione de’ nostri Europei).

Having established the primitive feral humanity, Duni returned to the concept of providence, hidden spring, but always present, of human development: From the secure witness of history, from the constant tradition, and from the metaphysical intuitions obtained in the contemplation of the human nature, we are also assured of the fact that all gentile nations began to regulate themselves with barbarous customs and laws born from coarse ideas, base, and material, which in time gradually were refined and reduced to levels approaching more and more natural equity (Dai monumenti sicuri della storia, dalla costante tradizione e da’ lumi metafisici sulla contemplazione della natura umana, siamo altresí assicurati, che tutte le nazioni gentili cominciarono a regolarsi coi costumi e leggi barbare, nate da idee grossolane, rozze, materiali, le quali di tempo in tempo e di grado in grado si andarono dirozzando, e riducendo ai punti piú vicini all’equità di natura). In his Vichian enthusiasm, Duni was almost trying to make his own the impetus and powerful expressions of his model. In his juridical inquiries, he was always insisting on the necessity of peeking deeply into the first origin of humanity and civil society, because only by comprehending, let us say, the dawn of civil living it would be possible to comprehend the guises of jurisprudence, at its birth: If we want to treat the theme of the laws of nations, we cannot disregard the origins and the progresses of societies upon which the cognition of the human laws and customs with their motives, introductions, and progresses uniquely depends. The same should be done when we want to understand the true system of Roman jurisprudence for which it is necessary to possess the cognition of the origin and growth of that nation (Per poter trattare la materia del diritto delle genti, non possiamo dispensarci di rintracciare le origini e progressi delle società donde unicamente dipende la cognizione delle leggi e costumi umani colle loro cagioni, introduzioni, e progressi; siccome per intendere il vero sistema del diritto romano fa d’uopo di ricorrere alle cognizioni delle origini, e progressi di quella nazione). In 1764, Gian Francesco Finetti bitterly challenged this precise necessity together with the idea of an initial feral humanity in two chapters of De principiis iuris naturae et gentium adversus Pufendorfium Thomasium, Wolfium et

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alios (On the principles of the law of nature and nations, against Pufendorf, Thomasium, Wolff, and others, vol. 8, ch. 2; vol. 12, ch. 6), to which Duni strongly reacted in 1765. Finetti did not remain silent and, with a short note in Novelle Letterarie, replied, “Soon or later, there would be another reply.” In fact, in 1768, his reply was published in Venice in the form of an Apologia del genere umano accusato d’essere stato una volta bestia. Parte prima. In cui si dimostra la falsità dello Stato Ferino degli antichi uomini colla Sacra Scrittura. Operetta che può servire di appendice ai libri “De principiis iuris naturae et gentium, etc., del Sig. G. F. Finetti (The apology of humankind accused of having been once of a beastly kind. Part one in which the ferine condition of humankind has been proven false by the Bible. This short work can be considered an appendix to the De principiis iuris naturae et gentium). The Apologia was published under the fictitious name of Filandrio Misoterio (“Lover of men” and “Enemy of beasts”), but surely its author was Finetti, who repeated the absolute incompatibility of the Vichian theses with the Bible, according to which “human beings never lived a solitary life, never were lawless, taciturn, without an articulate speech, and without permanent union or matrimony.” In the eyes of Finetti, Vico was endangering not only all the personalities of the sacred history, but religion itself, naturally originated by fear. In addition, Vico treated providence and grace with an extreme ambiguity, alien to that just equilibrium that he thought to have obtained by readapting in his own way the theory of Antonius Richardus, pseudonym of the Jesuit Etiénne Deschamps, an adaptation “placed, as in the middle of two extremes, between Calvinism and Pelagianism.” Vico in Autobiography (p. 119), commenting on this position and speaking of himself, wrote: This disposition enabled him later to meditate a principle of the natural law of the nations, which should both be apt for the explanation of the origins of Roman law and every other gentile civil law in respect of history, and agree with the sound doctrine of grace in respect to moral philosophy (La qual disposizione riuscí a lui efficace a meditar poi un principio di diritto natural delle genti, il quale e fosse comodo a spiegar le origini del diritto romano ed ogni altro civile gentilesco per quel che riguarda la storia, e fosse conforme alla sana dottrina della grazia per quel che ne riguarda la morale filosofia). In the process Vico assigned less and less place to grace, until in Scienza Nuova there would be providence alone to operate within the course of history. Providence, which per se is not merely an attribute of Christianity but is of all religions, becomes the law itself of the historical process. Of this providence Jannelli would profoundly observe that its character is essentially ambiguous, in so far as it would imply now a real intervention of God in the world, and then it would be reduced to a human ideal persuasion of a divine action in the universe.

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The observations of Finetti were certainly well founded on the point of view of Catholic orthodoxy, and to them would later appeal Giovanni Donato Rogadei and Francesco Colangelo. If the Catholics looked at the Vichian work with justifiable suspicion, the Illuminists, even when they approached Vico, always remained far away from the motives of his inspiration. And this happened to Genovesi and Filangieri, who greatly esteemed Vico and spoke of him with praise and admiration, but both of them, who were so much interested in the world of humankind, remained extraneous to the Vichian sense of a progressive conquest of the human spirit through the actualization within historical events of an absolute ideal of Platonic knowledge. In this line of thought, it happened also to Delfico—against whom an authentic Vichian like Jannelli will raise his voice—to condemn all history, in one block. Perhaps, not by chance, Delfico was dear to the Neapolitan revolutionaries of 1799, against whose mentality Cuoco drafted the Saggio storico that, while it constituted a salient prosecution of all the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century, succeeded in consigning to the century of the Italian Risorgimento (nineteenth century) some motives of the Vichian inheritance. 2. Mario Pagano The revolution of 1799 brings us to Mario Pagano, whose work Napoli Signorelli considered a plagiarism of that of Vico, when it was instead an attempt to combine Vichian inspiration with the teachings of the Enlightenment. To some, his trial was a hybrid connubium, a complete failure; to others, on the contrary, it seemed that he had developed, enlarged, and clarified the Scienza Nuova, “presenting to his contemporary the history of humankind as narrated by the philologist, the philosopher, the politician, the jurisconsult, and the naturalist.” Pagano appeared to have made a program for himself out of the Vichian harmony between the true and the certain, philosophy, and philology, when he declared: Now is the time for history to become a philosophy, a science of nature and of the various modifications of humankind, and for philosophy to become a history, the consideration of the aforementioned various phases of humanity. The vulgar gatherer of facts deserves none of our respect, and the philosopher who reasons without facts and without history should consider itself a delirious fabricator of vain chimaeras (Sia la storia una filosofia, cioè la scienza della natura e delle diverse modificazioni dell’uomo, e la filosofia una storia, cioè la considerazione dell’anzidette varie fasi dell’umanità. Non merita il nostro rispetto il volgare raccoglitore di fatti, e il filosofo che ragioni senza fatti e senza storia rimirisi pure come un delirante fabbro di vane chimere). This became the originating idea of the Saggi politici: the Platonic idea, no longer isolated in a transcendent Upper-world, is instead active and made in-

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trinsic to the becoming itself of this world. This is what Vico intended when he looked for a providence that would operate from within the history of nations; this is what the Vichians, from Duni to Jannelli, repeated and will repeat. Pagano was taken too much by the physico-moral examination of the human being (esame fisico-morale dell’uomo, as he called it), and ended with juxtaposing Platonic ideals and Lockean experiences. What Pagano believed was a deficiency in Vico and, on the other hand, his own precious integration of Vico’s work, resolved itself into becoming instead the defect of his own inquiry: The Egyptian and Platonic system that Vico has brought back to light has received my new demonstration by way of different laws and new means of civil progress that have been established. By way of a physical analysis of the earth and of a physico-moral examination of the human being—fields unknown to Vico—the vestiges of the progressive mutations of the human race have been established. Consequently, this system can very well be said meritoriously to be mine, in the same way than deservedly the solar system can be said to be of the immortal Newton, as before him it could be said that it was of Pythagoras, then of Copernicus, and finally of Galileo (Il sistema egizio e platonico, da Vico richiamato alla luce, ha ricevuto da me nuova dimostrazione: leggi diverse, nuovi mezzi del civile sviluppo si sono stability. Per mezzo di una analisi fisica della terra, di un esame fisico-morale dell’uomo—provincia al Vico intatta—si sono le vere vestigia fissate de’ progressivi cangiamenti della razza umana. In guisa che mio un tal sistema si può meritamente dire, come a ragione dell’immortal Newton vien detto il sistema solare, comeché quello prima fosse stato di Pitagora, poi di Copernico e di Galileo). In reality, of Pagano, in this Vichian development, there is only an insistence on the separation of what Vico wanted, not to juxtapose, but to truly connect. We may say that Pagano’s Vichianism mostly existed in his curious Platonism that induced Mamiani, in the dialogue dedicated to him, to adorn with Platonic resonances the words of the martyr of 1799. And this brings us once more back to Cuoco, and to those thinkers who, consciously or not, reconnected themselves in some ways to Vichian doctrines. Of these, two in particular should not be left apart: Stellini during the second half of the eighteenth century, and Cataldo Jannelli at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 3. Jacopo Stellini. The Call for Aristotle. Against Stoicism Mentioning Stellini is like mentioning Vico, no matter how great a difference in stature existed between the two thinkers. Gian Domenico Romagnosi and Giambattista Talia also worked on this comparison between the two, and we can say that Stellini was certainly not among the lesser-known writers on mo-

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rality during the eighteenth century. This man understood right away, at least in some parts, the meaning of the Scienza Nuova, that he imitated in De ortu et progressu morum et opinionum ad mores pertinentium (On the origin and development of human customs with some opinions about them) of 1740. Jacopo Stellini was a Somascan Priest, born in Tribil (on the hill), in the municipality of Stregna, in 1688. He joined the Somascans in 1718 in Cividale del Friuli and in 1739, after having been a preceptor in Venice for the Emo family’s children, obtained in Padua the Chair of Moral Philosophy, succeeding to Giacomo Giacometti. His lectures were attractive for the acuity of the doctrines, and less for the grace of the form in which they were presented, given that one of his auditors, Luigi Mabil, author of Lettere stelliane, described one of Stellini’s lessons in 1770, the same year the philosopher died, in these terms: I saw a Somascan who had nothing else that appears alive beside his eyes, which were ardent and sparkling. He was ugly but of the ugliness of Socrates, to which he resembled very appropriately. From his toothless mouth was coming the flow of his dull, nasal, monotonous voice, the way, they told me, he always did. But the benches were sorrowfully supporting the too many auditors. Truly, as for myself, of all that abstruse blabber I understood not even a syllable (Vidi un somasco che aveva di vivo poco di piú degli occhi, questi però ardenti e scintillanti; brutto nel genere della bruttezza di Socrate, a cui moltissimo rassomigliava; uscía da una bocca sdentata un filo di voce sorda, nasale, monotona, e l’ebbe sempre, mi si diceva, cosí; le panche non facevano festa, gravate di foltissimi uditori. In verità, di tutta quell’astrusa diceria non ne compresi una sillaba). The famous moral lectures, which he used to distribute during a course running for six years, were published posthumously in 1778 by Father Girolamo Barbadigo and his friend Antonio Evangelii, as Ethicae, seu moralium disputationum libri VII. Evangelii also published posthumously the Opere varie, in which writings on mathematics, religion, and literature are found, and the Lucubrationes ethicae (Ratiocinations on ethics). Witness of the variety of Stellini’s interests is a judgment of Algarotti, in which Stellini is compared to the Lucian mime who in his dance counterfeits all the gods. We mentioned that one of his most known and diffused works is the piece of 1740, especially in the version of Luciano Valeriani. It was also his most discussed piece right from the beginning, when the author was accused, not totally erroneously, of Spinozism and Hobbesian influences. Vico is never mentioned but is always present in this work. In it, Stellini intended to run through the course of human development from the feral state to the fullness of reason, from when the human brutes had none but an obscure sense of themselves, and where all was limited within the interest for individual preservation. In his opinion, the examination of such a development would put

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into focus those eternal laws that regulate human nature, “Nature teaches all the things by which the life and society of humankind must be preserved” (quibus humanae gentis vitam atque societatem contineri debere universa natura monet). Before facing the major problems of practical philosophy, he wanted to criticize the guises of the birth of laws and human virtues, retracing their simultaneous progressive discovery, “I found necessary to go back to their origin, in order to follow orderly their different steps of development” (rem altius ab origine ultima repetendam, eiusque gradus et quasi processus ordine relegendos esse duxi). It was the journey back to the origins, the journey that could allow the clarification of “the development of the faculty of the human spirit, the origin and progresses of opinions and appetites … [and] finally the reason why the customs, which derived from those opinions and tendencies, continued in various forms.” The key that opens the doctrine of the progress of nations is the examination of the human life, because it is the life of the human being that in a short cycle (exiguo circulo) contains in itself those same moments that in a larger scale can be found in the history of nations. The first phase in the human life is the total predominance of sensation, when the mind is deficient, and the only guide is the obscure and uncertain impulse of nature, “The whole multitude of human beings … when it reached a mature age but the mind was still immature, used to govern and regulate all life according to that first, obscure, and uncertain impulse that we have been given by nature, and in agreement with the first wish of our spirit, which aims at our preservation and integrity.” If human servitude is the point of departure, the ideal point of arrival is the liberty of the wise who, like citizens returning to their fatherland after extensive peregrinations (tanquam cives ex longis erroribus restituti patriae), would finally enjoy the beatific vision of truth. The state of alternating vicissitude is intermediate between the dominion of reason and the senses, the subtle fight between force and wits, in which Stellini’s morality is posited as the cautious guide and teacher of a careful strategy. In the first phase of humankind, when everything was sensation, sense itself was still obtuse, and men were inactive and tranquil, without any desire and industry. It was the golden age that Stellini does not posit as a desirable moment of perfection but as an idle and inhuman condition, “But the need for food destroyed all idleness and dissipated a happiness based on the avoidance of discomfort more than on the acquisition of comfort” (Sed ignavia haec excussa cibo est, ereptaque felicitas ea, quae vacuitate magis incommodorum, quam accessione bonorum continebatur). Strengthened in body thanks to paucity of alimentation, “there was new force and greater energy, and the spirit, not being tamed by art and culture, was restless and wild” (nel corpo sorgeva forza e lena grande, e l’animo, non ingentilito da arte o cultura, ardeva inquieto ed indomito). Violence was the result; the universal conflict of everyone against everyone, which Stellini derived from Hobbes, and covered it repeatedly with Vichian forms in Vichian language:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY The spirit then full of proud and rude force, was ready to explode into precipitous and implacable anger, rushing first with all impetus upon ferocious beasts…. Thereafter, man attacked other men, whenever they would interpose an obstacle to the stomach and to the libidinous inclination, which already had started to break the limit imposed by nature (L’animo, dunque, pieno di fiere ed orrende forze pronto ad ire precipitose e implacabili, s’avventò prima con tutto l’impeto contro le bestie feroci…. Poi si scatenò contro gli uomini stessi, ove si offrisse ostacolo al ventre inquieto ed alla libidine, che aveva già preso a sforzare i limiti posti dalla natura).

Following on the steps of Leviathan, Stellini spoke of the scarcity of the desired goods, of the growing violence of the conflict, and of how force became the measure of right (violentiae tributum ius summum). But then the disparity of force generated in those less strong “strategies, sorties, shrewdness, and remedies.” Cleverness joined to self-advantage becomes the envied and despised rival of brute force, “In the way that the one who did not recede before danger was called ‘good’, so the one who could fabricate deceptions suitable to the circumstances was called ‘wise’” (Ut bonus appellabatur, qui periculum nullum detrectaret; sic sapientis ei nomen factum est, qui dolos aptos tempori callide strueret). The shrewd Ulysses counter-opposed Ajax, until in time astuteness and usefulness took the upper hand and became the honored ingenuity that rules over the civil nations, “Then, all natures were refined, the arts and the disciplines came to light, and from them the spirit brilliantly vivified itself. Consequently, the advantages of life augmented, the forces of the commonwealths increased, and the ornaments of dignity prized the spirits” (Allora si dirozzaron gli ingegni, si trassero a luce l’arti e le discipline, da cui s’avviva lo spirito, e sogliono aumentarsi le utilità della vita, le forze della repubblica, ed ogni fregio di dignità). That was the originary feral state of violent conflicts, to which followed the orderly cities ruled by laws and justice, but in which wealth and idleness introduced cupidities and unrefrained passions that aimed at the breaking of the ties of civil norms. And soon there was barbarism again. It would be annoying and useless to follow Stellini any farther or institute comparisons with Vico, whom Stellini imitated often even in the interpretation given to poets, and particularly by his frequently recourse to Homer. Interestingly enough in Homer Stellini posited a precise consciousness of all the stages of the course of nations that is alien to the Vichian position: Homer, who in his poems has concealed the nature that is always in conformity with itself and proceeds with uniformity, has gathered and composed in one and same time the customs that gradually mutate. Of all the ages … he has expressed in the principal heroes the progress of human nature from its primitive barbarism to the extreme looseness of morals, has distinguished the successive stages of progress, and ex-

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posed them all in one setting. Leaving apart the ferocity proper to the brutes that was represented in Polyphemus, Achilles is the representation of unconquerable power and unrestrainable heart; Ulysses, of shrewdness supported by violence; Nestor, of prudence sustained with strength of spirit; Hector, of fortitude and justice; Antinous, of justice and timid prudence; Paris, finally, the symbol of a licentiousness so rotten that nothing is considered beyond the reach of his lewdness (Omero, il quale nei suoi poemi adombrò la natura ch’è sempre conforme a sé, e procede con uniformità, cosí raccolse e compose in un tempo solo i costumi che via via si tramutano, dell’età tutte … espresse ne’ principali eroi l’avanzar dell’ingegno umano dalla natía barbarie all’estrema dissolutezza, e distinse i successivi gradi, e gli espose in una sola veduta. Per tralasciare infatti l’efferatezza propria dei bruti adombrata in Polifemo, Achille è forma d’invitta forza e di cuore infrenabile; Ulisse dell’accortezza appog-giata dalla violenza; Nestore della prudenza sostenuta dalla fortezza dell’animo; Ettore della fortezza e della giustizia; Antenore della giustizia e dell’imbelle prudenza; Paride finalmente d’una licenza sí rotta che nulla tiene interdetto alla sua libidine). The doctrine of progress constitutes almost the preamble of Stellini’s ethics, which under a heavy structure of erudition at times too ostentatious is not lacking fortunate insights. This was also what Romagnosi observed when he concluded his compilation of moralists exactly with Stellini, of which he underlined the dependency from Aristotelianism, remarking immediately thereafter, “Stellini made use of the stratagem of those reformers, who wishing truly to ameliorate a system maintained the ancient external previous forms, and put out the banner of Aristotle” (Stellini usò dell’accorgimento di quei riformatori, i quali volendo realmente migliorare un sistema si attengono a forme esterne antiche, e però pose fuori l’insegna di Aristotele). And of Aristlotle, Stellini especially loved the sense of concreteness in the treatment of problems, the clear vision of interior life, the constant connection of the consideration of the single individual with the vision of the whole society. But together with Aristotelianism he felt with much clarity the influence of more recent currents. His polemic against the inhumanity in the “apathy” of the Stoics and in their “monastic ethic” remind us again of Vico; equally, the analysis of the passions and the consideration that affections should be equilibrated and won with other affections point to Hobbes and Spinoza. The appeal to Aristotle is done in the way of the ancient appeal to a rational system, not contrasting, but autonomous from revelation: This is the plan I proposed for myself in order not to move away from the system of Aristotle who decided to consider no other happiness than the one purely human, independently from any relationship to future life. Aristotle’s intention was that of forming good citizens, capa-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ble of being the constituency of an optimal commonwealth (Questo è il piano ch’io mi sono proposto per non allontanarmi dal sistema d’Aristotele che non ha preso a considerare altra felicità che la puramente umana, indipendentemente da qualunque relazione alla vita futura; non avendo egli in mira che di formare buoni cittadini, ed atti a costituire una ottima repubblica).

Stellini added that no accusations are valid for the fact that he proceeded without preoccupations of religious nature because “in order to be in this matter exculpated from any right imputation, it is sufficient that the principles that establish the happiness of present life are not incompatible with the happiness of the afterlife” (per essere in questo proposito esente da ogni giusta imputazione, basta che i principî che si stabiliscono per la felicità della vita presente non siano incompatibili con quella della vita avvenire). This concern is not of the philosopher, but of the theologian. The achievement and the goal of humankind is happiness. It is opportune to examine the human functions in themselves and in rapport to their ends, to determine their limits, and reach their reciprocal harmony. And given that the human being is a social being, it is also convenient to observe the human being as in an “absolute state,” but also as social in a “relative state.” Without following Stellini’s minute analyses of sensation, intelligence, memory, tendencies, will, and liberty, we must remember that Stellini, having analyzed the tendencies and also the characteristic elements of sensitive life, placed the foundation of goodness in the intellectual cognition, which would allow free will to orient itself. It has been observed that it is not within this poorly original frame that the original interesting motive of the philosopher can be found. In this frame, we could perhaps find nothing else than “the fleshless skeleton of the miserable Stellini barbarically lacerated” (lo scarnato ossame del misero Stellini barbaramente straziato), if we want to use the expression of Mabil. What makes these hard lessons of Stellini’s ethics still bearable today is their sense of human life in all its richness, which manifested itself particularly in the polemic against the Stoic rigorism. The human being is a strict connection of body and spirit and no one should pretend to separate it from its sensitiveness and from pleasure, from the self-love that is born out of the fruition of pleasure that the senses provide. Life and enjoyment are so interconnected that it would be impossible to separate them and establish whether pleasure is wanted for life or life for pleasure. Stoic rigorism and apathy present themselves in colors deserving aesthetic admiration more than approbation. Aristotle, who preferred the true over the pompous, observed with Socrates that with pleasures we should deal like with heat and cold, now to look for them, now to move away from them. Besides—Stellini would insist—Stoicism remove from human beings desires and pleasures, break the link between sense and reason, and embrace the most rigid ascetism. By doing so, the Stoics dry up the sources of individual and

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social life; they destroy the spring of goodness itself. The good should not be done for interest, but should be loved, supported with the affective forces that require it and bring it to triumph. To the Aristotelian ideal of virtue as mean and harmony, Stellini also added the consideration, which is of Hobbes and Spinoza, according to which reason is moved by passions, and passion is won by passion alone. For the control of the affections no reasoning is required, but other affections that reason would direct, guide, and solicit. Far from being dangerous and deserving destruction, the affections are the necessary collaborators of cold reason, which, on the other hand, by guiding and correcting them, would make of them the essential instruments of public and private goodness. As the wind clears the air from impure exhalations, so the affections both agitate the blood preventing it from becoming turbid, and make the senses more alert in seizing good and beautiful things. Whoever fights the affections, fights the body, fights the human being who is flesh and spirit, union and harmony of the two. This harmony is not given but created by reason and free will. The Vichian dignity—that shows how from ferocity, avarice, and ambition, legislation derives militia, commerce, court and wherefrom fortitude, opulence, and wisdom of the commonwealths—was not repugnant to Stellini. Stellini loved to represent to himself everywhere this interior reciprocity and essential identification of sense and reason. He compared the subtle, occult, and increasing penetration of rationality in the wider horizon of the history of the world to the minute blood vessels that carry the blood everywhere and seem to attenuate gradually themselves until they become completely unnoticeable. 4. The Morality of Pietro Tamburini Stellini’s name is mentioned with honor, and his doctrines are remembered and exploited in the writings of abbé Pietro Tamburini, professor at the University of Pavia, and well known in the history of Italian Jansenism. When called to Pavia to teach moral philosophy, Tamburini dedicated to citizen Francesco Melzi d’Eril the Introduzione allo studio della filosofia morale, and referred to the “dangerous conflicts” to which his theological doctrines exposed him, the “storm of malevolent libels, imprecations, insults, and satires” together with “ferocious persecutions.” He also hoped that, after the revolutionary tragedy, and the new storm of “audacious hypotheses, temerarious assertions, ridiculous plans, vulgar errors, and unrefrained licentiousness” by which it had been characterized, honest souls could again return to the appreciation of “an anthology of seeds of moral instruction that in an orderly series of ideas would rest on the immutable principles of nature.” In these words the reaction to some positions denying the objectivity of human values is already evident. The first point that Tamburini discussed was exactly the one concerning the origin of moral laws and the process of human history. He had before him the doctrines of those who were denying the originary moral structure of the human being, and were affirming that only natural vicissitudes are the

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cause of the transformation of the primitive beast into the being conscious of its duties. And Tamburini in Lezione 2 (vol. 1, pp. 20–21), replied: Modern philosophers … think that the first human being was born to the world almost by accident and as an animal, which is rational indeed for natural capacity, but rude, uncouth, restless, and obese. [This first human being] is satisfied with that little food that provident nature grows around it. The first human being knows not how to think or how to reflect upon itself or the external objects. It is only through a long cycle of years that, by stumbling over the exterior objects by accident, this inert machine receives some shocks that awaken its cupidities and consequently felt the inclination to satisfy them. From the development and satisfaction of these needs, the human being began to judge the objects around, to reason about them, and thus gradually became able to pass on to successive generation some ideas of what good and evil are (I moderni filosofi … risguardano il primo Uomo quasi nato al mondo per accidente e come un animale, ragionevole sí per la sua capacità naturale, ma rozzo, informe, torpido, obeso, che contento di que’ pochi cibi, che intorno a lui face crescere la provida natura, non sapesse né pensar, né riflettere sopra se stesso né sopra gli oggetti esteriori, e che solamente col lungo giro degli anni, urtando per caso gli oggetti esteriori l’inerte macchina, ricevessero una scossa le sue cupidità e quindi egli ne sentisse il solletico di soddisfare, e dallo sviluppo di queste prendesse le mosse a giudicare degli oggetti, a ragionar sui medesimi, e cosí un poco alla volta alle tarde generazioni tramandare potesse qualche idea di bene e di male). Tamburini does not deny historical development, does not deny that primitive human being was rude and uncouth; he denied the passage from being animal to being human, the change from what was not moral to the world that has morals. Morality is intrinsic, essential to human nature, and it is impossible to move from non moral to moral, from non mental to mental, through a causative generative process from one thing to another. In Lezione 3 (vol. 1, pp. 38–40), he clarified his position: No matter how many times I turn my thoughts to the consideration of the first infancy of the world and be persuaded of the late development of the sciences, the commerce, the arts, I still cannot bring myself to degrade the human being to the point of accepting it in a condition worse than the one of all the other animals…. On one hand, I do not look at the first human as an eximious doctor, who would explain from the cathedra the dialogues of Plato or the Enchiridion of Epictetus … as if it were wiser than Socrates or Aristotle, as the Talmudists said. On the other hand, I do not picture to myself the first human as being a

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wild machine moved uniquely by the stomach and by fear, with the hoe in one hand for food and a club on the other hand for defense, unable to reflect on itself and on the usage of all exterior things (Per quanto io mi porti col pensiero alla prima infanzia del mondo, e per quanto io sia persuaso del tardo sviluppo delle scienze, del commercio, delle arti, io non so indurmi a degradar l’uomo sino al segno di far peggiore la dilui condizione di quella degli altri animali…. Ma non per questo io risguardo il primo uomo come un esimio dottore, che salito sulla cattedra spiegasse o i dialoghi di Platone, o l’Enchiridio di Epitteto … e fosse piú sapiente di un Socrate e di un Aristotele, com’ebbero a dire i Talmudisti…. Ma non per questo io so figurarmi il primo uomo come una macchina selvaggia mossa unicamente dal ventre e dalla paura, con la zappa in una mano per vivere, e col bastone nell’altra per difendersi, incapace di rivolgere un pensiero sopra se stesso, e sull’uso delle cose esteriori). Tamburini added that the Father has implanted the seeds of moral conduct, intrinsic to human nature, in the heart of his children (I semi sparsi di una morale condotta dal Padre nel cuore de’ figli). In Lezione 11 (vol. 1, p. 161), he considered Locke like an Aristotle because of his great tyrannical diffusion throughout the world, and he mentioned Kant as being the one “who has invited humankind to loftier and worthier notions.” In Prospetto di un corso di filosofia morale e di gius naturale pubblico (Outline of a course on moral philosophy and natural public law) engaging in an attack against utilitarianism, Tamburini appealed again to Kant: There is a supreme law carved within the being gifted with reason. This reasonable being does not reject any of the moral maxims founded on human nature, maxims that are the expressions of its own diverse tendencies. With reason, the human being rectifies all tendencies, sanctions them, and finally subordinates them in an absolute way to the precepts [of that supreme law] (V’ha una legge suprema scolpita nell’essere ragionevole, che non rigetta alcuna delle massime morali fondate sulla natura dell’uomo, e che sono la espressione delle sue diverse tendenze; ma le rettifica tutte, e le sanziona, e le subordina in una maniera assoluta ai suoi precetti). The problem that Tamburini in Lezione 11 (vol. 1, pp. 4, 19–20) saw in Kant is that he splits the human being by directing him in two opposite directions with two fundamental laws, “One law drives the human being toward wellbeing, the other toward virtue. One law says, be happy; the other instead says, be virtuous” (l’una trascina l’uomo verso il benessere, l’altra verso la virtú. L’una gli dice sii felice; l’altra gli dice: sii virtuoso). Tamburini, who was neither Stoic nor Epicurean, concluded (ibid., pp. 7, 21) by saying:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY The philosophical ethics that would be perfect and complete would be the one capable of uniting all the motives of acting that correspond exactly to the nature and needs of the human being. Without excluding any, this philosophical ethics should use all those motives which could be supported by that same grade of evidence of which many other truths are susceptible, which are believed with firmness, and serve as rule and direction in the conduct of human beings (Quell’etica filosofica sarà compiuta e perfetta, che saprà riunire tutti i motivi d’agire, che corrispondono esattamente alla natura ed ai bisogni dell’uomo, e che senza escluderne alcuni sappia far uso di tutti i quali sieno appoggiati a quel grado di evidenza di cui sono suscettibili tant’altre verità, che pur si credono con fermezza, e servono di regola e di direzione nella condotta degli uomini). 5. Cataldo Jannelli and Vincenzo Cuoco

In the early years of the nineteenth century, quite different and more limited was the influence of Cataldo Jannelli, an erudite gentleman, a thinker of some value in Saggio sulla natura e necessità della scienza delle cose e delle storie umane (An essay on the nature and necessity of the science of things and human stories) of 1817, of which Romagnosi published a second edition in 1832. This work was probably born within the complex of discussions that accompanied the publication of the writing of Delfico against history, even though Jannelli explicitly referred to it only once, which is no more than his single citation of Francesco Saverio Salfi who against Delfico had defended all historical disciplines. The usefulness of history, Jannelli observed, is not to be found in practice, as if the study of history could make human beings better or wiser; history is useful because it satisfies the human desire of knowledge. History’s usefulness is a literate utility (utilità letterata) that is common to history as it is to all other sciences. History is even more useful because history is almost the basis or foundation of all human knowledge, as the one science that grasps the human becoming in its origin, itself becoming truly the queen of the human sciences. In this, Jannelli had to confront his major difficulty, a problem directly inherited from Vico, whom he saw as his teacher, though criticizing Vichian impetus and obscurity. Vico saw very well the necessity of asserting philosophy’s certainty with the help of philology as well as of making philology true with the help of philosophy. For Jannelli the problem consisted of trying to connect the ideal eternal history, which is the philosophy of the human mind, with the history of nations, which is the study of the concrete living of human beings, joining together the science of human spirit, which he found in Kant and the result of Vichian inquiries. He wrote: The science of human things necessarily presupposes history, the history of the faculties, proprieties, nature and needs of human societies. Because this history does not exist alone and separate from the facts

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and the operations of all forces and dependent needs; because it cannot be separated without a long struggle, and much serious attention, it is consequently clear that this science of human things, for the same succession of these things, would presuppose the human stories, how they have reached us, and how they depended from those facts (La scienza delle umane cose suppone necessariamente la storia: cioè la storia delle facoltà, proprietà, natura e bisogni delle società umane. E perché questa storia non esiste sola e separata dai fatti e operazioni da tali forze e bisogni dipendenti, né può separarsene senza lunga fatica, e molta e grave attenzione, è perció chiaro, che la scienza delle cose umane, per questo stesso ordine di cose, supponga le storie umane, come ci sono giunte, e da esse dipenda). We would not be able to say that Jannelli resolved the question, showing how his Istoriosofia (Historiosophy), or science of history, was a philosophy of the mind that arose and concretized through the course of the civil history of humanity. This does not forbid that he could show himself, in his comprehension of the most profound exigency of Vico, far ahead of those attitudes of his contemporaries in which the Enlightenment was exhausting itself in the most arid abstractness. Jannelli was hardly conscious that his Istoriografia was clearly distinguished from the philosophy of history of Aurelio Bertola dei Giorgi, whom he was strongly criticizing. Duni, Pagano, Stellini, or Jannelli were not the only heirs of Vichian spirit. Vico’s spirit is present also in all the works of Vincenzo Cuoco, though they are not strictly philosophical, but rather pedagogic, historical, and political. Cuoco did not possess the knowledge of Kant that would have been required for observing the link between the Vichian verum-factum and the synthetic activity of the spirit. He reacted to the criticism of Kant of Father Soave, since he wrote a “work too unsophisticated … unsuitable to Soave, and that he could have not written it, without any damage to his fame, and for the respect he owed to his readers and to himself.” Anyway, Cuoco had no appreciation for the Ideology, as it manifested itself in Soave; he praised those works of Soave that are simple, common, useful for the popularizing of philosophical questions among the unlearned. Cuoco always had a great opinion of Pagano, perhaps because the figure of the thinker appeared with the aureole of a martyr. Here, too, the greatest praise is given because Pagano understood and explained Vico. In 1806, Cuoco decreed, “Mario Pagano is the introducer of Vico!” In 1801, he wrote: To call in review the nations of all places and all times, among the infinite variety of history … to write the history of humanity is an invention in which the Italian ingenuity has no rivals. Plato merely caught a glimpse of Atlantis, but Vico like Columbus was the first to navigate it. After Vico, no one else but Pagano alone had the courage to follow on his footprints (Chiamar a rivista le nazioni di tutti i luoghi e di tutti

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY i tempi, tra le infinite varietà della storia; … scriver la storia eterna dell’umanità è una invenzione in cui l’ingegno italiano non ha verun rivale. Platone aveva appena intravveduto l’Atlandide; Vico, al pari di Colombo, fu il primo a navigarvi; ma, dopo Vico, niun altro se non che Pagano ha avuto il coraggio di seguirlo).

Like a new Columbus, Vico offered a solid and safe ground for inquiry; he truly discovered the philosophy of the human mind. Cuoco had the intuition that between Kantism and the new Vichian science the rapport was profound, and even though afterward he did not understand such a rapport, he had the merit of proclaiming it, “What the German school in these recent years has programmed, Vico had already executed one century ago” (Ciò che la scuola tedesca in questi ultimi anni ha precettato, Vico un secolo prima lo aveva già eseguito). But this Vichian Idealism is for Cuoco still and essentially Platonic, perfectly Platonic, and Platonic in an exorbitant way. It was from Vico— whom he wanted to imitate in the essay written in his youth “on the history of the most ancient civilization and wisdom of the Greeks deduced from etymology”—that he derived the love for Plato that nourishes his Platone in Italia, significatively dedicated to Telesio, “the first among the inquirers on the most ancient philosophy of the Italians” and who was reputed almost as the Italian Bacon. Vico, too, joined Plato and Bacon in one and the same act of love. We must observe once more that Cuoco did not clarify or deepen the many motives he derived from Vico. Of Vico he felt the limits of the theory of “corsi e ricorsi” that for him meant a concealed process falling back on itself, without any progress, and from which an excessive resemblance could be suspected between the first and second barbarism (la soverchia rassomiglianza tra la prima barbarie e la seconda). At the same time, he came to admit the vision of the providence within history that was positing the becoming of events within a hard necessity. Speaking in 1806 about the damages of the revolution of 1789 and its excesses, he envisaged already the total annihilation that the Jacobin extremism would at the end cause: The same providence—that at times forces human ideas beyond the limit of the true and human actions beyond the line of the just so that people would acquire that exaltation of thought that alone would move them to the achievement of the greatest enterprises—knows thereafter also how to restrain the excesses of evil and how to resurrect those ideas of the middle way that alone hold truth, virtue, and happiness (Ma quella stessa provvidenza, la quale talvolta spinge le idee degli uomini oltre il limite del vero e le loro azioni oltre la linea del giusto, onde acquistano quella esaltazione di pensiero che sola ne può spingere a tentare le grandissime imprese, li sa poi frenare per l’eccesso istesso di mali, e fa risorgere di nuovo quelle idee medie, nelle quali solamente stanno riposte la verità, la virtú, la felicità).

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As puppets in the hands of the Absolute, human beings recite on the stage of the world a drama of which they are merely appearances. Edmund Burke saw already beforehand among the Jacobin excesses the soldier who would have drowned in a military tyranny the movement of liberation of the doctrinaires of 1789. The difference was that while Burke brought his contribution for the fight against the “tyrant,” Cuoco greeted, in terms that appear Hegelian, Bonaparte as the man of providence, earthly incarnation of the animating spirit of history. The trace of messianism that brought Cuoco to oppose to the becoming of Vico a fixed point in which the process of events would almost conclude, brought him also to identify this final culmination with the life of his own time and in the semblance that was most convenient to him, as if the idea was exhausting itself in one of its earthly incarnations. It would be wrong to judge Cuoco only as the propagator of Vico, or as the centralizer of the concept of the providentialism of history, as this appeared in his essays of 1806. The Saggio storico on the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 is “not history, but observations on history,” as he underlined, and it showed itself full of Vichian spirit in its evaluation of the French Revolution. The work of Burke was not extraneous to the inspiration of Cuoco who mentioned him immediately at the beginning of the writing. A precise comparison between the two, Burke and Cuoco, would not be difficult. It is with originality that Cuoco proceeded in the most personal analysis of the abstractness of the revolutionary spirit understood as a systematic doctrinalism, which would indifferently impose the identical scheme to every concrete and actual situation. Hence, we had a geometrism that was repugnant to the human nature in its historical reality. The conflict between historical concrete reality and abstract philosophizing appeared typical to Cuoco in the tragic attempt at the Partenopean Republic, which failed, in his judgment, not because of an exterior violence or internal maladjustment, but because of its defect of origin. This defect was found in the attempt to apply to the Kingdom of Naples a constitution that was probably not even suitable to the country in which it was formulated. At that time, Cuoco wrote to Russo: I do not place my hopes in those constitutions that force has dictated. That this force would be of a conqueror, who has at his disposition one hundred thousand bayonets, or of an assembly of philosophers who with the aid of a favorable foresight snatched from the people the consent that after all the people don’t understand, it does not really matter. In the first case, violence is done to the will; in the second violence is done to the intellect. I believe that the constitutions that endure are those that the people made for themselves (Io non ispero molto da quelle costituzioni che la forza ha dettate. Che questa forza sia quella di un conquistatore, il quale dispone di centomila baionette, o di

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY un’assemblea di filosofi, i quali con l’aiuto di una favorevole prevenzione strappano al popolo un consenso che non intende, importa poco; nel primo caso si fa violenza alla volontà, nel secondo all’intelletto. Le costituzioni durevoli sono quelle che il popolo si forma da sé).

Twenty-Nine THE IDEOLOGISTS [The first Ideologists or Idéologues were the members of the group that met at the salon of Mme. Helvétius. The group included De Stutt de Tracy, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, and Constantin François de Volney, who promoted a reductive but utilitarian version of Condillac’s theories during the French Directory, 1795–1799, as a model for educational reform in the aftermath of the French Revolution.] 1. Francesco Soave and His Life. Criticism of G. Compagnoni, I. Kant, and J. Locke Less compassionate than Alessandro Manzoni, who remembered the paternal manners of Francesco Soave, was Antonio Rosmini. In Nuovo Saggio, Rosmini expressed this bitter condemnation: In the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom, the Rev. Father Soave, with the best of intentions has done serious damage by spreading everywhere Condillac’s doctrines and reducing philosophy to a pitiful thing, which, while it allures the populace with its apparent facility, engendered the presumption and the vain belief of being philosophers in those who cannot be and would never be philosophers, and would give way to the contempt for those grand questions that surpass their loquacious and sententious mediocrity (Nel Regno Lombardo-Veneto, il padre Soave, colle piú pure intenzioni, ha fatto un grave danno diffondendo per tutto il condillacchismo, e riducendo la filosofia a una tenuità compassionevole, che, mentre adesca il volgo coll’apparente facilità, ingenera la presunzione e la vana credenza di esser filosofi in quelli che nol possono esser né saranno giammai, e fa nascere il disprezzo per le grandi questioni superiori alla loro mediocrità loquace e sentenziosa). Referring to Soave, the Kantian Alfonso Testa spoke of “intellectual paucity” deprived of “any philosophical erudition.” Even the Italian Ideologists— Melchiorre Gioia called Soave’s writings “intellectual abortion”—accused Soave of speculative timidity, reproaching him of avoiding the consequences

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of the empiricist position, and of hesitating in front of the phenomenal idealism at which Destutt de Tracy arrived. Against Destutt, Soave had raised doubts in 1804 in Memoria sopra il progetto di Elementi di Ideologia del conte Destutt di Tracy (A comment on the project of the elements of Ideology of Count Destutt de Tracy), to which Giuseppe Compagnoni replied in 1817 with the publication of the Italian version of the Elements de Idéologie. The criticism of Compagnoni, with its ironic scorn, greatly surpassed that of Rosmini. Soave had feared that the Ideology could end as materialism, and had also criticized Destutt because, whenever he discussed the operations of the spirit, he never referred to the soul, and showed only the acceptance of a plurality of spiritual entities. It was to this point that Compagnoni was reacting with the observation that the “ideologist” in order to remain coherent with its assumption and method could only consider those spiritual operations that were susceptible to an analysis, leaving to the “psychologist” the task of discussing the nature of the soul. Compagnoni also added that the objections raised by Soave were merely motivated by the preoccupation of safeguarding in the best possible way “the systems which he worked all his life to establish, putting together as much as he could the doctrines of Locke and Condillac with a mixture of others, of which our schools have not yet been capable of purifying themselves” (Elementi di Ideologia, Introduction, p. xxix). Finally, Compagnoni was regretting that Father Soave, already at an advanced age, criticized instead of summarized, as he used to do when he was younger, the work in question. This was a poisonous attack against a man who had achieved the greatest celebrity in Italy for his school manuals (Compendio della storia della filosofia, in Milan in 1791 and 1794; Istituzioni di logica; Metafisica ed Ethica), and for having translated and explained with notes and appendixes the compendium that John Wynne had drafted of the Lockean essay (Milan, 1775), including the version of the Guida dell’intelletto. Born in Lugano in 1743, Francesco Soave frequented the schools of the Congregation of Regular Clerics created in 1528 at Somasca (Bergamo) by St. Girolamo Emiliani for the assistance to orphans. After the completion of his studies, he joined the same congregation of his teachers. Then he was sent to Parma, and Guilleaume-Léon Du Tillot destined him to the teaching of poetic eloquence at the university, and there, where the doctrines of Condillac were dominating, he gave himself to philosophy. Condillac’s motives are found in Intorno all’istituzione naturale d’una società e d’una lingua, e all’influenza dell’una e dell’altra sulle umane cognizioni (On the natural formation of a society and of one language, and their influence on human cognitions), which Soave presented to an announcement of competition from the Academy of Berlin, in which, instead, the winner was Johann Gottfried von Herder. When his Chair was suppressed at the University of Pavia, he moved to Milan to teach philosophy and morality at the Brera Academy, where afterward he obtained the Chair of logic and metaphysics. His new interests covered also the pedagogical ones, and these interests induced him to write works for children.

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Meanwhile, by mandate of the Austrian Government, he drafted against the ideas of the French Revolution the Vera idea della Rivoluzione di Francia (True meaning of the French revolution). The work saw its light in 1795 in Milan, under the pseudonym of Glice Ceresiano (a Latin transcription of Soave da Lugano). With the new French domination, Soave went to teach at Modena, where he printed in 1803 a criticism of Kant’s system, La filosofia di Kant esposta ed esaminata (Exposition and examination of the philosophy of Kant), then returned to Pavia were he died in 1806. Of Kant, Soave rejected totally the apriorism, placing himself manifestly within the empiricist position, opposing Experimentalism to Transcendentalism. But of Kant he knew only the exposition of Charles Villers and had seen the Latin translation of Friedrich Gottlieb Born published between 1796 and 1798, a work used also by Tamburini in Pavia. Soave found the Kantian exposition “obscure, enigmatic, and sibylline,” and wondered how anyone could make the effort of reading Kant’s works in full. If sometimes through the words of Soave we can see some reasonable observations, his critique is generally based on incomprehension, or is reduced to mere denials. In no way could they understand each other: the timid follower of empiricism, who stepped back in the face of its consequences, and the asserting author of the autonomy of reason. In his lessons on morality of 1797 in Pavia, Pietro Tamburini, with a completely different tone, had observed, “The transcendental philosophy has added the theories of pure reason to the principles of sensibility, thus humankind has been recalled from the sensible and pure empiricism to notions that are loftier and worthier” (La filosofia transcendentale aggiunge ai principî della sensibilità le teorie della ragione pura, e cosí dal sensibile e puro empirismo che era il sistema favorito fin qui, richiama l’uomo a nozioni pure e piú degne di lui). Soave preferred Locke to Condillac, because Locke was more moderate and cautious. It is with Locke that he intended to proceed analytically because The analytic method first places human beings in the various circumstances in which they must form for themselves the ideas of the things; then makes human beings to assign names to things guiding them gradually from particular truths that are simple to general ones that are more composite. In this way, human beings see the same things almost in their birth and successively growing under their eyes (Il metodo analitico, collocando prima l’Uomo nelle varie circostanze, in cui debba formarsi l’idee delle cose, e poi fissandovi i nomi, guidandolo gradatamente dalle verità particolari che sono piú semplici, alle generali che son piú composte, fa ch’egli vegga le cose medesime nascere per cosí dire e crescere successivamente sotto agli occhi suoi). If there was the need for a didactic artifice, then the synthetic method could be used. Soave found a complete analysis of the human spirit in Locke, to which,

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not always successfully, he added Condillac and Charles Bonnet. But “very little need existed of adding to the clearest and most minute analysis that Locke had already given of the most complicated notions.” As already mentioned, the only problem was that in the Lockean work “some propositions are found, which the Catholic Religion cannot tolerate.” Soave’s philosophy was an integration of Locke, a correction of Locke, when the religious instance required it. In reality, Soave limited himself to taking advantage of those motives in Locke that responded to the needs of his moderate and timid empiricism. If he proclaimed with Locke the inscrutability of substances, “The philosophers who wanted to penetrate the abyss of interior essences ended by losing themselves” (I filosofi che hanno voluto penetrare nell’abisso delle intime essenze, non hanno fatto che smarrirsi), in spite of that he reaffirmed their existence as the unknown substratum of qualities and of all modifications in general. With Locke, he reaffirmed the preeminence of reflection as the root of all interior life, feeling the need to deepen its characteristics and functioning. He observed that reflection it is not only receptivity of internal phenomena, a pure interior sense, but also “a deliberate application of the attention” (un’applicazione deliberata dell’attenzione). Reflection, in its proper sense, as an active and voluntary retiring of the spirit into itself, is only the deliberate application of the attention: By reflection I mean generally the application, conscious and deliberate, of attention to a thing whatever it may be. Following this definition, the simple passage of attention from one impression to another— when it is not a conscious and deliberate passage, but it is born mechanically from the successive power of the impressions that would capture the attention—would not be called “reflection,” or could only be called “passive reflection” (Io intendo generalmente per riflessione l’applicazione avvertita e deliberata dell’attenzione ad una cosa qualunque sia. Secondo questa definizione il semplice passaggio dell’attenzione da una impressione a un’altra quando non sia avvertito e deliberato, ma nasca meccanicamente dalla forza successiva delle impressioni, che l’attenzione rapiscano, non potrà chiamarsi riflessione, o non potrà chiamarsi al piú che una riflessione passiva). Soave insisted on reflection as activity and the source of all the activities of synthesis and organization, underlining the value of reflective conscience as the foundation of the certainty of our own existence and of our own personal identity. Here, too, as it happened for what concerned the reality of bodies and substances in general, Soave accentuated his appeal to mystery. How conscience exercises its own faculties, how it senses, perceives, occupies, contemplates, becomes aware, reflects; in what manner the motion of the fibers of the brain, from which

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sensation and perception take their origin, is communicated to conscience; how this same motion of the exterior organs is transferred to the brain; how is motion generated in the exterior organs, and what intrinsically are the bodies that excites motion; what intrinsically is the soul itself; these are all mysteries that to us remain impenetrable (Come senta, come percepisca, come attenda, come contempli, come sovvengasi, come rifletta, in qual modo sia ad essa comunicato il movimento delle fibre del cervello, da cui la sensazione, e la percezione hanno l’origine; come questo moto medesimo degli organi esteriori infino al cervello si trasferisca; come venga eccitato negli stessi organi esteriori, che cosa siano intrinsicamente i corpi, che l’eccitano, che cosa intrinsicamente sia l’anima stessa, son tutti misteri per noi impene-trabili). This confession does not reflect the problematic nature of the inquiry, but the acknowledgment of one’s impotence of clearly seeing the formulation of the problems that one has accepted but not posited. 2. Melchiorre Gioia In 1804, in his Memoria sopra il progetto di Elementi di Ideologia del conte Destutt di Tracy, Soave tried to focus on the function of the active reflection, and Melchiorre Gioia also would, when considering the French Ideológues, center his attention on this activity of the intellect in relation to the data of the senses. The truer interest of Gioia’s work exists in the importance given to inquiries concerning what Romagnosi called “civil philosophy,” not in profound innovations in the field of “metaphysical” research. In his praise of Gioia, Romagnosi remarked, Toward the end of the last century, a strong impulse was generated in favor of the studies concerning the social arts, with the effect that hypothetical speculations and literary achievements were considered less worthy. The most learned part of Europe was asking from all freethinkers cognitions supported by facts and suitable to the needs of a more mature civilization (Sul finire del secolo scorso, si destò un forte impulso verso gli studi relativi all’arte sociale; e però le ipotetiche speculazioni e le pompe letterarie scemarono di pregio. La parte piú colta d’Europa domandava ai pensatori cognizioni avvalorate dai fatti e adatte ai bisogni della cresciuta civiltà). For Romagnosi, the merit of Gioia is found in his having joined the orientation of Genovesi, Verri, Beccaria, and again of Vico, Jannelli, and Stellini. To the above, Romagnosi added: Gioia has strongly felt that impulse, and consecrated all his efforts to

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY the actual necessities of his own time. Economics, statistics, and the personal manners of a life in common attracted all his attention. All these disciplines crowned thereafter with the considerations on Merit and Recompense formed a whole with civil philosophy. These disciplines begin from the laws of understanding, willing, and acting of the individuals in general, and passing through the body of society and of the people, come ultimately back to the individuals in particular (Il Gioia sentí questo impulso, e consacrò tutte le sue fatiche alle esigenze presenti del tempo. L’economia, la statistica e le maniere personali della convivenza richiamarono tutta la sua attenzione e tutti questi rami, coronati poi dai pensieri sul Merito e le Ricompense formano un sol tutto con la civile filosofia. Essi partendo dalle leggi d’intendere, volere e operare dell’individuo in generale, e passando pel corpo della società e delle genti, ritornano di nuovo agli individui particolari).

This philosophy is a worldly science, a study of human beings in society. To remove the ideological premises of this philosophy and not to focus on what was their center of gravity, the study of human activities within the human world, would certainly mean to fall into error. In Gioia, and even more in Romagnosi, the true innovation in respect to the Ideologists of France is precisely this primacy of the human world, the reason why the analysis of the faculties is only an introduction to the study of that science that Vico had discovered. Gioia was born in Piacenza in 1767, where he studied at the Alberoni College under the supervision of “wise teachers … well-learned … and free from any restriction,” among whom Giovanni Antonio Comi, “who added to a wonderful suavity of character a profound knowledge drawn from the healthier sources of modern inductive philosophy.” From his first studies, Gioia already demonstrated a great interest for mathematics, learning thereafter to combine always the empirical data with mathematical systematism. His most profound urge was always that of observing through the uniformity of the data the constant rhythm of a geometric norm, from which came both his passion for statistics and his sympathy for the moral arithmetic of Jeremy Bentham, “Laws, rights, duties, contracts, crimes, virtues, they are nothing but additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions of pleasures and pains, and the civil and penal legislation is the arithmetic of sensibility” (Leggi, diritti, doveri, contratti, delitti, virtú non sono che addizioni, sottrazioni, moltipliche, divisioni di piaceri e di dolori, e la legislazione civile e penale non è che l’aritmetica della sensibilità). This was part of the preface to the Teoria del divorzio that would be a great source of scandal and, personally for Gioia, the origin of many troubles. When, after his misadventures and jailing in 1821, he quarreled with his admirer, the beautiful, learned, passionate, and bizarre Bianca Milesi, he did not hesitate to calculate in numbers the rapport of affections and cares between those he had given and those he received (Lettera alla Signora Bianca Milesi,

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Ginevra, 7 March 1822). Having left the Collegio Alberoni as a priest, he soon had the occasion of manifesting his admiration for revolutionary ideas when, answering to the query proposed in 1796 by the General Administration of Lombardy—which one of the free governments would be more convenient to the happiness of Italy—he envisioned a unitary republic. In consequence of this, Mazzini praised Gioia as having been his unique precursor in that sense, even though with some inexactness. Gioia worked as a journalist in Milan under the different successive governments after the Napoleonic invasion and performed as a proud and intransigent polemist, who found himself quite often in difficulties and very serious problems. “The Italian Republic” that he approved gave him free movement of actions. Having abandoned the priestly habit, and appointed historiographer of the Republic in 1801, he wrote an exposition in 1803 of his consent to the work of Melzi d’Eril, Ragionamento sui destini della Repubblica Italiana (Ratiocination on the destinies of the Italian Republic). With enthusiasm, he had embraced Bentham’s Utilitarianism that, as we explained, suited his need of coordinating the data in mathematical formulas. Writing various opuscules concerning religious questions, he asserted the necessity of considering religion exclusively from the point of the utilitarian view, leaving out the consideration on its truth and examining only its social usefulness. In 1802 in Milan, Nuovo Galateo, one of his most celebrated works, was published; thereafter, re-edited and reprinted in 1820, 1822, and 1827, with a wide diffusion. His intention in this work was that of having the opportunity of defining the norms of living in society, outlining the characteristics of civil “politeness” that consists in the art of molding the person and its actions, the sentiments and the discourse in the manner of making others happy about us and about themselves, in the manner of acquiring the esteem and the affection of others within the limit of the just and the honest, in a social reasonableness…. Politeness is not a ritual of conventions…. Its precepts are not withdrawn from the variable capriciousness of usage and fashion, but from the sentiments of the human heart, which are proper to all times and to all places (Nell’arte di modellare la persona e le azioni, i sentimenti e il discorso in modo da rendere gli altri contenti di noi e di loro stessi, ossia acquistarsi l’altrui stima e affezione entro i limiti del giusto e dell’onesto, cioè la ragion sociale…. La pulitezza non è dunque un cerimoniale di convenzione…. I suoi precetti non si attingono da’ capricci variabili dell’uso e della moda, ma da’ sentimenti del cuore umano, i quali a tutti i tempi e a tutti i luoghi appartengono). The premises of a rigid Empiricism were resolving morality in a description of human behavior in society; the norms of courtesy substituted duties and imperatives. Soave, in his Istituzioni di etica, was opposed to Utilitarianism by observing against Helvétius that “Usefulness by itself, even when advanta-

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geous to other, is not sufficient to make our actions upright, unless they in themselves are already convenient and worthy of approbation” (la sola utilità, che ad altri venirne possa, non basta a render probe le nostre azioni, qualor convenevoli e degne di approvazione non siano in sé medesime). Soave was rescuing the duty and the supremacy of reason, even though afterward he would curiously distinguish virtue, as a good activity superior to duty, from honesty, as the pure observance of duty itself. Gioia, though continuing to speak about virtue, insisted in a special way on social conduct. In the Preface to the fourth edition of Nuovo Galateo he expressed the following affirmation that was also pointed out by Romagnosi: Virtues win for their greatness and, let us say, for their weight, against politeness. But politeness wins against virtues for the frequency of its acts. It is not possible to be generous to all and always, but it is possible to be polite to all and always. The occasion of exercising gentle manners is renewed many times a day, so that frequency makes up for the lack of importance. In short, politeness is the flower of morality, the grace that beautifies it, and the color that makes it amiable and agreeable (Le virtú vincono in grandezza, e, per cosí dire, in peso la pulitezza; ma questa vince quelle nella frequenza dei suoi atti. Non è possible né a tutti, né sempre d’essere generosi; ma è possible a tutti e sempre d’essere puliti. L’occasione d’eccitare modi gentili si rinnova parecchie volte alla giornata, sicché la frequenza all’importanza supplisce. Insomma la pulitezza è il fiore della morale, la grazia che l’abbellisce, il colore che amabile la rende ed amena). To this regard, Romagnosi instituted a comparison between Giovanni Della Casa and Gioia in order to show the superiority of Gioia, because in the writer of the sixteenth century grace was kalón (the beautiful) indistinguishable from agathón (the good), meanwhile in Gioia politeness, more than the flower of virtue, was the surrogate of the generosity that cannot be shown always to all. Gioia did not exclude the possibility of a disinterested coefficient in those human actions that are positively appreciated, when in Trattato del merito e delle recompense (Treatise on merit and recompense), of 1818 and 1819, the work which he liked the most, admitted as elements of the meritorious action the overcome difficulty, the produced usefulness, the disinterested goal, and the social convenience. He remained faithful to an arithmetic morality, lamenting that morality could not allow measurements as precise as those in physics. And he disdained like a metaphysical muddle the Essai sur le mérite et la vertu (Essay on merit and virtue) that he attributed to Diderot and that, in reality, Diderot had taken from the Count of Shaftesbury, whose moral Intuitionism was absolutely repugnant to Gioia, so much imbued as he was with Bentham’s Utilitarianism. As we have seen, Gioia especially loved statistics and economics, to which he applied himself by official appointment of the government from

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1806 to 1808, compiling Tavole statistiche (Tables of statistics) and Logica statistica, and then again after 1811, when he could return to Milan, from which he had been forced to move in consequence of a polemic caused by the publication of the Tavole statistiche. The Filosofia della statistica, published in Milan in 1826, was the theoretical conclusion of the interest and activity that had been predominant in Gioia’s life. His orientation toward a worldly inquiry brought him to prefer economic researches, to which the Bentham reduction of every activity under the category of the useful attracted him. The economistic interpretation of human activity, expressing in terms of quantity the differences of the actions themselves, encouraged an arithmetic systematizing, a calculus of actions. The premises themselves of his ideology justified his tendency to calculate. Having reduced the inquiry on the human spirit to a pure descriptivism, the unique possibility of giving a basis to laws could be found in the verified repetition of facts. From these tendencies and orientation, Gioia’s need of collecting and classifying instances, listing actions, determining numbers and quantitative relations (ratios), and summarizing in the practical field the various advantages, originated. In this way, statistics confirmed the economic theories, while, at its own turn, economics helped in the interpretation of the result of the statistical inquiry. The exact classification of incidences according to specific types opens the way to seizing, not only the different coefficients of the phenomena, but the constants that are verified in the phenomena, and thus offers the possibility of arriving at some laws. In Filosofia della Statistica, the various social phenomena are brought under some essential motives: territory and population, production, industry, commerce, and so on. In the Trattato del merito e delle ricompense, a panoramic view is given of what, in various times and among various peoples, has been a motive of appreciation. These politico-social interests are at the animating root of the work of Gioia, as well as of that of Romagnosi, and fed without doubt his tendency to be an active participant in the serious vicissitudes that agitated Italy. He was arrested in 1820 for the proceedings against Pellico and Maroncelli, and was freed finally in July 1821, but remained under suspicion of having being a member of the Carboneria, under which pretext he was thereafter always under surveillance of police until his death on 2 January 1829. Like Romagnosi, he too composed his ideological works toward the end of his life: Elementi di filosofia ad uso delle scuole (Milan, 1818), Ideologia (Milan, 1822), in which he professed the most rigid descriptive method. In the preface to Ideologia, he affirmed: The reader will become aware that I don’t say one word concerning the nature of the soul, and the reason is that I frankly confess of not knowing it. I limit myself to the observation of the effects that derive from its operations. I do like the naturalists who limit themselves to observing the phenomena of the magnet without telling what it is (Il lettore

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY s’accorgerà ch’io non dico una sola parola sulla natura dell’anima, giacché protesto francamente di non conoscerla: mi limito ad osservare gli effetti che dalla sua azione derivano, come i naturalisti si limitano ad osservare i fenomeni della calamita senza decidere cosa ella sia).

Thereafter, he delineated these psychic facts, these sensations, in two groups: those excited by the senses and real, and those recalled and imaginary (sentiments and ideas). No matter how much he tried to keep himself within a rigid Sensism, he had to recognize that “the faculty of combining the sensations was different from the faculty of sensing” (la facoltà di combinare le sensazioni è diversa da quella del sentire). To Rosmini this appeared as incoherent, but instead, as it has been justly observed, it was “the work preparatory to overcoming pure Empiricism.” Gioia intended to move in a purely worldly sphere, while Rosmini was looking at something else. Henceforth, it is no wonder that Rosmini could find nothing relevant in the work of his adversary, save a disappointing superficiality. 3. Gian Domenico Romagnosi Gian Domenico Romagnosi was born in Salsomaggiore on 11 December 1761. He was a student at the Alberoni College, which he joined in 1775, and where he remained until 1781, preserving always a profound and affectionate remembrance. In 1821, he dedicated to the “Signori della Missione Direttori del Collegio Alberoni,” the Trust Board of the College, the book Dell’insegnamento primitivo delle matematiche “in order to manifest to both the public and you the gratitude that I always felt, and still feel most vividly in my advanced age, for the instruction and the education received in this College.” He maintained his scientific interests, but not in separation from a philosophical preparation that induced him to summarize, at the age of eighteen, Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding, and to feel most fortunate for having obtained from a peer the Essai analytique sur le facultés de l’âme (An analytic essay on the faculties of the soul), of which later he would say, “During my adolescence this was the one book that contributed more than any other to form my mind and has served as the true gymnastics of my understanding.” Defendente Sacchi narrates that, when near to his death, Romagnosi wanted to sign his spiritual testament, by marvelous chance the book taken to support his hand was the volume of Bonnet, “the work that opened his intellect, seemed to have been destined to be useful to him up to the writing of his last line.” Of Bonnet and his contemporaries, Romagnosi must have heard during the lessons of the one who seemed to have been the dearest of all his teachers, Comi of Pavia, professor of metaphysics, the nature of whose teaching we know from the large amount of notes collected in two volumes by one of his students during the biennium 1779–1780. This is not the course Romagnosi

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audited, but it can still give us a precious indication of an initiation that has remained so profoundly impressed in the mind of the youth. Comi was following in the structure of his teaching the Leibniz-Wolff system, widely discussing Condillac’s psychology, but without giving to it the preeminent place it was custom to attribute to it in the cultural environment of the Duchy where he lived as the honored guest. Beside Condillac, Comi used to quote and comment on Bonnet, La Mettrie, Voltaire, and D’Holbach, fiercely fighting the last three individuals. Above anything else, the professor exalted the libertas philosophandi, “that comes not from divine authority, but from that of humankind … according to the agreement of humankind … even in things less true”; the right of all to express themselves “on all philosophical matters according to their own opinion.” Though he was against Kantism, Romagnosi was recognized as having encountered the Kantian problematics in his own personal way, beginning from his first introduction to philosophy when he proposed to himself the same formulations of doctrines as Kant: on one hand, the Leibniz-wolffische Philosophie that left its traces in the need of a constructed systematism; on the other hand, the critical elaboration of the disciples of Locke. When Giuseppe Ferrari saw in Romagnosi only “the free interpreter of Bonnet,” and when Carlo Cattaneo underlined instead in Romagnosi “the regular disciple of Wolff,” we can say that both were at least partially in the truth, because in the mind of the philosopher both elements came to fuse themselves together. Romagnosi, however, did not stop there and, as Alfonso Testa objected to Ferrari, “having proclaimed the absolute rational intimacies, he abandoned even Bonnet and Condillac” (avendo proclamato le intimità razionali assolute, si é licenziato da Bonnet e da Condillac). Romagnosi lived in Piacenza for various years, before and after his university degree of 1786; they were years very nurturing in his formation. It was at Piacenza that he conceived Genesi del diritto penale, already completed by 1789, published in Pavia in 1791, and enlarged with the fifth and sixth part in the third edition of 1824, in Milan. The question has been raised whether the idea of the work derived from the discussions at the Piacenza Literary Society, of which he was a member and where he spoke many times between 1789 and 1790. Even if some cues or hints came to him from conversations with the lawyer Gaetano Godi, later on professor at the University of Parma and his colleague, the concepts that Romagnosi exposed in the book remain profoundly original. He was asking himself—what is the origin of the right of punishing? He was not asking for the historical origin, or the moral, but for the natural-metaphysical one. In order to find the origin of this one, it is necessary to reconsider the complex of the primitive attributes of humankind, to represent them in their hypothetical simplicity, to see which relations derive from them, to follow the results of these relations, the transformation of the results, up to the point in which we would be brought back by the process of ideas into the womb of soci-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ety and government (È d’uopo riportarsi al complesso de’ primitivi attributi morali dell’uomo, raffigurarli nella loro semplicità benché ipotetica, vedere quali relazioni ne nascono, seguire i risultati di queste relazioni, le trasformazioni di questi risultati; sino al punto in cui saremo risospinti dall’andamento delle idee in seno della Società ….)

It would be within society that he would find the right of punishing, not in the individual. It is society alone that can inflict on someone “as much punishment as necessary in order to preserve the well-being of the members of society,” preventing with menaces the criminal incentive. Punishment is in function of the tutelage or indirect defense of the social body. Punishment must be constituted as the counter-action capable of opposing the inclination toward crime that results from “the simultaneous concurrence of three elements, the desire of the fruit of the crime, the hope of committing it, and the illusion of avoiding the punishment” (par. 1432). Keeping in mind the inclination and the way of operation of the criminal action, “the essence of the penal magistracy consists uniquely in a moral counter-incentive and nothing more” (l’essenza del magistero penale consiste unicamente in una controspinta morale e nulla piú, in par. 1471). The theory of counter-incentive or controspinta was only mentioned in the first edition of Genesi del diritto penale, but it was amply explained in the two new parts added to the third edition of 1824. Romagnosi was already determining some of the fundamental lines of his thought and was overcoming what was fictitious in the construction derived from the Lockean school. Baldassare Poli, in his review of the third edition of Genesi del diritto penale (in Biblioteca Italiana, pp. 107–108), asked: How much is the system of Romagnosi different from the principles of the systems of Locke, Filangieri, Beccaria, and their followers? They have assumed that penal right is a right to individual defense, a right that pertains to every human being even considered in the state of nature. They have assumed that this right with the social pact and with the conventions has been transferred to the highest authority. In this way, first, they have confused and strangely altered the true character and essence of the right of defense and the penal law. The right of defense is born at the moment of the offense and is exercised by the offended person. The penal law, on the contrary, is the product of an offense that went through the necessary rapports that it possesses with the future and pertains to a moral person distinct and diverse from that of the offended. Second, they have imagined that the right of punishing is proper in an hypothetical state and contrary to true human nature, while, on the contrary, the right of punishing cannot exist in any other way than in the state of society as the only means for its preservation (Quanto il sistema di Romagnosi non differisce dai principi del Locke, del Filangieri, del Beccaria e dei loro seguaci? Eglino supposero che

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il diritto penale sia il diritto di difesa individuale, appartenente a ciaschedun uomo nello stato anche di natura, e che col patto sociale e colle convenzioni degli uomini venisse ceduto alla podestà suprema; onde per siffatta guisa prima di tutto confusero ed alterarono stranamente la vera indole ed essenza del diritto di difesa e del diritto penale, mentre quello non nasce che al momento dell’offesa, ed è esercitato dal solo offeso, laddove questo è il prodotto di un’offesa passata pei necessary rapporti che ha col futuro e compete ad una persona morale distinta e diversa da quella dell’offeso; in secondo luogo immaginarono il diritto di punire proprio di uno stato ipotetico e contrario alla vera natura dell’uomo, quando egli non può sussistere se non nello stato di società qual unico mezzo di conservarla). The human being, for Romagnosi, is always a social being by nature because society, as he says, is “the status for which nature has formed human beings,” which, after all, “is really the same in the state of nature and in that of society, so that passing from one to the other he changes only rapports and relationships” ([l’uomo] è realmente lo stesso nello stato di natura e di società, sicché passando da quello a questo non cangia che di rapporti e relazioni). In 1791, Romagnosi, following the ancient custom of the communes, was appointed “podestà” (governor or chief magistrate of a town) of Trent for one year, as the statutes established. After the year, the Bishop-Prince made him member of the ancient Council that administered the city. During the ten years he was in Trent—they were the tempestuous years of the Revolution and of the ascension of Bonaparte—Romagnosi published, beside a discourse Sull’amore delle donne (On the love of women), in which he criticized a sentence of Helvétius, two opuscules, more political than philosophical: Cosa è uguaglianza (Trent, 1792), Cosa è libertà (Trent, 1793). Under the pressure of the new ideas, Romagnosi wanted to expose plainly to all how behind those two words-of-combat there was no subversive or negative content, but that, on the contrary, equality is not a right, but only the measure or the safeguard of rights, that is, existence of the same quantity of rights in all human beings, and that the true social liberty consists in the faculty of exercising without obstacles all those acts that can make us happy without unjust injury to others (Ma che al contrario, l’eguaglianza non è un diritto, ma solo la misura o la salvaguardia dei diritti, ossia l’esistenza della stessa quantità di diritti in tutti gli uomini, e la vera sociale libertà consiste nella facoltà di esercitare senza ostacolo tutti quegli atti che possono farci felici senza l’altrui ingiusto nocumento). The composition of these two writings was criticized as the expression of a Jacobin mentality, and he was arrested in 1799 with the accusation of high treason and held in prison for fifteen months. A few months later, Emperor

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Francis II signed Romagnosi’s full absolution. In Trent, for a competition proclaimed in 1795 by the Academy of Mantua, Romagnosi rapidly drafted Ricerche sulla validità dei giudicii del pubblico a discernere il vero dal falso (Researches on the ability of public judges to discern truth from deceit), a work published by Carlo Cattaneo in Milan one year after Romagnosi died. In this work, Romagnosi considered for the first time those psychological, gnoseological, and logical problems that would become the object of his later interests, but that already could clearly manifest his tendencies and uncertainties. Toward the end of December 1802, on his own petition, Romagnosi was named professor of natural and public law in Parma by the general administrator Moreau de Saint-Méry, but he was not pleased with the two courses of 1803 and 1804 because of the desertion of the students, and perhaps for the hostility and the gossips of colleagues. He wrote to Saint-Méry: “It is better to occupy oneself in writing and publishing than to show oneself at school and then come back home with shame” (Fia miglior partito occuparsi a comporre, ed a stampare, che ad andare a mostrarsi alla scuola, e poi tornare indietro con vergogna). In 1805 in Parma appeared the Introduzione al diritto pubblico universale, whose directive lines he will summarize later, at the occasion of the second edition of the work, in five letters to his friend Giovanni Valeri, letters that were published in Antologia. The Introduzione constitutes the fundamental piece that shows the concept that Romagnosi had of the “civil philosophy” understood as the “science of Jurisprudence and Politics.” He wrote: Being aware of the necessity of deriving every thing from clear and demonstrated principles, and facing the contemporary discussion concerning the first elements of science, I felt obliged to linger for a long time on these principles and even on the analysis of the first ideas. Thus, I occupied myself first with the chemistry, let us say, moral and political, before planning the structure of the whole body. A great portion of the first volume is dedicated to that special kind of chemistry and in providing a dictionary of terms. In the second volume, I began with laying down the bases of the civil philosophy (Comprendendo la necessità di dedur tutto da chiare e dimostrate origini, a fronte delle dispute che si agitano ancora sui primi elementi della scienza, io ho dovuto lungamente trattenermi su queste origini, e perfino nell’analisi delle prime idee, ed occuparmi della chimica, dirò cosí, morale e politica, prima di passare ad architettarne il corpo. Gran parte del primo volume fu impiegata in questa specie di chimica, e nell’esibirne il dizionario. Nel secondo poi ho incominciato a porre le basi della civile filosofia). Having posited as basic concept the original and essential tendency of humankind toward peace, equity, and security, the fundamental mean to obtain such goals appeared to Romagnosi to be incivilimento (the process of civiliza-

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tion, or acculturation) or, in clearer words, economic, moral, and political perfect growth of nations. This perfectioning, at its own turn, can be achieved through governments that warrant “a great tutelage together with a great education” (una grande tutela accoppiata ad una grande educazione). The process was thus delineated, in which “a social value” was attributed and extended “over the greater number possible of the individual components of a nation; so that thieves and slaves were reduced to the possible minimum” (un valore sociale sopra il maggior numero possible d’individui componenti una nazione; talché i ladri e gli schiavi sono ridotti al minimo possible). On the other hand, “because of an admirable economy of nature, it happens that in the proportion that the means of well-being and the stimuli to greed increase, so at the same time also the ties that keep men within the limits of order are reinforced” (per una mirabile economia della natura a proporzione che crescono i mezzi del benessere e gli stimuli alle cupidigie, crescono a pari passo anche i vincoli che trattengono gli uomini entro i confini dell’ordine). At last, “in this successive transfusion of the individual unity into the social one” (in questa successiva trasfusione dell’unità individuale nella sociale) an always more solid senso pubblico (public uniform sentiment) will be born and naturally reinforced. All this would happen as a natural operation through which the supreme law of the life of a State will finally manifest itself: This supreme and unique law is the perpetual tendency of all the parts of a State toward the equilibrium of the unity and of the forces through the conflict of interests and powers. This conflict is caused by the action of the stimulations (stimuli), moderated by the inertia (idleness), perpetuated and guided by the unceasing urgencies of nature, modified by the different condition (status), retrograde or progressive or stationary of the single individuals and the entire population, without ever moving away from a continuous motion (Questa legge massima ed unica si è la tendenza perpetua di tutte le parti di uno Stato allo equilibrio dell’unità e delle forze mediante il conflitto degli interessi e dei poteri; conflitto eccitato dall’azione degli stimuli, rattemperato dalla inerzia, perpetuato e predominato dalle incessanti urgenze della natura, modificato dallo stato diverso retrogrado, progressivo o stazionario sí dei particolari che delle popolazioni, senza discostarsi mai dalla continuità). As we can see, the central points of the philosophy of civilization (incivilimento, the growth of civilization) were thereby established. The principles of a “civil philosophy” were established in the need of a body of laws proper to morality, politics, and justice. Romagnosi affirmed: Morality, politics, and jurisprudence must rest on laws of human nature that are certain and solid, in the same way that agriculture and me-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY chanics rest on the laws of physical nature. Foolish or false is the one who pretends to substitute his fantasies to the commanding facts of providence. It is time by now, to abandon the fairy-tales of an impatient and superficial philosophy, or of a blind and arrogant mysticism (La Morale, la Politica, ed il Diritto, debbono riposare su leggi certe e solide della natura umana, come l’agricoltura e la meccanica riposano sulle leggi della natura fisica. Folle od impostore è colui che pretende di sostituire le sue fantasie ai fatti imperiosi della Provvidenza. Temp’è ormai di abbandonare le favole o di una impaziente e superficiale filosofia, o di un cieco ed arrogante misticismo).

At this time, the Napoleonic government opened a career of wide activities for Romagnosi. He was invited in 1806 to Milan by Minister Giuseppe Luosi to attend to the preparation of penal codes and penal procedures. He was thereafter in 1807 named professor of Civil Jurisprudence in Pavia, and finally in 1809 to the Chair of High Legislation in the R.R. Special Schools (of perfection). As supreme inspector of all the schools of jurisprudence, director of the Giornale di Giurisprudenza Universale, Romagnosi was involved in an intense activity until the crisis of the Napoleonic government, when he had to suffer some police harassment. It was first a “note” in the “Giornale,” then, after the Austrian take-over, a conspiracy of 1814, which subjected the philosopher to perquisitions, searches, and interrogations. These became more impelling after the publication in 1815 of the first volume of Della costituzione di una monarchia nazionale rappresentativa (On the constitution of a representative national monarchy). He was then deprived of the teaching chair, began to write for the Conciliatore, was implicated in the process Pellico-Maroncelli, was arrested, and when interrogated by Antonio Salvotti, his ex-alumnus, his ex-colleague in the Freemasonry, he could luckily enough defend himself against his insidious interrogations. The requisitory of Salvotti had the effect of depriving Romagnosi of the license to teach private lessons, a thing that gathered around him disciples and continuators like Cattaneo. In jail, Romagnosi drafted Dell’insegnamento primitivo delle matematiche (Milan, 1822), a work occasioned by the Introduction à la philosophie des matematiques of Jozèf Marja Wronski (Paris, 1811). In 1820, he published Assunto primo della scienza del diritto naturale (First assumption of the science of natural law), which, according to Cesare Cantú, would be the result of the lessons he dictated from the Chair of High Legislation. This work presented the principles of an eternal right that runs through time according to the variations of nations, “of a reason necessary and immutable, but when considered in its particularities, it holds a mutable position as the vicissitudes of nature and fortune.” As it has been remarked by Alessandro Levi, “the Assunto with the Genesi and the Diritto pubblico, forms the triad of the best, or the most characteristic writing of this author from Piacenza.” The philosopher’s last years were very sad. When invited by Lord Guilford to assume a chair at the University of Corfú, he drafted Giurisprudenza

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teorica ossia Istituzioni di civile filosofia, which was published posthumously in Florence in 1839. But the Austrian government refused the concession of the passport, suppressing his last hope. He lived then as he could with the help of a generous industrialist, Luigi Azimonti, in an oppressive succession of legal consultations, reprints, editions and commentaries, writing articles for Biblioteca Italiana, for Antologia of Jean Pierre Vieusseux, for Ape Italiana, and particularly for Annali universali di statistica. Works of strict theoretical character were composed during this period, as if, having constructed by now the structure of civil philosophy, he intended also to make definite its general concepts. Between 1827 and 1829, he dealt with the problem of Kantism in Biblioteca Italiana, in the occasion of the publication of Elementi di filosofia and Lettere filosofiche of Galluppi. In 1827, dedicated to Valeri, Che cosa è la mente sana? Indovinello massimo che potrebbe valere poco o niente (What is a healthy mind? The greatest joke of little or no value), is published. Francesco Forti raised some objections to the work in Antologia (1828) and Romagnosi, in the same year, replied with Della suprema economia dell’umano sapere in relazione alla mente sana (On the supreme economy of human learning in relation to the healthy mind). In 1832, he published for the second time the work of Genovesi, Logica pei giovinetti (Logic for teenagers), together with his own Vedute fondamentali sull’arte logica (Fundamental views on the art of logics), in which, in the fourth view, he wrote amply on the theme of incivilimento. Almost repeating exactly what he said previously on incivilimento he wrote the memory Sull’indole e sui fattori dell’incivilimento con esempio del suo Risorgimento in Italia (On the nature and causes of a growing civilization with examples of its rebirth in Italy), which was published in the Annali universali di statistica in 1832. During this same period, he wrote about Vico and Jannelli, gathered some works on morality from the Aristotelian compendium of Francesco Maria Zanotti to Stellini, and drafted some original articles. Death, on 8 June 1835, stopped this feverish activity. 4. The Thought of Romagnosi The works of Romagnosi, in which he discussed systematically the traditional problems of knowledge and morality according to the traditional demands, are all part of the last period of his activity, when he was old and had already given the best of himself. He confirmed this point when he wrote to Vieusseux that only “accidental external occasions” had induced him “to publish at the end what he had elaborated in his mind in the beginnings.” He also confessed that “the historical, physical, metaphysical, and even the theological studies” appeared to him “merely tools” and “provisions” for the “philosophy of law (jurisprudence?)” that was at the center of his interests. With Vico and Vichians, though from a different point of view, he intended to investigate the human world, human history, human civilization in its growth, all of which he wanted to analyze and study in the events that regulate and reveal them, once fixed in their value. Gnoseological doctrines for him were

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merely frames, crowns or presuppositions, in which his acumen as a thinker certainly manifested its strength, but without being seriously applied, accepting openly the results obtained by others, without submitting them to a critical evaluation. Even here his attitude was not without interest, since he moved away from Bonnet, whom he had previously accepted as gospel, criticized Kant, whom he did not understand, and showed the awareness of the same exigencies that dominated Kantism. Testa realized this fact when, in Discorsi sulla filosofia della mente (p. 96), he criticized Romagnosi: After proclaiming the absolute rational intimacies, he [Romagnosi] abandoned Bonnet and Condillac. By doing this he proclaimed a different philosophy, though this fact was misinterpreted by other peoples. We wish only to add that like old lovers Romagnosi returns to his first love, and we can see in him, to use one of his own expressions, that truth bears violence. But truth conquers affections. He is a transcendentalist, therefore, though not completely of his own will (Avendo [egli] proclamato le intimità razionali assolute, si è licenziato da Bonnet e da Condillac; ché questa proclamazione non è meno che un’altra filosofia, sebbene possa non sembrare ai moltissimi. Solo aggiungeremo che, come i vecchi innamorati, Romagnosi si volge ai primi amori; e si vede in lui, per usare una sua espressione, che la verità patisce di forza. Ma il vero vince l’affetto; ed egli è trascendentalista, sebbene un po’ mal volentieri). It was probably an excessive conclusion, although not without foundation. It happened in fact to Romagnosi that, though he accepted the presuppositions of the dominating philosophy, and turned his acumen to a concrete field of inquiries in which he revealed himself master, he operated in such a manner that those presuppositions came to break apart, showing their insufficiency. He did not let his love for concreteness be dissipated by a certain arid mathematizing systematism. His object of inquiry was the concrete human experience; his actions’ goal was the human world. Like Bacon, he loved to repeat that science is power. The science he had in mind was “the natural and reasoned history of individual minds [compiled] in order to make that of the collective mind, and with the contributions of the one and the other arrive at the knowledge of the individual and social life of humanity in all its phases” (la storia naturale ragionata delle menti individuali [fatta] per compiere quella dell’uomo collectivo, e coll’una e coll’altra conoscere la vita individuale e sociale dell’umanità in tutti gli stadi suoi, in Suprema economia, vol. 2, p. 28). He confessed that this science had already been cultivated by Vico and Stellini, and affirmed that in relation to it the particular analyses have a value merely subsidiary and preparatory. Again in Suprema economia (vol. 2, pp. 29–30), he advised:

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We should remember that the philosophy of mind is nothing else than a great reasoned history of the intellectual cultural life of nations.… The abstract analysis of various functions is not yet the history of positive operations and of the total development of human thought (Ricordiamoci che la filosofia della mente altro non è che una grande storia ragionata della coltura intellettuale dei popoli…. La analisi astratta della tale o tal altra funzione, non è ancora la storia delle positive operazioni e del complessivo sviluppamento del pensiero umano). Thereafter, he added: We are in need of knowing the effective human being (the person of action), not the speculative human individual. If we wish to engage in analysis and arrive at general laws, it is only in order to know this human being of action. But this effective human being is not the one we can know through the Platonic visions, or the Peripatetic quiddities, or the Transcendental nuances … but truly through the study of the products and the laws according to which humankind lived and lives on earth. This limits our research to the human beings in society, because outside of this state, human beings are considered below the brutes (Noi abbisognamo di conoscere non l’uomo speculativo, ma l’uomo di fatto: e se vogliamo salire all’analisi e alle leggi generali, egli è appunto per conoscere questo uomo di fatto. Ma quest’uomo di fatto non si conosce né colle visioni platoniche, né colle quiddità peripatetiche, né colle sfumature trascendentali … ma bensí collo studio delle produzioni e delle leggi colle quali visse e vive sulla terra. Ciò limita lo studio all’uomo sociale, perché fuori di questo stato l’uomo è al di sotto dei bruti). His was a concrete inquiry of the concrete human being, who is such in the midst of human society: “uomo di fatto’ (a person of action), as Romagnosi said repeatingly against the critics of Empiricism, “Between the positive truth and the chimerical no reasonable middle is given. We should be inductive experimentalists, or visionary. With the first, understanding, goodness, and power are produced; with the second, darkness and discouragement” (fra il positivo vero e il chimerismo non vi è mezzo ragionevole. O convien essere sperimentali induttivi, o visionary. Col primo si producono lumi, bontà, e potenza; col second tenebre, mal essere e abbattimento). Between the extreme fogs of ultra-metaphysics and the accidentality of pure Empiricism the truth is given by the “middle axioms” of Baconian memory. Continuing in Suprema economia (vol. 2, p. 32), he stated: As long as we involve ourselves in concrete particulars without being able of achieving their total power, we are condemned to act with a casual Empiricism. Going then to the opposite extreme, if we stop at

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With the telescope we begin adjusting it to that precise point in the middle where it is possible to see perfectly. If the middle axioms (assiomi medi) are the point of arrival, the process overall is a vision of the whole (assunto) followed by an accurate analysis. In Dell’uso della dottrina della ragione (ch. 3), he stated: “Actual constant law of the human mind is to embrace first of all the totalities, then to distinguish their particularities according to the way in which attention is activated in their regard” (Legge di fatto costante della mente umana [è] di abbracciare prima di tutto le totalità, indi di distinguerne le particolarità secondoché l’attenzione viene attivata sulle medesime). In Diritto pubblico, he explained that “the general views of the assunto precede the analysis and assign the theme … the first ones present the whole field of observation” (le viste generali di assunto precedono l’analisi e ne danno il tema … le prime presentano tutto il campo dell’osservazione). The hypothetical enunciation is, thus, integrated with an analytical process that would permit the seizing of the rapports and the transforming of the intuited order in a comprehended order that is reconstructed. The profession of Empiricism was not an obstacle for Romagnosi in his acknowledgment, in addition to the passivity of the pure sensible reception, of the existence of an activity of the mind. No matter to which sector of the life of the spirit we address ourselves, we would always find the constant concurring of action and reaction, so that thereby the concrete experience would always be constituted in every case as the meeting-point of two motions, one objective and another subjective. The touch of the player and the vibrating of the strings are fused together to generate the harmony of the harp, which cannot be reduced to the one or the other of the two terms taken in isolation, “Inert passivity has no place anywhere” (La inerte passività non ha luogo in veruna parte). In Vedute fondamentali (vol. 1, sect. 2, art. 2), he declared that the conscious life is born everywhere as “the resultant from the action of two forces, from that of external vibrations and from the other of the soul” with

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the effect that both elements converge in a reciprocal modification. This is the law of causal compotency (legge della compotenza causale) according to which nature and spirit collaborate. To know is not mere receptivity, nor absolute creation. Cognition is the third moment, synthetic, in relation to the two poles ideally anterior (nature and spirit) and concurring in the concrete act of conscience. The law of causative com/potency is for Romagnosi a law universally valid that can therefore be extended to the whole life of the spirit: to psychology, in which each fact is the synthesis of soul and body; to ethics, in which we always find the concourse of natural motives (impulses) and reason; to jurisprudence, and to politics. In compotency (compotenza) a principle of order and harmony is universally found, everywhere domineering. In Mente sana (vol. 2, p. 12), the law of compotency (la legge di compotenza) manifests itself as the essential law of understanding, [which is] a transaction—between the compact significance of the received action and the distinct significance of the corresponding reaction—carried out through the strong action of a sufficient and receptive sensation, and of a selected and qualified concept. The result [of this transaction] is the production of the perception of being and of the possible ideal productivity of things (Una transazione fra il senso compatto dell’azione ricevuta e il senso distinto della reazione corrisposta, operata mediante l’azione solidale del sentire discreto e accolto, e del concepire trascelto e qualificato, in forza della quale vien prodotta la percezione dell’essere e del fare ideabile delle cose). Thus, we see the collaboration of spirit and nature, but not the absorption of the world in the “I.” Romagnosi looks at the problem of the existence of the world in itself and tries to base it on the principle of non-contradiction included, he says, in the causal principle. If our mind, we ourselves, were a selfsufficient principle, the motion of the spirit would be like that of a ball thrown in one unique direction … the forms of this life would always be uniform, immutable, limited to that sole form conceived at the beginning of human life…. Everything would begin and end in one monad in virtue of its sole essence (Come quello di una palla spinta in una direzione unica … le forme di questa vita sarebbero sempre uniformi, immutabili, circoscritte a quella sola che fu concepita da principio della vita umana…. Tutto incomincerebbe e finirebbe in una monade in virtú della sola sua essenza, in Mente sana, vol. 1, p. 5). Between the interior and the exterior there is “a real and substantial commerce,” which does not exclude, but implies an industrious activity of the subject. Romagnosi called this activity senso logico o razionale (logical or rational sense), and it is the activity itself of the intellect that coordinates the

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data among which it would establish relations. This logical sense is the moment of the mental reaction in front of the sensible action, and it cannot be separated from it; its functions are “coetaneous with any act of the mental life. These functions are generated by an immediate reaction of the energy of our thinking self (sono coetanee a qualunque atto della vita mentale. Esse sorgono per un’immediata reazione dell’energia del nostro io pensante). The essence of the excitable unity of the sentient self (l’essenza dell’unità eccitabile dell’io senziente) is translated in the activity of the logical sense. If, keeping in mind the analogies of Romagnosi, we compare those interior motions to the strings played on an instrument, we can indicate the structure, the proper characteristics, and individualities (haecceity) of these intellectual vibrations. We have here the interior word, irreducible, original expression of an activity and of a potency that the mind will afterward project on the world through its own functions. In Vedute fondamentali, Romagnosi explained: To these functions I assigned the name of lógie from lógos, the reason. I have chosen this name because these functions can be applied even to the ultra-sensations of the infinite and of the unknown, and make ourselves rigorous judges of what is outside of us, even though we cannot conceive any of its aspects. In this there is no space, no time, no whole or parts, no synthesis, no analysis, etc., but only, and I don’t know what, some rational and indefinable individual beings, always perceived and also unperceived in the most trivial conversations and even in the aesthetic sense (Egli è perciò che a sí fatte funzioni diedi il nome di lógie, da lógos ossia ragione. Questo nome venne da me trascelto, perocché esse possono essere applicate fino alle ultra-sensazioni dell’infinito e dell’incognito, e recarci giudici rigorosi di ciò ch’è fuor di noi, benché non ne possiamo concepire aspetto alcuno. Qui non entrano né lo spazio, né il tempo, né il tutto o le parti, né la sintesi, né l’analisi, ecc.; ma soli non so che razionali individui ed indefinibili, sempre sentiti ed anche inavvertiti nei piú triviali discorsi e nello stesso senso estetico). This was rational sense, radical power of human reason, indefinite, universal, ineffable, but operating in the practical field and in the theoretical one, without ever being defined, overcoming truly the empiricist premises from which it started. 5. Minor Ideologists All around the names of the major ideologists the crowd existed of the minor and minimal ones, such as fastidious professors, repeaters in general of ineffective schemes, rigid in their positions, scarcely critical in regard to difficulties and insufficiencies. An often-cited document of the enthusiasm for Locke

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that was domineering in the official cultural circles is the letter of the abbé Amedeo Peyron written in 1830 from Turin to Victor Cousin: The system of Locke has been introduced like a fashion within Piedmont in such a measure that, while studying logic in 1817, I had to write under dictation of a professor of the university a dissertation on anatomy, with which the professor assumed to make us understand both sensation and perception (Il sistema di Locke si è introdotto come una moda nel Piemonte in tale misura che, studiando logica nel 1817, ho dovuto scrivere sotto dettatura di un professore dell’università una dissertazione d’anatomia, con cui riteneva di farci intendere la sensazione e la percezione). In Tuscany, Gino Capponi was reading Destutt and praising “the healthy and judicious school of Locke” (la sana e giudiziosa scuola del Locke), and G. B. Nicolini was raising dithyrambs to the “eternal and sane doctrines of Locke and Condillac” (eterne e sane dottrine di Locke e Condillac). Giuseppe Montanelli, after having learned “to unmask the impostures of the clergy” from La Mettrie and D’Holbach, writing to Silvestro Centofanti, was exalting Destutt as the one who “was truly teaching how to study the human being” (insegnava veramente a studiar l’uomo). A student of Cousin, Jean Georges Farcy, in 1827, was writing in this way from Italy: The wind of physics has blown here as much as in our country…. Ideology, philosophy of man, and statistics complete here the circle of moral and philosophical studies. Their main teacher and authority is M. de Tracy: they read him and nourish themselves with him…. In this exclusive knowledge and adoration of one single system, they think of everything save of doubting, which is the beginning of wisdom (Le soufflé physique a soufflé aussi fort ici que chez nous.… L’idéologie, la philantrophie et la statistique accomplissent le cercle des connaissances morales et philosophiques; leur chef et maître, celui qui l’a dit, s’est M. de Tracy; il le lisent et s’en nourissent…. Dans cette connaissance et cette adoration esclusive d’un seul système, ils ne songent seulement pas au dout, commencement de la sagesse). He added that even the names alone of Spiritualism or Platonism were sufficient to raise disdain and suspicion. Just by re-reading the introduction to the version of Compagnoni of the Ideologia of Tracy is possible to see how true was what the young French student wrote. With Compagnoni, a figure certainly interesting of the Napoleonic period, we should mention Paolo Costa, the onorando (Honorable) Paolo Costa, as Pietro Maroncelli used to call him, who was a prolific writer but an unoriginal thinker. Completely attached to Locke, Costa indicated in Empiricism the worthy continuation of the school of Galileo, the only true Italic philosophy. When Costa saw the first successes

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of Rosmini, he added to his major work, Del modo di comporre idée (On the method of composing ideas), a new essay of confutation of Rosmini, the Confutazione intorno al Nuovo Saggio … in difesa delle dottrine del Locke e del Condillac (1837). Rosmini, in a friendly manner, reacted with this description of Costa: Paolo Costa was a man with a sharp intellect, solidly rooted in the doctrines learned in his youth. But in his old age he saw new doctrines being born throughout Italy and outside the traditional philosophical schools. These new doctrines were opening new and better paths for the human minds and awakening loftier sentiments of pure virtue in the spirits that were like stupefied and suffocated by the materialism of the previous doctrines. Paolo completely misinterpreted the tendency of this kind of a new philosophy. He became angry and accused the new philosophy of drawing men from their happy submission to Locke and the other teachers he himself venerated. He deplored the blindness of the age that was returning, as he was saying, to the Platonic larvae (Paolo Costa, uomo di chiaro intelletto, ma tenace nelle dottrine apprese nella sua gioventú, quando in sua vecchiaia vide sorgere per l’Italia e fuori delle scuole novelle di filosofia, le quali aprivano all’umano ingegno delle migliori vie, e svegliarono nell’animo degli alti sentimenti di pura virtú quasi assopiti e soffocati dalla materialità delle dottrine precedenti; egli misconobbe intieramente la tendenza della nuova filosofia: si corrucciò ad essa, che traesse gli uomini dalla felice soggezione di Locke, e degli altri maestri da lui venerati: deplorò tanto accecamento de’ tempi tornanti, com’egli diceva, alle larve platoniche). Under the influence of Destutt were the Elementi di filosofia metafisica (Florence, 1804) of Raffaele Zelli, a monk from Monte Cassino, and also Corso elementare di lezioni logico-metafisico-morale (Perugia, 1815) of a confrere of his, Vincenzo Bini, esteemed and cited by Compagnoni. In Condillac philosophy were the essays of Luigi Pungileoni, essays published in “Giornale Arcadico,” between 1828 and 1832. We will not consider him or the works of Pietro Schedoni, Giovanni Ferri of S. Costante, abbé Cestari, Mariano Gigli, G. B. Savioli, Giuseppe Passeri, Giuseppe Accordino (who corresponded with Galluppi), Andrea Albà, Girolamo Albéri, Giuseppe Sanchez, Evasio Andrea Gatti, G. Bertolli, Giuseppe Germani, G. Scaramuzza, Giovanni Raguleas, Domenico Bruschelli, Pietro Buttura, Giuseppe Bravi, Ubaldo Ubaldini, Camillo Ramelli, Pietro Nessi, Tommaso de Ocheda, Giuseppe Grones (esteemed by Romagnosi), Agatino Longo, Francesco Pizzolato, Giambattista Kohen, Giambattista Zandonella, and Luigi Feletti. Those who, like Capone Braga, were not satisfied with the scanty enumerations of Poli, tried to give us something more than just a name or a bibliographical line, have not received any recompense for their compassionate fatigue with the finding of some less-

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than-ordinary-opinions. After all, a lost single observation is not enough to bring to life these quite dead and quite modest builders of culture. In this crowd, it is possible to distinguish Jacopo Bonfadini, professor at Padua, for his interest for Kantism and for his essay Sulla ragion pura di Kant, and Epifanio Fagnani, for a prolix work on the necessity and use of divination, Della necessità e dell’uso della divinazione testificati dalla Scienza Nuova di G. B. Vico (Turin, 1861; 2nd ed., 2 vols.), more than for Storia naturale della potenza umana (Mortara, 1833). The Della necessità e dell’uso offers a diligent exposition of the Vichian major work; it is preceded by an interesting discussion on foreseeing historical facts, and on the possibility and foundation of such a foresight. Fagnani said that it was time to elaborate ideas from facts, to seize the dynamism of being, the living life in things, and to work from within the things themselves: The sentiment of the soul reaching power is intoxicating: it is the sentiment of the energy of life, as pain is the sentiment of impotence and death. This is the indefinite progression, this is the fundamental law that divine nature has imposed on the will. This is the law that makes anew and perfects the life and the will of human beings on earth…. Visible nature is subjected to the order that dominates and rules it. At every instant, visible nature is showered and pervaded by the power of God; it is the sempiternal trace of God, who creates and preserves it (Inebriante è il sentimento dell’anima che raggiunge il potere: é il sentimento dell’energia della vita, come il dolore è il sentimento dell’ impotenza e della morte. Questa è la progressione indefinita, questa è la legge fondamentale che la natura divina ha imposta alla volontà. Questa è la legge che rinvergina perfettamente la vita e la volontà degli uomini in sulla terra…. La natura visibile è passiva dell’ordine che la domina e la comanda; inaffiata ed invasa ad ogni attimo dalla forza di Dio, essa è orma sempiterna di Dio, che la crea e la fa essere). More than Saggio d’estetica (Venice, 1827–1828), of abbé Giambattista Talía the work that counts is Lettere sopra la filosofia morale (Milan, 1830, 2nd ed.), eight letters sent to Ippolito Pindemonte, and worthy for the long appendix on Vico and Stellini. Worthy of mention is Saggi filosofici (Milan, 1829), in which Ermes Visconti, better known for the discussions on aesthetics and Romanticism, dealt with much clarity the problem of the existence per se of the external world. By now, however, philosophy was moving on another path and the survivors of the eighteenth century were in vain trying to hold it on Lockean positions and on the discussions originating from them. The front of research and polemic was already elsewhere.

Part Six ITALIAN THOUGHT DURING THE RISORGIMENTO(*) (Chapters 30–36)

(*) Risorgimento: the period of the movement for liberation, reform, and unification of Italy, from the latter part of the eighteenth century to ca. 1870.

Thirty SOUTHERN ITALIAN THOUGHT AND PASQUALE GALLUPPI 1. The Crisis of Ideology. Pasquale Borrelli and Paolo Costa. Kantian and Eclectic Influences We have already seen in some of its aspects the speculation of Melchiorre Delfico, a speculation well connected with the premises of the Ideology. Within the Condillac trend remained Carlo Lauberg in Riflessioni sulle operazioni dell’umano intelletto (Reflections on the activities of the human intellect) published perhaps around 1789, a work that added very little to the varied and interesting figure of the author. Beyond the circle of orthodox Ideologists, we find instead Pasquale Borrelli, who through Delfico linked to Genovesi but foretelling the new orientation of Galluppi, of which he appreciated the value, and whom he survived. Of Galluppi, Borrelli said, “The powerful breath of a new spirit of culture invests the pages of his writings” (Il soffio potente di un nuovo spirito di cultura agita i fogli dei suoi scritti). In Borrelli, vaster historical interests and cultural contacts existed with wider horizons, which revealed at times needs not easily satisfiable by the premises established at the beginning. In the eulogy to Galluppi, Discorso pronunziato presso al letto funebre del barone D. Pasquale Galluppi (1846), Borrelli, though insisting on the criticism of metaphysical darings, demonstrated of having seen the too strong limitations of Sensism. In relation to Galluppi’s speculation, he observed, “He found himself settled between a bold philosophy that had denied many great truths and an illusive philosophy that gave credit to many illustrious fables” (Ei si trovò costituito fra una filosofia baldanzosa che molte grandi verità aveva negate, ed una filosofia illusoria che aveva preso a porre in credito molte favole illustri). The middle way between Sensism and Idealism appeared to Borrelli as the correct way, even though originally he concerned himself with the theses of Jean-Pierre-George Cabanis. He identified these theses so much with the medical conceptions of John Brown that Delfico was entranced and showed great enthusiasm receiving the introduction to the natural philosophy of thought, Introduzione alla filosofia naturale del pensiero that Borrelli published in 1824 in Lugano under the anagrammatized name of Pirro Lallebasque. A year later, always in

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Lugano, Borrelli’s other work on the principles of the genealogy of thought, Principii della genealogia del pensiero, was also published. In 1826, after receiving the Introduzione alla filosofia naturale del pensiero, Delfico wrote: When I received your Introduzione alla filosofia naturale del pensiero, I believed to have received a celestial messenger bringing truth … and in the swiftness of the momentary comparison of the mind, I told myself, “Here is Bacon in Italy, in the nineteenth century!” Everything was confirming the image born in that instant in my mind … but when, between surprise and joy, I arrived at page one hundred eighty-eight, in which the author expands the series of those ideas that with the Principii della genealogia del pensiero must give the genesis of all the science of humankind, with the surprise came also the most reliable hopes. These hopes found fulfillment at page one hundred ninety-eight in the reunion of Ideology with Physiology. This agreement has been always proposed by well-intentioned philosophers, but has never been executed with a happy result. Now at last it will not fail to reach its completion in the hands of a grand Physiologist and Ideologist, one who sees these two operations combined as a unique human phenomenon (Quando mi pervenne l’Introduzione credei vedere un messaggiere celeste precursore della verità … e nella rapidità del momentaneo paragone della mente dissi: “Ecco un Bacone in Italia, ma nel secolo XIX!” Tutto confirmava infatti questa imagine nata nell’istante ... ma quando fra la sorpresa e la gioia pervenni alla pagina 188, nella quale l’autore espone la serie di quelle idee che colla Genealogia del pensiero debbono dare la genesi di tutta la scienza dell’uomo, alla sorpresa si accompagnarono le piú ben fondate speranze; le quali sorgono alla pagina 198 nella riunione della Ideologia alla Fisiologia; concordia sempre proposta da’ piú ben intenzionati filosofi, e non mai eseguita con esito felice; ma che non potrà mancare di venire a compimento sotto la mano di un gran Fisiologo ed Ideologo ad un tempo, e che vede queste due operazioni combinate come un fenomeno dell’uomo). Borrelli had in fact taken his steps beginning from John Brown’s works, on whose theories he had already based Principia zoognosiae (Naples, 1807), in which his intention was to show that “the principle of excitation” of which the Scottish physician spoke was the same than the principle of sensitivity of Cabanis, which is at the basis of all the phenomena of animal life. Excitation was understood as the force reacting to stimulation, which in the muscular tissue is irritation, and in the nervous system is sensitivity. From this, he concluded that thought originates from a force inherent in us and from a stimulus. Though confessing to believe with the sensists a physics of the soul, Borrelli insisted on acknowledging that thought possesses an activity of its own,

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an activity that is distinct from the stimulus that initiates its motion. Sensation is not so much the transformation of the stimulus but an interior activity that the stimulus excites, in the same way than in judgment, something not derived from mere sensing is present, a force distinct from the power of sensing: The sensations that coexist in the spirit are not sufficient by themselves alone to produce a judgment. In order to produce a judgment, a power of judging is necessary. This new product of a different force is not and could never have been in the senses (Le sensazioni che coesistono nello spirito non bastano da sé sole a produrre un giudizio. È necessario a produrlo una forza di giudicare: e questo nuovo prodotto di una forza diversa non è dunque mai stato né poteva esser nei sensi). Borrelli had no intention of siding with the supporters of apriorism, save in affirming with Locke: Every idea is sensation or presupposes some sensations. The idea presupposes some sensations in the sense that if sensations would not take place, no idea would ever appear in the soul, no matter whether in the soul reflections would happen or not (Ogni idea o è sensazione, o presuppone delle sensazioni; e le presuppone in questo senso, che se mai sensazioni non avessero luogo, non mai per riflessioni o senza riflessione apparirebbe nell’anima). The human being possesses one force that is properly its, autonomous, not obtained from the senses. No doubt was possible that Borrelli was moving beyond the Ideology; but that he would then declare himself spiritualist instead of materialist is incorrect. The position of the Ideology transcended materialism and idealism. With Locke and Condillac, the Ideologists wanted to deal only with the generation and connection of psychic facts (ideas), without being concerned in any way with the question of essence and substance. While rejecting the accusation of materialism, Paolo Costa in his book Del modo di comporre idee (On the method of composing ideas) observed that the ideological position was only intended to serve as a map of navigation within the ocean of consciousness, which was to be understood as an activity conscious of itself: The soul is the sentiment of one center alone, which senses within itself, not outside of itself. It may very well appear that this doctrine is the same as the one of the idealist George Berkeley, but it is different because it admits that, besides the ideas, outside of the human being the causes exist of the ideas. Of these causes, we know the existence and nothing else. What are the things in themselves? To the question, we cannot answer except by saying they are the unknown causes of our sensations. We know that they exist, that they are subject to modifica-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY tion, and that we know all this because they produce modifications in our spirit. Consequently … all ideas have, as their original elements, sensations, reminiscences, and sentiments, which are in the soul and not outside of it. This is the way the followers of Locke and Condillac think, who, by way of mockery, are called by modern authors with the name of sensualists and materialists. For good reason, materialists should be called our adversaries, or at least for one half materialists, because they admit that the sentiments of the body perceive and judge in relation to the qualities of external things (Il sentimento di un solo centro, questo è l’anima; e l’anima sente in se medesima, e non fuori di sé. Potrà parere che questa dottrina sia la stessa dell’idealista bercleio: ma essa è diversa, perché ammette che oltre le idee vi sieno fuori dell’uomo le cagioni di esse idee. Di queste cagioni noi conosciamo l’esistenza e nulla piú. Che cosa sono i corpi in se stessi? A questa interrogazione, non si può rispondere se non dicendo: sono ignota cagione delle nostre sensazioni. Sappiamo che esistono, sappiamo che si modificano, e tutto ciò sappiamo perché fanno delle mutazioni nell’animo nostro. Dal che si deduce … che le idee tutte hanno per loro primitivi elementi le sensazioni, le reminiscenze, i sentimenti che sono nell’anima, e non fuori di lei. Cosí la pensano i Lockiani, i condillacchiani, chiamati per beffa dai moderni autori col nome di sensualisti e di materialisti. Materialisti a buona ragione si possono chiamare i nostri avversari, o almeno materialisti per metà, giacché ammettono che i sentimenti del corpo percepiscono, e giudicano relativamente alle qualità delle cose esterne).

Borrelli in his work brought another note of originality: an ample examination of Kantian thought, which was carried on not through translations or expositions, but on the original texts. As it is known, between the last years of eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, the first elementary knowledge of Kant was beginning to be diffused in France, by way of some partial versions of his minor writings, by means of the Latin translation of Frederick G. Born (Leipzig, 1796–1798), but especially thanks to the expositions of Charles Villers, Johannes Kinker, and Joseph Mari Degérando. Based on these documents, Destutt de Tracy constructed his criticism of Kant, and with Destutt, the major part of the reaction to Kantism in Italy became connected. In fact, to the knowledge of Kritik der Reinen Vernunft scarcely could help the Critica della ragion pura, the translation that, between 1820 and 1822, Vincenzo Mantovani published in Pavia in the well-deserving series “Collezione dei classici metafisici” of Pietro Bizzoni. More than the absence of translations, what was an obstacle in Italy to the comprehension of Kant was the common formulation of thought on bases so diverse from those, for instance, of the Ideology. The ideologists had in common with Kant an anti-dogmatic exigency that they exhausted in a pure description of the psychic life. The philosophy of the transcendental on which Kantianism intended to construct its

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metaphysics remained irremediably extraneous to them. In spite of some recent support, the critique of Francesco Soave in La filosofia di Kant esposta ed esaminata is out of focus: it grasps very little of the synthetic character attributed to thought by Kant. Let us merely mention the observations of Cesare Baldinotti, Paolo Costa, Jacopo Bonfadini, Tommaso Valperga di Caluso, and Galeani Napione. In the eyes of Piedmont thinkers, Kantian Criticism appeared as the deception of philosophism (traviamento del filosofismo). A frail pile of absurdities that is how Costa referred to Kantianism: If a person were to combine the idea of gold with the idea of the mountain that is before its eyes, would it because of this connection compose a true idea? Certainly not. How could then Kant, who finds in his mind the metaphysical idea of the connection, by adding this idea to two facts presented by the senses, conclude that this added connection constitutes truth? (Se ad alcuno venisse talento di aggiungere l’idea dell’oro, che egli ha nella mente, all’idea di una montagna che gli sta davanti, comporrebbe egli per sí fatto modo un’idea vera? Certo no. Come dunque il Kant, che trova nell’animo suo l’idea metafisica della connessione, aggiungendo questa a due fatti che gli si presentarono ai sensi, potrà conchiudere che una sí fatta aggiunta costituisca una verità?). And after an argument so formidable, Costa complacently commented: What kind of solidity will this construction have? Any person with a good mind can see and know that many bulldozers are not needed to tear it down. A tower built on a wooden platform can be destroyed by fire started with a fistful of hay. With the exposition of a few facts, with the clarification of the precise value of a few terms, many volumes of badly founded doctrines can be eliminated (Quale sarà la solidità dell’edificio? Chi ha fior di senno sel vede, e conosce che ad atterrarlo non fa bisogno di molte macchine. Una torre eretta sopra un palco di legno, si farebbe cadere col foco di poca paglia; cosí coll’esporre pochi fatti, col dichiarare il preciso valore di pochi termini, si annientano molti volumi di mal fondata dottrina). Not more illuminating was the criticism of Baldinotti, for whom the Kantian philosophy, because it was formulated a priori was vain and unsubstantial, a pure product of fantasy. Bonfadini did not perform any better, when he threw against Kant the objection that to some seemed fundamental, but that in itself had no real validity: It is a most marvelous thing that the soul, being for itself more excellent than any corporeal thing that acts on the senses, must remain sleepy, without ever using those cognitions that are so much superior

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY to the empirical, unless first awakened from that turbid slumber by the material and most idiotic experiences (È cosa piú d’ogni altra meravigliosa che l’anima, essendo per se stessa molto piú eccellente di qualunque oggetto corporeo che agisce sopra i sensi, debba stare dormi-gliosa né mai valersi di quelle cognizioni pure che sono per se stesse di tanto superiori alle empiriche, quando prima non sia tratta dal torpido suo sonno, dalla materiale e idiotissima esperienza).

We have seen how inappropriate and superficial Romagnosi remained; all he truly said was that Kant had his head in the clouds and stood nebulously among them (sta fra le nuvole e vi sta nuvolescamente). He resembled Carlo Gozzi when he concluded, “The Italian good sense will never allow that its philosophy and language would be reduced to such a point that a beautiful maid would say to her lover, ‘You love me subjectively but not objectively!’” (il buon senno italiano non permetterà mai che la filosofia e la lingua sua siano ridotte al segno che una bella dica seriamente all’amante suo: voi mi amate subbiettivamente e non obbiettivamente). They are words that correspond to the exclamation of Gioia, “L’Italia non s’inkanta!” (Italy would never be charmed by Kant!). What about Giuseppe Compagnoni for whom, with the exclusion of Tracy, philosophy has been “a continuous series of foolishness … a pile of bizarre capricious presuppositions, the fruits of which were errors, because those presuppositions were nothing else than error” (una serie continuata di follie … un cumulo bizzarro di supposizioni capricciose, non altro fruttificanti che errori, perché non altro che errore erano esse medesime). Parmenides was delirious, Plato a dreamer, or “an eloquent novelist philosopher … an inconceivable pile of eccentricities, which contributed perhaps to the thicker darkness that at the fall and successive ruin of the Roman Empire covered the earth.” Aristotle sensed that truth comes from the senses, but then through the centuries “a disastrous confusion led the minds astray.” In short, the first human being who philosophized was Locke, and Bonnet was very great because “no other human being has known the mechanism of thought better than him.” Great was also Condillac who systematized philosophy at last. And then “suddenly, we saw a system from Germany springing up with so much fuss that threw again all the minds into confusion.” Kant was, indeed, a second Plato, “Every one can easily see that this system of his is nothing but the delirium of Plato, which has transferred from the minds of the imaginative Athenians into the heads of our contemporary Southern Germans” (ognuno può facilmente vedere altro insomma non essere questo suo systema, se non il delirio di Platone, dagli immaginosi Ateniesi trapassato a questi tempi nelle teste de’ Tedeschi settentrionali). All these chimerical rhapsodies have been dissipated forever by the Ideology of Destutt de Tracy. Costa exclaimed, “Oh no! Experience alone should be our guide! To hell with all those fantasies of the Berkeleys, the Kants, the Stewarts, and with all the others who would love to dream! (No, no, che l’esperienza sola sia la nostra guida … e vadano alla malora tutte le fantasie

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dei Berkeley, dei Kant, dei Stewart, e di quanti altri amino di sognare!). The critique of Borrelli was different. He never ceased to oppose Empiricism to Criticism, without ever hitting the target with his objections, save perhaps when he reproached Kant with the difficulty of connecting the synthesis of the intellect through categories with the synthesis of the senses through pure intuitions. He, too, could do little against Kant because the forces on which he tried to preserve the autonomy and the activity of the subject were not mental functions but pure blind mechanical forces from which conscious syntheses could hardly spring up. The same can be said, though on the practical and aesthetic level, of Francesco Paolo Bozzelli, who, in his most famous work on the tragic imitation among the ancients and the moderns, Della imitazione tragica presso gli antichi e i moderni (Lucerne, 1838), criticized with good arguments the distinction of August Wilhelm von Schlegel between “classic” and “romantic.” Bozzelli’s analysis of morality fell within the doctrines of Claude-Adrien Helvétius, reducing every motive of action to that of pleasure and, under the influence of Adam Smith, he resolved thereafter through the sphere of social advantages the problem of relationships with others. Besides, the Scottish school on one side, and the philosophy of Pierre Laromiguière, Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, and Cousin on the other, with their always wider influx were gradually overcoming the pure eighteenth century formulation of Delfico and of the greater part of the production of Borrelli and Bozzelli. While the thought of these thinkers was at first strongly influencing Galluppi, it was thereafter fused together with his own thought in such a fashion to be able to renew solutions and problems. Delfico enthusiastically pointed out in Luigi Dragonetti, a convinced follower of Thomas Reid, a profundity and vigor of critique worthy to be compared with, or be put ahead of those of Bozzelli and Galluppi. As friend of Dragonetti, Niccolò Tommaseo presented in “Antologia,” in February 1831, Giacinto de Pamphilis, Geografia dello Scibile (Naples, 1829), a philosophical work on the geography of the knowable, inspired by Reid and handled according to the teachings of Dragonetti, a book called “bellissimo” in the judgment of Luigi Settembrini. With Reid, Cousin, too, was gaining ground, even though to some followers of the Scottish school, like Gaspare Selvaggi, also friend of Dragonetti, to follow Cousin “was to go too far … in poeticizing for a while with the metaphysics of Plato, meanwhile it was necessary to proceed at a snail’s pace, and induce in the multitude ideas that are evident and demonstrated truths (andare troppo al di là … poeteggiando un poco in metafisica con Platone, laddove bisogna andare a passi di formica e non indurre nella massa delle cognizioni che verità evidenti e dimostrate). A supporter of Cousin was Galluppi who in 1831 translated Cousin’s Fragments Philosophiques (of 1826) into Italian, while David Winspeare in his Saggi di filosofia intellettuale, anonymously published in 1843 and 1846, remained strictly tied to the Scottish School and criticized greatly the eclectics as the ones who, by mixing Reid’s philosophy with the idealistic one of the

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Germans, were making it all perverted and corrupted. In the opinion of Winspeare, the tenebrous Kantian philosophy was like one of those singular products of human ingenuity destined to have the life of a meteor. Having no correlation with the previous and subsequent status of common knowledge, these mental products are outside the natural connection of historical facts and form those parentheses in which the transformations of reason remain locked in (come uno di que’ singoli parti dell’ingegno umano, a’ quali è destinata la vita delle meteore. Non avendo essi alcuna correlazione coll’antecedente e col susseguente stato delle comuni conoscenze, trovansi fuori della natural connessione de’ fatti storici, e formano altret-tante parentesi nelle quali van chiusi i trascorrimenti della ragione). The conclusion of the European thought, according to Winspeare, was not Kant but Reid seen as the expression of truth in a modest and quiet form. This last thesis in 1846 found a resolute adversary in Luigi Palmieri, an open follower of Gioberti who criticized Winspeare; in Gaspare Capone, disciple and successor of Galluppi on the Neapolitan University chair; and finally in Galluppi himself. Except that already in 1845 with his observations on common sense, Osservazioni sul senso commune, Galluppi, though so much in debt to Reid for several things, raised many objections to the Scottish School, showing how common sense itself, far from being acceptable as the meter of our philosophizing, must undergo a rigorous scrutiny, given the many errors universally dominating humanity. Galluppi emerged among these minor thinkers for the breadth of his cultural interests, for the subtlety of his criticism, and for the amplitude with which he introduced the results of the European thought into the Italian philosophical world. Modest, instead, was his philosophy, and not for the tone intentionally subdued, but because that tone was the honestly suitable vest for the body of his doctrines. 2. Life of Pasquale Galluppi. Religious Motives In his autobiography, Pasquale Galluppi introduced himself in these terms, “I was born in the city of Tropea … on 2 April, 1770. My parents were Baron don Vincenzo and Lady Lucrezia Galluppi, both from the same Galluppi kin, one of the ancient patrician families of the city of Tropea (Io nacqui nella città di Tropea … il 2 aprile dell’anno 1770. I miei genitori furono il Barone don Vincenzo e donna Lucrezia Galluppi, tutti e due della stessa famiglia Galluppi, una delle antiche famiglie patrizie della città di Tropea). Immediately thereafter, he recalled the school of philosophy and mathematics of don Giuseppe Antonio Ruffa: The amiable teacher put in my hands the Italian logic of Rev. Genovesi and the elements of geometry of Euclid. He impressed on my spirit the

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strongest passion for philosophical and mathematical disciplines and still today, when seeing those two books, I am overcome by great emotion since they were the ones from which I began my course of studies. When some of the disciples of Ruffa adopted Leibnizian doctrines, I felt compelled to read the Theodicea of Leibniz. I greatly esteemed this great man and applied myself to the reading of the works of Christian Wolff. Knowing that questions of theodicy related to those of revealed theology and because a type of mysticism introduced itself among the disciples of Ruffa, I was welcomed as a student of theology. In Naples, I audited the lectures of Francesco Conforti, studied the Bible, ancient history, ecclesiastical history and the Christian Fathers of the first centuries, among whom I especially loved St. Augustine. When some members of the clergy censured some propositions of mine, then I published an apologetic note. It was the year 1795 (Quell’amabile maestro mi pose in mano la logica italiana dell’abate Genovesi e gli elementi di geometria di Euclide: egli seppe imprimere nell’animo mio la piú forte passione per le filosofiche e matematiche discipline, in modo che, vedendo io ancor oggi i due libri, da’ quali principiò il mio corso di studi, provo una certa commozione. Il leibnizianismo adottato da alcuni discepoli di Ruffa fu il motivo che mi spinse a leggere la Teodicea di Leibniz; io concepii dell’alta stima per questo grand’uomo e mi applicai alla lettura delle opere di Wolfio. Siccome le questioni della Teodicea hanno del rapporto con quelle della Teologia rivelata, e siccome tra i discepoli di Ruffa si era introdotto un certo misticismo, cosí io fui condotto allo studio della Teologia: ascoltai in Napoli le lezioni di Francesco Conforti, studiai la Bibbia, la storia antica, la storia ecclesiastica ed i Santi Padri dei primi secoli e mi attaccai specialmente a Sant’Agostino. Avendo alcuni ecclesiastici censurato qualche mia proposizione, nell’anno 1795 pubblicai una memoria apologetica). In the apologetic note, Galluppi defended the thesis that the virtues of the pagans were nothing other than splendid vices. Then he added: I continued with my studies of philosophy and mathematics but all the books in philosophy I was reading were from the Cartesian school. About the year 1800, I read the works of Condillac and the second period of my philosophical life began. The works of this philosopher forced me to change the direction of my studies in philosophy (Frattanto non tralasciava lo studio della filosofia e della matematica, ma i libri filosofici che leggeva erano tutti della scuola cartesiana. Circa il 1800 lessi le opere dell’abate Condillac. Qui cominciò la seconda epoca della mia vita filosofica, ché le opere di questo filosofo fecero cambiare la direzione de’ miei studi nella filosofia).

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He read Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding, and in 1807 in Naples, he published the opuscule on analysis and synthesis, Sull’analisi e sulla sintesi: When I published that opuscule, I had no knowledge of the philosophy of Kant. Actually the knowledge I acquired of Kant’s philosophy did not change the orientation of my studies … though I learned a lot from the work of the philosopher of Königsberg (Io non conoscevo ancora, all’epoca che lo pubblicai, la filosofia di Kant. La conoscenza di questa filosofia non cambiò la direzione dei miei studi … ma profittai molto delle fatiche del filosofo di Koenigsberg). Then Galluppi composed and published in Naples and Messina the six volumes of the philosophical essay on the critique of knowledge, Saggio filosofico sulla critica della conoscenza, starting in 1819 and ending in1832, when a second complete edition came out from Neapolitan printers. In 1820, he began the publication of another set of six volumes of elements of philosophy, Elementi di filosofia (1820–1827), composed with an analytic methodology “in order to make philosophy useful to the youth.” In 1827, in Messina, were published the Lettere filosofiche on the vicissitudes of philosophy in relation to the principles of human understanding from Descartes to Kant included. In 1841, he gave the following account: Between 1832 and 1840, I published in Naples six small volumes of an analysis of the practical side of philosophy, the philosophy of the will, Filosofia della volontà. In 1831, I was made professor of philosophy at the Royal University of Naples and for that purpose between 1832 and 1840 I put together a course of lessons in logic and metaphysics in six small tomes, Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica. With one contrary vote, in 1838 I was unanimously nominated Correspondent of the Royal Institute of France…. In 1839, I sent to the Institute some philosophical considerations on the transcendental idealism and absolute rationalism of the system of Fichte, Considerazioni filosofiche sull’idealismo trascendentale e sul razionalismo assoluto, which were praised, translated into French and added as a new volume to the catalogue of books of that academy (In sei volumetti impresi pure un’analisi della parte pratica nella Filosofia della volontà, [1832–1840]. Nell’anno 1831 fui nominato professore di filosofia alla Università Reale di Napoli, e composi per tale oggetto un corso di lezioni in sei volumi [Lezioni di logica e metafisica, Napoli 1832–1834; 2nd edition 1840]. In dicembre 1838 fui nominato all’unanimità meno un voto, corrispondente del Istituto Reale di Francia. L’anno 1839 mandai all’Istituto una memoria sul sistema di Fichte [Considerazioni filosofiche sull’idealismo trascendentale e sul razionalismo assoluto, Napoli 1841], che fu applaudita, tradotta in francese ed inserita nei libri di quella accademia).

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In these scanty autobiographical notes the pattern was revealed of a life completely dedicated to meditation but which destiny did not preserve from grief. In 1822 Galluppi wrote, “I have been married since 1794 to Lady Barbara d’Aquino, sister of the deceased General d’Aquino. Together we procreated fourteen children, eight boys, and six girls. One of these died as the victim of a madman (Sono ammogliato sin dall’anno 1794 con donna Barbara d’Aquino, sorella del fu generale d’Aquino. Con essa procreai quattordici figliuoli, otto maschi e sei femmine; uno di questi cadde vittima del furore d’un giovane sconsigliato). During the risings of 1844 his son Vincenzo, a captain in the Bourbon police force, was also killed. Broken-hearted, Galluppi abandoned his studies. When he died in December of 1846, he was reduced to a vanishing shade. By now, epresentatives of Italian thought were other individuals. The world he had known in Italy and France was also disappearing. To that world he did not bring passionate impetus like other thinkers of the stormy age, but a certain conformist meekness, always honorable, bashful and straight at the same time, with a firm cult for ethical-religious values and a candid love for philosophy. In an inaugural oration, he cried: O August Philosophy! If I from my early years consecrated my life to you, if in my own heart I promised never to allow a lie to profane my lips, today I renew before you at the presence of this respectable audience and in this august temple of wisdom, the same sacred promise (Augusta filosofia! Se a te consacrai fin dai miei primi anni la mia vita, se nel mio cuore ti promisi di non far che la menzogna giammai profanasse i miei labbri, io ti rinnovo oggi, alla presenza di questa rispettabile udienza ed in questo augusto tempio del sapere, la stessa sacra promessa). About politics he maintained himself detached. He was a modest functionary during the Napoleonic period, and celebrated the return of Ferdinand IV in verses and prose. When in 1820 the Constitution was proclaimed, he published some opuscules in which he expressed a moderate liberalism. These opuscules were then the object of a denunciation and motive of terror during the Restoration. In 1831, with the advent of Ferdinand II, he composed new verses and prose and, a little later, he proposed in his teaching to educate “virtuous subjects of the august descendant of Charles III.” And faithful he remained always to the King, his Lord. Much more interesting was his religious attitude, as it was characterized by an intransigent rigor that motivated discussions on Jansenism, not only for the appeal to Pietro Tamburini but for the constant tone with which the Kantian ethic of duty was linked with that of the Gospel, “The love commanded by the Gospel contains all the duties both general and particular of humankind” (La carità comandata dal Vangelo contiene tutti i doveri tanto generali che particolari dell’uomo). Worthy of consideration is an academic oration of

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1816 that Augusto Guzzo also noticed, an oration given for the beatification of Alfonso de’ Liguori in which the idealism, winner over sensism, is invoked to demonstrate the illusory reality of the world of the senses, to which the reality of the world of the spirit is opposed. In this oration, the morality of pleasure is rejected and the morality of duty is fully justified. The human being, made of body and spirit, redeems itself with renunciation and in this manner acquires happiness. To pretend not to suffer in the midst of sufferance is the foolish pride of the Stoic. To feel beaten down without possibility of recovery is the unhappy destiny of the Epicurean. To feel the pains imposed by nature with the consolation of the spirit is the condition of virtue on this earth; it is the formation of the Christian. To be entirely free from pain is the object of human hope; it is the recompense of human virtue. O Philosophers of the century, O profound thinkers, independent and strong spirits, whatever is your name, I ask of you, which is the resource of the unhappy virtue. Do you have the ability of giving a satisfying answer to this terrible question, resolving my uncertainties, satisfying the essential needs of my reason? I retire in the sanctuary of my being; there I read these primitive and fundamental truths of my normal existence: by necessity I want to be happy and I must live the life of duty. Virtue deserves happiness. Vice deserves punishment. These truths are from the nature of sentiments: they are indelible; they constitute my moral essence. I would be in contradiction with myself if I were not to admit all of them in their integrity. O Philosophers of this world, a system I ask of you that would bring, without altering them, these truths together and resolve the human enigma (Pretendere di non soffrire in mezzo ai dolori è la stolta fierezza dello Stoico. Esservi abbattuto senza riscossa è la sorte infelice dell’Epicureo. Sentire i dolori della natura colle consolazioni interne dello spirito è lo stato della virtú su questa terra; è la costruzione del Cristiano. L’essere intieramente esente da’ dolori è l’oggetto della sua speranza; è la ricompensa della sua virtú. Filosofi del secolo, pensatori profondi, spiriti indipendenti e forti, come vi chiamate, quale, io vi domando, la risorsa estrema della virtú infelice? Siete voi nel caso di dare una risposta soddisfacente a sí terribile domanda, di dileguare le mie incertezze, di soddisfare i bisogni essenziali della mia ragione? Io rientro nel santuario del mio essere; io vi leggo queste verità primitive, e fondamentali del mio essere normale. Io voglio necessariamente essere felice. Io debbo vivere la vita del dovere. La virtú merita la felicità. Il vizio merita la pena. Queste verità sono di sentimento: esse sono indelebili: esse costituiscono il mio essere morale; io sarei in contraddizione con me stesso non ammettendole tutte nella loro integrità. Filosofi della terra, un sistema io vi domando, che riunendole senza alterarle spieghi l’enigma dell’uomo).

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His religion, so sincerely professed, was in agreement with the Kantian rigor. 3. Genesis of Galluppi’s Philosophy. Supposed Kantism of Galluppi It was the opinion of Luigi La Vista, a martyr for liberty, that Galluppi’s speculation was a “reserved and modest” philosophy, and at the same conclusion essentially arrived Augusto Guzzo, the most accurate scholar interested in Galluppi. In order to identify the positive characteristics of Galluppi’s thought we should retrace his own intellectual journey. He was always concerned with the assessment of his reflections in rapport with those of others, trying to justify in an indefatigable discussion with major and minor thinkers his own conclusions. This discussion had the historical function of bringing the Italian philosophical culture in touch with that of Europe, allowing that the echo of some contemporary inquiries could come into Italy. This is so true that perhaps it constitutes the major significance of Galluppi’s work, certainly greater than his problematic Kantism or his personal pretended criticism that would be seen as a position parallel to that of the philosopher of Königsberg. His constant need of formulating historically every problem, of examining minutely various solutions, this historical requirement was nourishing in him a certain eclectic tendency that likened him to his friend Cousin, who had set him out in the acquisition of knowledge and evaluation of thinkers and schools. From the time of the first autobiography of 1822 to the fourteenth epistle of the Lettere filosofiche, to a fragment of 1841, Galluppi several times engaged himself in the task of determining the genesis of his own thought. His inquiry had Wolffian origins, “The first philosophical books I carefully studied are those of the School of Leibniz.” He subsequently deepened the Cartesian position, to pass over thereafter to the study of Condillac, and then to the problem of the method of analysis. All this motivated him to face the problem of knowledge as it was formulated by Lockean Empiricism. In Lettere filosofiche, Galluppi said, “I understood that before affirming anything about humankind, God, and the universe, we must examine the legitimate motivations of our judgments and posit a solid basis for philosophy. Furthermore, I understood that we must go back and trace the origins of all that we know” (Io compresi che prima di affermare qualunque cosa sull’uomo, su Dio e su l’universo, bisognava esaminare i motivi legittimi dei nostri giudizi e porre una base solida alla filosofia; che bisognava perciò risalire all’origine delle nostre conoscenze). On this ground, in which Cartesianism and Empiricism met and agreed, the influence of Kant found root. Galluppi confessed of having studied the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft “with much pain and attention,” acknowledged “the merit of the problems raised by critical philosophy,” though it appeared that “the solutions given by such a philosophy were insufficient.” The essence of Kantism remained for the most part extraneous to Galluppi, not only and not so much because of the imperfect knowledge that he

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first had of it through the works of Charles Villers, Johannes Kinker, JosephMari Degérando, Johann Gottlieb Gerhard Buhle, and even the Latin version of Friedrich Gottlieb Born. Galluppi’s mental formation itself, his way of formulating the questions, inclined him to reduce Kant to the limits of that kind of speculation to which Kant had turned his back. In fact, even though in 1819 in the Saggio filosofico sulla critica della conoscenza, Galluppi wrote, “The Kantian revolution deserves more merit than what is commonly believed,” he would immediately reduce the Kantian problem to the same questions raised by the Ideologists: what is the origin of our ideas? If it is true that Galluppi objected to Kant that once the distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself were posited, it would be contradictory to affirm also the existence of the thing in itself through the arbitrary extension of the categories of cause and substance. Kant, for this reason, remained always dogmatic and skeptical in the eyes of Galluppi. For him, while Descartes started from skepticism to find the ubi consistam or the solidity of the internal evidence, prolonged thereafter to the dogmatic of substances, Kant instead, moving from the dogmatism of the elements a priori of knowledge, concluded with skepticism about the phenomena. While time makes a phenomenon out of the interior life precluding the access to it, while the various a priori functions bar us from objective reality, “we walk unceasingly within a circle of appearances, looking for a solid point of support on which to establish them, without ever finding this point any where, within or without ourselves.” In the Considerazioni filosofiche sull’idealismo trascendentale e sul razionalismo assoluto of 1839, in which the examination is extended to Fichte, the accusation is repeated against all transcendental idealism of nullifying the world and of banishing the most solid certainty of consciousness. Within Galluppi’s vision even the correct particular objections to Kant are lost because of the substantial incomprehension of his animating motives and of the structure itself of his thought. Even though Galluppi suggested a solution to the gnoseological problem, which was properly the one of Kant, this happened on another level and took advantage of diverse motives, more in the atmosphere of the school of common sense than in that of Hume’s criticism. As Kant was awakened from the dogmatic slumber of the LeibnizWolffian metaphysics by the critical analysis of Hume, so Galluppi was brought out of it by the reading of Condillac. “It is at this point that the second period of my philosophical life began. The works of this philosopher changed the direction of my studies of philosophy.” While the mind of Kant was opening up to critical inquiry on the impulse of Hume, Galluppi was abandoning the “futile” Wolffian ontology under the incentive of Locke’s thought. This distinction should not be forgotten also because Locke appeared profoundly tied and intimately compatible with many aspects of Cartesianism, so much so that a synthesis between the two on the ground of the analysis of conscious experience could seem very acceptable. Galluppi’s speculation often preferred this synthesis.

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4. Analysis and Synthesis The reading of Condillac inspired Galluppi to write Sull’analisi e sulla sintesi in 1807. It was intended “not for the learned, but for the learning youth,” and the author did not limit himself to the enunciation of principles, but explained “everything with some examples,” he taught “analysis by way of analyzing.” In the 1841 autobiography, Galluppi confessed: I read the works of Condillac and, because this philosopher knows no other legitimate method than the one of analysis, so his opinion influenced me and I decided to meditate carefully on the laws that follow the two methods. In the year 1807, I published an opuscule on analysis and synthesis, which was widely praised (Lessi le opere di Condillac e siccome questo filosofo non conosce altro metodo legittimo che quello dell’analisi, cosí questa opinione mi condusse e volli attentamente meditare su leggi che seguono i due metodi. Nell’anno 1807 pubblicavo un opuscolo sull’analisi e la sintesi che fu molto applaudito). In the introduction Galluppi justified the reason of his writing stating that since Condillac never clarified in full his analytic method, a thorough explanation was required. In Dell’Analisi e della Sintesi (the Sull’analisi e sulla sintesi, in the edition by Di Carlo, pp. 19–20), he observed: The synthesis begins from the definitions and considers them as if they were principles that prove the truth. The analysis instead returning to the origin of those ideas that would be present to the spirit, explains gradually their becoming. Analysis, too, uses the definitions, but far from looking at them as principles that bring to the cognition of truth, posits them as the results of the genesis of the ideas, the genesis that the definitions explained (La Sintesi incomincia dalle definizioni, essa le riguarda come principj, che conducono alla prova della verità. L’Analisi rimontando all’origine di quelle idee, che vuol presentare allo spirito, ne spiega gradatamente la generazione. Essa usa bensí delle definizioni, ma lungi di riguardarle come principj, che conducono alla cognizione della verità, le pone come de’ risultati della genesi delle idee da esse spiegata). The analysis is a reverse process of thought in which thought regresses through the path followed in its previous natural manifestation, with the goal of grasping its own meaning and of becoming completely conscious of itself: We can clearly see … that synthesis and analysis present the same ideas of solid, surface, line, and point. The synthesis does not retrocede to research the origin of these ideas and gradually explain their generation, but right away present them to the spirit through their definitions,

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY which it considers first principles. Analysis, on the contrary, beginning from our sensations, retrocede to the source of these ideas, explains gradually their generation, and gives birth to the definitions themselves which are seen as the results of the cognitions that analysis itself has provided (Si vede chiaramente … che la Sintesi, e l’Analisi danno le stesse idee del solido, della superficie, della linea, del punto; ma la Sintesi non si cura di rimontare all’origine di queste idee, e di spiegarne gradatamente la generazione, ella le presenta sin da principio allo spirito per mezzo delle definizioni, ch’essa riguarda come de’ principj primi, l’Analisi al contrario principiando dalle nostre sensazioni, rimonta all’origine di queste idee, ne spiega gradatamente la generazione e fa nascere le definizioni come resultati delle cognizioni, ch’ella somministra).

In short, it is the same Maine de Biran’s decomposition of thought that brought the analysis of Locke back within the limits of the Cartesian process. It is thought that “doubles itself” and repeats backward the course of its own stages, re-affirming at the light of clear consciousness the already accomplished process in its constructive immediacy. At the level of the synthesis, the Wolffian dogmatism, the ontology imbued with definitions and deduction, is established; at the level of analysis, the Lockean criticism, preoccupied with the self-generation of notions in the subject, is unrolled. Taking the side of Locke and Condillac, Galluppi moved against Wolff and lined up at the side of a critical gnoseology against dogmatic metaphysics. Deepening the concept of Locke and Condillac, he insisted on the concreteness of analysis, which is not a mechanical division or decomposition but the probing of awareness in the regression that is an actual interior illumination. For Galluppi, synthesis juxtaposes, while analysis seizes the unitary thread that unifies. In Dell’Analisi e della Sintesi (p. 51), he said: If in the synthesis everything is isolated, in the analysis on the contrary everything is united. The analysis piles up neither definitions, nor axioms, nor postulates; it does not arbitrarily propose problems for resolution. Analysis goes gradually from known to unknown, and does not assign any specific place for any kind of these propositions, Following the natural progress of the spirit, analysis ties with a surprising thread all the series of its own cognitions (Se nella Sintesi tutto è isolato, nell’Analisi al contrario tutto è unito. Ella non ammassa né definizioni, né assiomi, né postulati: non propone arbitrariamente problemi da risolvere. Ella passa gradatamente dal noto all’ignoto, ella non assegna alcun luogo determinato per alcuna specie di queste proposizioni, ma seguendo il progresso naturale dello spirito, lega con un filo, che sorprende, tutta la serie delle sue cognizioni). Analysis alone therefore brings us before the unitary process of the genesis of

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knowledge; analysis alone decomposes and composes at the same time. While analysis distinguishes, it also illumines, unveils the relationships, deepens the connections, brings awareness of them, and raises them to clarity: By decomposing the expression of the instant of velocity, we have determined the relation that exists between the different instants of the bodies. We are therefore in the right of concluding that analysis offers a series of decompositions together with compositions (Decomponendo l’espressione del momento [della velocità], abbiamo determinato la ragione che passa fra i diversi momenti de’ corpi, Siamo dunque nel diritto di conchiudere, che l’Analisi offre una serie di decomposizioni, e composizioni insieme, in Dell’Analisi e della Sintesi, p. 59). The Cartesian rhythm of analysis-synthesis is summed up in the analysis, in which philosophizing, as the continuous motion of thought, has the duty to deepen (to analyze) by integrating the data, by descending into the roots of oneself, repeating our own path backward, not to re-step on the already completed steps, but to give them a new sense, revealing their secret, a meaning re-acquired at the same time than created anew. Always without losing sight of the human spirit, “realities unknown to the multitude of common writers would then be discovered.” One goes from the material to the immaterial, from sense to reason. In his opuscule of 1807, Galluppi understood the process of Condillac as a motion of regression of thought, as a reflection capable of reaching in the spiritual life one’s own secret and that of reality. The empiricist Lockean instance was re-lived in the Cartesian tradition; the secret of cogitare (of thinking) was researched through “interior doubling” within the roots of sensation. 5. Galluppi’s Cartesianism. The Cognitive Synthesis If we consider now Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica, the motive mentioned would appear to us already fully developed. In this work, every philosophical inquiry is channeled back within the ambiance of the science of human thought. In Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica (ch. 2), he explained: All the parts of metaphysics are parts of the science of human thought: on the other hand, there is no doubt that logic and ethics are part of it. Consequently, by defining philosophy as the science of human thought we exactly comprehend in it the three parts called logic, metaphysics, and ethics or moral philosophy (Tutte le parti della metafisica appartengono alla scienza del pensiero umano: da un’altra parte non v’ha dubbio che la logica e l’etica vi appartengono; definendo, in conseguenza, la filosofia per la scienza del pensiero umano, noi comprendiamo esattamente in essa le tre parti dette logica, metafisica, etica o filosofia morale).

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And the method of inquiry of the human spirit is the Cartesian reflection, understood as the “experimental philosophy of the spirit.” In Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica (ch. 5), he wrote: The father of the experimental philosophy of the human spirit was not, therefore, Bacon, but Descartes.… This great man taught the friends of truth to turn their attention on their own thought and observe it in all its elements. Descartes’ metaphysical dogmas have shattered; but his method has remained and will continue so long as men will love true philosophy (Il padre della filosofia sperimentale dello spirito umano non fu dunque Bacone, ma Cartesio…. Questo grand’uomo insegnò agli amici della verità a ripiegare l’attenzione sul proprio pensiero e ad osservarlo in tutti i sui elementi. I suoi dommi metafisici sono quasi tutti caduti; ma il suo metodo è rimasto e durerà finché gli uomini ameranno la vera filosofia). To philosophize is “to know the acts of one’s own spirit, research them in one’s own memory, and observe their relationships of similitude and succession.” It is not an external observation, “a recourse to the external experience, to the anatomic knife,” which is like teaching a blind person from birth the ideas of colors by way of hearing, but it is always a reflection, a folding of ourselves on ourselves taking advantage of the transparency of thought. Galluppi concluded, “We will follow the law of the method, the law established by Descartes, when he established philosophy on the observation of one’s own thought.” For Galluppi the truth of Cartesianism is found in the inquiry of Locke and Lockeans and this inquiry’s intention is to seize thought with thought. “The disciples of Locke, the most famous, like Condillac, D’Alembert, and even Destutt, have followed him in this: they made use only of the consciousness of ourselves in order to know the facts of the soul” (I discepoli di Locke i piú celebri, come Condillac, D’Alembert, e fino lo stesso Tracy, l’hanno seguito in ciò; ed eglino ricorrono solamente alla coscienza di noi stessi, per la conoscenza dei fatti dell’anima). Cartesianism must be integrated with Locke, must be understood through Locke, “Descartes placed the foundations, but Locke is the one who constructed on them” (Cartesio gettò la base, ma Locke fu quegli che costruí su questa base, in Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica, ch. 7). The primacy of analysis over synthesis was preserved since, as he repeated, the analysis is the reflective motion itself that initiates “the examination of the actual condition of our spirit, from which to pass to the deduction, as far as it is possible, of the primitive condition of the same.” We must immediately declare that the priority of analysis over synthesis, as sustained by Galluppi, refers uniquely to the method of inquiry to the construction of the philosophy of the spirit. His view does not undermine the reality of a cognitive synthesis, of an activity intrinsic to thinking, an activity of which analysis, retracing the cognitive process, is also a participant because reflection is

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also integration, clarification, and illumination of data. In Saggio filosofico sulla critica della conoscenza, Galluppi advised us not to confuse analysis and synthesis as methods with analysis and synthesis as functions of the spirit. As functions of the spirit, they both concur in the analytic method, which is a perennial analytic-synthetic process, apt to perform both a resolution and a composition. In this crucial point of his thought, which he continuously reiterated, under the urgency of the Kantian syntheticism, because of his preoccupation with the polemic with Kant, Galluppi’s results were often little persuasive, though he was generally very clear. His punctual criticism against the kind and the examples of the synthetic judgments given by Kant in the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason were justifiable. Nonetheless this criticism reveals his incomprehension of the Kantian syntheticism, of the conception that posits at the basis of the cognitive process an active moment that operates a connection, after which alone an analysis would be possible. His desire to preserve the objectivity that appeared to be endangered by the critical concept of a priori elements brings him to reduce the cognitive synthesis to a recomposition of elements composed in themselves and decomposed by us. In Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica (ch. 85), he stated, “Synthesis is the faculty of re-uniting the perceptions that analysis has separated. Analysis is thus an essential condition for synthesis.” This means that synthesis re-unites in the judgment “the real elements of a real subject, and re-unites them because in nature they are found united.” It is also true that Galluppi, beside a sintesi reale, “a copy of nature,” posits a sintesi ideale in which thought not only decomposes and re-composes the complex perception of the real objects but also places the objects near each other and superimposes one on the other, though the objects in nature may be separate. Product of these paragons is the formulation of ideas of some relations that are attached to the compared objects, as he explains in Saggio filosofico sulla critica della conoscenza (ch. 3, p. 31). As Guzzo pointed out, “The sense gives the terms; but the spirit, from the depth of itself, posits the relations…. Up to this point, Galluppi is a pure Kantian” (I termini li dà il senso; ma i rapporti li pone lo spirito, traendoli dal proprio fondo…. Galluppi è kantiano schietto). But Guzzo continued: But he does not stop here. For him, all the relations are not of the same nature. Those of identity and diversity are merely logical relations: they are subjective in their origin, because the spirit does not find them, but posits them; they are also subjective in value, because nothing corresponds to them within reality. The rapports of cause and substance, which are subjective in their origin, are objective in value, because they have a correlative term in the reality. In this is found the anti-Kantianism of Galluppi (Ma egli non si ferma qui. Per lui i rapporti non son tutti di eguale natura. Quelli di identità e diversità sono mere relazioni logiche: soggettive di origine, perchè lo spirito non

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY letrova, ma le pone; soggettive di valore, perchè nulla corrisponde loro nella realtà. Ma i rapporti di sostanza e di causa, soggettivi di origine, sono oggettivi di valore, perchè hanno corrispon-denza nella realtà. Qui è l’antikantianismo di Galluppi).

Here we must ask ourselves whether this anti-Kantism would not cancel out the previous Kantism; whether Galluppi’s a priori would not be identical to the one acknowledged by the Empiricists and his syntheticism like that of the Lockeans. 6. Galluppi’s a priori. Sensation To resolve this problem, as Guzzo also correctly noticed, it would be necessary to examine the original experience, on which the spirit would act with analysis and synthesis, in such a way to generate its secondary experience. To speak of a Kantism of Galluppi it would be necessary to show in this instance something corresponding to the transcendental esthetic, when, on the contrary, Galluppi insisted on the a posteriori of all primitive experience. Then if for him, as he wrote in 1841, innate ideas and forms a priori are identical, if the a priori judgments are only identical judgments, one cannot see in what sense Galluppi’s criticism would not be empiricist, but transcendental. It has been pointed out already that Galluppi’s preoccupation was of a different kind and was directed in a sense contrary to the one that animated Kantism. We cannot but recall the famous distinction of Fichte between idealists and dogmatists, when reading in Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica (ch. 15) this clearly anti-Kantian conclusion: If skeptic philosophy is absurd, critical philosophy is even more absurd, because it pretends to unite the absolute ignorance of things with the science of our faculty of knowing. Every philosophy is essentially dogmatic, and cannot be otherwise than dogmatic (Se la filosofia scettica è assurda, la filosofia critica lo è maggiormente; poiché essa pretende di unire insieme l’ignoranza assoluta delle cose colla scienza della nostra facoltà di conoscere. Ogni filosofia è essenzialmente dommatica, e non può essere che dommatica). It is undeniable that Galluppi sensed very strongly the need that forced his whole thought to gravitate toward sensation, toward the point of departure of any elaboration, the point where the question of the validity of external knowledge and of all the ulterior reflected elaboration must be completely considered. Bertrando Spaventa and especially Gentile believed to have precisely found in this fact, against the old positions of Ottavio Colecchi, the pretext to sustain the Kantism of Galluppi. It was an unwitting Kantism, in accord with Spaventa, but nevertheless still firm if, as Gentile observed, “his sensation was not the ingenuous sensation of realist empiricism: but con-

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sciousness of sensing and thus a principle totally internal, subjective, and even spiritual” (la sua sensazione non era la ingenua sensazione dell’empirismo realista: ma coscienza di sentire e quindi principio tutto interno e soggettivo, e però spirituale). We should come back to this point if we would decide on the significance of his work. His point of departure was the Cartesian cogito understood as the conscious transparency that allows the subject to be present with his interiority. Galluppi was motivated to criticize Descartes who, basing himself and relying on the evidence of consciousness, had invested with such evidence not the trans-subjective existence of the thing sensed but only the idea or representation of it. Thought alone, transparent to itself, is certain in so far as it is thought. This certainty is not extended to the things outside the circle of thought. Only the appeal to the veracity of God could break the circle of doubt. This was the point in which Galluppi found Descartes insufficient. If consciousness is evidence, the same certainty should be attributed to both the terms of the conscious rapport, to the subjective pole as well as to the objective one. If cogitare is the justification of being, the same justification should be valid for the subject (the “I”) as well as for the object (“outside the ‘I’”). In Lezioni di Logica e Metafisica (ch. 5), Galluppi suggested that Descartes did not know … that the veracity of the interior sense speaks also in favor of the veracity of our faculties of perception; and that, consequently, by admitting the veracity of the interior sense, we are required to admit, under some aspects, the veracity of the exterior senses, that of memory and that of reasoning (non conobbe … che la veracità del senso intimo depone ancora in favore della veracità delle nostre facoltà di percezione; e che in conseguenza, ammettendo la veracità del senso intimo, siamo obbligati ammettere, sotto certi riguardi, la veracità dei sensi esterni, quella della memoria e quella del raziocinio). The above passage shows how rich in meaning Galluppi’s objection was, because the cogito ergo sum, the “I think, therefore I am,” is, under some aspects, also a cogito ergo est, “I think, therefore it is,” investing with the same necessary existence both the contained object and the form or subject of knowing. In which case, the accentuation was posited on that “under some aspects,” that is, on the deeper significance that it is convenient to assign to the reality that reveals itself in the act of perception. Galluppi was more satisfied with sensing this exigency than with trying to resolve it. He showed this in Saggio filosofico sulla critica della conoscenza when he dealt with the problem of the foundation of objectivity through the examination of Kantism. How is it possible that the intellect, which is subjective, could render objective the sensation that by its nature is subjective? As Galluppi goes on to say, “It is impossible with some subjective elements to construct an objective one” (È impossibile di fare con degli elementi soggettivi un oggettivo). Only the “pernicious influence” of Descartes could support the contrary opinion. In reality, the act of consciousness wit-

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nesses as equally objective the “I” (me) and what is “outside the ‘I’” (fuor di me), which is necessary in the same degree as the “I” (me). The insidious point of Galluppi’s construction was exactly found in this. If objectivity is not conferred by the intellect, by the category of the intellect, in a Kantian fashion, to the datum, then it must be derived from sensibility itself. This is the reason why he gravitated toward sensibility all his attention, in an acute inquiry, albeit not free from the uncertainties, which the singular formulation of his own problems obliged him to face. To the empiricists he objected that sensation is not subjective; sensation does not make the world subjective. If this was true, nothing could ever return objectivity to it. No objectifying intellect exists but a felt objectification. In other words, the original synthesis of “I” and “outside the ‘I’” posits as equally real its terms, the external (given by the external sense) and the internal (given by the internal sensibility). With this, the problem is reimported: What is the meaning of this reality? Is it the reality by which the two terms live in that rapport? In which case, if it is right not to subordinate or reduce the one to the other—me, the “I” and fuor di me, outside the “I”—it is also necessary to admit that it would be impossible to speak of “their reality” outside that rapport. Sensation would not be opposed to the intellect as the subjective to the objective. Sensation would be the initial mode of a process and, if we wish, the end of another. Sensation would be fully worthy for everything it could give but without allowing the laceration that would posit as per se subsisting, with the same characteristic with which they are in the rapport, the aspects of the rapport itself. Galluppi realized the difficulty, since he confessed in Saggio filosofico sulla critica della conoscenza, “A terrible difficulty indeed, which often left me frightened” (terribile difficoltà e dalla quale sono spesso rimasto spaventato). Rosmini objected that all the objectivity that Galluppi searched for, was enclosed within the limits of the subject. Galluppi’s philosophy, in the opinion of Rosmini, is a philosophy “that goes on in a perpetual circle within the human subject, and in the human subject nothing immutable exists; there is no stable point about which the lever could pivot” (si volge in circolo perpetuo dentro al soggetto-uomo, e nel soggetto-uomo non vi ha nulla d’immutabile; manca il punto fermo a cui appoggiare la leva). Galluppi’s solution, in the last analysis, was unable to overcome the problem, or the formulation of the problem, because he acknowledged the subjectifying character of sensation. The qualities one sensed are different from the characteristics that things have in themselves. They are in the “I” (me). They are the translation of extraneous elements into my own terms: I am asked: what is this external quality, object of the sensation of flavor? It is, I answer, the action of the saporous body on me. I have no consciousness separately from this action, but I am conscious of the sensation, which is the reaction of me, it is my reaction. When I perceive the sensation as a reaction, I perceive in the sensation the exter-

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nal action, but since I cannot perceive the action alone, without the reaction, I cannot know it in itself. The action of the saporous body remains an unknown thing, which I cannot determine but that it is positive (Mi si replica: che cosa è mai questa qualità esterna, oggetto della sensazione del sapore? È, io rispondo, l’azione del corpo saporoso sul me. Io non ho coscienza isolatamente di quest’azione; ma son conscio della sensazione, la quale è la reazione del me; percependo la sensazione come una reazione, io percepisco nella sensazione l’azione esterna, ma non potendo percepire l’azione sola, senza la reazione, io non la posso conoscere in se stessa, ella é un’incognita, che io non posso determinare, ma che è tuttora positiva). Sensation therefore cannot and could not provide reality in itself but only a translation of it into my own subjective language, “The whole world of bodies is a complex of phenomena or appearances because what is received from the outside cannot be separated from the mode in which it is received” (Tutto il mondo dei corpi non è che un complesso di fenomeni o di apparenze, poiché ciò che si riceve dal di fuori non può isolarsi dal modo onde si riceve). Given all this, it is not possible to see how Galluppi could be superior to Locke, in whom sensation also is the self-revealing in subjective terms of something in itself objectively real. If the idea that sensation is the first surfacing of a reality within human horizon could be a fecund idea, it does not seem that Galluppi has particularly developed it, so preoccupied as he was of sustaining overall its objectivity. The empiricist formulation can be found again when, in the examination to which we referred, of the contribution given by thought to the connection of the datum, it is attributed to thought itself only the function of positing the rapport of identity and diversity. The reason is that if the other notions, such as cause and substance, are formed by the mind, they are so formed because objective, justified in their objectivity by the witnessing of the “I” (me) and of its rapport with the “outside of the ‘I’” (fuor di me). In reference to this, Gentile was perfectly right in vindicating the activity of the spirit both in positing the ideal synthesis (sintesi ideale) and in elaborating the real synthesis (sintesi reale). Not even Empiricism has doubted the spiritual activity elaborating the rapport of identity and diversity and, in addition, what in Galluppi expressed the rapport of substance and cause was not the Kantian categorization, “because their objectivity is not an objectivity of value—in which case, posited by the intellect—but an objectivity resulted from the correspondence with the object in itself” (ché la loro oggettività non è oggettività di valore—e quindi posta dall’intelletto—ma oggettività scaturita dalla corrispondenza con l’oggetto in sé). Gentile opportunely recalled one of Galluppi’s sentences that could make us think of an objectivity of value, “The objective denotes then that element of our knowledge to which a reality in itself corresponds” (l’oggettivo denota

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allora quell’elemento della nostra conoscenza, a cui corrisponde una realtà in sé). But, if that is true, it is also true that Galluppi hundreds of times insisted on the closed down circle of subjectivity within which the intellect limits the judgment in accord with which reality is demanded due to the irreducibility of sense. For this reason, Rosmini said repeatedly that it is not possible to identify a logical merely subjective necessity, which is proper to human thought alone, with metaphysical necessity. And Gentile concluded, “Galluppi’s science like that of Kant closed itself in the impassable circle of the phenomenon; thus, he ends, in science, with the criticism that he wanted to correct” (La sua scienza come quella di Kant s’è chiusa nella cerchia invalicabile del fenomeno; sicché egli riesce, per la scienza, a quel criticismo che voleva correggere). In reality, more than with the criticism of Kant, he ended with the criticism of the skepticism that he feared in Kant, to which corresponded on another side a pure dogmatism. Galluppi’s weak point is found not so much in his having reliance on conscious evidence and his desire to vindicate objectivity outside of Kantism, as much as in having been unable to move out of the difficulties of which he was aware but could never overcome. 7. Practical Philosophy Galluppi, while not admitting the synthesis a priori in its theoretical part, was instead accepting it at the practical level. Galluppi’s ethics, if it were not so loaded with sterile discussions, could be counted among the most useful efforts of his thought. This ethics was outlined mostly in Elementi di filosofia of 1826; but it was developed in Filosofia della Volontà, published in four successive volumes from 1832 to 1840. Human beings are not only knowledge, they are also action. In the field of action, it is convenient to distinguish clearly between an activity performed in view of pleasure or an activity we call moral, accomplished in view of duty. Galluppi refused to consider the morality of pleasure as a human morality. To search for happiness, and subordinate everything to such end, is a morality for beasts instead of for human beings. It is happiness, not moral life. Morality is something else; it is found in listening to the voice of duty that resounds in our conscience: I agree with the philosopher of Königsberg that in human beings two principles are found that determine our will: pleasure and duty…. I agree that duty determines the will by itself, independently from pleasure, and that duty cannot subordinate itself to happiness without its own destruction (Io convengo col filosofo di Koenisberg, che vi sono nell’uomo due principî determinanti della nostra volontà, il piacere e il dovere…. Io convengo che il dovere determina per se stesso, indipendentemente dal piacere, e che esso non può subordinarsi alla felicità senza distruggersi).

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The principle of duty comes “from us, not from the objects.” It is an evident truth, “essential to our own reason.” It is not innate, but it is such that it originates necessarily from the constitution itself of the human spirit: The human being is made of such nature that the notion of duty springs up, in the occasions, from its own depth. This notion of duty, in respect to its origin, is a subjective notion because it comes from the subject who must act. The notion of duty comes from the inside of ourselves, and as it is applied to the actions, which present themselves to the spirit, constitutes those judgments that are precepts or commands (L’uomo è costruito di tal natura, che la nozione del dovere, sorte, nelle occasioni, dal suo proprio fondo: ella, riguardo alla sua origine, è una nozione soggettiva venendo dal soggetto che dee agire. La nozione del dovere sorte dall’interno di noi medesimi, ed applicandosi alle azioni che si presentano allo spirito costituisce quei giudizi, che sono precetti o comandi). Liberty is strictly connected with duty. In human beings, the presence of duty implies the presence of liberty, “The consciousness of the interior law contains the consciousness of one’s own liberty. The command presuppose in the person to whom the command is directed the power of executing or not executing it” (La coscienza della legge interiore contiene la coscienza della propria libertà. Il commando suppone in colui a cui è diretto il potere di eseguirlo o di non eseguirlo). In this way, we have arrived at the Kantian, “You ought, therefore you can” that Galluppi supported with the witness of conscience, which gives us the sense of power proper of the will for the good. He stated, “Liberty is a primitive truth of conscience.” The third point within Galluppi’s morality, after duty and liberty, is happiness, which, though not the primary object of moral conduct, is always its indissoluble reward. Already in 1816, in the academic oration for the celebration of St. Alfonso de’ Liguori, Galluppi narrated: I enter the sanctuary of my heart and there I read these primitive and fundamental verities of my normal being. I necessarily want to be happy. I ought to live the life of duty. Virtue deserves happiness. Vice deserves punishment. These are the truths of my sentiments: they are indelible. They constitute my moral being. I would be in contradiction with myself, if I were not to admit all of them in their integrity (Io rientro nel santuario del mio cuore; io vi leggo queste verità primitive e fondamentali del mio essere normale. Io voglio necessariamente essere felice. Io debbo vivere la vita del dovere. La virtú merita la felicità. Il vizio merita la pena. Queste verità sono di sentimento: esse sono indelebili: esse costituiscono il mio essere morale; io sarei in contraddizione con me stesso non ammettendole tutte nella loro integrità).

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After proffering the famous apostrophe of Kant to duty, Galluppi considered happiness as the consciousness of the accomplished duty. In the Elementi di filosofia, while fighting the Kantian rigor without actually opposing it, he would assert: Some German philosophers have pretended that obedience to duty must be the effect of a pure respect of reason for law, without any kind of pleasure, and not even of love. Such doctrine is false, and contrary to the indisputable testimony of our conscience (Alcuni filosofi alemanni hanno preteso che l’ubbidienza al dovere dee esser l’effetto del puro rispetto della ragione per la legge, senza alcuna specie di piacere, né di amore. Una tal dottrina è falsa, e contraria alla testimonianza irrefragabile della coscienza). And he explained with these words: [If] one ought not to be just and beneficial for the purpose of happiness … then virtue would be more pure and uninterested, more alive would be the pleasure, which results from the consciousness of having practiced virtue…. Virtuous man wants duty for duty’s sake: this is the ultimate goal of his will. Consequently, he does not perform his duty for pleasure, but pleasure is not left out in the performance of duty ([Se] non si dee essere giusto e benefico, per essere felice … piú la virtú sarà pura e disinteressata, piú vivo sarà il piacere, che risulta dalla coscienza di averla praticata…. L’uomo virtuoso vuole il dovere per se stesso: e questo è il fine ultimo della sua volontà; egli in conseguenza, non fa il dovere per il piacere; ma il piacere non lascia di accompagnare la pratica del dovere). 8. Ottavio Colecchi. The Influence of Victor Cousin A systematic adversary of Galluppi was Ottavio Colecchi, a noble man, and priest, who knew how to relive Kantism in its loftiest moral inspiration. Colecchi was a convinced Kantian, so much that his disciples were intent on demonstrating his originality in comparison to Kant, but without success. Today, he is still imagined as a consoling visitor of Luigi Settembrini in his cell, proudly showing disdain before the constituted powers, educating intolerant souls of young people ready to face prison and police persecutions in order not to dishonor human dignity, which was celebrated in such great and lofty manner in the Kantian ethics. It was probably for this reason that the Hegelians, with Spaventa at their head, looked with great sympathy at Colecchi. These Hegelians were too different from the well-trained and obedient youth of the school of Galluppi, the likes of Paolo Emilio Tulelli, Giacomo Racioppi, and Luigi Palmieri, all “devoted to the traditions of home, to the pious beliefs, and more or less to the optimal prince!” That is the way that Ferdi-

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nand II of Bourbon appeared to Luigi Palmieri, Galluppi’s successor, while on the contrary the disciples of Colecchi, suffering in bitter chains, were insurgent against the “feral despot.” On this point, Gentile observed that “it is of this antagonism between the two schools” that we must be aware in order to comprehend their reciprocal rapports. In his writings, partially published originally in the journal Progresso of Naples and collected thereafter in the incomplete Quistioni Filosofiche (Naples, 1843), Colecchi on one hand showed the inconsistency of Galluppi’s observations to Kant, and on the other hand exposed and made his own the essence of the transcendental philosophy of the three critiques. When he found the Kantian thought obscure and insufficient, as in the doctrine of schematism and in the deduction of the categories, he himself was not able to expose clearly his own thought, certainly conscious of Kant’s difficulties, but without the ability of resolving them. This does not reduce the value of his acuity in the polemic, in which he showed to have understood the significance of Kantism, of which he admired over anything else the doctrine of practical reason, which in his eyes truly constituted the highest expression of modern philosophy. His sensibility for problems between human beings was not the basis of only his conduct so dear to his disciples, but also, as he consciously reflected upon it, the dictator of excellent thoughts: Woe to the sensible person who dared to break the veil of society and refused to abandon itself to that theatrical illusion so necessary to our tranquility! Its soul in this life finds itself in the womb of nothing and this is the cruelest of torments! (Guai all’uomo sensibile che ha osato di squarciare il velo della società e ricusa di abbandonarsi a quella illusione teatrale sí necessaria al nostro riposo; la sua anima si trova in vita nel seno del nulla; egli è questo il piú crudele dei supplizi). Colecchi was a Kantian of strict observance, with an inexplicable incomprehension of Hegel, whom he approached later in life, but had some sympathy for Cousin, from whom he deduced motives of criticism about Kantism. French eclecticism easily succeeded in Italy and had a vast diffusion. Through Cousin, two ancient needs, now conjoined, could find satisfaction: the concreteness of experience and the Platonic aspiration for the transcendent. The historical interests of the French School helped to enlarge the borders and consolidate the bases of Italian culture. Galluppi had published in 1831 in Naples a version of Cousin’s Fragments Philosophiques as Frammenti; in 1842, Francesco Trinchera translated the Philosophie de Kant as Lezioni sulla filosofia di Kant that contained also Galluppi’s interesting notes. In the words of Francesco De Sanctis, Cousin was in Naples in the intermediate period that preceded the diffusion of Hegelianism, when the interest was more alive for the philosophical European culture, especially German. This was due to the diffusion of Cousin’s writings

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and created hostility towards the pioneers of the reaction against sensism. Stanislao Gatti, writing in 1846 Della filosofia in Italia, pronounced on Galluppi a hard albeit exact judgment: His true merit is certainly that of having been the first in Italy to feel the exigency of a philosophy with wider aspirations to oppose to the minute investigations of Condillac, Tracy, and the others of that school. This is the true merit of Galluppi, and even for only this he is due a place in the history of Italian philosophy. It is true also that his weapons were most of the time taken from the Scottish School, or even from that same Locke who was the father of the doctrines he intended to fight. This does not diminish his merit or the obligation that the Italian philosophy owes him. Equally, he was the first who started to divulge among us the system of Kant…. As for his own system, composed in part with the theories of Locke and in other parts with those of Reid, I don’t believe, if we want to be honest, that one could speak of them with any kind of admiration (Il suo vero merito sí è quello di essere stato il primo in Italia a sentir la necessità di una filosofia piú ampia da opporre alle minute investigazioni di Condillac, del Tracy, e degli altri ancora di quella scuola. Codesto è il vero merito di Galluppi, e per questo solo gli è dovuto un posto nell’istoria della filosofia italiana. Vero è che le sue armi erano il piú delle volte domandate alla scuola scozzese, o eziandio a quel medesimo Locke che era il padre delle dottrine le quali egli voleva combattere; ma codesto non diminuisce né il suo merito, né l’obbligo che la filosofia italiana gli deve avere. Medesimamente egli è il primo che abbia incominciato a divulgare tra noi il sistema di Kant…. Quanto poi al suo proprio sistema, composto in parte dalle teoriche di Locke e in parte da quelle di Reid, non credo che volendo esser giusti si potrebbe parlarne con alcuna ammirazione). Stanislao Gatti, as an eclectic friend of Cousin, later approached Schelling and Hegel but always manifested his special interest for the historical development of thought, which was the truly positive influence of Cousin. Tommaseo understood this point when writing to Dragonetti, who at the time was participating in a program on eclecticism. He observed: Eclecticism is a system, a doctrine—as I was jokingly telling a friend a few days past—a doctrine without criterion. To choose the true from the false, the good from the bad, it is impossible for eclecticism without knowing what truth and goodness are. Truth by nature is necessarily eclectic, because it hits the mark and because there is part of truth in every error. This does not mean that by putting together the remnants of worm-eaten clothes, a new cloth can be made, good for any period of time. As a system and as a doctrine, eclecticism seems to me

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most false, but as a method it possesses its useful side. To search goodness in badness, the unity in the variety, to compare personal ideas to those of others, to bring them together to rectify them, is to me the most beautiful thing. This is the intention that alone is worthy of rendering tolerable and agreeable the study of the history of philosophy ([Eclettismo] sistema, dottrina—come scherzando io dicevo giorni sono ad un amico—dottrina senza criterio. Scegliere il vero dal falso, il buono dal reo, gli è impossibile senza sapere che sia vero e buono. La verità è per se stessa necessariamente eclettica, perché coglie nel segno, e perché in tutti gli errori è una parte di verità; ma non è però che mettendo insieme gli scampoli d’un panno tarlato se ne faccia un vestito nuovo, né di grande durata. Come sistema, come dottrina, mi pare falsissimo; come metodo, ha il suo lato buono. Cercare il bene nel male, l’uno nel vario; confrontare le idee altrui colle proprie, ravvicinarle per rettificarle reciprocamente mi par cosa bellissima; intenzione che sola vale a render tollerabile e ameno lo studio della storia filosofica). Giuseppe De Vincenzi, in “Discorso primo dell’eclettismo in Francia,” published in 1835 in Progresso, understood in its greater part the value of eclecticism, as it has been described in the above citation. So did Luigi Blanch, even though his work cannot be reduced within the ambiance of Cousin’s position. At the same time, on the contrary, Stefano Cusani, the “good Cusani” of the school of Basilio Puoti, from eclecticism was arriving at the Hegelian identification of history and philosophy or, better, of philosophy and history of philosophy. He said, “In history there is the whole philosophy. To recognize philosophy in history is the inevitable condition of every philosopher” (Nella storia è tutta quanta la filosofia, e riconoscerla nella storia è condizione non evitabile di ogni filosofo). In his articles he was already digging into the difficulties of the Hegelian system, when death prematurely came. To the French eclecticism of Cousin, Poli counter-opposed the Italian universal eclecticism, which truly was his own, and of which in 1823 he had already made the following eulogy, in an oration “Intorno al vero e giusto spirito filosofico” (On the true and proper philosophical spirit), “Studious youth must apply itself in philosophy to Empiricism and to Rationalism, as the systems that well combined together induce to the discovery of a true and reasonable Eclecticism (La gioventú studiosa dee attenersi nella filosofia all’Empirismo ed al Razionalismo, siccome quelli che ben combinati insieme conducono alla scoperta di un vero e ragionevole Eclettismo). Reading in the “Temps” of 5 December 1835 that “M. Poli a introduit l’Eccletisme en Italie” (Mister Poli has introduced Eclecticism in Italy), he felt insulted and disdainfully exclaimed: If it were possible to make a joke of things so serious, we could say, for the sole reason of the dates, that Cousin (1828) is the one who

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY teaches the principles of Poli in Paris, and not that Poli (1823) is the one who teaches the principles of Cousin in Milan (Se fosse lecito lo scherzo in cose tanto gravi, bisognerebbe dire per la sola ragione di data che Cousin (1828) è quegli che insegna a Parigi i principî del Poli, e non già Poli (1823) quegli che insegna a Milano i principî di Cousin).

To the empirico-psychological and historical eclecticism of Cousin, Poli opposed his own, an empirico-rational, universal, and systematic empiricism, which he developed in seven sections: (1) a philosophical principle that does not inquire into the whole object of science is erroneous; (2) a philosophical principle that does not explain the whole object of science is erroneous; (3) the whole object of science constitutes the spiritual and supra-sensible object considered in all its relationships; (4) empiricism by itself brings to skepticism; (5) rationalism by itself brings to skepticism; (6) the only veracious system is the orderly coordination of empiricism and rationalism; (7) such system is unique, universal, most original, and Italian. Poli would then honestly add that a system better structured and solid than the one of Cousin is still to be constructed. This was the reason for his scarce fortune. His most candid confession, then, was: The eclecticism that is universal and truly positive has not yet been constructed, and it cannot present itself as a sufficiently satisfying philosophy that could be a valid challenge or support to the systems of philosophy already accredited by tradition (L’Eclettismo, almeno universale, e veramente positivo, non essendo ancora compiuto, non può presentarsi siccome una filosofia abbastanza soddisfacente che serva di valido sostentamento ancora ai sistemi già accreditati dalla abitudine). 9. Vincenzo De Grazia Beside the accusation of empiricism that he made against Galluppi, Colecchi also reproached Galluppi for not having taken into account the Kantian synthetic a priori judgments, although a faithful disciple of Galluppi, Antonio Fulci, had tried in vain to defend the master. Another individual who occupied a prominent place among the critics of Galluppi was Vincenzo De Grazia, whose major works are a philosophical essay on the reality of the human science, Saggio filosofico sulla realtà della scienza umana (Naples, 1839–1842), in which already from the title it can be seen how it opposes Galluppi’s Saggio and Prospetto di filosofia ortodossa (Naples, 1851), in which the systematic discussion on Galluppi is combined with that on Rosmini. In Saggio filosofico sulla realtà della scienza umana, Galluppi is not openly discussed, but the work intends implicitly to be a demolition of Kantism and of the philosophy of experience that the philosopher of Tropea had delineated. It is De

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Grazia’s contention, relying on evidence of fact and of reason as the ultimate foundation of knowledge that Kantian philosophy oscillates between an arbitrary dogmatism and the most unjustified concession of common sense. Dogmatism is to aver the adaptability of the multiplicity within the forms of the intuitions; dogmatism is to admit the external origin of sensations; dogmatism is the theory of the a priori elements of the intellect. Kant, vacillant between transcendental idealism and empirical realism, was unsuccessful in the effort of welding together the two branches of his thought. And the worse happened to him in his appeal to practical reason. De Grazia, in Saggio filosofico sulla realtà della scienza umana (Part I, sect. 2, ch. 2, art. 2), wrote: After declaring illusory the view of reason, Galluppi becomes aware that the irresistible conviction of the interior sense cannot be connected with an illusory view. Therefore, he separates the irresistible conviction from the evidence, which was unknown to him, and retaining conviction isolated in practical reason embraces the faith of the interior sense, and comes together with Reid. But the public spirit could not remain satisfied with practical reason as it is with the philosophy of common sense. The reason is that Kant had already manipulated evidence, while Reid kept the most prudent aptitude of not dealing at all with the thorny analysis (Dopo aver dichiarata illusoria la veduta della ragione s’avvede che il convincimento irresistibile del senso intimo non può andare annesso ad una veduta illusoria. Separa quindi il convincimento irresistibile dalla evidenza, da lui sconosciuta, e ritenendolo isolato nella ragion pratica abbraccia la fede dell’intimo senso, e s’incontra con Reid. Ma lo spirito pubblico non potea restar cosí appagato della ragion pratica, come lo è della filosofia del senso comune, perchè Kant avea già sfigurato l’evidenza mentre Reid tenne il partito piú prudente di non toccare la scabrosa analisi). When evidence is shaky, since for De Grazia it is the unique support of truth, nothing more can give us the certainty of something. “All Cartesians and Kant had no means to verify this admirable agreement between the laws of our thought and the reality of things” (Non vi fu mezzo alcuno pe’ cartesiani e per Kant, onde verificare questo mirabile accordo tra le leggi del nostro pensiero e la realtà delle cose). This is where Galluppi was wrong. He accepted the critical instances, even the skeptical ones, which modern thought brought against evidence, in order to pretend thereafter to found himself on sense and proceed analytically beyond sense itself. De Grazia in Prospetto (p. 127) objected: “The most accurate observation of the phenomenon of sensation offers no characteristic that could serve as an indication that we effectively sense beyond the external body” (l’osservazione piú accurata del fenomeno della sensazione non offre alcun carattere, che valesse quale indicazione che noi effettivamente sentiamo

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oltre il corpo esterno). Galluppi, for this reason, appeals to reason and finds analytically in the sensation our reality, our passivity and, therefore, the external existence. In this way sensation would be transcended by our interiority, and we would be reaching an apodictic demonstration of the world. Indeed, Galluppi in Considerazioni filosofiche sull’idealismo trascendentale (Milan, 1845, p. 188) concluded: The consciousness of me being affected by sensations is the consciousness of me being passive. To sense myself as passive is the same as sensing an “X” [unknown something] modifying me. The spirit senses itself as limited, and in its limitation senses “the outside(r)” that limits it (La coscienza del me affetto da sensazioni è la coscienza del me paziente; sentir se stesso paziente è lo stesso che sentire una X che lo modifica. Lo spirito sente se stesso come limitato, e nel suo limite sente il di fuori che lo limita). Therefore, we reach the object with the senses; with psychology, we construct ontology. Two great verities seemed to Galluppi to have been forever acquired. “One must begin from psychology … in the rigorous sense of the terms…. Starting from psychology, we can arrive at ontology (ibid., p. 197). De Grazia’s criticism is serried and stringent. We do not sense ourselves as passive. Passivity and activity imply the reference to the will, they imply a double distinction that can be had only in judgment, at a heterogeneous level in respect to that of pure sensing, “To go from being involuntary to the idea of passivity, our sensations have to go through a distance that has never been overcome. We never sense passivity; passivity can only be judged” (Per passare dall’essere involontarie le nostre sensazioni all’idea di passività, v’è tutta una distanza che non fu mai superata. La passività non è mai da noi sentita, è giudicata). The other conclusion that to sense implies the existence of an unknown external cause is even worse. First, the cause could be internal; second, to posit an object would be positing something subsistent per se, but such position implies a series of judgments. As for the assertion that to sense the limit means to sense the limiting, De Grazia said there is nothing more absurd than that. In Prospetto di filosofia ortodossa (pp. 128–133) he wrote: Even if there was a limit common to the spirit and to the external body, the spirit would apprehend that limit as its own limit, and there would be needed another mental operation in order to apprehend that the one’s own limit is also the limit of another being (Quando anche vi fosse un limite comune allo spirito e al corpo esterno, pur nondimeno lo spirito lo apprenderebbe come proprio limite, e vi sarebbe uopo di altra operazione mentale per apprendere che il proprio limite è anche limite di un altro essere). De Grazia concluded that it is impossible to transcend sensing within sense, as

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it is equally impossible, beginning from an abstract reason, to rejoin with the concreteness of sensing. Galluppi’s philosophy of experience fails, in the attempt to obtain empirically from experience itself what is meta-empirical. On the other hand, Rosmini’s philosophy, closed within the idea of the possible being, does not reach the real, or it reaches it with sensation, leaving unfilled the hiatus between the sensible and the intelligible. These two terms were not to be confused, counter-opposed, and disconnected but were to be made to correspond, as they were considered correspondent in Thomism: Factual evidence, reasonable evidence, immediate or demonstrative, and their alliance in the inductions: these are our means of knowledge…. Perceptions and truths impressed originally in our spirit, for the purpose of helping our faculty of knowing that by itself is impotent to acquire the principles of knowledge, or to help the faculty of knowing fused with the faculty of sensing (Evidenza di fatto, evidenza di ragione, sia immediata, sia dimostrativa, e loro alleanza nelle induzioni; ecco i nostri legittimi mezzi di conoscere…. Percezioni e verità impresse originalmente al nostro spirito, per supplire alla nostra facoltà di conoscere, impotente per se stessa ad acquistare i principî delle conoscenze, ovvero la facoltà di conoscere confusa con la facoltà di sentire). Galluppi and Rosmini: they are the errors to be avoided; and let us not mention the so-called epopea giobertiana (the epoch of Gioberti), according to the opinion expressed by Vincenzo Padula in his writing to De Grazia. The only salvation is to be found in a return to the Thomistic abstraction. In Saggio filosofico sulla realtà della scienza umana (Opere, vol. 5, pp. 345–347, edition of 1948, Milan), De Grazia explained: Physical light is the means for the eye to see the objects. Evidence is the interior light by means of which human intelligence, in the natural order, sees absolute truth. Natural lights are ideas and truths inspired by our spirit and our reason is born equipped with them. In the natural order, evidence is the true light that enlightens human intelligence. Experimental philosophy alone can reflect the total and pure primitive light. In the second stage of intellective life, reason displayed all its power. The human being possesses absolute truth, and in such a possession it senses the dignity of its nature. The philosophy of experience, displaying the reflected light of truth, duplicates in us the precious sentiment that serves as the continuous encouragement to moral perfecting (La luce materiale è il mezzo onde l’occhio vede gli oggetti. L’evidenza è la luce interiore onde l’umana intelligenza, nell’ordine naturale, vede la verità assoluta. Non già idee e verità ispirate al nostro spirito sono i lumi naturali, di cui la ragione umana nasce fornita; ma nell’ordine naturale l’evidenza è la vera luce che illumina l’umana

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY intelligenza. La sola filosofia sperimentale può riflettere tutta intera e pura la luce primitiva. Nel secondo periodo della vita intellettiva la ragione ha spiegato tutto il suo potere; l’uomo è già nel possesso della verità assoluta; e in tal possesso ei sente la dignità della propria natura. La filosofia dell’esperienza, dispiegando la luce riflessa della verità, raddoppia in noi quel prezioso sentimento che serve di segreta continua spinta al perfezionamento morale).

De Grazia, separating himself from Galluppi and opposing the surging Neapolitan Hegelianism, believed to resolve every modern philosophical problem by joining the side of Luigi Taparelli and Matteo Liberatore. The following words of his Saggio filosofico remain greatly significant: A venerable ancient philosopher, not seduced by the brilliant Platonic inspirations that were instead accepted with enthusiasm by his contemporaries, when questioned on the reality of what we know, calmly answered: “I possess the evidence of truth in the depth of my consciousness, but I don’t see its light reflected within the philosophical systems.” The profound thinker was not wrong in saying that, being a period when the systems were merely arbitrary hypotheses…. However, he added the austere foresight: “This would never be obtained until or unless in the future the origin of our knowing would be discovered, or, which amounts to the same, the philosophers would not be satisfied with a hypothetical theory on the origin of knowledge” (Un severo antico filosofo, cui non sedussero le brillanti ispirazioni platoniche accolte con entusiasmo dai suoi contemporanei, interrogato sulla realtà delle umane conoscenze, freddamente rispose: “Ho l’evidenza della verità nel fondo della coscienza; ma non ne veggo riflesso il lume ne’ sistemi filosofici.” Non s’ingannava il profondo pensatore ad un’epoca in cui i sistemi non erano piú che arbitrarie ipotesi…. Egli però aggiunse l’austero presagio seguente: “Né mai ciò si otterrà, finché non si sarà scoverta l’origine delle nostre conoscenze, o, che importa lo stesso, finché i filosofi si contenteranno di una origine ipotetica”).

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 Antonio Rosmini Serbati was born on 24 March 1797 at Rovereto from a rich and noble family. Pietro Orsi, a priest, taught him the first elements of philosophy and, between 1815 and 1816, “with the power of truth and with the sweetness of friendship, teaching him philosophy,” enamored him with virtue, influencing the youth with personal prestige more than with professed doctrines. Drafted in Rome on 3 May 1829, the affectionate dedication to Orsi of Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (New essay on the origin of ideas) is full of a profound gratitude. From his first writings Rosmini opposed the Lockean sensism that was the main component of the education of the time and to which Orsi subscribed. It is said that, at this time, Rosmini read and meditated Plato, deducing from these readings objections against his teacher, who was at first embarrassed but then convinced of having an ingenious disciple. Certainly Gioia, Romagnosi, and the most conspicuous representatives of Condillac’s movement found immediately a stern adversary in Rosmini, who looked also at Galluppi’s critical empiricism with a serious suspicion. The nature of the philosophical studies of the period 1815–1816 was essentially introductory. Though Rosmini began to approach Kantism through unreliable works and studied Franz Samuel Karpe and Karl Leonhard Reinhold, he still dreamed, on the footsteps of Bacon, to construct “a sacred temple that would represent and express the world” (un sacro tempio il quale rappresenti ed esprima il mondo). Under the influence of sensism, with some modest hints to a separation from it, was the Florentine Cesare Baldinotti, who had taught philosophy at the University of Padua until 1809 but who was still living in 1817 when Rosmini came to study theology in Padua. Rosmini loved to stop and chat with the very old and near to death Baldinotti, raising questions, and observing as he used to do with Orsi. Though Baldinotti made the distinction between act of consciousness, sensible perception, and perception of ideas, he

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remained faithful to empiricism in 1787 with De recta humanae mentis institutione (On the right training of the human mind, Pavia 1787) and in the only volume published in 1817 of the three written on Tentaminum metaphysicorum (Exercises in metaphysics). Baldinotti also authored the first outline of a history of philosophy, Historiae philosophiae prima et expeditissima adumbratio that arrived at Kant and perhaps helped Rosmini to a better knowledge of Kantism. With that book Baldinotti helped also Jacopo Bonfadini who, too, wanted to study Kant. In the fight against the Enlightenment, Rosmini looked for weapons instead of in the French thought of philosophers like Joseph De Maistre and Louis-Gabriel-Antoine Bonald, in the Italian philosophical tradition from Thomas to Gerdil, and the disciple of Gerdil, Tommaso Vincenzo Falletti of Barolo, who in Studio analitico della religione had strenuously fought against Locke and Condillac. Falletti, dealing with the serious problem of a Storia dell’umanità, concluded around 1822 that “a restoration” before anything else must be a spiritual renewal, a triumph of the ideals of the Christian civilization. This would certainly be possible only in a Christian society, in which every power would be posited under the universal authority of the papacy. This was precisely the thesis that Rosmini defended in 1823 in a eulogy of Pious VII. In Padua, Rosmini frequented Tommaseo and established a friendship that continued his whole life. In 1821, he was ordained priest and soon he formulated a life program that seemed to presage the confidence with which, a few years later, he moved to Rome bringing with him the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee together with the constitutions for the establishment of a religious society whose members would be guided by the spirit of evangelical love, the “Istituto della Carità,” to which he would dedicate generously himself. In a world that exalted “reason” and lessened altars, Rosmini wanted to diffuse a doctrine that would restore the solemn principles of the truth already supported by the most venerable tradition, preaching at the same time those maxims of “charity” that are the essence of Christianity. Pious VIII, at the time of the request for the permission to found the “Istituto della Carità,” in 1829, exhorted Rosmini to occupy himself with the study and the writing of books, “It is the will of God that you should occupy yourself with the writing of books. It is your vocation…. Be convinced that you would be able by writing to bring an advantage to your neighbor greater than by exercising any other activity in the sacred ministry (È volontà di Dio che voi vi occupiate nello scrivere de’ libri: tale è la vostra vocazione…. Tenetevi certo, che voi potrete recare un vantaggio assai maggiore al prossimo occupandovi nello scrivere, che non esercitando qualunque altra opera del sacro ministero). No contradiction was seen in the attitude, theoretical and practical, of the young priest, and in his candid conviction that one could not disjoin speculation from action. The spirit of Christian tradition for which charitas is the safer way to reach veritas would nourish his action. He would be seen constantly con-

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cerned with the social problems of his time and with the new rising doctrines. He would be seen not just as a theoretician, but as an actor as well in the drama of the Risorgimento. Graduating in divinity and canonical jurisprudence on 23 June 1822 in Padua with a lucubratiuncula (brief dissertation) on divination, De sybillis, he composed an essay on happiness, Saggio sopra la felicità, which by purposely changing the title would become an essay on hope, Saggio sulla speranza, collected in the second volume of Opusculi filosofici, which was published between 1827 and 1828. This essay was the confutation of an assertion of Foscolo, for whom the only happiness was hope, a discomforting conclusion that to Rosmini appeared directly descended from the predominant sensism. In 1823 in Rome, he befriended the future Pope Gregory XVI, Mauro Cappellari, who would constantly support and encourage him in his studies. He continued in the meantime his attacks against the eminent exponents of sensism and in 1824 published a confutation of Gioia, a writing that was also included in the Opusculi filosofici, together with the one on divine providence in the government of temporal goods and evils, Della Divina Provvidenza nel governo dei beni e dei mali temporali, which had an effect on Manzoni, was edited in 1826, included in the collection of opuscules, re-edited and made part of the Teodicea of 1845. The polemic against Gioia and Romagnosi constituted the central nucleus of the Opusculi filosofici. In the introduction to the second volume of the Opusculi, Rosmini attacked Romagnosi who in 1828, when the first volume of the Opusculi was published, wrote against it an anonymous article in “Biblioteca italiana.” Foscolo, Gioia, and Romagnosi were the three most evident exponents of the revolutionary and Napoleonic mentality, and they stood facing the Rosminian reaction. Practical preoccupation, pedagogical when taken in a wider sense, was the first spring of Rosmini’s reflection. Already in 1827, he had initiated the composition of the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, as he wrote to his ancient teacher, Orsi; and by the end of that year, Rosmini communicated to Tommaseo that the work was ready for the printer. Later, he will say that the work was conceived and drafted in 1829 in Rome, “Center of Catholicity,” on the exhortation of Mauro Cappellari. This work was going to be the first stone of a vast construction of Christian philosophy, the beginning of a reform ab imis fundamentis for the constitution of a philosophy “not mixed with the mysteries of religion, … a healthy philosophy from which could only derive favorable consequences for religion, … a solid philosophy, which could provide the weapons valid for fighting the false and daring contemporary philosophies, and could posit the fundaments of a plain and satisfying theology.” He wrote this on 17 March 1829 from Rome. The great design, which would find actualization in the numerous works intended to complete a determined system in every one of its articulations, had already been conceived; the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, though per se important, could not be separated from the other parts of the huge literary organism. In

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1831, one year after the publication of Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, writing to Pietro Orsi, in Introduzione alla filosofia (pp. 416–417), he observed: Ideology carefully guided me outside the mind, and did so that I could find myself on the borders of ontology, where the discourse falls no longer on ideas, but on things themselves. It is in the text of Ontology, which I have still to publish, that I bring back to its true and supreme unity also the real world, as in that of Ideology I reduced to its unity the ideal world. After this, in Natural Theology, I combined the two worlds, I made the real and ideal worlds to depend from one alone and identical point, from the Being of beings, in which truth, or the mental being, becomes a person undivided from the divine substance (L’Ideologia mi condusse a mano fuori della mente, e fece che mi ritrovassi sul limitare dell’Ontologia, ove il discorso non cade piú sulle idee, ma sulle stesse cose. Ed è nell’Ontologia, non ancora da me pubblicata, che io richiamo alla sua vera e altissima unità anche il mondo reale, come coll’Ideologia ho richiamato alla sua unità il mondo ideale, per dover poi nella Teologia naturale congiungere, cioè far dipendere i due mondi reale e ideale da un solo e medesimo punto, cioè da quell’ente degli enti, nel quale la verità, ossia l’essere mentale, diventa una persona indivisa dalla divina sostanza). Ideology served as an introduction to ontology; an introduction necessary, though insufficient in itself, as Rosmini would observe (Epistles, vol. 8, num. 77) later when in polemic with Gioberti, “The ontological questions, when they are confronted without first having enriched oneself with firm ideological doctrines, was the true reason why the Herculean efforts of the Germans had no effect at all” (Le questioni ontologiche, affrontate senza essersi prima forniti di inconcusse dottrine ideologiche, fu la vera ragione onde a nulla riuscirono gli sforzi erculei dei tedeschi). The Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee was published in 1830; in 1831, Principî di scienza morale was put out for the wedding Castelbarco-Litta, in which the fundaments of ethics in the distinction between eudemonology, or research of sensible goodness, and ethics, properly so-called, are defined. During the same period in Trent in 1832, Rosmini began Antropologia soprannaturale, which he continued to write until 1836, but he never finished it, and the work was posthumously published in 1884. In 1832, while going to Venice, he always stopped at the Benedictine Monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, and there he drafted Delle Cinque Piaghe della Santa Chiesa (On the five wounds of the holy church), which will be made public only in 1848, and La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale (The constitution according to social justice), which with the previous document was listed in the Roman Index of forbidden books in 1849. During these years, beside his vast theoretical production, Rosmini con-

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tinued to care for the Istituto della Carità that he founded at the Calvario of Domodossola, and whose constitutions he composed in 1828 but never made public. Visiting Turin, during these same years, he came to know Cesare Balbo, Silvio Pellico, Michele Tarditi, and Gustavo Benso of Cavour. In 1836, the year he transferred his domicile to Stresa, where he remained, Rosmini brought forward the book on the renovation of philosophy in Italy, Il Rinnovamento della Filosofia in Italia proposto dal C. T. Mamiani della Rovere ed esaminato da Antonio Rosmini-Serbati. In 1834, Mamiani published a book titled Del Rinnovamento della filosofia antica italiana (On the renovation of the Italian ancient philosophy), “a rare example of incoherence and of laziness of mind” (esempio raro d’incoerenza e di lassezza di mente), as Rosmini rightly judged it. Meanwhile, on the contrary, Gioberti in Primato morale e civile degli Italiani (On the moral and civil supremacy of the Italians), perhaps thinking of the patriot instead of the thinker, wrote a moving eulogy of Mamiani. It was to Gioberti that Mamiani went for an explanation of Rosmini’s doctrines, and in 1834 before issuing Del Rinnovamento della filosofia antica italiana, he wrote to Gioberti: Thanks to your learned letter I think I have at last a distinct idea of the Rosminian system. I see now clearly that it is all built on one alone and truly principal theme, which is to say the impossibility of thinking anything at all without thinking exclusively the idea of being (In grazia del tuo dotto foglio io penso avere infine una idea distinta del sistema rosminiano, e vedo chiaro che egli è tutto edificato sopra un solo e principalissimo tema, cioè a dire l’impossibilità di pensare ad alcuna cosa senza pensare esclusivamente all’idea dell’essere). But he could not see completely clearly, if in the same letter he added that something else impeded him from finely comprehending the truth of the system. Rosmini himself would show repeatedly how little Mamiani understood him in his voluminous answer, which is like a long commentary on Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee. For the historical part of his explanations Rosmini used St. Thomas, interpreting him in a way that provoked many reactions from several Thomists. Between 1837 and 1841, the major Rosminian works concerning moral life were promulgated: Storia comparativa e critica dei sistemi intorno al principio della morale (Comparative and critical history of the systems concerning the principles of morality, 1837); Antropologia in servizio della scienza morale (Anthropology at the service of the moral science, 1838); Trattato della coscienza morale (Treatise on moral conscience, 1839); and Filosofia del diritto (1841–1845), to which we could add other minor works as, for instance, Filosofia della politica (1839). The Storia comparativa was a critical exposition of the history of morality; the Antropologia gave a prospectus of philosophical problems relating to ethics; the Filosofia del diritto dealt again with moral thought albeit exposed with its foundation on the concept of right itself. If the Filosofia del diritto brought him some

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nuisance from the Austrian censure, the Trattato della coscienza morale, by discussing probabilism, raised against him the objections of the Jesuits who will accuse him of Jansenism. Giuseppe Luigi Dmowski, a Polish Jesuit, already in 1840, in the second volume of his Institutiones philosophiae dedicated to ethics, had initiated the attack that was exacerbated by the Pope’s approval in September 1839 of the Istituto della Carità. In 1841, under the name of Eugenio Cristiano a violently critical writing circulated, which gave beginning to a poisonous war against Rosmini. In 1845, among the documents of the Storia universale of Cantú, Rosmini’s Sistema filosofico, composed in 1844, also appeared which was afterward included with other writings in Introduzione alla filosofia (1850). In the Introduzione, Rosmini outlined the systematic organism of his philosophical construction, in which to the inquiry of Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee was assigned a precise place in the encyclopedia of knowledge. In the three books of Teodicea, also printed in 1845, several problems that would be at the center of his metaphysics were already widely discussed. These problems involved profound metaphysical thoughts formulated by Rosmini in a long period of meditations, and to which the criticism moved against him by Gioberti, with whom the most alive polemic already started, was not extraneous. Gioberti, in 1838, in Teorica del soprannaturale (A theory on the supernatural), had judged Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee a “valuable and rare” work but ideological rather than ontological. Rosmini reviewed the Teorica del soprannaturale fiercely criticizing it in a letter to Gustavo Avogadro, a letter was believed to have been sent at first to Giovanni Baracco, a friend of Gioberti and director of the magazine Propagatore religioso of Turin. Baracco rejected the article that appeared instead in Il Cattolico of Lucerne in 1839 as “Lettera all’ab. Gustavo de’ Conti Avogadro, sulla Teorica sovrannaturale” and was reprinted in 1840 in Rosmini’s volume of Apologetica. Gioberti in the letter to Baracco professed to be pleased for the critiques but also that he could not abstain from adding this remark about Rosmini: “From the confutation that he did of Mamiani (whose work is truly lacking as psychological work, but it still has some merits), I became aware that sometimes the good Rosmini ought to try to be more courteous.” In the same letter Gioberti proposed that in the future he would clarify with an Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, “some errors” of the person he was proclaiming to be “the first psychologist of the age.” In Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, Gioberti held subtly the accusation of psychologism and of a Rosminian uncertainty between the opposite excesses of nihilism and pantheism. When from Lucerne he received from Massari the article of Rosmini that appeared in Il Cattolico, he decided not to reply polemically, “both for the respect due to the author and because the matter did not deserve an answer.” Between 1841 and 1842, Michele Tarditi published in succession the Lettere di un rosminiano a Vincenzo Gioberti, letters that Gioberti believed to have been reviewed by Rosmini, as afterward Giovanni Ferri would repeat, but that instead, as Gentile concluded, appeared too

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much inferior to the acumen of Rosmini. From an epistolary exchange between Antonio Corte and Tommaseo, it would appear that Rosmini was aware of the matter. The letters of Tarditi, the reprinting of the article of 1839, and the persisting silence of Rosmini became the cause of Gioberti’s embitterment. Rosmini added a note to the reprinting of the article of 1839 in Il Cattolico: “I regret to have to add that in the new work of Gioberti … many things are said that certainly that egregious author would not have said, if he had applied to the doctrines that I proposed a longer and more serious meditation” (Duolmi di dover aggiungere, che nella nuova opera dell’abate Gioberti … molte cose si dicono che non sarebbero certamente state dette dall’egregio autore, se avesse conceduto alle dottrine da me proposte una piú lunga e seria meditazione). Gioberti’s volumes on the errors of Rosmini, Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini, began to be published in 1841, and their prolixity forced Gentile to complain about so much time spent so badly, even though none of the two philosophers could ever be appreciated for conciseness. Rosmini broke his silence only to publish, without name, in the Imparziale of Faenza in 1845 the short article Difficoltà che l’Abate Gioberti muove all’Abate Rosmini ridotte a sillogismo colle loro risposte (Objections moved by Gioberti against Rosmini, reduced to a syllogistic format with a reply), and in 1846, still anonymously, six lessons addressed to a friend professor, on Vincenzo Gioberti e il panteismo, reprinted with the same title in 1853 in Lucca, after the death of Gioberti, with the addition of six more lessons and other minor writings against Gioberti. From his side, Gioberti in 1850 reprinting the Teorica del soprannaturale, in the preliminary discourse, declared, “I regretted thereafter the aggressive manner in which this was written when I met Rosmini in person and I, too, began to venerate with whole Italy such great wisdom and virtue” (Ebbi poscia a dolermi della vivacità del dettato, quando conobbi di persona il Rosmini e cominciai anch’io a venerare con tutta Italia tanta sapienza e tanta virtú). How can anyone explain, after the silence of Rosmini, the reprinting of the book against Gioberti, after the death of Gioberti? How can anyone explain the reluctance from the side of Rosmini to compete with the acutest of all his adversaries, when he did not disdain adversaries like Mamiani, Bertini, and Dmowski? The most exact answer is still the one coming from Gentile: Rosmini felt that Gioberti could be fully confronted only on the ontological level. Unluckily, Gioberti’s worthy confutation was planned in the Teosofia that death stopped Rosmini from completing. It is not the case to follow Rosmini in the complex vicissitudes of 1848– 1849, which saw him together with Gioberti as part of the political events of Turin, of Rome at the side of Pious IX, of Gaeta, of Naples, and finally as the victim of enemies always more ruthless who forced the condemnation of his two opuscules, La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale and Delle Cinque Piaghe della Santa Chiesa. In 1850 finally Psicologia was published after having been in the hands of the printer since 1846; in 1854, Logica was also

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put through. Rosmini died on 1 July 1855, leaving the metaphysical coronation of his work incomplete. He attempted at the construction of his metaphysics during many years and left voluminous fragments that became part of Teosofia and of other works like Aristotele esposto ed esaminato, Saggio sulle categorie, La dialettica, and Il divino della natura. Not even today it is easy to give a judgment on a man not without contrasting attitudes or on a work manifesting broad-mindedness but also accentuations of reactionary tendencies. Rosmini’s philosophy weighed heavily on Italy for more than a century not only within Catholic thinking, where it raised ferments and contrasts of an undeniable value, and which are still felt. Different men, of a uncommon greatness like Manzoni and Tommaseo, admired and venerated his activity and figure. With all of this, nonetheless, we should mention other judgments expressed with a totally diverse tone but justified as well by specific attitudes. Doubtlessly Gioberti let himself be carried by the exuberance of his character and the duress of a polemic when in 1841 he exclaimed, “For a long time I considered Rosmini a generous man and a saint; but afterward I came to know that he was malign, arrogant, and presumptuous” (io tenni per lungo tempo il Rosmini come un uomo generoso e un santo; ho poi saputo ch’egli è maligno, arrogante, e presuntuoso). Cattaneo, the offended disciple of Romagnosi, in 1836 addressed himself to Rosmini writing in Annali di Statistica: You have accused Alfieri of baseness, Foscolo of plagiarism and madness … you have called Romagnosi with the names of plagiarist, liar, disloyal, and atheist…. Against Benjamin Henry Constant, you have written a book titled “history of impiety”; you have written one book against Foscolo, one against Count Mamiani, and four against Gioia. All your literary life is a continuous implacable invective (Voi avete accusato di bassezza Alfieri, di plagio e di forsennatezza Foscolo … avete chiamato plagiario, bugiardo, sleale, ateo Romagnosi…. Contro Beniamino Constant avete scritto un libro intitolato istoria dell’empietà; avete scritto un libro contro il Foscolo; un libro contro il conte Mamiani; quattro libri contro Gioia. La vostra vita letteraria è una continua implacabile invettiva). The fact remains that Capponi once opposed the idea of inviting Rosmini to teach at the University of Pisa for fear that he would be a persecutor. And the letter Rosmini sent to the Pope from Gaeta on 15 June 1849 sounds like a most clear condemnation of all the movement of the Risorgimento. The letter is doubtlessly shocking: “In all my works I have confuted with all my strength the false principle of the sovereignty of people, constantly declaring it absurd, unjust, and immoral…. I have condemned revolutions for any cause and for any pretext by teaching that the people can never rebel against their absolute Princes (Nelle mie opere io ho confutato con ogni vigore il falso principio

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della sovranità del popolo, dichiarandolo costantemente assurdo, ingiusto, immorale…. Io ho condannato la rivoluzione a qualunque titolo e sotto qualunque pretesto, insegnando che i popoli non possono mai ribellarsi ai loro Principi assoluti). A history of the Italian philosophical culture of the nineteenth century, less faithful to a traditional vision of philosophy, more sensitive to solicitudes and ferments that remained almost without echo, at least among contemporaries, although valid in their time will reserve much less place to the Rosminis and Giobertis than to the Romagnosis and Cattaneos. The fact remains that from the battles for the Italian Unity until the whole first half of the nineteenth century, from the origins of the so called “rinascita idealistica” (the rebirth of idealism) to contemporary debates, within the most informed Catholic thought and in respect to it, the efficacy and the weight of the Rosminis and Giobertis have been, and are, unique. Without keeping in mind the structures perhaps archaic of their systems, it would be impossible to comprehend too many individuals and too many things of an Italy perhaps old but still surviving. From this comes the necessity of continuing to run over again the constructions with structures at times anachronistic, often strangely solitary and isolated on the stage of the European thought, if one would want truly to comprehend, not only a century of very vivid debates, not only the accents of a Manzoni, but also doctrines, to offer just two examples alone, like those of Spaventa and Gentile. 2. Unity of Rosminian Thought. The Critique of Subjectivism. The System of Truth The anti-sensist polemic centered the interests of Rosmini on ideology to the point that he would be considered exclusively as the author of the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee. It is certain that he intended very early to give a systematic unity to his thought, in a way that gnoseological inquiries maintained a predominant but not unique place. In the preliminaries to the ideological writings of 1851, Rosmini denied to Giovanni Maria Bertini that he could be classified with the critical philosophers and refused the accusation of psychologism. He insistently repeated to Gioberti that one cannot embrace ontology without first having carefully studied ideology. The procedure of the philosophical construction at first should be regressive, turned toward the search for the criterion of truth, the light of reason, and the condition of knowing. Then, there would be mediate philosophy, which would attempt to specify the formal processes of knowledge (Logica) and its material conditions (Psicologia). At this point it would be possible to proceed with progressive philosophy toward the true and proper structuring of the philosophical system, which would be like the corona of the construction. Because Rosmini has left his whole system incomplete, it is correct to proceed by illustrating the various parts in consideration of the totality. Rosmini, on several occasions, and in particular in the Discorso, which was included in the Introduzione alla

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filosofia, repeated that the polemic against Sensism and the different forms of Subjectivism were the major incentive of his thought. Rosmini saw in the empiricist subjectivism not only an execrable kind of philosophy, but the principle of every subversion, moral and political. His theoretical interest found its nourishment and inducement in a practical exigency: The subversion or the annihilation of philosophy operated during the last century by the authors of sensism, a medley of negations and ignorance, which under the assumed name of philosophy invaded all Europe, resulted in a damage to true knowledge greater than the one brought by any barbarian invasion. From that subversion derived the profound corruption of Morality, Jurisprudence, Politics, Pedagogy, Literature, and more or less of all the other disciplines. This corruption, of which we are witnesses and victims, transfused in the actions and mental life of nations, and even in that of human society, continues to lacerate, like a deadly venom, the spirit of the people and to threaten society itself with death (Dalla sovversione anzi dall’annientamento della Filosofia operato nel secolo scorso dagli autori del sensismo, guazzabuglio di negazioni e d’ignoranze, che sotto il nome assunto di filosofia invase tutta l’Europa con piú detrimento del vero sapere, che non vi avesse recato giammai alcuna invasione barbarica, derivò quella corruzione profonda della Morale, del Diritto, della Politica, della Pedagogia, della Letteratura, e piú o meno di tutte l’altre discipline, della quale noi siamo testimony e vittime: e questa corruzione, trasfusa nelle azioni e nella vita mentale de’ popoli e della stessa società umana, continua a dilacerare, come mortifero veleno, le viscere di quelli e a minacciar questa di morte). The crisis of speculation has shown all its consequences in the moral and political grounds. Sensism was to be coherent in not recognizing duties, and consequently coherent were its followers in refusing any binding and bond: If with sensism and subjectivism the mind coherent with itself cannot acknowledge the existence of duties or rights, then, with the annihilation thereafter of these, the mind would not be able to conceive any other kind of politics than the one consumed with deceit and violence that like the ideal prince of Machiavelli, is biform, half lynx and half lion (Se col sensismo e col soggettivismo la mente coerente a se medesima, non può riconoscere l’esistenza né di doveri né di diritti; coll’annullamento poi di questi, ella non può piú concepire alcun’altra politica che quella che si consuma in frodi e in violenze e che, come il principe ideale di Machiavelli, è biforme cioè mezza volpe e mezzo leone). This is Rosmini’s complete restoration of the traditional values and of the

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political forms challenged, fought, and destroyed by the revolution. It is an ethical and political restoration established, at its own turn, on a theoretical restoration, on a “reform,” or a speculative Counter Reformation. Naturally, Rosmini did not make known the practical “roots” of his thought, though he intended to restore, as he affirmed, the primacy of reason against the Kantian primacy of practical reason, “a scare-crow placed on the throne, so that, thanks to philosophers, it would reign without governing” (fantoccio di ragione messo sul trono, acciocché, per la grazia dei filosofi regni, ma non governi). On the contrary, it is speculation that must now posit the bases of knowledge and of duty. The Kantian pure reason failed because it wanted to break all connections with any object, with any reality that was not of its own free activity. This pretended disengagement became a confession of impotence: Here is what happened! This is what was supposed to happen from having posited the principle that thought is not free unless it abandons itself completely to reason without a primordial truth that like a luminous torch would guide all reasoning (Ecco quello che è avvenuto; ecco quello che doveva avvenire dall’aver posto il principio che il pensiero non è libero, se non s’affida interamente al ragionamento senza una verità primordiale, che guidi come face luminosa ogni ragionamento). Subjectivism, even the Kantian one, is the enemy! And those who instead of moving out of the magic circle of thinking, like Galluppi, tried to find a point of support excavating more deeply within thought itself fell into it! The reason is that it is from the outside of thought that it is possible to find the measure of validity of thought. In relation to the question of Sensism and Subjectivism, which is the source of all modern frenzies, it is in vain that Galluppi said to be disproving it in Naples, Bonelli in Rome, and many in Northern Italy. These and other Italian philosophers, just to mention those at home, being unable to substitute to sensism and subjectivism a positive system concerning the nature and the origin of cognition, though demonstrating some accidental defects of subjectivism, left in their works the stump of those errors and, almost clearing away the thickness of sylvan shoots, rendered it more productive (Per ciò che riguarda la questione del sensismo e del soggettivismo, fonte di tutti i moderni deliri, invano il Galluppi disse di confutarlo a Napoli, il Bonelli a Roma, molti nell’alta Italia: questi ed altri filosofi italiani, per non parlar che de’ nostri, non potendo sostituire al sensismo e al soggettivismo alcun sistema positivo intorno alla natura e all’origine della cognizione, mentre pur ne dimostrarono alcuni accidentali difetti, lasciarono saldo

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY nelle loro scritture il ceppo di quegli errori e, quasi diradandogli intorno il folto de’ suoi silvestri virgulti, lo resero piú vivace).

Then Rosmini mentioned the names of some individuals, Collizi, Mario Mastrofini, and Paolo Costa, who lamented with him that sensism had been slandered. The conclusion was that a new system had to be built, a new system of truth, Sistema della Verità, which would organize in a perfect articulation all human knowledge hereto accumulated. This system was represented as a pyramid in the form of a tetrahedron, in which from the immense basis, formed by the particular truths, one could ascend to the apex of the absolute unity. It was a system within which the verities singularly observed did not juxtapose each other as in the eclecticism of Cousin, but found their place in an orderly and perfect collaboration. The confutation of sensism that Rosmini initiated early in his first writings with the polemic against Gioia, Romagnosi, and Foscolo, was not going to end with a negation; it had to assume consistency “by facing a true system concerning the nature and the origin of cognitions.” The ideological formulation of the system was accentuated merely because it was required by the urgency of the polemic. 3. Ideology. The Platonism of Rosmini. The Criticism of Kant Considering the point of view held by Rosmini in Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, it has been said that very early in his career he conceived the notion of “intuition.” In 1854, he himself supposedly confessed to Father Francesco Paoli of having discovered the idea of being when he was eighteen. As he declared, he began with a sentence of common sense, with the primordial question, “What is the light of reason?” His goal was not to find one, two, or three forms, but the unique form “that we call the form of truth.” His goal was to specify the thinking that underlines every determination, seizing its form, functioning, and originary rhythm. Rosmini wanted to place himself as the mediator between those who impoverished knowledge by reducing it to a mere receptive sensibility and those who, crowning it with an overflowing wealth of originary forms, also lose the meaning of its effective functioning. If the ones sinned by excess, the others erred by defect. Truth, said Rosmini, is intermediate. With this formulation he immediately risked finding the solution at the border between the two adversary fields, meanwhile he intended to place it beyond both fields, given the peculiar significance that the notion of being as the unique objective form was supposed to acquire. The problem that Rosmini posited was this: to know is to judge; every judgment implies necessarily a concept that functioning as the predicate makes possible, by itself alone, that judgment. We may think that the diverse concepts we possess descend at their own turn from previous judgments we formulated, so that re-ascending from one step to another to the previous concepts and judgments, at the end we should arrive at the point where we would admit one concept anterior to any judging act and condition the concept pro-

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duced by the first judgment. We must “assume that in the human mind some general ideas must pre-exist to all its judgments with which it would be capable of judging and in that manner arriving at the formulation of all other ideas” (supporre che nell’uomo preesista a tutti i giudizi suoi una qualche idea generale, colla quale a bel principio egli possa giudicare, in tal modo venirsi man mano formando altre idee). The empiricists in general, and Locke with the Lockeans in particular, pretending to derive every cognition from experience without presupposing any a priori, had no success in explaining our knowing. Locke and Condillac, as the “respectable” Galluppi had already noticed, shipwrecked against the idea of “substance,” without being able to explain it. Thought cannot do without substance and, on the other hand, it is contradictory to pretend to derive from the senses that give us only qualities what stands under the qualities. The Lockean expedient of presenting substance as “something I don’t know what” obscure and impervious does not resolve the question, because sensibility can only be closed within the limit of subjectivity, without any possibility of explaining what in knowledge is objective. Empiricism, not being able to explain, negates. The objectivity of judging cannot be derived, as Condillac pretended, referring to the attention with which an idea or more than one idea is formulated. Condillac wanted to thrust away ideas from judgments, so that he could derive judgments from ideas; a vicious circle that would daunt any person who would not state precisely the nature of the primitive judgment. The evaluation that Rosmini offered of Condillac—(“a kind of Lockeanism naturalized in France”) who reduced “philosophy to such a pitiful small thing that, while it attracts the multitude with its apparent easiness … gives rise to the contempt for the grand questions”—is totally negative. The merit of Reid and of the Scottish School is that of having posited a natural and primitive judgment of existence before positing the ideas, stating that the first process of the spirit is synthetic, not analytic, as the Lockeans thought. Does that first judgment of existence not imply at its own turn the referring of a predicate—existing, being—to a subject? Whence such a predicate comes? Reid did not resolve the problem or considered it, “content with wrapping his primitive judgment in a mysterious cloud.” But the knot of the whole question was exactly in the effort of determining the origin of the idea of being. The solution could only be found in the clarification of the rapport between sense and intellect, distinct and united in the synthesis of the “I”: sense would give perception, while the intellect would discover its truth. The intellect, Rosmini said, brings its own patrimony in the cognition: it is the intellect’s patrimony a priori, not derived from experience. What is the extension of that patrimony? If it is right that the sense would appeal to reason and the ideas, the excess of considering innate the whole ideal world is not justified.. Plato saw the terms within which the problem should have to be posited, but afterward he annihilated knowledge making the ideas object of an originary intuition. In the view of Rosmini, Aristotle, on the contrary, came nearer to the truth using

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the concept of light that illumines the intellect, which was certainly Platonic, making it capable of discerning the intelligibility of the real. In a manner always more accentuated, Rosmini from Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee to Il Rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia tried to see Aristotle in function of his Platonism relived through the medieval thought of Bonaventure instead of Thomas, as he would pretend in Il Rinnovamento. But the most persisting critique was without doubt the one for Kant, with whom Rosmini had to have a reckoning at one time or another, considering that for him Kant was the most dangerous of all philosophers because, although admitting an a priori, or better—as Rosmini improperly put it—seventeen forms a priori, nevertheless could not free himself from a skeptic subjectivism. “When it seemed that the Scottish School had finally posited the solid bases of philosophical knowledge, the sophist of Königsberg appeared who again destroyed them with greater consequences” (Mentre pareva che la scuola scozzese avesse poste finalmente le solide basi del sapere filosofico, sorse il sofista di Konisberga a rovesciarle di nuovo con maggior rovina). Rosmini stated, “The pivotal error of criticism consists in having reduced our ideas and external things to a single thing” (L’errore principale del criticismo consiste nell’aver fatto delle idee nostre e delle cose esterne una sola cosa). The major equivocation of Kant consisted in underestimating the value of the act of thinking and its objectivity of existence, by not positing the category as a true and proper predicate of judgment, and making it instead intrinsic to the sensitive datum in the intellective act. Only if existence is a predicate, it would invest with its “intelligible light” the subject given by experience, and in this way it would change it into something thought (pensato). For Kant, instead, the existentializing act is not so much the act that affirms “the possibility that the thing can be thought” (pensabilità della cosa), as much as the act that posits the subsistence of the thing (sussistenza della cosa). While the thing is deprived of reality and is reduced to a subjective affirmation (since the category is a function), not even its “possibility of being thought” (pensabilità) is justified. According to Rosmini, Kant missed the synthetic capacity of thought. At an attentive examination, the Kantian categorical judgment would always result in an act of analysis and not of synthesis, because the synthetic moment is found in the constitution itself of concepts or, if we wish, in the primitive judgment that posits the concepts. The examples advanced by Kant are invalid, and every reference to the categories is in reality in Kant a proposition that explains, analyzes, articulates conceptual elements, meanwhile the syntheticity is found only in the construction of the concept. This construction of the concept, at its turn, may very well be also a predication by way of an a priori, but in this affirmation there would be no contrast in respect to the above critique, because this a priori is no longer a function merely subjective. This newly constructed concept is the unique idea of being, which constitutes thought by its being posited, and would possess the characters of the true syntheticity, because it would be the primary and

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unique means for the construction itself of concepts. If we analyze the previous lines, it is apparent that the exigency that moved Rosmini seemed more Kantian than Kant, even though thereafter Rosmini at his turn would miss the intendment of Kantian syntheticity. The reason is that, though Rosmini’s analysis of some examples of judgments used by Kant appeared well founded, it was nonetheless true that Kant was very conscious of the synthetic process of the thought that thinks (pensiero pensante), while Rosmini appeared, at the end, not to comprehend well what the Kantian syntheticity is. With the critique of Kantism, Rosmini specified his own point of view: to seize the act of the originary thought that reveals and constitutes the intelligibility of reality. This act would explain the origin and the value of human knowledge without destroying its objectivity. For Rosmini, the Kantian category was not a predicate, but a manner of predicating. According to Rosmini, in the Kantian judgment we do not see the category to be added to the subject provided by the senses, so that the given term and the predicate would be united in the act of predication, but would still remain clearly distinct. Since the Kantian category is viewed as the categorizing mode of thinking the datum, it happens that the mode consubstantiates with the datum, and the world so far as it is thought becomes a world emanated from the spirit, “Kant assigns to the spirit the power to create the external world, but subject to inexorable laws, with which, in the same time that the spirit continuously emanates from itself the external world, it also involves itself in a deep, inextricable, and necessary illusion” (Kant dà al medesimo spirito una energia creatrice del mondo esteriore, soggetta però a leggi inesorabili, colle quali, nello stesso tempo ch’ella emana continuamente da sé il mondo, involge insieme se medesima in una profonda, inestricabile, necessaria illusione). In the way of explaining knowing, being was fatally lost. 4. Illumination. Being. Being and Existence Having criticized Kantism in this fashion, Rosmini preserved it only in its gnoseological formulation of the problems. He addressed himself to the building of a metaphysics that could justify gnoseology itself. Kant, too, intended to found a metaphysics, but the supra-sensible that he researched was the immanent supra-sensible, because it would be direction, indication, “intention,” and rule. Rosmini remained within the ambiance of the late-medieval Platonism, deriving from the Platonic tradition the idea of illumination. In Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, he said convincingly: Expressing the doctrine of Aristotle, I showed that the philosopher of Stagira arrived at the awareness that human intellect, though having no cognition in itself, must have had innate the light that could make it able to illuminate sensible things, and in this way know them. If we want to follow on the traces of Aristotle’s thought and push forward the progression of his reasoning all that we have to do is to explain in

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY some proper terms what was meant with that innate light. I have applied myself to research precisely this matter, in the face of which Aristotle stopped. At this point, I began to conjecture that the light could be nothing else than the idea of being in its universality, demonstrating that this idea is the true light of the mind and the one by which all things sensible are illumined, or perceived. This conjecture, herewith, that I formulated with the intention of bringing the system of Aristotle one step ahead … comes from St. Bonaventure and for six centuries has been taught in schools and presented as something free of doubt (Sponendo la dottrina di Aristotele io ho mostrato che il filosofo di Stagira era pervenuto a conoscer che l’intelletto umano, sebbene non portasse con se nessuna cognizione, tuttavia doveva avere innato il lume che lo rendesse atto ad illuminare le cose sensibili, e cosí conoscerle. Ora volendo tener la traccia de’ pensieri di Aristotele, e sospingere innanzi quella progressione di ragionamento, non restava che a spiegare in termini propri, che cosa s’intendesse per quel misterioso lume innato. Io mi sono messo in questa ricerca, sul limite della quale Aristotele s’è fermato, ed ho conghietturato, che altro non potesse esser quel lume, se non l’idea dell’ente in universale, dimostrando che questa idea è il vero lume della mente, e quella onde tutte le cose sensibili s’illuminano, cioè si percepiscono. Ora questa mia conghiettura, ond’io cercava di far dare un passo innanzi al sistema di Aristotele, … viene da S. Bonaventura, già sei secoli sono, insegnata, e come cosa fuori di ogni dubbio presentata).

In Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, Rosmini added and almost substituted St. Bonaventure with St. Thomas in a new interpretation; constantly, and abundantly in Teosofia, he made the appeal to the theory of illumination. In Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee Rosmini had clearly pointed out in a Plato comprehended through Aristotle the solution of the difficulties of the empiricism within which he placed Kant: When Aristotle says that the agent intellect must be in act itself to form the universals, the intellective cognitions, it appears that he wanted to say that this intellect possesses already from the beginning and because of its own proper nature some kind of cognition with which it would be able to produce the other actual cognitions, at the occasions offered by the sensible phantasma. If, after all this, the philosopher peradventure refused to penetrate further into the examination of this species of innate cognition, it may have been because he felt the difficulty of the problem … or for the fear of discovering things too favorable to the much fought system of Plato (Dicendo Aristotele che l’intelletto agente, per formare gli universali, cioè le cognizioni intellective, dee essere in atto egli stesso; sembra ch’egli abbia voluto dire che questo intelletto possegga già fino dal principio e per sua propria natura,

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qualche specie di cognizione, colla quale egli possa produrre le altre cognizioni attuali, all’occasione datagli da’ fantasmi sensibili: e che il filosofo siasi ritenuto per avventura dall’entrare piú addentro nell’esame di questa specie di cognizione innata, o impaurito dalla difficoltà … o pur temendo che n’uscisser cose favorevoli troppo al combattuto sistema di Platone). On this Rosminian motive, we will never insist enough if we want to grasp the many rapports it had with Kantism. In order to comprehend the intelligibility of the reality that was challenged by empiricism, Kant began to search the basis for objectivity within thought and presented the world of experience as something constituted by the activity of the “I think” (je pense) according to its own functions; Rosmini instead looked for a superior principle of intelligibility. In one word, while Kant posited the root of the synthesis in the transcendental unity of the “I,” Rosmini searched for it in Being, one, and trine, which created the ideas and the reality. Thereby, for Kant, to know is the activity of reason, which constitutes experience structuring the sensible data, meanwhile for Rosmini it is light that descends over both thought and things, giving intelligence and intelligibility. The Kantian synthesis is a synthesizing force that operates organizing the data of the senses; the Rosminian synthesis is self-revealing and does not constitute experience. The fundamental problem of Rosmini is that of finding the conditio sine qua non of every cognitive act, of the concept that conditions the primitive judgment. This concept can only be found in being because, as ancient Parmenides accurately saw, the true condition of “being thought” (pensability) is existence: being is the only thing that can be thought [only “what is” can be “what is thought”], and “what can be thought” (pensability) “can be thought” in so far as it exists. It would be absurd to assume that existence, condition of every judgment, would be derived from some judgment. Being is the a priori form of knowledge, the basis of knowledge. The question is to find out how such a form should be understood and how it operates. Rosmini tells us that the form is “that by reason of which an entity possesses a primitive act [perfection] of its own, which makes it to be what it is.” Here, two kinds of forms can be considered: those that are “part of the being itself” (parte dell’essere stesso), fused with the same act, and which can be divided from it only by abstraction; and those that are really divided from the act and from the being of which they are the form. For example, the form of a knife is the blade of the knife and cannot be separated from it; on the contrary, “the form of a redhot iron is the fire, that is, a different thing than iron.” When the iron and the fire come together then we have the iron becoming incandescent. Now then, because being (essere) is the condition of understanding, it would be considered a form in the second and not in the first sense. Being would not be a guise, a mode of thinking, ingrained in thought itself, but in relation to thought it would be like what fire is to iron:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY The essence of being becomes the form of our spirit uniquely by way of making itself known, by means of revealing its natural knowableness: hence, no reaction to it would come from our spirit. Our spirit only receives: the light, the notice that the spirit receives, is what makes it intelligent. The essence of being is simple, inalterable, unchangeable, and it cannot be confused or mixed with anything else: this is the way it is, and cannot reveal itself in any other way. The spirit that intuits the essence of being and the act of the intuition remain outside the essence of being; the spirit does not intuit itself. The essence of being takes the name of object, which means that it is counterpoised to the intuiting spirit, to which the name of subject is assigned. It can be seen from all this that when we say that the “ideal being” is the form of the spirit, we are using the term “form” with a meaning entirely different and opposed to the Kantian forms, because the forms of Kant are all subjective, but ours is an objective form, and rather an object by its own essence (L’essenza dell’essere diventa forma del nostro spirito unicamente col farsi conoscere, col rivelare la sua naturale conoscibilità: quindi dalla parte del nostro spirito non v’ha niuna reazione. Questo non fa che ricevere: il lume, la notizia che riceve, è ciò che lo rende intelligente: l’essenza dell’essere è semplice, inalterabile, immodificabile, non si può confondere o mescolare con altro: cosí si rivela, né può rivelarsi altrimente. Lo spirito che la intuisce, e l’atto dell’intuizione, rimane fuori di lei, non intuisce se stesso. Quindi è che l’essenza dell’ente prende il nome di oggetto, ch’è quanto dire contrapposta allo spirito intuente, al quale è riservato il nome di soggetto. Dal che si vede che quando noi diciamo che l’essere ideale è forma dello spirito, usiamo la parola forma in un significato intieramente diverso ed opposto alle forme kantiane; perocché le forme di Kant sono tutte soggettive, e la nostra è una forma oggettiva, e anzi oggetto per essenza, in Sistema Filosofico di A. Rosmini, p. 35).

The ideal being, or essence of being, stands to our understanding as a light; it is “the light of reason.” As the light gives ability of seeing (la vista) to the eye and ability to be seen (visibility) to things, in that same way the ideal being makes the intellect intelligent and the things intelligible. The proper activity of the understanding, if it makes sense to speak of activity, is the connecting, which would better be said a receiving, and an accepting, at the same time, the light and the object, so to actualize vision, transforming the visible into seen and the intelligible into truly intended. But this activity is made possible, actualized, by that idea, that intelligible light, which should be confused neither with the eye (mind), nor with the object. In Vincenzo Gioberti e il panteismo (p. 19), Rosmini observed: But someone replied that the ideal is certainly not in the mind, which is real. Of course! However, the ideal is not the mind in the same way

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than the ray of the sun is not the eye. It is true that the eye does not see without the ray of the sun, and that it needs it in order to perform its act, but it is not true that the act of the eye is the luminous substance, unless we would wish to return to those ancients who believed that with our eyes we shoot things with the crossbow, throwing rays like many arrows that would hit the things (Ma si replica: l’ideale non è però nella mente la quale è reale. Sí certamente: ma non è la mente, come il raggio del sole non è l’occhio. È vero che l’occhio non vede senza il raggio, che ha bisogno di esso per uscire al suo atto; ma non è mica vero perciò, che l’atto dell’occhio sia la sostanza luminosa: qualora almeno non si volesse tornare a quegli antichi che credevano che coi nostri occhi balestrassimo le cose, emettendo i raggi quasi altrettante frecce che le colpissero). The ideal being, intelligible, it alone posits thought, “Being … object of the intuition that has been given to human nature is the truth in its formal integrity.” Rosmini returns with insistence to the analogy of light in Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, citing the famous passages of chapter five of the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum of St. Bonaventure; in Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, searching for it in all the philosophers and St. Thomas himself, with the same tendency of reviewing Aristotle through Plato, as we previously narrated, and for which he praised Jacques Charpentier who dedicated himself to building such harmony. Rosmini recognized gladly, “It appears that those learned moderns subscribed to the true when they decided to conciliate Aristotle with Plato, and equally I don’t see any other possible way to reconcile Aristotle with himself” (Egli pare adunque, che al vero si apponessero que’ dotti moderni, i quali tolsero a conciliare Aristotele con Platone, né altra via parimente io ravviso onde si possa conciliare Aristotele con se medesimo). Plato, the Plato of the Republics, is the one “who indicated to us the true stones with which to construct philosophy.” In Introduzione alla filosofia (p. 164), commenting on the famous similitude of the sun, Rosmini placed in Plato’s mouth his own theory: Mutable and contingent real things … are not known to us; they are not knowable, except in their essences, which are eternal and per se intelligible, and are called ideas when they are communicated to the mind. These essences are all reduced to a first light that is called the light of reason, which is nothing else than being manifested to the mind from the time of its first constitution. In other words, the essence of being, intuited by us without any limits or determinations, is the first idea that produces the others, like the physical light produces the colors. These other ideas and essences seen in it [in the first idea] are indeed that same idea of being in various ways specified and limited, like precisely colors are light, not all united, but refracted, separated into small luminous beams, in one word, limited too. The true, then, the permanent

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY being of things, the being that is always in one and the same mode, the being that does not falter between being and not-being, but simply is, it is found in their essences, of which the mutable and contingent things are properly nothing else than imperfect expressions, and, as Plato calls them, similitudes (Le cose reali mutabili e contingenti … non si conoscono da noi, né sono conoscibili, se non nelle loro essenze, le quali sono eterne e per sé intelligibili; e si chiamano idee, quando sono communicate alla mente: ora queste essenze si riducono tutte ad un primo lume, che dicesi il lume della ragione, e non è altro che l’essere manifesto alla mente fino dalla prima costituzione di essa; ossia, che è medesimo, l’essenza dell’essere intuita da noi senza confine né determinazione alcuna, è la idea prima che produce le altre, come il lume corporeo i colori: perché l’altre idee ed essenze in esse [essa?] vedute, non sono che la stessa idea dell’essere variamente determinata e limitata, siccome appunto i colori sono la luce, non tutta unita, ma rifratta, separata in fascicoli luminosi, in una parola, anch’essa limitata. Ora il vero, il permanente essere delle cose, quell’essere che è sempre e in uno stesso modo, né tentenna fra l’essere e il non essere, ma semplicemente è, trovasi nelle loro essenze, di cui le cose contingenti e mutabili non sono propriamente che espressioni imperfette, e, come Platone le chiama, similitudini).

The only objection that Rosmini raised against this “magnificent and holy” doctrine, when he was writing these words, around 1850, was that of not having properly distinguished between being as real and as ideal, thus opening the way to the kind of pantheism that he came to notice in Gioberti. The originary intuition that gives origin to the understanding and constitutes the intellect itself, is intuition of the essence (idea) of the thing not of the existence; being appears as illuminant and self-manifesting. Subsistence must be searched elsewhere, in the same way that reality is other than ideality. Intuited being is, indeed, possibility, a most rich and fecund ideality, because “while the real is not reproducible nor realizable, the ideal, on the contrary, has its own character of fecundity and realizability” (mentre il reale non è riproducibile né realizzabile, l’ideale all’incontro ha per suo carattere la fecondità, la realizzabilità). The ideal presents itself as a universal potentiality. The a priori is objective by its own nature and posits the objectivity itself of knowing. The fact that the a priori “becomes known” does not make it subjective; it remains the light that illumines thought and things, without losing its aseity. The objectivity that Rosmini mentioned refers to the value that the idea of being confers to truth making it what it is: Even if our manner of conceiving things was merely apparent, that is, even if we were to believe of conceiving the thing in itself, but the thing as conceived by us would have merely an existence in relation to us, my reasoning would not be less valuable. It would be a matter of

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explaining this appearance: in one word, apparent or real as it may be, it is a matter of explaining the fact of the perception of things as they are, an objective perception. On the other hand, because we are here speaking about the manner in which we perceive things, the distinction between apparent and real has no place. We cannot be mistaken concerning the manner of conceiving. The reason is that to say: “I conceive the object in this way” is nothing else than to affirm “I conceive in the way that I conceive” and nothing more than that. The question— whether the external thing corresponds to the concept I have of it—has nothing to do with it (Quando questa nostra maniera di concepire le cose non fosse che apparente, cioè quando noi credessimo di concepir la cosa in sé, ma la cosa da noi concepita pur non avesse mai che un’esistenza a noi relativa, il mio ragionamento non avrebbe un valor minore. Si tratterebbe allora di spiegare quest’apparenza: in una parola apparente o reale che sia, si tratta di spiegare il fatto della percezione delle cose in sé, oggettiva. D’altro lato non parlandosi qui che della maniera onde noi percepiamo le cose, la distinzione fra l’apparente e il reale non può aver luogo. Non ci possiamo ingannare circa il modo di concepire; poiché il dire: io concepisco l’oggetto in questo modo; non è che un dire, che io concepisco, a quel modo che concepisco, e nulla piú. Non c’entra qui la questione se la cosa esterna corrisponda al mio concetto di lei). The objectivity of truth exists distinct from the subsistence (sussistenza) that is applicable only to the real being. The ideal being is the source of the intelligibility of things, and we must be aware that “the cognition of the things’ essence (essenza) is something different from the cognition of the things’ subsistence (sussistenza).” Through the light of the ideal being the subjective modifications of sensibility are objectified; they assume existence per se, they posit themselves as able to stand per se, beyond the modifications of the subject. The objectified modifications become the terms of conceiving, and are no longer modes of sensing; they are independent in their essence that is “absolutely” posited. As objective, the idea of being is also such that it would never exhaust its richness in the subsistent; it is a priori, ideal, possible, simple, one, universal, necessary, immutable, and eternal. The idea of being, beyond every determination, remains for us in its indeterminacy, which is not inherent in it: it proceeds “from the imperfection of our intuiting” (dall’imperfezione del veder nostro). If our intuition could be fully rich, we could seize a priori, through being, all the system of essences. It is our weakness alone that impedes us from reaching such fullness: All the possible modes and determinations of real entities should necessarily emanate from the idea alone of the possible entity, if this idea could be perfectly comprehended. Our mind cannot conceive the pos-

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The intuition of the ideal being is not sufficient for human knowledge. Beside the idea of being, Rosmini posits sensation, the modification of the senses, of the “fundamental feeling” that constitutes the living texture of the human beings, of things, of reality in all its extension. The light of the ideal being illumines the human mind causing it to conceive as objective the modification due to sensation and that objective modification becomes “the thing.” Three elements are given of the intellective perception: (1) sensation (sensitive perception); (2) idea of existence at the universal level; (3) rapport between sensation and idea of existence or judgment, in which the idea of existence (the predicate) is attributed to the complex of sensations, which have been received and tied among themselves together in a given mode (the subject); and it is in this act of the spirit that the production of the intellective perception of bodies properly happens (nel quale s’attribuisce l’idea di esistenza (predicato) al complesso delle sensazioni ricevute e legate tra loro insieme in un dato modo (soggetto), nel quale atto dello spirito sta propriamente la produzione della percezione intellettiva de’ corpi). The intellective perception wants to make explicit what was wrapped in the mysterious darkness of the primitive judgment of Reid; wants to make sense of the origin of ideas, of the “ability or possibility of being thought” (pensabilità) of the world. With it, by subsuming the modifications of the “fundamental feeling” into the ideal being, such modifications become objectified, from being sensed they become cognized/known, from being obscure they become clear, while the ideal indeterminate being specifies itself in concrete ideas. The knot, according to Rosmini, is found in the unity of the real subject that is sense and intellect and not in the unity of thought as Kant said. Sense and intellect come to the point of determining and connecting themselves: sense gives the particular and the intellect thinks the particular through the

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ideal being. In all this, we are moving within the cognitive field, ideal, without penetrating the real world, which is the matter for ontology that should give the reason for the things as they are. In Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia (p. 374), Rosmini suggested: We should reflect attentively on the fact that when we speak of true or false cognitions we are always in an ideal world, or certainly in a mental world. If we would give a criterion of truth, we must realize that this cannot be searched or found among any other things than those that go through the mind. We should attentively reflect also on the other fact that the real world, the world of the finite subsistences, is not known for what it is; so that it is not absurd to think that the world, in regard to its real subsistence, could remain even if no one would know of it. The real world has need of a mind in order to be known, because it is in the mind that the world receives the light, which is intelligibility. Cognition is a thing totally mental; cognition is within the order of ideas in which all judgments and ratiocinations are resolved. Only within that order can truth be found, the essence of truth, because it resides in that order. We should well reflect again that feeling itself is part of the real world, or, to put it better, feeling constitutes it, though it is not known directly per se … but it too is known in the mind, and through the mind by way of the ideas which are in the mind (Conviene attentamente riflettere, che quando si parla di cognizioni, vere o false che siano, noi siamo sempre nel mondo ideale, o certo mentale; e però, che se si dà un criterio del vero, questo non può cercarsi, e non può trovarsi, se non in quelle cose che passano nella mente. Conviene attentamente riflettere, che il mondo reale, il mondo delle sussistenze finite, non è cognito per se stesso; di maniera che non è assurdo pensare che il mondo, quanto alla sua real sussistenza, rimanga anche se niuno lo conoscesse. Il mondo reale ha bisogno dunque di una mente per essere conosciuto; e però è nella mente ch’egli riceve luce, intelligibilità. La cognizione adunque è una cosa del tutto mentale; appartiene all’ordine delle idee in cui si risolvono tutti i giudizi e i raziocinii: in quelle sole adunque può esser la verità, l’essenza della verità, poiché in queste risiede la cognizione. Conviene ben riflettere ancora, che il sentimento stesso appartiene al mondo reale, o per dir meglio, lo costituisce; però non è cognito per se stesso … ma anch’esso viene conosciuto nella mente, e per la mente; cioè mediante le idee, che sono nella mente). At the level of ideology no meaning can be found in searching “a principle that would be ideal and real at the same time, two things that could never be completely unified” (un principio che sia ideale e reale insieme, due cose che non possono esser giammai del tutto unificate). The real is here a heterogeneous element, “which has nothing to do with the essence of truth, and would

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have no other effect than that of being like a dense substance that would mix with light and is received together with the light in our eyes” (che non ha a che fare cosa alcuna coll’essenza della verità, e che non farebbe altro ufficio che quello di una sostanza crassa la quale si mescolasse con la luce, e ci venisse con essa insieme negli occhi). In this page of the Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, Rosmini clearly presented the character of his primitive synthesis that consisted in the universalization or the understanding of the real, in making it intelligible, and not in the positioning of the subsistence of the object: The universalization or primitive synthesis … has no need of reflection: on one side, we have sensation, which is a direct act of our spirit; on the other side, we find the intuition of being, which is also a direct act of our spirit; and between them there is the unity of the subject that is simultaneously conscious of the sensation and of the idea. This consciousness is already the universalization almost complete and perfect (L’universalizzazione, o sintesi primitiva, … non ha bisogno di alcuna riflessione; c’è da una parte la sensazione, che è un atto diretto del nostro spirito; c’è dall’altra parte la intuizione dell’essere, che è un altro atto diretto: c’è in fra essi l’unità del soggetto conscio ad un tempo della sensazione e dell’idea: questa consapevolezza è l’universalizzazione quasi bella e fatta). In Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, Rosmini insists on the necessity of keeping ontology and ideology distinct. The question that spontaneously derived from all this was about the possible manner for a passage from the ideal being to the real, if the distinction between ontology and ideology was to be neatly maintained. Rosmini in Il rinnovamento showed scarce comprehension of the criticized thinker, but he referred to an objection found in one of Mamiani’s letters, Sei lettere del Mamiani all’ab. Rosmini (Paris, 1838), in which Mamiani asked in what manner with the idea of a possible being and the subjective modification, in itself blind, of feeling, would be it possible to attain the subsistence of things? In other words, in what manner was a passage from the ideal to the real, from the possible to the subsistent, attainable? For Rosmini, the intellective perception brings with itself the subsistence of the thing. Though he distinguishes the cognition of the ens (being) in its essence from the cognition of the ens (being) as subsistent, in the primitive judgment understood as a true and proper existential judgment he accomplishes the convergence of ideal essence and subsistence. The subsistence is affirmed “with an interior word,” with an adhesion, “so that it is not the idea that we seize in the feeling, it is not the ideality of ens, but … the ens itself” (per cui non è mica l’idea che affermiamo nel sentimento, non è l’idealità dell’ente, ma … l’ente stesso, in Frammento di lettera sul giudizio primitivo). Unfortunately Rosmini is here far removed from clarifying the double aspect of the primitive judgment, and entangles himself with the same uncertainties in which he moves as

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well in regard to the theory of assent in logic. On one side, the primitive judgment idealized the given (datum) by the senses, making it intelligible, and the existence appears to resolves itself in the intelligibility. On another side, the primitive judgment should supposedly be an affirmation of reality, which is derived not from the idea of being, but from feeling or, from that “interior word” pronounced by conscience, the third element, which seems to appear now just to resolve the complex question. Gioberti centered his criticism precisely in this point. The Rosminians like Michele Tarditi, Paolo Barone, and even Alessandro Pestalozza could not overcome his objections. Gioberti observed that it is not possible to see how the union of the sensible and the intelligible would happen in the judgment, where they would be juxtaposed instead of synthesized, and added that what absolutely cannot be comprehended is the way in which the presence of the idea of an ens (somethingness) would justify the real subsistence of things. But he asked, “If the idea present in us is the idea of the possible being, how would one break the circle of the possible in order to come to the affirmation of existence?” Rosmini, in Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee and in Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, clearly accentuated the distinction between the possible (the ideal) and the real. The idea of being illumines the sensible data of the intelligible (possible) light, showing the things at the level of ideas, beyond any existential consideration. The idea of being concerns the pure intelligibility. Where does reality come from? Gioberti insistently counterattacked: Either reality proceeds from the ideal Ens (Being) or does not. In the first case, the ideal Ens (Being) must contain in itself the reality, must be also real, concrete, subsistent, and thus all the system of Rosmini crumbles. In the second case, reality cannot be found in any place, because all the knowability of things, all their truth, evidence and certainty, all the value and importance they have, in relation to our thought, derive from the ideal Ens (Being), outside of which there is nothing that can be thought (O la realtà procede dall’Ente ideale o non procede, Nel primo caso, l’Ente ideale dee contenere la realtà in se stesso, dee essere anche reale, concreto, sussistente, e crolla tutto il sistema dell’Autore. Nel secondo caso, la realtà non si può trovare in nessun luogo, poiché tutta la conoscibilità delle cose, tutta la loro verità, evidenza e certezza, tutto il valore e il peso che esse hanno, riguardo al pensiero nostro, proviene dall’Ente ideale, fuori di cui non v’ha nulla di pensabile). Presented in this fashion, Gioberti’s objection was truly insuperable. On the other hand, the understanding of Rosmini was different. For him, in a Platonic way, the real was the ideal, the intelligible, which does not change even if the existent changes. It is wrong to identify ideal, real, and existent! In such case the existent must be, as in Spinoza, a mode of the absolute real. Rightly, then, Rosmini affixed pantheism to Gioberti. However, was Rosmini saved from

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the charge of psychologism affixed to him by Gioberti? Gioberti became aware that in Rosmini the fundament of subsistence, and the root of the existential judgment, is not the idea of being, pure intelligibility, but the corporeal fundamental feeling, “which is not only the corporeal fundamental feeling described by Rosmini in Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, but the one illustrated in its completeness in Teosofia, where it is the reality of the act with which we feel ourselves as living beings, living a life that is at the same time spiritual and sensitively corporeal.” Except that Gioberti could not persuade himself that the judgment of existence could be defined as an equation between sensible and intelligible. Apart from the incomprehensibility of such an equation, how can existence originate from the union of the possible with a sensible impression? What kind of identity could the sensible as such have with the intelligible? If the sensible were identical to the intelligible, the intelligible would be useless, and the sensible could manifest itself by itself, as the one that would be intelligible by its own nature, and the sensists would be right. If the intelligible and the sensible were unlike, how would it be possible to have an equation between them? (Che medesimezza può avere il sensibile, come tale, coll’intelligibile? Se il sensibile fosse identico all’intelligibile, questo sarebbe inutile, e il sensibile si manifesterebbe da se medesimo, come quello che sarebbe intelligibile di propria natura; e i sensisti avrebbero ragione. Se dunque l’intelligibile e il sensibile sono disformi, come mai potrà aver luogo una equazione fra l’uno e l’altro?). From where, then, comes existence (esistenza) or, to call it as Rosmini does, subsistence (sussistenza)? The two terms, idea and sensation, cannot give more than what they have in themselves. Between existence and the possibility of existence an infinite interval is found. From where does the concept of existence emerge? Does it from the possible? Certainly not. Does it from the impression? The impression possesses nothing intellective. Does it from the muddle of the possible with the sensible? But if each of them by themselves cannot give what they don’t have, they would certainly never be able to give anything not even if united (I due termini [idea e sensazione] non possono dare quello che non hanno in sé. Fra l’esistenza e la possibilità dell’esistenza corre un intervallo infinito. Da che cosa, dunque, emerge il concetto di esistenza? Dal possible? No certo. Dall’impressione? Ma l’impressione non ha nulla d’intellettivo. Dall’accozzamento del possible col sensibile? Ma, se ciascuno di essi in separato non può dare quel che non ha, nol potranno neanche riuniti).

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6. The Teosofia. The Synthesism of Being Pointing out the difficulties of the Rosminian system, Gioberti indicated what, in his opinion, could be the way of resolution of Rosminianism: the doctrine of the “fundamental feeling,” in which the intuiting of the real being has supposedly been outlined. In Teosofia, ontology and natural theology, Rosmini searched the real basis of the intelligible in the reality of the subject: A being cannot be said intelligible, unless something is given that could understand it…. But, if in addition to the intelligible what can understand it exists, then, beside the ideal being, the real being also exists, because what can understand is an intelligent subject, and a subjective being is real by its own definition. In brief, the ideal form of being demands the real form of being (Un essere non può dirsi intelligibile, se nulla ci fosse che lo potesse intendere…. Ma se oltre l’intelligibile c’è chi lo può intendere, dunque, oltre l’essere ideale, c’è l’essere reale, perché chi può intendere è un subbietto intelligente, e l’essere subiettivo è reale, per la stessa definizione. Dunque la forma ideale dell’essere esige la forma reale). In the doctrine of the forms of being and in that of the fundamental feeling, Rosmini was finally attempting at an answer to his greatest adversary. With the unity-distinction of the forms of being—ideal, real, and moral—Rosmini articulated the aspects of reality, supporting the distinction of the pensato, “what is thought” (object, ideal), from the subject (real), but also insisting on underlining their necessary connection. With the theory of feeling, he wanted to point out in the human being the self-conscious subject, the unity of the sensible and the intelligible, of soul and body. The extension of the “doctrine of feeling” was going to open for him the way to the vision of the real in itself and in relation to God. The real being posits with its being the necessity of its reason or intelligibility (ideal), which, at its turn, presupposes the real subject, and from both derive exigency (dover essere, ought to be) and actualization (morality, value). In this is found the synthesism of Being (l’Essere), its trinitarian aspect, implying always the reciprocal impact (incidence, insidenza) of the modes, which Campanella would have called primalities. This is the way, according to the most recent Rosmini, in which the equation of the sensible and the intelligible, against which Gioberti fiercely moved, would cease being absurd, since the equation would be interpreted simply as the necessary rapport of real and ideal. The real (the feeling), immediately intuited (felt, sensed), is objectified in the light of thought through the ideal being. The intellective perception presupposes the unity-distinction—of the forms of being—concretized in the human being who, together, is intelligible and sensible because of the inevitable reciprocal impact of the forms themselves. We have here precisely the synthesism of being, the unfailing solidarity of the

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forms, solidarity proper to the essence itself of being. The “fundamental feeling” is the intimate, originary sensation of being alive (sentirsi vivere), as the primitive sense of the corporeal life and of its limits, sense of a determined expansive force. This is the sense of reality; sensus sui, the sensation of oneself, as of a limited activity; of activity and passivity; of force and extension (space); of something subjective and something extraneous (extra-subjective). In Antropologia, Rosmini clarified eagerly: Properly speaking no world exists that is external to the soul, because the relation between soul and matter cannot be expressed with terms like “inside” or “outside,” or with those of “interior” or “exterior,” but only with those of “different entities” (Propriamente parlando non vi ha un mondo esteriore all’anima, perchè la relazione tra l’anima e la materia non si può esprimere coi vocaboli di dentro e di fuori, o con quelli di interiore e di esteriore, ma solo con quelli di entità diverse). The real, all the real, is feeling (sentimento), indefinable, ineffable, precisely because essential and primordial. The subject and the extra-subject are founded on feeling. Existence (subsistence) at its root is not intellection; the intelligible is limited to the reasons of the existent, to the idea. The greater part of Teosofia moves in the direction of the concept of feeling (concetto del sentimento), aggrandized to the point of becoming the living root of being in all its fertility: Human beings do not know positively in themselves any other real thing than their fundamental feeling (or sentiment) and their intellective feeling (or sentiment), the “I” … (the intellective ens-principle is a feeling), and the “feeling” not only sees the “I” fully determined, but sees also more than the “I” whenever it could not be determined on all sides. And the “I” would certainly not be the “I” if it were not a unique and simple principle that has as its limit what is sensed and what is understood (L’uomo non conosce positivamente in sé altro reale che il proprio sentimento fondamentale, e il proprio sentimento intellettivo, l’Io, l’ente, principio intellettivo, è un sentimento, e questo non solo lo vede a pieno determinato, ma vede di piú che l’Io, se non fosse da tutti i lati determinato, se non fosse un principio unico e semplice avente un termine sentito e inteso, certo non sarebbe l’Io). Feeling is the unitary source of being, but in its original obscurity it is also the enigma of the existent. Feeling is the pure act which, in the human beings, is not clarified in the heavens of understanding, but pulsates in the springs of the universal life. In Teosofia (ch. 4, p. 206), Rosmini elucidated: The bond would be revealed that joins temporal things with the eternal ones. This connection is the reality of feeling that, though remaining

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identical to itself, if it is considered as the sentiment constituted by an act of sensation, is temporary; if considered as the determination of the ideal Being, is eternal. The reality of feeling has this double mode of being. And so far as it is identical, meaning that it is the unique subject of the temporary and eternal modes, which can be comprehended only by way of abstraction, it is not yet either temporary or eternal, but it is a certain initiation to both modes. The second corollary states that it is here found the reason why at the bottom of all human knowledge some obscurity always exists, and also why all nature appears covered by a mysterious veil. The reason is that a ring is always missing in the chain: what is missing is the consciousness of the creative act. We see contingent things, we see them as the terms of an eternal being; but this eternal Being, which composes itself in our mind with the contingent things as the principle to its end, and makes them entities, is not the real ens (being) itself, but is the eternal Ens (Being) in its mode purely ideal, and sufficient to make things known, but not to produce them. Given that we know things as effects and productions, but cannot intuit their cause in its operation, all things we know appear to us as a mystery, as an arcanum. They appear produced without cause, existent without reason. We understand what repels us; we understand that this cause must exist, although it escapes us. The universe is an enigma of which we have no clue; it is a problem that continuously fatigues our minds and of which we can never find the explanation, although at the same time we know that this explanation certainly exists (Si rivela il nesso che congiunge le cose temporali colle eterne; il qual nesso è quella realtà sentimentale, la quale identica, se si considera come sentimento e dall’atto di sentire costituita, è temporanea: se si considera come determinazione dell’Essere ideale, è eterna. Ella ha questo doppio modo di essere; e in quanto è identica, ossia in quanto è subbietto unico del modo temporaneo e del modo eterno, il che si può concepire solo per via d’astrazione, non è ancora né temporanea, né eterna: ma è un cotale iniziamento dell’uno e dell’altro modo. Il secondo corollario si è, che qui stesso trovasi la ragione perché in tutta la cognizione umana trovasi un fondo di oscurità; perché tutta la natura sia ravvolta in un velo misterioso. Questa ragione si è che ci manca sempre un anello; ci manca la coscienza dell’atto creativo. Noi veggiamo le cose contingenti, le veggiamo come termini di un essere eterno; ma quest’Essere eterno, che nella mente nostra si compone colle cose contingenti come principio a suo termine, e cosí le rende enti, non già l’ente stesso reale, ma è bensí l’ente eterno nel suo modo puramente ideale, il quale è bastante a far conoscere le cose, ma non a produrle. Conoscendo dunque noi le cose come effetti e produzioni, ma non potendo intuire la loro causa nell’operar di questa, le cose tutte che conosciamo ci riescono come un mistero, come un arcano: pro-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY dotti senza causa, esistenti senza ragione. Intendiamo ciò che ripugna, intendiamo perciò che questa causa ci deve essere: ma pure non ci apparisce. L’universo dunque è un enigma di cui ci manca la chiave; un problema che affatica di continuo le nostre menti, di cui non possiamo trovar mai la spiegazione, ma saper solo che questa spiegazione ci deve pur essere).

For reason of all this, it is impossible to have in Rosmini’s system the deduction of categories that, on the Hegelian model, Donato Jaja thought to find in Teosofia, in which one could observe a certain regret, because the same being that in the Ideology needed to take all its determinations from the outside, from sensation, in Teosofia is made capable, or is tempted at least to effect them from the inside of itself with an a priori proceeding (Un pentimento; imperocché quello stesso essere che nell’Ideologia ha bisogno di prendere tutte le sue determinazioni dal di fuori, dalla sensazione, nella Teosofia è fatto capace, o è tentato almeno di darle dall’interno di se stesso con un procedimento a priori). This regret, said Fiorentino, was due to the passage of Rosmini from Kant to Hegel, “The reason for this change of perspective consists in this: in his first work, Rosmini kept an eye on the Kantian critique; in his last one, he paid attention to the dialectic construction of Hegel” (La ragione di questo cangiamento di prospettiva sta in ciò: che nella prima opera il Rosmini teneva d’occhio la critica kantiana; nell’ultima la costruzione dialettica dell’Hegel). In Teosofia, Rosmini demonstrates that the solution of his problem was beyond any gnoseological formulation made in the fashion of criticism; the solution was to be found in the ontology from which he began, in which he always fundamentally remained, and that, thankfully for Fiorentino and Jaja, had little to do with Kant or Hegel. It is for this reason that Rosmini, instead of occupying himself with ideology, preferred to deal with Psicologia as the metaphysical doctrine of the soul, and with morality. It is the real being and the moral being that are for Rosmini the beginning and end of his research. 7. Psychology In Psicologia, Rosmini developed the theory of the “fundamental feeling,” the basis of sensibility, the elementary faculty of the soul, anterior to any modification, and that, at a serious scrutiny, reveals itself as an indefinite space and a force without specified limits, diffused within that same space. This sensation is the matrix of existence. If the soul were not this sensation, this sensation of itself in its own modifications, it would vanish. As he observed in Psicologia, the modification of what is sensible is sensible, but the modification of what is not sensible is not sensible. At the point of insertion of the “fundamental feeling” with the “intellective feeling” (intellective ens-principle) the “I” ex-

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ists as the determination and opposition of action to action and, as a circumscribed action, action-passion: If the “I” were not determined in all sides, if it were not a unique and simple principle, having a capacity of sensing and understanding, it would certainly not be the “I.” In regard to this real thing, its determination and limitation are what essentially constitute and form it at every instant. In regard to the other real and trans-subjective things, the “I” knows them only for the action that they exercise over the “I,” and this action is specific because if it were undetermined there would be no action. The agent that acts should be determined from all sides, otherwise it would not be the acting agent. But if the agent would not be acting, it would not be a real thing existent in itself. In order to exist, the finite real must be fully determined and circumscribed by definite borders, which alone would make it this thing instead of that (L’Io, se non fosse da tutti i lati determinato, se non fosse un principio unico e semplice, avente un termine sentito e inteso, certo non sarebbe l’Io. Rispetto dunque a questo reale la determinazione e limitazione sua è ciò che essenzialmente lo costituisce e forma in ogni istante. Riguardo poi agli altri reali e transoggettivi, non li conosce se non per l’azione che essi esercitano in lui, e questa azione è determinata, e vede, che se non fosse determinata non sarebbe nessun’azione. L’agente dunque deve essere determinato da tutti i lati: altrimenti non potrebbe essere agente. Ma se non fosse agente non sarebbe reale in sé esistente. È dunque necessario che il reale finito, acciocché possa esistere, sia pienamente determinato e circoscritto da certi confini i quali soli lo rendono piuttosto questo che quello). Luigi Ferri, not unjustly, in this connection of sense-intellect, of an “I” as coincidence of action and passion, of the body as the sensible link with the world, recognized something in Maine de Biran’s taste, which in his opinion runs through all the analysis that Rosmini does of psychic phenomena and of their rapport with corporeity. Ferri himself underlined the necessary connection of these aspects of Psicologia with the cosmological ideas developed in Teosofia, with the reminiscence, at this time, more of Campanella than of Leibniz. Matter, for Rosmini, is sentiment (sentimento) whose end is extension, an active energy in respect to which space is the phenomenon. Sentient and sense, action and passion, are correlative terms: The primitive and generic essence of the soul is everywhere. Everything lives and contains life. The phenomenon exists equally everywhere because everything is sensible and sentient, from the lower level in the ladder of beings to the lofty human level, from the sentiment applied immediately and blindly to its correlated end up to the principle

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY that senses itself in a reflective mode and prefers itself. Everywhere a substantial principle having in itself the purpose of its own activity is present, present will also be an extension with space, localizations, relations, all things susceptible to be sensed or imagined, and everywhere inseparable from sensation (L’essenza primitiva e generica dell’anima è dovunque; tutto vive e contiene la vita, il fenomeno ugualmente è dovunque, poiché tutto è sensibile e senziente, dal grado piú basso della scala degli esseri fino all’uomo, dal sentimento applicato immediatamente e cecamente al suo termine fino al principio che sente se stesso in modo riflesso e si preferisce. Ed ovunque sia un principio sostanziale avente in se stesso il termine della propria attività, ivi è anche l’estensione con lo spazio, le localizzazioni, le relazioni, cose tutte suscettibili solo di essere sentite o immaginate, e dovunque inseparabili dal senso).

It is the universal triumph of the sentiment, or of sensing somethingness. In the Teosofia, Rosmini concluded with a precise historical indication: space is sensorium Dei, space is the field in which human beings experience God. In God and in the science of God, in theology, the Rosminian system begins and concludes. The distinction between relative and absolute, between beings and Being, does not exclude their connections. To deepen this issue is for Rosmini to face the problem of creation and of the analogy of being, of the relation between the being of the creature and of that of the Creator. In Teosofia, Rosmini tried to give a reason for the creative act. The absolute Being in its subjective form loves infinitely itself as an extended object. Being infinitely loves Being. This love brings Being to love being in all modes in which it is susceptible to be loved. In order to love being in all its modes, Being would love being as absolute Being and Infinite, but also as relative and finite. This love is the creative act. The Absolute creates for itself a finite and loveable object through the expansion of love. Such an object is the world. In order to create the world, the Absolute must conceive it because the Absolute is intelligent and what is not known cannot be loved. The Absolute must make the world real because if it is not real, it would be only possible, and anyone wants the existence of what one loves. From this we see the two elements of the ideal essence and of the real existence, produced together. Naturally, the various isolated moments are distinct only ideally. Rosmini, introducing divine abstraction and divine imagination, believed to have given reason for the production of the idea and the finite ends or terms, the end terms of the idea. 8. Theodicy. Morality. Church and State Finitude emerges from the love of God. It is goodness for the good people, although in the kingdom of this finitude evil also exists. Rosmini alerts us, “Teodicea must be considered a branch of Teosofia itself.” Evil is limitation or let us say that it emerges directly and rapidly from a limit, “Limitation is in

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the nature of all things save God. Limitation is the fundamental law of creation, and is the key of Divine Providence” (Teosofia, pt. 2, p. 189). Limits open the door to the possibility of fall, “because the nature of all created things, or of those that can possibly be created, have their proper limitation, and this limitation opens the way to the possibility of evil.” On the other hand Rosmini insists that only the limitation confers to human nature “the noblest quality of becoming the perfecter of oneself, and, I would dare to say, to be part with the Creator in giving to oneself the proper completion” (ibid., p. 192). Finitude, sign of creation, is also risk of death and possibility of glory; it is closure within the limits, but also an invitation to overcome the limits: The limitation of the reality that constitutes the human nature is the necessary occasion for moral fighting, for the battle for which the finite is obliged to break through its limiting circle so to expand itself in the infinity communicated to the intellect and to participate of the infinite goodness, which is what morality always is. This acquisition of perfection would be greater, the better the act and the efforts are of the people who acquire it. The supreme moral perfection of human beings would not be actualized unless the condition of opposition will also be given. But the Goodness of God is infinite, and as such tries to derive from the created things all the possible moral goodness. It was the decision of divine wisdom and goodness that all created things should be ordained in this way, so that in them and for them the maximum of opposition would be developed as the indispensable means to their greatest moral perfection. Everything was going to threaten the virtue of the created, but the virtue of the created was going to triumph over everything. The infinite in the created was going to triumph over everything finite. In this is found the triumph of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator, the Glory of God (La limitazione della realtà che costituisce l’uomo è occasione necessaria di lotta morale, di questa lotta per la quale il finito è obbligato a rompere la propria cerchia per distendersi nell’infinito comunicato all’intelletto, e partecipe cosí appunto del bene infinito, qual`è già sempre per se stesso il morale la qual perfezione è manifestamente tanto maggiore, quant’è maggiore l’atto e lo sforzo dell’uomo per acquistarla. Dunque la somma perfezione morale per l’uomo non si potea porre in essere se non a condizione dell’antagonismo. Ma la bontà di Dio è infinita, e come tale tende a cavare dalla creatura tutto il bene morale che può darle. Dunque era consentaneo alla sapienza e bontà divina che cosí le cose create si ordinassero, che si dovesse svolgere in esse e per esse il massimo antagonismo, qual mezzo indipensabile alla massima loro morale perfezione. Tutto dunque doveva congiurare contro la virtù della creatura, e la virtú della creatura doveva trionfare di tutto: l’infinito nella creatura dovea vincere tutto il finito: tale è il trionfo della sapienza e

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Thus, morality is essential to Being in its absoluteness. In the Teosofia it is said that sentiment and life possess essentially the quality of being pleasing and, when knowledge is added, they also are amiable. From which it follows that, given an eternal subject or sentiment, which intends eternally and immediately itself, it must love itself in a manner as much as its understanding of itself is necessary. As the poet says (Dante, Paradiso, xxvi, 28–33): The more the Good comprehends Itself as Goodness the more It inflames Itself with Love. And Love is greater the more of Goodness Good comprehends in Itself. Its Essence is so expansive that even what exists outside of it, is nothing but a spark of its ray (Ché il ben, in quanto ben, come s’intende, Cosí accende amore, e tanto maggio, Quanto più di bontade in sè comprende. Dunque all’Essenza ov’è tanto avvantaggio, Che ciascun benché fuor di Lei si trova, Altro non è ch’un lume di suo raggio). In 1826, in the second part of Teodicea (pt. 2, p. 336), Rosmini observed, “The spirit follows on the steps of reason, and love would follow after cognition” (segue l’animo i passi della ragione, e l’amor vien dietro alla cognizione). The way that Being reveals Itself to human beings is the worthy one in which It wants to be wanted, to be affirmed. Already in the theory of assent (assenso), in the Logica, Rosmini placed in the will, which affirms its own grade of being, the root of error. Goodness is objectively manifested in the different grades of being; the human being must recognize it and love it according to its own measure. In Principi (ch. 1, p. 3), he writes, “If the idea of being in the universal is innate, and if it is the supreme law, then it means that we carry inserted by nature in our soul all morality in its germ” (Se l’idea dell’essere in universale è ingenita, e s’ella appunto è la suprema legge, ne consegue che noi portiamo inserita da natura nell’anima nostra tutta la morale nel suo germe). While sense gives facts, the reason a priori can give the necessity of a command, “so that we deny morality or recognize its principle as being infused in us” (sicché o conviene negar la morale, o riconoscerne infuso in noi il principio). We have the a priori of the law and the objectivity of goodness, “and as the obliging force comes from the object, so the feeling/sentiment and the consciousness of it come from the subject” (e come dall’oggetto viene tutta la forza obbligatoria, cosí dal soggetto viene il sentimento, e la consa-

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pevolezza della medesima). Without sense, there would be no “I,” the acting subject (dove non è un senso, non è un Io); but, without being (existence), morality would be annihilated in the search for pleasure: Goodness identifies with being (existence). Good is nothing but being (existence). Being (existence) realizes, actualizes, develops itself, and in its actualizing good follows an intrinsic and necessary order, whose reason is found only in its self…. Being (existence) and goodness are identical. Goodness is being (existence) that is considered in its proper order and it is known by the intelligence, which from knowing it derives a certain delight. The good, in one word, is being (existence) that is in rapport with intelligence, because intelligence sees what every nature demands for itself, and to which it aims with all its forces, no matter whether this need is sensed or not (Il bene quindi si immedesima coll’essere; il bene non è che l’essere; l’essere si realizza, si attua, si sviluppa; nell’attuarsi, nello svilupparsi egli ha un ordine intrinseco e necessario, di che non si può trovare la ragione se non in lui solo…. Essere e bene sono dunque il medesimo; senonchè il bene è l’essere considerato nel suo ordine, il quale viene conosciuto dall’intelligenza, e in conoscendolo ne viene a questa una dilettazione: il bene in una parola è l’essere in rapporto con l’intelligenza, in quanto questa vede che cosa ogni natura esiga a se stessa, e che tenda colle sue forze, sia poi questa esigenza sentita o no, in Principi, pt. 2, ch. 1). Objectively, the good is the process of the life of Being and almost the amorous circularity of Being; subjectively, the good is comprehension and participation of the created in the harmony of Being. In this way the three Rosminian formulas, the triple expression of an unique law, are obtained: (1) “Follow the light of reason” (segui il lume della ragione); (2) “Predispose your will toward being” (doversi inclinare la volontà verso l’essere); (3) “Predispose your will in an orderly way toward being” (doversi inclinare la volontà verso l’essere ordinatamente). This law proposes as its ultimate end persons and God, who is no other than the absolute goodness seen as an Ens or person, in which every finite reality attempts at resolving itself.” Rosmini then says, “For in virtue of this most strict union that every reality can make of itself with the absolute good, every reality becomes one thing with the absolute good, and on this unity the extreme excellence of creation rests” (Conciossiaché in virtú di questo congiungimento strettissimo, ch’ella può fare di sé col bene assoluto, diventa una cosa con lui: e qui però riposa l’estrema eccellenza del creato). In Filosofia del diritto, Rosmini deduced from the supreme law of morality the rules of society: of family, State, and Church. To appease his suffering spirit and also for the comfort of other peoples, in the document Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa, he formulated what the structure of the Church must be, its relationship with the State, and its mission in education.

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 9. Niccolò Tommaseo, Alessandro Manzoni, and Alfonso Testa

After the sentence of the Church condemning in 1887 forty propositions taken from the works of the philosopher of Rovereto (Trent), Rosmini’s philosophy continued to influence many faithful disciples and Italian thought in general. We will not dwell upon the Rosminians of strict observance, the compilers of manuals that were most diffuse, such as Antonio Corte and Alessandro Pestalozza, whose systematic exposition was translated into Latin. His ancient schoolfellow in Padua, Niccolò Tommaseo, was no philosopher, but he liked to deal with ponderous problems and discuss pedagogical questions. Toward Rosmini, the thinker, Tommaseo always showed reverent respect. In a note to a translation extensively commented of the fortunate manual of moral philosophy of Dugald Stewart (Lodi, 1831), he celebrated the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (p. 48): A work that deserves to be meditated by every person who loves science. What in the ideas is common, universal, and possible is manifestly demonstrated by Rosmini to be totally superior to the experience of the senses. Of this most complicated fact the supreme reason is reduced to an ultimate simplicity, to a simplicity that is almost revealing grand and fertile ideas (Opera che merita d’essere meditata da chiunque ama la scienza. Quello che nelle idee è di commune, di universale, di possible, è dal Rosmini evidentemente dimostrato essere affatto superiore all’esperienza del senso; e di questo fatto complicatissimo la cagione suprema è ridotta all’ultima simplicità, a quella simplicità ch’è quasi rivelatrice delle idee grandi e feconde). The vagueness of this judgment parallels completely some ulterior observations on the ideology of Plato, in which Tommaseo was fully inconsistent. His comprehension of modern philosophy is not better, though he shows some preference for what he calls “idealismo innocente” (at least in its intentions) of Berkeley, but condemns without appeal the idealism of Kant that, in his opinion, “is brother and ally of the most abject materialism” (ibid., p. 184). From these premises we may very well assume how much depth runs through Tommaseo’s exposition of Rosmini’s most important essay, Esposizione del sistema filosofico del “Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee” di Antonio Rosmini Serbati (Turin, 1838). Gino Capponi doubted the perspicacity of the exposition of Tommaseo and criticized the analogy offered by Tommaseo between the idea of being and a cloud in which thereafter the single ideas assume their differentiation. Tommaseo certainly remained always faithful to Rosmini, and in the polemic with Gioberti, he searched for the possibility of conciliation. In Il Rosmini e il Gioberti (1843), he concluded with these words:

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I love Rosmini like a ray of light more than human, which illuminated my youth. But I love Gioberti, and I remember the colloquia of the exile and the examples of a sincere virtue. I wish that he too would recall those hours, whence he may be able to draw some sense of gratification and peace (Amo il Rosmini come un raggio di luce piú che umano, che illuminò la mia giovinezza: ma il Gioberti amo, e rammento i colloqui dell’esilio e gli esempi della sua schietta virtú. Rammenti anche egli quelle ore, che forse ne attingerà qualche senso di indulgenza e di pace). Tommaseo celebrated Rosmini in Antologia (1832), in Aforismi della scienza prima ad uso dei principianti (1837), and so on, until the affectionate commemoration, in 1855, in Rivista contemporanea. To Rosmini, Tommaseo was dedicating his last study, a short time before death, “Il Muratori e il Rosmini comparati tra loro” (A comparison between Muratori and Rosmini) in Memorie dell’Accademia di Modena of 1873. From the name of Tommaseo we should not separate the one of Manzoni, who, too, was not a philosopher, but learned in philosophy, and somewhat subject to the fascination of the Vichian obscurity. Manzoni was an elegant polemist in Appendice al capitolo terzo della Morale Cattolica, published in the edition of 1855 with the assiduous assistance of Rosmini, who greatly praised it. Rosminian are also the presuppositions of the confutation that Manzoni attempted, against utilitarianism, at a confutation based on an objective moral order dependent from God as the supreme end. The just is precisely what refers to such order, meanwhile utility is what brings us to the level of the individual. If between the useful and the just one must search for an accord, it is obvious that between the two there is a clear distinction. The obligation in its irreducible originality is connected with the just, it cannot be in any way deduced from a sanction that any authority could impose or threaten. The most successful expression of Manzoni’s Rosminianism is without doubt the dialogue Dell’invenzione, in which the reference to the theses of Rosmini is constant, with an open condemnation of all those doctrines that want “to give birth to the idea from the mind that contemplates it, which is like saying, the light from the eye, or the needed means for the operation from the operation itself” (far nascere l’idea dalla mente che la contempla; che è quanto dire, la luce dall’occhio, il mezzo necessario all’operazione dalla operazione medesima). These are systems that “end with reducing truth to be a contingent and relative thing, denying explicitly its attributes of universality, eternity, and necessity, because such attributes cannot be predicated of a thing that has been produced” (finiscono col fare della verità una cosa contingente e relativa, negandole esplicitamente i suoi attributi di universalità, d’eternità, di necessità; perchè in effetto tali attributi non possono convenire a una cosa che sia stata prodotta). There is little to tell about minor Rosminians, save their honest clarity and devotion in spreading the doctrines of the teacher. Tarditi has been al-

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ready mentioned; Gian Battista Peyretti, a professor in Turin, author also of a famous manual, Elementi di filosofia (Turin, 1857), saw his theories of logics minutely discussed by Ausonio Franchi; Giovan Antonio Raynieri, a passionate admirer of Rosmini, developed the pedagogical doctrine of Rosmini in Della pedagogica libri V; P. Paganini, professor in Pisa, decided to clarify Rosmini’s conception of space, Dello spazio: saggio cosmologico (Pisa, 1862); Gustavo Benso di Cavour summarized the theses of the teacher in Fragments philosophiques (Turin, 1841). Under Rosminian influence were also developed the researches of Ruggero Bonghi and Domenico Berti, meanwhile Marco Minghetti, discarding the sensism of Costa, was moving definitely to the side of the Rosminians. Among the acclaims of faithful followers and the violent attacks of Gioberti, Rosmini enjoyed more tranquil discussions such as those with the “good” Galluppi, who in some letters objected to his subjectivism, and who in Lettere filosofiche would notice in Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee the presence of an open Kantism. Vincenzo de Grazia would not only sustain that Rosmini performed a systematic alteration of Thomism, but also that the passage from the idea of being to reality is impossible. Joining in this criticism was Salvatore Mancino in his Elementi di filosofia, in which echoes of the criticism of Mamiani and Gioberti are also found. How can the spirit begin from an abstraction, if abstract ideas presuppose the concrete? On the other hand, how could anyone avoid empiricism, or worse “the most base sensualism,” when trying to save the reality of the external world? Interesting news is that the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee was considered by Alfonso Testa of Borgonovo (Piacenza) a philosophical novel. Testa was a valuable thinker, and he was responsible for having stimulated the knowledge of Kant in Italy. He began with a partial adhesion to sensism, of which his first book, Della filosofia dell’affetto (Piacenza, 1830–1834, 2 vols.), is fully pervaded; but soon with a subtle critical analysis he approached the problem of knowledge that brought him closer to the positions of Kantism. In Filosofia della mente, published in Piacenza in 1836, he affirmed the apriorism of universal and necessary notions, and while analyzing substance and cause he revealed their validity, establishing them as laws of our thinking, as meta-empirical roots that are irreducible to experience. Identifying the idea of cause with that of force, he concluded in favor of a distinction between phenomenal and noumenical reality. Following the publication of the Filosofia della mente, Testa attacked Rosmini with Il “Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee” dell’abate A. R. S. esaminato dall’abate A. T. (Piacenza, 1837), reproaching him of abstractness of ideas, in regard to which he demonstrated understanding of the formal character of the categories as the law of thinking in contrast to their character as object of thought, clearly distinguishing the function of the category in the constitution of a concept from the function of an idea predicated in a judgment. In the exposition and examination of the critique of pure reason in Della critica della ragion pura di Kant esaminata e

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discussa (Lugano-Piacenza, 1843–1849), Testa stopped when facing the consequences of Kantism, he realized that Kantism had only constructed “a subjective system that destroyed veracious science.” 10. Gino Capponi, Raffaello Lambruschini, and Silvestro Centofanti In speaking of Rosmini, Manzoni, and Tommaseo, we mentioned also Gino Capponi. Capponi with Lambruschini should not be separated from this movement of spiritual rebirth that, through the polemic against sensism, intended to renew in all Italians the consciousness of the traditional values. Capponi and Lambruschini were not professional philosophers; they even showed a continuous diffidence for an official philosophy. Capponi confessed of being unable to follow any philosophy whatsoever, and was incredulous toward all systems (incapace a tener dietro a una filosofia qualunque, e quindi incredulo a ciascuna). Lambruschini, too, confided, “I am not much of a friend of philosophy, I mean, of what until now has been called philosophy” (io non sono molto amico della filosofia: cioè di quella che finora si è chiamata filosofia). They loved piecemeal thought, the philosophical fragments, and skeptically laughed at systematic philosophy, the “whole philosophy” (filosofia intera). Their criticism of the system, the eulogy, and justification of the fragment were not accidental; the two of them did not reflect a constructive deficiency, but a specific concept of human nature. Capponi, in many occasions, fought the philosophy of the schools, saying: A system is like a sect, which wants to oblige me to the ipse dixit, which I abhor. I love instead fragments of philosophy and those teachers who profess it in that manner, and in their reasoning have silent moments that are filled up with “I don’t know” (Un sistema è come una setta, e vuole obbligarmi all’ipse dixit, da cui aborrisco, amando invece la filosofia in frammenti e i maestri che in tale modo la professano, e che nei loro ragionamenti hanno di quelle lacune che sono empite dal “non lo so”). At other times, insisting against Silvestro Centofanti, the supporter of the filosofia intera, Capponi admitted, “I have never been capable of accepting a whole philosophy, and I sincerely love those philosophers who can give us the sum of their thought in a few brief but dazzling sentences” (a me però d’una filosofia intera non è riuscito mai di capacitarmi, ed amo i filosofi che danno a noi tutta la somma dei loro pensieri per frammenti). Still young, while preparing a Progetto, an outline for what would be the Anthology, he eulogized historical concreteness, the Lockean method considered as an adherence to facts. His empirical method was developed in the direction of a humanism that could be realized only in a religious conception of

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life. His philosopher per excellence was Augustine, who “with the method of an expeditious, all round, and strong discourse” appeared to him “as the prince of philosophers.” Immersed in a great experience of life, the Augustinian meditation is not “poetic … imagination”; it is a re-thinking of a contact with the roots of reality. This contact, this originary embracing of a position was no abstract reasoning, or reasoning by syllogisms. Will, sentiment, and action are the principles of an illumination superior to any analysis, to any of the filosofie intere (the so-called whole philosophies). His claims were: I wish I could have those philosophies … or have had them … but I would prefer to possess and work with rich soil…. Thought is truly a derivation from sentiment…. The will, which today is undervalued, holds the first place in the consciences…. Without here repeating with the insolence of Rousseau that a man who meditates is a depraved animal, we can actually affirm that in the great majority of men thinking is necessarily brief and its end is an act of the will…. I do love my own philosophy all the times I obtain from it norms more certain for my judgments, or derive those canons that are useful for life (Vorrei di quelle filosofie … averne avute … ma vorrei possedere e lavorare il pingue limo…. Il pensiero si presenta come una derivazione del sentimento…. Il volere che oggi si nega, ha il primo posto nelle coscienze…. E senza ripetere con la insolenza di Rousseau, che l’uomo che medita è un animale depravato, possiamo bene asserire in fatto, che nella grande maggiorità degli uomini, il pensiero è necessariamente breve ed ha per termine un volere…. Io amo la mia filosofia tutte le volte che io ne tragga norme più certe a’ mie’ giudizi, o ne derivi di quei canoni che sono utili alla vita). Born from “il pingue limo” (the rich soil) of life a fertile reflection continues to operate in it. At the center of Capponi’s thought this circle of thought existed that originates from sentiment and returns to sentiment to nourish itself again. In Scritti (ch. 2, pp. 432–433), he wrote: This is what is great and singular in the philosophy of St. Augustine: the most abstract speculations are by him brought back within the sphere of consciousness and are compared to the interior sense in order to be proved and verified; from this they learn their limitations as well as derive their strength and security. These speculations in Augustine do not move around outside the center of gravity as it happens for the human thought that would reduce to the form of science the ontological investigations. These Augustinian speculations find God at the depths of consciousness and at the apex of the thought that searched objectively for It, while the discourse of the mind find its equilibrium and convenience by being between the two homogeneous extremes. At the apex of thought words are always missing, but in the return of the

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human reflection to itself, human nature is aided by the inarticulate word that God has infused in it and that would inform the rational being where science should end. This is so, not because the sterility of doubt should begin, but because the demonstrated truths of reason are submitting themselves to the certainty of the truths of sentiment. The truths of sentiment are located at the depths where the roots are found of all healthy discourse and they were before the word was (Questo è di grande e di singolare nella filosofia di Sant’Agostino, che le piú astruse speculazioni da lui ricondotte dentro alla cerchia della coscienza, e messe a riscontro del senso interiore, quasi a riprova ed a verificazione, imparano quivi a farsi un limite, e da esso pigliano forza e sicurezza. Non vanno pensili e vaganti fuori del centro di gravità, come avviene al pensiero umano che voglia ridurre a forma di scienza le ontologiche investigazioni; ma Dio ritrovando nel fondo stesso della coscienza, come egli era obbiettivamente in cima al pensiero che ad esso mirava, tutto il discorso della mente serba equilibrio e convenienza trovandosi posto tra due termini omogenei. In cima al pensiero manca sempre la parola; ma in quel ritorno dentro se stesso, all’uomo soccorre la parola non articolata che Dio vi ha infusa e che lo avverte dove la scienza finisca; non perché sottentri la sterilità del dubbio, ma perché ai veri dimostrati sottentrano i veri che hanno certezza nel sentimento, e stanno in fondo al discorso sano, perch’essi erano prima del discorso). In this presence at the roots of the “I,” the human being finds again God, and philosophy and religion join together, “Let’s bring philosophy back to the womb of religion!” Like Capponi, Lambruschini wished for a religious philosophy, for a human morality that could be cult of God and goodness: I do know, or at least I foresee a philosophy that I dreamed in my soul as a mysterious beauty and more attractive. This philosophy includes the whole humankind, it does not divide; this philosophy unites one human being with another—and what is even better—unites the human being with God (Pur conosco, o almeno intraveggo, una filosofia ch’io vagheggio nel mio animo come una bellezza misteriosa, e perciò medesimo piú attraente. Ella comprende tutto l’uomo, non lo divide; ella congiunge l’uomo all’uomo, e—quel che è piú e meglio—ella congiunge l’uomo a Dio). Lambruschini advocated a human philosophy and, precisely because fundamentally human, a philosophy linked to God, equally distant from “the nebulous metaphysics of the mystics” and the pretentious science of the philosophers. Philosophers have been rejected “by the superstition of the populace, by the nebulous metaphysics of the mystics, and the power of the clergy…. They ridicule everything, believe everything an error, human fiction, or con-

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vention, and without much examination, they judge, condemn, and despise.” Lambruschini faced sensism and ideology, two systems that he considered repugnant, “Their criterion is natural reasoning resting on pure sensations. If the mystics are subtle, the philosophers are light; the logic of both is equally false” (Il loro criterio è il ragionamento naturale appoggiato alle pure sensazioni. Se i mistici sono sottili, i filosofi sono leggeri; e la logica di tutti e due è egualmente falsa). The human science, the empirical experimental cognition is always limited, partial, centered on a finite sector; it is abstract; it never reaches the heart of reality, the life of the whole: The human science divides and dissolves. The human science takes advantage of the forces of nature in order to reproduce certain effects, each in its separate manner. The human science cannot reproduce these effects all in accord with each other, all concurring in the formation of a common effect, an effect that is not this or that operation but a new one that results from all. The chemist and the physiologist are right when they do not recognize life in this, because, in what they do, no life exists (La scienza dell’uomo separa e disfà; si vale delle forze della natura per riprodurre effetti tali e tali disgiuntamente; ma non può riprodurli concordati insieme o concorrenti a formare un effetto comune, un effetto che non è tale operazione, né tal altra, ma una nuova che risulta da tutte. Il chimico, il fisiologo han ragione di non riconoscere la vita perchè, in quel che essi fanno, la vita non c’è). In 1866, Lambruschini mentioned a discussion on positive philosophy with Giambattista Giorgini at Capponi’s home: In these meetings, we were speaking about the bad turn that natural philosophy was taking…. It was called positive philosophy because it was considering facts alone. But it considered the facts in a way much different from the way used by Galileo and the great Italian physicists and naturalists. These people observed and experimented, but in their experiments they were discovering only the idea (Si parlava della mala piega della filosofia naturale…. La chiamano la filosofia positiva, che tien conto dei soli fatti. Ma ne tien conto in un modo ben diverso da quello di Galileo e dei grandi fisici e naturalisti italiani. Costoro osservavano e sperimentavano, ma nei fatti scoprivano l’idea). At this point Lambruschini added the polemical note against the contemporary materialists, “Leader of this school in Florence is Moriz Schiff, the great butcher and murderer of dogs and rabbits” (Caporione a Firenze di questa scuola è lo Schiff [Maurizio], grande scorticatore e carnefice di cani e conigli). To this dispersion toward what is external, Lambruschini opposed a continuous appeal to interiority, to ethical-religious values:

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This interiority of the human being is a thing that everyone believes to know very well and they think it deserves no more exploration. It is a thing about which all would say that it should be valued, guarded, and perfected, but very few, or none at all, esteemed it. The human interiority of which I speak is a mystery: it is a hidden treasure that no one wants to dig out. This is the evil of our generation (Quest’uomo interiore è cosa che tutti pensano di conoscere a pieno e perciò non degnano poi di esplorare. È cosa che tutti dicono dover esser pregiata e custodita e perfezionata, ma pochi, se pur alcuno, la pregiano. Ma l’uomo interiore di che io parlo è tuttavia un mistero: è un tesoro nascosto che nessuno vuole scavare. E questo è il male della generazione nostra). The thought of the Enlightenment has abated in the name of progress and happiness; its critique was useful, but it did not construct, “Philosophy promised happiness to humankind, if it could destroy bad systems, evil laws, and despotic powers…. Philosophy has destroyed, has spoken, and was heard by everybody, but the world found no happiness” (La filosofia promise agli uomini la felicità; sol che riuscisse a distruggere i cattivi ordini, le male leggi, la dispotica autorità…. Ella ha distrutto; ella ha parlato, ed è stata da tutti ascoltata; ma il mondo non è felice). Philosophy and reason are strong in criticism, but sterile in building, “Religion alone can accomplish what all other systems promised in vain” (La Religione può sola adempiere quello che da tutt’altri è promesso invano). Religion is a constructive process of the spirit, it is sentiment, action, and morality: We should bring Religion back to its true duty as the perfecter of the human heart and of the law of the moral world. What are its means? Are they theoretical speculations? No! Religion would do that with sentiment and actions. Religion does not consider ideas and works in abstract manner in themselves, but in relation to the status of the human heart and in regard to the power that these doctrines have over sentiments and actions (Ricondurre la Religione al suo vero ufficio di perfezionatrice del cuore dell’uomo, di legge del mondo morale. Con quali mezzi vuol ella ottener questo? Con speculazioni teoriche? No: con sentimenti e con opere. Le idee, o dottrine, ella non le contempla astrattamente in sé medesime, ma in relazione allo stato del cuore, e per il potere ch’esse dottrine hanno sui sentimenti e sulle opere). In the dialogues Dell’istruzione, which began to be published in 1852 but was then interrupted, Lambruschini introduced Ficino as the narrator, and returned to the thesis of illumination as the basis of the objectivity of knowing: This is the intellectual light, which God irradiates unto our soul so that

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To this Platonic-like spiritualism that loved to find its origins in Rosmini, Gioberti Silvestro Centofanti also participated, a friend of Capponi and Lambruschini, a lover of the filosofia intiera that Capponi refused, but who like his friends was all taken by a religious philosophy capable of reconstructing what the Enlightenment reduced and ruined. The same motive that we saw in Lambruschini returned in Centofanti: Physics, chemistry, natural history, geology, medicine, astronomy, all the sciences of economics, all the arts that produce food, riches, prosperity and open and multiply the ways to the equitable circulation of this social blood, are all things necessary, profitable, and beautiful. They, however, are merely means, conditions, and provisions so that humankind could reach its goal. They are not the goals for which human beings were created. You know the laws of the stars, and why do you ignore those of your thought? (Fisica, chimica, storia naturale, geologia, medicina, astronomia, tutte le scienze economiche, tutte le arti che producono alimenti, ricchezze, prosperità e sgombrano e moltiplicano le vie all’equabile circolazione di questo sangue sociale, son cose tutte e necessarie, e profittevoli e belle: ma esse son mezzi, son condizioni, presidii, onde l’uomo attinga il suo scopo: e non il fine a cui egli fu creato. Conosci le leggi degli astri, e ignori quelle del tuo pensiero?). If every cognition does not wish to disperse itself, it must derive its meaning and value from the human nature, “All cognitions presuppose as a necessary principle of their subsistence the natural and eternal laws of the human intellect” (Tutte le cognizioni presuppongono, come necessario principio per cui sussistono, le leggi naturali ed eterne dell’umano intelletto). The true science of the human being is the one that alone sees the human being in its relationship to other human beings and God: Stop boasting to me with so much cautiousless certainty your own sci-

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ence and the wonderful advantages it produces. You may possess an angelic intellect for science, but not be a whole person for humanity. Analyzing bodies, you corrupted them with philosophical violence. You know many wonders of nature but live as a pilgrim by yourself. You would die without ever having known that secret part of your soul where the Finger of God has impressed the monogram of the entire universe. You used your reason, but never felt God (Cessa di vantarmi con troppo incauta sicurezza il tuo sapere, e le stupende utilità che produce. Sarai forse un angelico intelletto alla scienza, ma non pienamente uomo all’umanità. Corrompesti analizzando i corpi con violenza filosofica; ti son note molte opere della natura: e vivi pellegrinando da te medesimo, e morrai vergine di quella segreta parte dell’anima ove il dito del Creatore ti aveva impresso il monogramma dell’universo. Usasti sempre la tua ragione; e Dio giammai non sentisti). In Centofanti, the filosofia intiera and the philosophical reconstruction were resolving themselves into rhetoric. It was the same rhetoric that could efficaciously move his students of Pisa to go and fight courageously at Curtatone and Montanara. [In 1848, young voluntaries from every part of Tuscany were joining the forces of Northern youth fighting for liberty against the Austrian Empire. They demonstrated great heroism in one of the first battles, the Battle of Curtatone and Montanara, for the actual independence of Italy from any foreign dominion. Unfortunately, under General Johann Joseph Radetsky, the Austrians won the battle and continued their supremacy over Northern Italy until 1860.]

Thirty-Two VINCENZO GIOBERTI 1. Vincenzo Gioberti’s Life and Studies. Giuseppe Mazzini and Gioberti Gioberti was born in Turin on 5 April 1801 and studied with the Priests of the Oratory. On 9 January 1823, he graduated with a degree in theology. On 11 August 1825, he joined the College of Theology of the University of Turin, while his fame continued to spread. He studied Kant very early in life and compared him to Aristotle; and read ancient and modern philosophers. As custom demanded he came under the influence of the Scottish School, of Joseph Mari Degérando, Ludovico A. Breme, Ermes Visconti, Ottavio Falletti, and their attempt to renew the old Sensism with the help of the Ideology. It was under these last influences that, according to Santino Caramella, a welldeserving scholar on the evolution of Gioberti’s thought, Gioberti moved from the early acceptance of Kant to a critique of Kant, criticism that will be manifest to any person who will move from the reading of Miscellanee to that of Meditazioni filosofiche. Connected with Meditazioni filosofiche, which perhaps contains its first preparatory notes, is the doctoral thesis of 1825, in Turin, De deo et naturali religione, De antiquo foedere, De Christiana religione (On God and natural religion, On the ancient covenant, On the Christian religion), in which it is possible to find Galluppi’s influence as well, and the assertion of the concurring of sense and intellect in knowledge. As already noticed, Gioberti was at this time half way between Galluppi and Rosmini. The document of an always more precise criticism of Sensism is the unpublished Responsiones ad obiecta (Answers to objections). To the period between 1830 and 1834 are to be attributed the fragments gathered and published by Arrigo Solmi with the title Teorica della mente umana (Theory of the human mind), which very strangely Solmi attributed to 1850–1852, but that first by Gentile and then by Caramella were recognized as of an earlier period, but not before 1830, because of a reference to Rosmini, “in whom it appears that the ingenuity of Pythagoras and of the first Zeno have returned to a new life.” The so much admired Rosmini is already criticized and convinced of psychologism, or of sensism, “The capital error of the theory of Rosmini is the idea of being as

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capable of expressing only mental and possible beings, and this psychological error destroys ontology” (errore capitale della teorica di Rosmini. Egli considera l’idea dell’essere, come esprimente il solo essere mentale e possible, e questo error psicologico distrugge l’ontologia). In 1834, in La Giovane Italia, the famous letter appeared in which with the exaltation of Vico, Gioberti exalted Bruno as the representative “of a pantheism founded on truth, healthy, moral, and religious” (di un panteismo, fondato in verità, sano, morale, religioso). This pantheism was present in the pages written by Mazzini, to whom Gioberti confessed, “I think that I am noticing in some parts of your journal some mention and some presentiment of this pantheism, and in your political doctrine an application of its dictates.” This pantheism appeared as “the only true and solid philosophy, destined to flourish one day with the unanimous vote of all good minds” (la sola vera e soda filosofia, destinata a fiorire un giorno col voto unanime dei buoni ingegni). Gioberti believed to have found in Mazzini’s religiousness something agreeable with his intrinsic unity of religion, philosophy, and human freedom, “Religion … is philosophy itself; and … philosophy is freedom” (la religione … è la filosofia medesima … e la filosofia è la libertà). He was not aware of the profound distance existing between his meditation and the moralism of Mazzini, certainly rigorous, but still so vague, nourished by sentiment, made of human sympathy, and permeated by a humanitarian religion of Sansimonismo origin. Mazzini and Gioberti could come together in the polemic, in the necessity of liberty, but in their constructive program they were as distant from each other as, at the political level, democracy is from liberalism. On the doctrinal plain, how far from Mazzini was he who in the natural religion of the English and Rousseau pointed out “a defective and superficial system that does not satisfy profound and speculative spirits!” The formula “God and people”(Dio e popolo) to the ears of Gioberti sounded as a renewed Christianity fighting for the humble against the oppressors, fighting for truth against hypocrisy and mendacity. In this spirit, Gioberti once exclaimed: Compare the pope and Christ—and after you have made the comparison and shown the great difference that runs between the one and the other, between the sublime redeemer of peoples and that vile oppressor of nations, who in addition to the tyranny and murdering of his own, blesses all despots, hits with anathema all who are oppressed, praises an heretic prince swollen with the blood of a Catholic and generous nation, proclaims the crusade against every civilization, sanctifies tyranny as a right, imposes slavery as a duty, and condemns liberty as a crime—then, I dare to say, as you have completed this comparison, dedicate courageously yourselves to this true and alive Christianity, clarify it, publicize it, proclaim its doctrines in order to suppress tyranny, without fearing that someone would confuse it with that religion of slavery and barbarism, that today still reigns (Paragonate il papa al

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Cristo—e quando avrete compiuto il paragone, e fatto vedere quanto divario corra dall’uno all’altro, e dal sublime redentore delle genti a quel vigliacco oppressore di popoli, che, non contento di tiranneggiare e trucidare i suoi, benedice tutti i despoti, sfolgora cogli anatemi tutti gli oppressi, adora un principe eretico grondante del sangue di un popolo cattolico e generoso, bandisce la crociata contro ogni civiltà, santifica la tirannide come un diritto, impone la schiavitú come un dovere e condanna la libertà come un misfatto; quando, dico, avrete conchiusa questa comparazione, ponete mano arditamente al vero e vivo Cristianesimo, chiaritelo, divulgatelo, proclamate le sue dottrine per conquidere la tirannia, senza tema che per alcuno si confonda con quella religione di servitú e di barbarie, che oggi regna). From this it is clear that Edgar Quinet was wrong when he reproached Gioberti of repeating so often what had been taught by Joseph De Maistre and Luis Gabriel Ambroise De Bonald, on whom in the Miscellanee there is the severe judgment that if they would have conducted their studies better, “they would have been admonished to abandon their systems.” When the letter of Gioberti appeared in La Giovane Italia, he, after the arrest of May 1833, had already escaped into exile. In Paris, he came into contact with French culture and found motive for a dislike that never ended. Toward the end of 1834, he moved to Brussels, where, as an instructor at the Istituto Gaggia, he returned to his own studies. The first fruit of these studies, in 1838, was the Teorica del sovrannaturale, o sia discorso sulle convenienze della religione rivelata colla mente umana e col progresso civile delle nazioni (Theory of the supernatural, or a discourse on the agreeableness of revealed religion with the human mind and the civil progress of nations). In this work, the religious problem and the political one are strictly connected in so far as “the political conditions of a people have their foundation in as many moral conditions that precede, form, and conserve them,” while the “two principal elements of the moral life of a people are language and religion.” In this way Gioberti deepened his criticism of the sensism from which he took his first steps, and at the same time in the elaboration of his thought he achieved the doctrine of political and religious liberty. His accusations of De Maistre and De Bonald, “the praisers of barbarism,” are renewed with his condemnation of Lamennais, “devoid of the good judgment, which saves from the hallucinations of fantasy.” Tending to excesses, Lamennais could one day praise despotism for love of religion, and the next day renege faith for love of liberty. As he completed the Teorica del sovrannaturale, in 1839, Gioberti dedicated himself to the composition of Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, printed in 1840 in Brussels, in which he exposed “in short chapters all the texture of his system of philosophy,” that had already been fixed in its fundamental lines and in many complementary aspects. This fact proved that the scholars supporting the thesis of a definite change in the thought of Gioberti, as it was exposed in Protologia, are wrong.

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In Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, Gioberti better outlined his political plans vis-à-vis of the democratic followers of Rousseau. In the antithesis between De Maistre and Lamennais he oriented himself toward a liberal solution equally adverse to the “despotism” of the one group and the “license” of the other, “In both cases, power is always subjective and arbitrary, violent and capricious, because license and tyranny, anarchy and the despotic government are the faces of the same monster.” The political sensism, child of religious and philosophical psychologism, which from Luther and Descartes has corrupted the modern world hereafter, must be uprooted through the sovereignty of the Idea, which would overcome both the human free will and the force of the multitudes. Always in 1840, in Brussels, the Considerazioni sopra le dottrine religiose di Vittorio Cousin appeared and, in the beginning of 1841, the Lettre sur les doctrines philosophiques et politiques de M. de Lamennais, in “Gazette de France,” inspired by an article of exaltation of Mazzini and directed against the “Puppets of the Young Italy” (bamboli della Giovane Italia). In 1841, in addition to the discourse Sul bello (On the beautiful), Gioberti engaged passionately against Tarditi in Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini, a book that was enlarged in the second edition of 1843–1844, in which the answer to the criticism that Ferrari did of Primato was also included. The main lines of the Primato morale e civile degli Italiani (On the moral and civil supremacy of the Italians) were already present in the conclusion of the treatise Sul buono (On goodness), completed in the beginning of 1842, and published in 1843. From the protological formula of “the Being creates the existent” derived the general conclusion that “religion creates the morality and the civilization of humankind,” from which again particularly was deduced that “the Catholic religion has created the morality and the civilization of Italy.” Gioberti explained: In the same way that the Son of God posited the first principles of the Gospel in Jerusalem, the head of his disciples transplanted them in Rome, so that from Jerusalem and Rome, as from a double origin, the redemption of nations could begin, according to the two ways of nature and grace, and the double course of human cases and prodigies (Come l’Uomo Dio pose in Gerusalemme i primi principî dell’Evangelo, il capo de’ suoi apostoli lo trapiantò in Roma; perché da Roma e Gerusalemme, come da doppia culla doveva muovere la redenzione dei popoli, secondo le due vie della natura e della grazia, e il doppio corso dei casi umani e dei prodigi). The principle dear to Gioberti of an intrinsic unity of religion and politics was widening in a providential vision of the history of Italy. In an epistolary exchange of Gioberti with Mamiani, we can become aware of this determination and gradual focusing. The Church is concrete only in the papal Roman spirit in the same way that religion lives in the Church, “Pope and Church, taken

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separately, are two abstractions, which become concrete and acquire value only when united together” (Papa e Chiesa divisi sono a mio giudizio due astrazioni, che non diventano concrete, e non hanno valore, se non unite insieme). Only through a renewed Catholic thought it would be possible to cure the evils that torment the modern world, from Descartes onward: The most secure, dignifying, and efficacious way to cure the Church is to reconcile it with the progress of civilization. To such end, it would be necessary to create in Italy a school of philosophy, liberty, civil wisdom, Catholic, moderate, anti-French, anti-German, and truly Italian. With its influence, this school would destroy the evil done by three centuries. The ecclesiastic discipline has separated itself from civilization, from the time when civilization has repudiated faith. When the progress of civilization would be friendly again with religion, then the other accords would also be re-established (Il modo piú sicuro, piú dignitoso, piú efficace di sanar la Chiesa, sta nel riconciliarla coi civili progressi. E a tal effetto è uopo creare in Italia una scuola di filosofia, di libertà, di civil sapienza, cattolica, moderata, antifrancese, anti germanica, e veramente italiana; la quale con la sua influenza distrugga il male fatto da tre secoli. Imperocché la disciplina ecclesiastica si è sequestrata dalla civiltà, da che la civiltà ha ripudiata la fede; quando i progressi civili si riamicheranno colla religione, l’altra concordia verrà ristabilita). The enthusiasm generated by Gioberti’s work was overwhelming, but still the objections were many and quite relevant. In 1845, in Prolegomeni, Gioberti clarified his position, insisting on the bond between political and philosophical thought and beginning the polemic with the Jesuits. Religion, for Gioberti, has to be active on earth; it must be useful to order and organize the earthly city. For the Jesuits, this would constitute the danger of subordinating to political contingent needs what should remain beyond and above the vindications of particular parties. What moved Gioberti were “liberal” interests and not profound theoretical reasons, according to the implicit and explicit accusations present in the letters of Silvio Pellico and Taparelli d’Azeglio, in the works of Francesco Pellico and especially in those of Carlo Maria Curci, who in Naples in 1845 published Fatti e argomenti in risposta alle molte parole di V. G. intorno a’ Gesuiti nei Prolegomini al Primato (Facts and arguments in reply to the many words of Vincenzo Gioberti about the Jesuits in the prologue to Primato morale e civile degli Italiani). As was to be expected, Gioberti replied with extreme violence in Gesuita Moderno (1846–1847) and in Apologia del Gesuita Moderno (1848). By now he was taken by the political life, and this new experience is reflected in Operette politiche, gathered and edited by Giuseppe Massari, and in Rinnovamento civile degli Italiani, which Fausto Nicolini with great ingenuity called “errata corrige” of the Primato morale e civile degli Italiani (On the

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moral and civil supremacy of the Italians). When an early death came, various other works remained interrupted. The fragments of these works as assembled by Massari, in their own way, are among the most singular writings of Gioberti. The Protologia, as “a volume in octavo,” had already been announced in the cover of the edition of 1843 of Errori del Rosmini, but Gioberti never completely revised and finished it. A more furbished work was La filosofia della rivelazione, and connected to it were La riforma cattolica and La libertà cattolica. An interesting document of Gioberti’s teaching in Brussels between 1841 and 1842 was Cours, which Giovanni Calò published. Concerning the Rosminian polemic we have the dialogues that Arrigo Solmi edited in Rosmini e i Rosminiani. 2. The Genesis of Gioberti’s Thought. Religious Doubts Gioberti arrived at the formulation of his thought through a long meditation on and a critical revision of the greatest thinkers of every time. If in the principal lines he remained almost completely faithful to himself much more than it would appear at a confrontation of Introduzione with his last works, we cannot deny in him a process of self-criticism that ended in a new arrangement, although incomplete, of his philosophy. His work can be inserted into the reconsideration of the eighteenth century’s thought, especially of the Condillac’s school, which we have already seen at the center of Galluppi’s teaching and of Rosmini’s synthesis. Kant’s Critique and the influx of the Scottish School greatly influenced not only Galluppi and Rosmini, but also Gioberti. With the German thought, what also influenced Gioberti were Plato, the Platonism of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Vico, Malebranche, Gerdil, and Rosmini. It has been rightly said that Gioberti was more Platonist than Rosmini. In 1831, Gioberti, writing to Carlo Verga and praising the course in philosophy of Jean Filibert Damiron, observed how the Platonic philosophy deserved Italian citizenship because of its ancient right. Born in Great Greece through the work of Pythagoras, Platonic philosophy was continued by the Italic School, embellished by Cicero, made sacred by the Latin Christian Fathers, resurrected by Marsilio Ficino, augmented by Giordano Bruno, amplified by Vico, and finally perfected by Antonio Rosmini (È degna che le sia fatta cittadinanza in Italia per antico suo diritto: poiché nata nella magna Grecia per opera di Pitagora continuata dalla scuola italica, fu abbellita da Cicerone, consacrata dai padri latini, risuscitata da Marsilio Ficino, accresciuta dal Bruni [Giordano Bruno], amplificata dal Vico ed ultimamente perfezionata da Antonio Rosmini). In Rosmini, the reminiscence from De antiquissima italorum sapientia (On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians) of Vico was immediately manifest,

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and in Vico Gioberti loved to re-discover the roots of many of his own positions. From Bruno, according to the affirmation of Luigi Ornato to Domenico Berti, the philosopher from Turin had derived his central inspiration. In 1833, writing to Carlo Dalmazzo, Gioberti said, “I will say nothing of Giordano Bruno because I cannot speak of such a rare and unfortunate ingenuity without tears. He, together with Vico, has shown to what lofty altitude the Italians can reach in works of philosophy” (del Bruni non dirò nulla, perché non posso parlar senza lacrime di un cosí raro e sventurato ingegno, il quale, congiunto al Vico, mostra a quale altezza si possano levar gli italiani in opera di filosofia). In the epistolary exchange with Ornato, an exchange very important for the knowledge of his attitude, Gioberti in 1833 again wrote, “I feel a great affection and admiration for this Bruno because of his spontaneous, lively, and successful manner with which he renewed an ancient doctrine to which I am attached with all my sentiments” (Io mi sento una grande affezione e ammirazione per questo Bruno per il modo spontaneo, brioso e fecondo, con cui rinnovò un’antica dottrina, a cui i miei sentimenti mi rendono molto parziale). Platonic metaphysics—dominated by the concept that philosophy intended reality, a reality that was not the appearance of the senses, but something absolutely valid—constituted the most solid support in an antienlightenment polemic that, in many cases, aimed at an integration and an overcoming instead of at a pure and simple restoration. It was in this sense that Gioberti, in a letter to Dalmazzo of April 1833, would exalt in Manzoni “a significant philosopher sovereignly Platonic, and a Christian who recognized, contrary to today customs, in the doctrines of Christ the Socratic philosophy in a symbolic and perfect condition.” Gioberti, with the humanistic education of his youth, drew from Catholic French traditionalism his motives against sensism, against which he maintained a constant condemnation, “It is the most specious system that at the first instance appears to have to be adopted by those who superficially consider it, but that is instead most false and evidently absurd in ulterior considerations of it” (sistema speciosissimo e quasi necessario ad adottarsi nel primo aspetto e ai consideratori superficiali, ma falsissimo ed evidentemente assurdo nelle ulteriori considerazioni). In this anti-sensist reaction, Gioberti was forced to face Kant and the idealists on one side, Galluppi and Rosmini on another. Early in his life he read Kant, and in 1841, he would write underlining the same fact, “I began to doubt the existence of cobble-stones, but not of that of God, because Kant is not an atheist, and furthermore, in my reading, I did not even advance to the point where he explains the antinomies” (e dubitai dell’esistenza dei ciottoli, ma non di quella di Dio, sia perché il Kant non è ateo, e perché in quella lettura io non giunsi né meno fino alle antimonie). He was referring to the period of 1815 and 1816. Later, as his admiration

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increased with his own knowledge, Gioberti remained conditioned by an interpretation tied to the ideas of the Scottish School, which together with the school of Cousin exercised great influence on his own thinking, no differently than what happened to his contemporaries. In Introduzione, the criticism of Cousin and his school was quite strong: They are healthy instead of robust. Although they have a distinct vigor, nonetheless their spirit and their intellectual features tend to be feminine and delicate, instead of masculine and athletic. They are brilliant teachers instead of discoverers; they are good professors, but mediocre thinkers (Sono sani, anziché robusti; e benché abbiano un certo vigore, il loro spirito e le loro intellettuali fattezze tengono piuttosto del muliebre e del delicato, che del maschio e dell’atletico. Sono abili ad insegnare, anziché a discoprire, parlatori facondi, e buoni professori, ma pensatori mediocri). The sole valid aspect of the Scottish activity for Gioberti was the employment of the Scottish thought in the criticism against the Ideology. Gioberti was also influenced by a certain Platonic tradition that with Spinoza oriented him toward a sort of pantheism, which would never disappear from his system. We heard already of the enthusiasm with which in 1833 he immersed himself in reading Bruno, and how, from the Greeks to Gerdil, he meditated often on the Platonic themes. In 1841, writing to Rosmini, he remembered: A long time before the printing of the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee of Rosmini, I was already convinced of the great importance that the idea of Being has in the field of philosophy and of its superiority over the other speculative sciences…. The word that awakened in me those first presentiments came from religion … and from some Christian philosophers; among them, I will only mention Malebranche, Boursier, and Gerdil (Assai prima che uscisse alla luce il Nuovo saggio del Rosmini, io era persuaso della grande importanza che l’idea dell’Ente ha in filosofia, e della maggioranza dell’ontologia sulle altre scienze speculative.… La parola che destò in me quei primi presentimenti, fu quella della religione … e di alcuni filosofi cristiani, fra i quali citerò solamente il Malebranche, il Boursier e il Gerdil). In the same work, Gioberti successively cited, “beside Plato and his ancient family,” Malebranche and more than anyone else St. Bonaventure. This Platonic meditation was necessarily inclining him to connect philosophical and religious traditions. At the same time that he was attacking sensism and all tendencies of skepticism, he was clarifying his ontology and invigorating his religion, which he was identifying with Catholicism. In 1830, he wrote about himself to Leopardi, “From all these studies the result has been a complete

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change of ideas, an intimate, profound, and sincere adhesion to the Catholic religion.” Philosophical meditation was freeing him from religious doubts and oriented him away from “indescribable torments and anxieties, the remembrance of which is strong enough … to horrify him.” In the same letter to Leopardi he confessed: My dear Leopardi, I have discovered that I was seriously mistaken about religion. In the past, I was professing a pure theism, and in regard to this I differed from your philosophical opinions because you thought that every concept of the human mind derives from sensation, and is contained in it, while, on the contrary, I was believing that natural, primitive, and universal concepts exist, which can neither come from sensation nor be reduced to the elements of sensation (Ho scoperto, mio caro Leopardi, che io era in un grave errore, intorno alla religione. Io professava allora un puro teismo, e su di questo in tanto differiva dalle vostre opinioni filosofiche, in quanto voi tenevate che ogni concetto della mente umana nasca dalla sensazione, e si contenga in essa, e io credeva, che vi siano concetti primitivi naturali, universali, che non si possono dedurre dalla sensazione, e ridurre agli elementi di essa). An analysis in depth of the concept of the supernatural induced him to consolidate his ontological position, but also to recognize “the truth of Christianity (and of Catholicism, which is the only unchangeable expression of it) as a doctrinal system and a historical fact.” With this adhesion to the Christian thought, and the overcoming of the religious doubts, the conviction was growing that religion and philosophy were convergent. In Teorica del sovrannaturale, he will write that philosophy is “the nude religion, without its poetic veil, and reduced to rational ideas alone” (la religione nuda, spogliata del suo velo poetico, e ridotta alle sole idee razionali), while “religion is philosophy adorned with efficacious and pleasurable emblems that are apt to shake courageously or to cheer up imaginatively” (la religione è la filosofia addobbata di emblemi forti e piacenti, atti a scuotere gagliardamente, o a rallegrare l’immaginazione). The adhesion to Christianity was not due to an act of faith, but with faith concluded a process of reason. It was a new philosophy that, born against the skepticism originated by the Enlightenment, turned to traditional religion but in an interpretation that raised rational religion to the level of that of philosophy. This movement was duplex and convergent in such a way that religion and philosophy could relate peacefully, without anyone of the two having to sacrifice the rational process. This process did not justify philosophy, but religion that, when it is true, it is in conformity with philosophy; it is a philosophy of reason. In 1832, writing about Pellico, Gioberti specified gently: Silvio’s kind of Christianity is not that of the Jesuits; it is not that of

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY the enemies of philosophy and civilization; it is not that of the theologians and ordinary believers of our days. The religion of Silvio is the philosophy of Christ, the philosophy of human reason, the universal reason, which is not cut, reduced, or corrupted (Il cristianesimo di Silvio non è quello dei gesuiti; non è quello dei nemici della filosofia e della civiltà; non è anco quello dei teologi e del volgo dei credenti ai dí nostri. La religione di Silvio è la filosofia di Cristo; cioè la filosofia della ragione umana, della ragione universale, non dimezzata, non impicciolita, non corrotta).

How can we then situate in the sphere of reason what, by definition, is superrational? This was the problem Gioberti had to face: to justify rationally what is beyond reason, without exhausting it, but without destroying in an irreducible opposition the value of rationality. In the already mentioned letter of 1830 to Leopardi, Gioberti summarized and gathered together his reflections on the supernatural, of which the human mind possesses the concept, but of which a demonstration on the natural level would constitute a contradiction, “The only possible way of knowing the supernatural is the Revelation” (La sola via possible di conoscere il soprannaturale è dunque la Rivelazione), which can be an external revelation, independent from any “immediate, internal, and individual revelation.” Such a revelation “exists, it is Christianity.” 3. Teorica del sovrannaturale. The Super-Intelligence With the Teorica del sovrannaturale of 1838 Gioberti wanted to set up his first conclusions relating the affirmation and the justification of supernaturalness. He justified rationally revealed religion and, with its theoretical value, also its historical function: the “agreement with the human mind and the civil progress of nations.” To achieve this, it was first necessary to overcome the position of pantheism, clarifying at the same time the distinction and the link between nature and super-nature, between the human and the divine or, as Vico phrased it, between divine providence and this human world of nations. Gioberti sensed what pantheism possessed of truth and depth, and understood “what in pantheism could seduce many noble intellects and how it could renew an error so monstrous in every age of philosophy.” This error consists of “the psychological and ontological interpenetration of God with the Universe, which, in one hand, would pertain to the intrinsic essence of things, and, in the other, to the nature of the human mind.” The finite cannot subsist without the absolute, and it is inconceivable to think the specific and the determinate without the implicit reference to the Being that conditions it: We cannot think the existences, which constitute the world, without thinking simultaneously the pure Being that is God. We know that the mental incapacity of disjoining the two representations derives from the real impossibility of separating the two objects (Noi non possiamo

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pensare le esistenze, cioè il mondo, senza pensare simultaneamente l’essere puro, cioè Dio, e conosciamo che l’impotenza mentale di disgiungere le due rappresentazioni proviene dall’impossibilità reale di separare i due oggetti). The error of pantheism is to conceive this relationship as an identification resolving or trying to resolve integrally one term into the other. It is a question of trying because even the most rigorous pantheists were always at the end obliged to re-introduce a distinction between the two terms, under another form, as an antithesis of appearance and reality, of mode and substance, and of reality and ideality. Gioberti, who at the beginning proclaimed himself the renovator of Eleatic philosophy, intended to preserve “unity” together with “distinction” because if it is true that “existence includes psychologically and ontologically being, [it is also true that] being considered ontologically is totally independent from distinct existences” (l’esistenza inchiude psicologicamente e ontologicamente l’essere, questo nel rispetto ontologico è affatto indipendente dalle esistenze). This is a law of duality, Gioberti insisted, because “we cannot think whatever object without knowing that the cognition of it would bring with itself that of a conjoined and correlative object” (non possiamo pensare ad un oggetto qualunque senza che la cognizione di esso importi quella di un oggetto congiunto e correlativo). This duality is also a rapport, a bond, a connection, and a unity. It is a unity which cannot be obtained with the destruction of one of the two terms, as sensists, pantheists, and idealists did. The terms must be preserved and their connection enhanced. Besides Plato, who affirms the truth of the idea, we must place Reid who holds the truth of the thing. The true and the made, philology and philosophy, as Vico said, should be preserved in their unity and distinction. In the Teorica del sovrannaturale, Gioberti did not penetrate into the depth of the connection, though he clearly presented its terms: God and World: The Revelation that contains the whole philosophy and more than philosophy expressed the intimate union of the primitive duality with the definition of God: “I am who I am.” These words were commented by Paul with the addition of “in whom we live, move or are,” which are words of illustration, deduction, and particular application (La Rivelazione, che contiene tutta la filosofia, e piú che la filosofia, espresse l’unione intima della dualità primitiva colla sua definizione di Dio: Io sono colui che sono, di cui le parole commendate da San Paolo: in cui viviamo, ci moviamo o siamo, sono una illustrazione, una deduzione, e una applicazione particolare). How can we reconcile the distinction between human being and God? What is human and originated from God tends obviously to God in a process of becoming more perfectible, the process of which God will be the end. This progress is founded on the perfectibility and concrete efficacy within civilization,

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which is the “interior growing and exterior and successive actualization of human knowledge” (l’ampliamento interiore e l’effettuazione esteriore e successive della conoscenza umana). Is this human knowledge truly capable of seizing the unitive secret of the duality? That human thought is rooted on a primitive revelation was indisputable for Gioberti in the Teorica del sovrannaturale, enough by reflecting on the divine origin of language that has infused in the human mind the intelligible roots of reality. To this function of language Gioberti would assign an increasing relevance, but already in the Teorica he underlines its importance: The supernatural infusion of language was necessarily accompanied by the inspiration of an order of ideas, and as words bring concepts and as a language is essentially a system of science, so primitive philology was a kind of supernatural encyclopedia (L’infusione sovrannaturale del linguaggio fu accompagnata necessariamente dall’ispirazione di un ordine intero di idee, e perciò, come i vocaboli importano i concetti e un corpo di lingua è essenzialmente un sistema di scienza, la filologia primitiva fu una specie di enciclopedia sovrannaturale). To know is to reflect, to deepen the primitive revelation, which compares to the cognition and the progress of civilization as creation does to nature. The process of knowing is a reconquest that thought does of itself to find again, through the insufficiencies of single moments, the fullness of the truth that was originally revealed. Sensations and sentiments bring us in touch with ourselves and the world, making us find ourselves in the world and the world in ourselves, because we cannot penetrate deeply into ourselves, who in the intimacy of ourselves cannot find the external world; and if we scatter ourselves too much on the outside, then the danger exists that our thought would abandon totally the most recondite penetralia of human nature (Noi non possiamo tanto profondarci in noi stessi, che nella nostra intimità medesima non troviamo il mondo esterno, siccome non possiamo talmente spargerci di fuori, che il nostro pensiero abbandoni affatto i penetrali piú reconditi dell’umana natura). The deepening of sensibility makes reference to something else; the sensible presents itself to us as insufficient in respect to its existence as well as in respect to its knowability, with a lack of balance “that corresponds to its insubsistence and in-comprehensibility.” We are referred, beyond qualities and effects, to the intelligible, the being, the substance, and the cause. Unfortunately, not even reason would seize the true essence, the quiddity of being: The essence that, according to the etymology of the word, signifies “the quiddity of the being,” expresses the unknown value of human

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cognition, the universal mystery of God and nature, and the foundation of any other mystery (L’essenza, che, conforme all’etimologia del vocabolo, suona “la quiddità dell’essere,” esprime l’incognita della cognizione umana, il mistero universale di Dio e della natura, e il fondamento di ogni altro mistero). If the human mind is incapable of seizing the essence, it still can grasp its reality, in the sense that the mind knows that something exists although it does not know what its essence is. This cognition of an unknown (cognizione di un’incognita) is faith instead of cognition; it is the cognition proper to that faculty that Gioberti called sovraintelligenza (super-intelligence), apex mentis (the apex of the mind) “that tries to believe in the reality of unknown essences” (che si sforza di credere nella realtà delle essenze sconosciute). This kind of cognizione di un’incognita is something that has the characteristics of a mystical intuition and also of a Kantian reason, because it nourishes itself with faith, a credence that excludes true and proper knowledge. On the other hand, only the cognition of the essences could give us the inside meaning of the connections. Duty of the super-intelligence is making us capable of feeling within the insufficiency of reason its limits and the need of a revelation: The super-intelligence stands between those two sources of knowledge: it moves from reason and guides the human mind up to the vestibule of revelation. Consequently, revelation is the supplement and the complement of the super-intelligence and unfolds in part for us the object of which the super-intelligence learns the existence in a generic and instinctive manner (La sovrintelligenza sta come di mezzo fra quelle due fonti di conoscimento, movendo dalla ragione, e guidando la mente dell’uomo fino al vestibolo della rivelazione. Conseguentemente la rivelazione è il supplimento e complemento della sovrintelligenza, svelandoci in parte l’oggetto di cui questa facoltà apprende l’esistenza in modo generico ed istintivo). As we can see, the difficulties of Gioberti’s Teorica del sovrannaturale are evident, and they gravitate not only around the little clarity of the connection between God and the human being, which “the ideal formula” would try to deepen, but also around the relation between the primitive revelation (rivelazione primitiva) and the cognitive process oriented toward the final revelation. In this second difficulty, the first reappears, the one of the rapport between a God who is self-subsistent and perfect and the human being who has as its duty that of repeating what already is. This was altogether the problem of progress, of becoming, and of history. To the sensists, and in general to all those who proposed the philosophical problem in gnoseological terms, to the psychologists, Gioberti opposed the value of Platonism that affirms the reality of the idea directly apprehended, and of the school of the common sense, which sustained as well the reality of

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the object of perception directly seized for what it is. The full difficulty consisted in the reconciliation of the two plains: being and existence. “The ideal formula” would precisely try to explicate that rapport and give the reason for it in the various fields of reality. This is Gioberti’s progress in Introduzione allo studio della filosofia. 4. Introduzione. Vico and Gioberti. The Ideal Formula. The Word. The Creation The Introduzione allo studio della filosofia deals with the problem in its historical level by attacking the gnoseological tendency imposed by Descartes to modern thought and fatally ending in psychologism. Descartes believed that the human being knows itself only as knower, while being remains inaccessible. Between being and the subject the diaphragm exists of the idea, which is not understood Platonically as the true reality, but as an intermediary agency representing it. The whole Cartesian doubt would succeed only in definitively separating knowledge and reality, closing the human mind in the world of representations, a world that is distinct and separate from real entities. No longer anchored in reality, the human being is all centered on itself, meanwhile the psychological subjectivism runs parallel to the religious psychologism introduced by Lutheranism. We must recognize: The first invention of psychologism must be attributed to Luther instead of to Descartes. The heresiarch threw the fatal seed, which the French philosopher explicated. Luther substituted the psychological method to the ontological one in religion. Descartes applied this innovation to philosophy in particular and through it to all the knowable. The first cut the thread of religious tradition, the second put aside even the scientific tradition (La prima invenzione del psicologismo si dee attribuire piuttosto a Lutero che a Cartesio. L’eresiarca gittò il seme fatale, che fu esplicato dal francese filosofo. Il primo sostituí il metodo psicologico al metodo ontologico nella religione; il secondo applicò questa innovazione alla filosofia in particolare, e per essa a tutto lo scibile. L’uno troncò il filo della tradizione religiosa; l’altro diede lo sfratto eziandio alla scientifica). Gioberti’s problem, then, consisted entirely in coming out of the circle of subjectivism and in finding an objective foundation for knowledge. It appeared to Gioberti that Kant and Rosmini did not find such foundation in Kant, whose synthesis cannot come out from the thinking subject, or in Rosmini, whose idea of Being, in its being a pure possibility, cannot reach reality. When Gioberti said “reality,” he meant “a full, total, and absolute” reality: a Being without any non-being, as Parmenides wanted. He would once say that what is missing in the Kantian formula is not the objectivity of the noumenon, but the absolute objectivity of God:

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Let us admit that the Rosminian form can be distinguished from the spirit and it is objective. Yet this form would not offer any advantage better than the forms of the German philosopher. The vice of these forms is not precisely the fact that they are subjective instead of objective, but of being subjective and human, instead of being objective and divine, because outside of the divine there can be no suitable basis for a dogmatic philosophy. [The vice of] the form of Rosmini is that it was created as contingent and finite because he denies that the spirit has the intuition of the Being, which alone is uncreated, necessary, and infinite, God. Hence, the scientific value of the Rosminian form is not different from that of the Prussian psychologist (Concedasi che la forma rosminiana distinguasi dallo spirito e sia obbiettiva; non perciò ella avrà alcun vantaggio sulle forme del filosofo tedesco. Imperocché il vizio di queste non è già precisamente di essere subbiettive, anziché obbiettive, ma di essere subbiettive e umane, anziché obbiettive e divine; perché fuori del divino non vi può essere base idonea per una filosofia dogmatica. Ora la forma del Rosmini è creata contingente, finita poiché egli nega che lo spirito abbia l’intúito dell’Ente, che solo è increato, necessario e infinito, cioè di Dio; onde, per ciò che spetta al valore scientifico di tal forma, essa non diversifica da quelle del prussiano psicologo). The cognition of truth can only be given by seeing the actual relationship between the existent individual and Being, the concrete universal. Rosmini, who begins from the possible, would never be able, by way of reflection, to extract from it the real, contingent, or necessary. He is obliged to appeal to the sentiment. The psychological reflection of Rosmini would never be able to come out from the analysis of the intuition, meanwhile the ontological reflection would be the concrete development of being in itself. Through the Rosminian reflection we would always find ourselves before an abstractive process but not before the living articulating of the Idea in the articulation itself of reality. The psychological reflection operates on the idea that the subject has of the Ens; the ontological reflection turns to the concrete synthesis of the subject with the object, and aims at that “most simple point of contact in which object and subject, substantially distinct, touch each other and form the unity of the conciliating synthesis” (punto di contatto semplicissimo in cui l’oggetto e il soggetto, sostantialmente distinti, si toccano e formano l’unità della sintesi conciliativa). In one word, in the psychological reflection the cognitive process is separated from the creative connection; in the ontological reflection, the cognitive synthesis, coinciding with the creative act or, better, becoming intrinsic to it, constitutes a contact with the becoming itself of the world: “ideality and subsistence become one and the same thing” (l’idealità e la sussistenza s’immedesimano insieme). For Gioberti, Rosmini is corrupted by Kant’s psychologism, which is no different from that of Descartes, “Critical philosophy and Cartesian philoso-

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phy are substantially identical” (la filosofia critica e la cartesiana essendo identiche sostanzialmente). Spinoza in the same way as Schelling and Hegel, though falling into pantheism, by moving from the critical method (Descartes and Kant), are not arriving to the genuine Idea, but to an Idea “mixed with sensitive elements … a contradictory synthesis of sensible and intelligible … a confusion of subject and object, of intelligible and sensible, marked by an indelible subjectivity and relativity.” In other words, they are unable to articulate in a real synthesis the universal and the individual, the world and God. Gioberti finds his inspiration in St. Bonaventure, but he rethinks especially Malebranche and Vico. The Augustinian-Franciscan theory of illumination influenced Gioberti in the doctrine of the intuition; Bonaventure’s motives returned in the conception of the original vision of Being: Being is what the intellect grasps immediately, and this being is the being that is pure act. This being is not a particular being because otherwise it would be limited since it is mixed with potency. It is not an analogous being because it participates little of the act since it is minimal [within the order of existence]. This being must be divine … being, absolute, primary, eternal most simple, most actual, most perfect, and supremely one (Esse est igitur quod primo cadit in intellectu, et illud esse est quod est purus actus. Sed hoc non est esse particulare, quod est esse arctatum, quia permixtum est cum potentia; nec esse analogum, quia minime habet de actu, eo quod minimo est. Restat igitur, quod illud esse est esse divinum … esse absolutum, primarium, aeternum, simplicissimum, actualissimum, perfectissimum et summe unum). In this, Gioberti was relying on Malebranche and Gerdil, who defended Malebranche’s theory against Locke. Of Malebranche, Gioberti celebrated the theory of the vision in God, but joining and fusing it with the theory of continuous creation. We see God and in God. Because the conservation of existing things—which do not subsist in themselves—is always a new work of God, by seeing things in God, we see them in their becoming from God, we see things in the creative connection, in their making, in their emerging into existence. If we carefully reflect on this, we may say that it could be a profound interpretation of the cogito itself. In the Protologia, Gioberti would recognize that Descartes “resembles one who has found a diamond, takes it, uses it, and let people believe that it is a splinter, a drop of crystal, a button made of glass” (somiglia a uno che trova un diamante, e lo piglia, lo adopera, lo spaccia come una sverza di pietra, una gocciola di cristallo, un bottoncino di vetro). Among Descartes’ considerations we may count that God is the unique substance, that the thought of the “I” finds foundation and root in the infinite divine thought, so that Cartesian is also the seed of the vision in God connected with continuous creation. In this concept, Gioberti could find possible the insertion of Vico and of the verum-factum, avoiding at the same time pan-

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theism and articulating the two terms (God and World) that would be presented to the mind with equal indisputable evidence by intellectual intuition (Plato) and sensible perception (Reid). If to know things Vichianly means to know their origin, their birth, scire per causas, then we would arrive, through the vision of God, to overcoming the Vichian difficulty of the cognition of the physical world. The human mind, in the vision of God, would become intrinsic to the divine thought that coincides with the divine making and the human mind would be present at the production of the world, “Our intuitive cognition … must apprehend creation as a fact of which our spirit is witness” (La nostra cognizione intuitiva … dee apprendere la creazione come un fatto, di cui lo spirito è testimonio). And again: “The psychological process of intuition is identical to the ontological and the tenor of our knowing is not different from the extrinsic and effective order of things. The human spirit is at every instant of its intellective life the direct and immediate spectator of creation” (Il processo psicologico dell’intúito essendo identico all’ontologico, il tenore del nostro conoscimento non si differenzia dall’ordine estrinseco ed effettivo delle cose … [lo spirito umano] è in ogni istante della sua vita intellettiva spettatore diretto e immediate della creazione). This could be translated in Cartesian terms: the cogito finds again the creation of things in its cogitatio and from it obtains the foundation of knowledge (the divine veracity). Or, at the pleasure of the Platonism of Gioberti, we may even recall the opinion of Agostino Steuco on the perfect wisdom of Adam, which was due to the fact that he witnessed the creation. In the concept of creation, Gioberti believed to have found the knot between the absolute Being and the existent, without falling into the pantheism of Spinoza. By insisting on the infinity and perennial productivity of God and on the presence of this absolute making in the consciousness, Gioberti thought to be able to save the making that knowledge does, without reducing it within the limits of the subject. For this reason, he judged himself to be removed from both Kant and Rosmini, for whom the cognitive activity, the synthesis, was something other than reality, meanwhile the ideal formula—l’Ente crea l’esistente (Being creates the existent)—intended to offer a real synthesis in which the productivity is divine, but at the presence of the human mind that participates of it in the intuition. The objective and subjective order of the synthesis coincide, “Every concept is a thing, every thing is a concept” (ogni concetto é una cosa; ogni cosa é un concetto). Matteo Liberatore observed that there is something more to it, and recalled an efficacious expression of the Introduzione: The intuition receives the notice of the Ens, of the intelligible, whence he deduces as well its intuitive power; and given that the Ens is the intelligible itself, it is by us understood as it posits itself, and it posits itself in so far as it is understood: ideality and subsistence become one identical thing (L’intúito riceve la notizia dell’Ente, del-l’intelligibile,

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY onde trae del pari la sua potenza intuitivo; e siccome l’Ente è l’intelligibile stesso, egli viene da noi inteso in quanto si pone, e si pone in quanto s’intende: l’idealità e la sussistenza s’immedesi-mano insieme).

The ideal formula, Being creates the existent (l’Ente crea l’esistente), while articulating the two levels of reality, sensible and intelligible, in a real synthesis, was founded on the identification of the ordo rerum (order of things) with the ordo idearum (order of ideas), of the psychological with the ontological process. Rosmini, separating himself from the doctrines of Condillac and Kant, placed the distinction of Ens and Idea in God. Hence, the Idea as the possibility of being took shape. For Gioberti, the Idea is the Absolute, it is God; it is, as Plato wanted, the supreme Reality, and, together, the supreme Truth. It is the root of existence and intelligibility, and for that reason it is an indemonstrable, evident, and the first truth. It is il primo filosofico (the first philosophical principle), which is altogether the ontological first and psychological first. Then, if philosophy is the explication of the Idea, God is the first philosopher, and “human philosophy is the repetition of divine philosophy” (la ripetizione della filosofia divina), the conscious retracing of the divine process: God is not only the object of science, but also its first teacher, and It is teacher of the knowable because It is the Intelligible. The philosophical work does not begin in the human being, but in God; it does not rise from the spirit to Ens, but descends from Ens to the spirit. This is the profound truth that clarifies the truth of ontologism and the absurdity of the opposite system. Before being a human work, philosophy is a divine creation. The psychologists who deprive philosophy of its celestial support and remove philosophy from the Ens, make of it a pure human artifice, condemn it to a painful doubt, and assign to it the nothing as its beginning and end (Iddio non è dunque solamente l’oggetto della scienza ma ne è eziandio il primo maestro; ed è maestro dello scibile, perché è l’Intelligibile. Il lavoro filosofico non comincia nell’uomo, ma in Dio; non sale dallo spirito all’Ente, ma discende dall’Ente allo spirito. Eccoti la ragione profonda, che chiarisce la verità dell’ontologismo, e l’assurdità del sistema contrario. La filosofia, prima di essere un’opera umana, è una creazione divina; laddove i psicologisti, frodando la filosofia del suo appoggio celeste, e spiccandola dall’Ente, ne fanno un mero artificio umano, la condannano a un dubbio doloroso, e le assegnano il nulla, come suo principio e compimento). The necessary reality of the Ens, of the Idea, which is the philosophical first, is the auto-definition of God. God is not a formula: l’Essere è, Being is, as the act of the thinking spirit (come atto dello spirito pensante). God is “I am who

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I am” (Ego sum qui sum). It is a primary judgment, but the spirit in it “it is not a judge, albeit a simple witness and auditor.” It is here that we have the primitive intuition that reflection would come to repeat in an explication made possible through the Word “that expresses the reality of Ens, a reality created by Ens, and it is a second revelation or, to speak more exactly, the primordial revelation, dressed up in that form by the revelator (che esprime la realtà dell’Ente, [che] fu creata dall’Ente stesso, ed è una seconda rivelazione o, per parlar piú esattamente, la rivelazione primordiale, vestita di una forma dallo stesso rivelatore). The word is the limiting and determining principle, which is necessary to reflection as its interior and ineliminable point of support. In the Theaetetus, Plato defined “thinking” as the interior discourse of the soul that makes explicit in its own determinations and articulations the first Being through determined terms. In the polemic with Rosmini Gioberti narrates the concretizing of intuition in the open and extended truth of the discourse: Truth is rule as it is law. At the same time, we have the supreme Regulator and Legislator who speaks to the spirit with the voice called evidence, which is the natural oracle of the Idea that is received in the intuition and it is repeated by reflection through the word. Truth is not an abstract rule but a concrete ruler, as the one of Polycletus; at the same time [truth is] the work and the model, the exemplar and what is made according to the exemplar. This truth is resplendent in the intuition of all human beings from the first instant of their life, without any kind of exceptions, and it is called reason. Intuition is the same in all places, in all times, and for all individuals; it is not subject to succession, addition, diminution, progress, and mutation; it is continuous, perpetual, and immanent, as the essence of the spirit that possesses it. [This spirit] has existence and conserves existence only because it continuously receives it from the creative act of God, and has the uninterrupted and perennial vision of this first act and of the principle from which it originates. So that the intuitive cognition becomes present in reflection, it is necessary to have the intervention of certain conditions, organic and sensitive, of which the most important is the word [speech]. The human being, in its present condition, cannot reflect without words, no more and no less than it can speak without tongue, see without eyes, and think without brain. Without language, the human being has reason, but not the use of reason; without language, the human being has the ability of reflecting, but does not actually reflect (La verità è regola come è legge; ma nello stesso tempo il Regolatore e il Legislatore supremo, parlante allo spirito con quella voce che si chiama evidenza, ed è l’oracolo naturale dell’Idea ricevuto dallo intúito, e ripetuto dalla riflessione col mezzo della parola. La verità non è una regola astratta, ma un regolo concreto, come quello di Policleto, opera e modello, esemplato e esemplare nello stesso tempo. Questa verità risplende

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY all’intúito di tutti gli uomini fin dal primo punto della loro esistenza, senza eccezione di sorta, e dicesi ragione. L’intúito è lo stesso in tutti i luoghi, in tutti i tempi e per tutti gli individui; non soggiace alla successione; non è suscettivo di aggiunta, di diffalco, di progresso, di mutamento; è continuo, perpetuo, immanente, come l’essenza dello spirito che lo possiede; il quale, non potendo avere, né conservar l’esistenza, se non in quanto la riceve continuamente dall’atto creativo di Dio, ha la visione non interrotta e perenne di questo primo atto e del principio da cui deriva. Ma acciò la cognizione intuitiva trapassi nella riflessione, è mestieri il concorso di certe condizioni organiche e sensitive, fra le quali importantissima è la parola. L’uomo non può meglio nel suo stato attuale riflettere senza parola, che favellar senza lingua, vedere senz’occhi, e pensare senza cervello. Senza il linguaggio l’uomo ha ragione, ma non uso di ragione, ha la riflessione in potenza, non in atto).

The intuition is unique, but the language within which it manifests and determines itself changes. Language formulates the first judgment: l’Essere è (Being is), showing the passage from being to existing, existere, which signifies “to stand out, to show oneself, to emerge” (emergere, mostrarsi). Language points to “the manifestation, or the explication of a thing that was occult, enveloped, implied in another one, which finally, becoming out of it, makes itself visible on the outside” (la manifestazione, o sia l’esplicazione di una cosa, che prima era occulta, avviluppata, implicata in un’altra, e che, uscendone si rende visibile di fuori). The Real is Ens, God, subsistent in itself, substance. Things exist (ex-sistunt), they emerge, they come out of where they stood; but they also insist (in-sistunt), [they hold on what they stood], they rest on what subsists per se, “Existence is the proper reality of an actual substance, produced by a distinct substance, that contains it potentially, because it is apt to produce it” (L’esistenza è la realtà propria di una sostanza attuale, prodotta da una sostanza distinta, che la contiene potenzialmente, in quanto è atta a produrla). This means that only Ens has in itself its reason, it is causa sui, meanwhile the existent would not subsist without Ens, which is its productive cause. Gioberti concludes, “The idea of existence is inseparable from that of the Ens, and it manifests itself to us as an effect, of which Ens is the cause” (L’idea di esistenza è inseparabile da quella dell’Ente, e ci si rappresenta come un effetto, di cui l’Ente è la cagione). In all this the danger of falling into pantheism is evident, because the causing or being the reason why something happens appears linked to the idea of a production understood as explication [or coming out] and emanation [flowing from]. Gioberti observed that if instead of taking the point of view of the existent, we ascend from it to Ens and place ourselves in the Ens and defend its character of being the first (that is determined also by itself) and efficient cause (that is veraciously productive), we would only conclude that “the idea of creation is inseparable from that of cause, when taken in its absolute

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meaning.” In its proper sense, only the creating is a true causing: a causing that is precisely creating and not a self-determining in logical-mathematical sequences, as in Spinoza. Ens, the concrete and absolute universal, produces the individual that truly is actualization of the idea, as, at the same time, the idea is the actualization of the individual. The Idea (God), the intelligible, concurs in the individual through the creative act, while the sensible is the emerging in existence of that act. In other terms, “Existence is the extrinsic finality of the creative act of Ens” (L’esistenza è adunque il termine estrinseco dell’atto creativo dell’Ente). Through the creation, seen as the knot of the two terms of the ideal formula, Gioberti wanted to save both the absolute originality of individuation and the intrinsic bond with God. God produces without being internally necessitated to produce. Reality is something new, but it is, at the same time, rooted in the unique true Ens. Reality emerges, it does not subsist. The principle of creation became the center of reality, the key for the understanding of it. In 1843, Gioberti wrote these words in a letter to Francesco Puccinotti: In the way that the principle of creation applied to medical sciences is the activity of life, in that same way, when adapted to philosophy, it is the activity of the idea. In the physical sciences, the activity of nature is the dynamic philosophy; in the mathematics, it is the activity of the infinite, which is, if I could express myself in this way, the dynamism of calculus, and so on. In all these disciplines, [the principle of creation] is the supreme root of all data, principles, and methods used by them, of the goals they intend, of the philosophy that shapes them, of the morality that rules them, and of their speculative and practical fecundity in thought and action (E come il principio di creazione, applicato alle scienze mediche, è l’attività della vita, cosí adattato alla filosofia, è l’attività dell’idea; alle fisiche, l’attività della natura, cioè la filosofia dinamica; alle matematiche, l’attività dell’infinito, che è, se cosí posso esprimermi, il dinamismo del calcolo, ecc. E in tutte queste varie discipline esso è la radice suprema dei dati, dei principi, dei metodi, onde esse si valgono, dei fini a cui collimano, della filosofia che le informa, della morale che le governa, e della loro fecondità speculativa e pratica in ordine al pensiero e all’azione). 5. Developments. Mimesis and Methexis. Protology. Palingenesis When Gioberti expressed the ideal formula as “ens creat existentias,” it became clear that this brief sentence was centered on the concept of creation, and he decided to demonstrate the fecundity of the concept by developing the new vision of the creative act. In Protologia, he wrote, “Philosophy is the science of the creative act in itself and in relation to its effects” (la filosofia è

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la scienza dell’atto creativo in se stesso e in relazione coi suoi effetti). In Introduzione, and then in its Prologue or Prolegomeni, he had focused already on the circularity of the process that ties together ens and existent. The existent created by Ens returns to Ens through its own activity. Logic retraces the steps of the ideal formula; virtue and art tend to return to the absolute Being. Once more, Gioberti elucidated: Our philosophical formula offers the concept of two creative processes. Ens, after having produced outside of itself the image of its own ideas with the substantial creation of the existent, recalls back to itself with an embrace of love such image through a successive transformation and creation of moral acts, which embellish and complete the work of the first creation (La nostra formula filosofica ci porge il concetto di due cicli creativi, per cui l’Ente avendo tragittato fuori di sé una imagine delle proprie idee colla creazione sostanziale dell’esistente, a sè la richiama con amplesso amoroso mediante una transformazione e una creazione successiva di atti morali, che abbelliscono e compiono l’opera della creazione prima). In Protologia, Gioberti deepened the significance of the concept of creation: to understand the rhythm One-Many that constitutes reality. The intuition makes us conscious of that relation, but of it we receive only a confused, immediate, indistinct consciousness that reflection alone can clarify and explain, “The intuition gives us all the truths at the same time, all rolled up almost to make a ball, so that they appear like one truth. It is like to see a chain of mountains from far away, so that they look like one single mountain” (L’intúito ci porge tutti i veri, ravvolti e raggomitolati insieme sí che paiono un vero solo; come un gruppo di monti, che veduti da lontano, paiono un monte solo). Reflection brakes that confused unity and places the concepts in order, “Reflection moves through two dialectic moments: in the first, reflection distinguishes or breaks the unity of the Idea; in the second, reflection harmonizes the separate parts and preserves their individual distinction” (La riflessione discorre per due momenti dialettici; nel primo distingue, anzi rompe l’unità dell’Idea, nell’altro armonizza le parti rotte, serbando però fra loro la distinzione). Philosophy has the task of clarifying reality, of illumining existence in the light of conscience, of bringing existence back to the Idea, the world to God, reality to itself. Gioberti asked: What is the dynamism of the universal life of existence? It is the evolution of mentality, which is to say the history of consciousness, from its beginnings to its most recent growths. Every reality is an initial and potential consciousness or an actual and complete one. (Che cos’è il

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dinamismo della vita universale dell’esistenza? L’evoluzione della mentalità, che è quanto dire la storia della coscienza dai suoi primi principii sino agli ultimi progressi. Ogni realtà è coscienza o iniziale e potenziale, o attuale e compiuta). For this reason, the process of reality as a reconquest of the existent is simultaneously the conquest of Ens as it is the absolute consciousness: Reality is not reality unless it possesses itself, reflects on itself, and is identical to itself. This identity of itself and intrinsic reflection is conscience. Consciousness and reality are synonymous. God and the universe are also conscience: one is actually infinite, the other is potentially infinite. Outside of consciousness, nothing exists, and nothing can exist. Existence, thought, consciousness, they are one whole thing. The various grades, statuses, and processes of reality are the same as those of consciousness. Consciousness is the soul and everything. This transcendent psychologism is the true ontologism. The intuition of this truth is the strange and profound part of the system of Fichte (La realtà infatti non è tale se non possiede sé stessa, se in sé non si riflette, se non è identica a sé medesima. Questa medesimezza e riflessione intrinseca è la coscienza. Dunque coscienza e realtà sono sinonimi. Dio e l’universo son del pari coscienza; l’uno infinito attualmente e l’altro potenzialmente. Fuor della coscienza non vi ha nulla, né nulla può essere. Esistenza, pensiero, coscienza è tutt’uno. I vari gradi e stati e processi della realtà non sono altro che quelli della coscienza. E la coscienza è l’anima; dunque, l’anima è tutto. Questo psicologismo transcendente è il vero ontologismo. L’intúito di questo vero è la parte pellegrina e profonda del sistema di Fichte). Ontologism is transcendent psychologism. Descartes, who has been already condemned, is now amended with the substitution of the Cogitatio for the cogito: Cogitatio est. With Descartes and Fichte, Hegel too is accepted and reinterpreted. In Gesuita Moderno, we can read, “Thought forms the most intrinsic substantiality of things” (il pensiero forma la sostanzialità piú intrinseca delle cose). In Protologia, we can experience the depth of the thesis presented already in Teorica, of the coincidence of the external and internal: The interiority of things is spirit, thought, and methexis. The exteriority of things is sameness, mimesis, matter, and the sensible. Interiority is the continuum of space; exteriority is its discrete side. Interiority is not in space, if by “space” we mean the non-contiguous (the discrete). Interiority alludes to space because the internal presupposes the external. The external is the irradiation of the internal, but it is an incipient, imperfect, obscure, involute, and mimetic in the cosmic status. The irradiation would be complete only in the palingenesiac

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY status. At that time mimesis, the sensible, will cease to be. The internal will make itself known extrinsically. And only then what Hegel said will at last be verified: the internal is the external, and vice versa (L’internità delle cose è lo spirito, il pensiero, la metessi; l’esternità è lo stesso, la mimesi, la materia, il sensibile. L’internità è il continuo dello spazio; l’esternità ne è il discreto. L’interno non è nello spazio, se per ispazio s’intende il discreto. Ma allude allo spazio, perché l’interno presuppone l’esterno. L’esterno è l’irradazione dell’interno: ma irradiazione incoata, imperfetta, involuta, e quindi mimetica nello stato cosmico. Tale irradiazione sarà compiuta solo nello stato palingenesiaco. Allora cesserà la mimesi, il sensibile. L’interno estrinsecherassi. Allora solo si verificherà ciò che dice Hegel, l’interno essere esterno e viceversa).

Mimesis is the first cycle: opaque mentality; methexis is the reconquest: the sensible ascends to the intelligible, which tends to God, to the palingenesiac consciousness (coscienza palingenesiaca), in which the infinite chronological process of the world assumes the form of an infinite simultaneous logical process. Gioberti asserted, “Palingenesiac human beings hold eternity in their hands. They see time in space, and space in the continuum, in the Idea” (L’uomo palingenesiaco tiene l’eternità in pugno. Vede il tempo nello spazio, e lo spazio nel continuo, cioè nell’Idea). Root of every process because root of reality is again and always the creative act: To cause and create is to be and exist. Creating activity and reality are one identical thing. Schelling and Hegel admit the identity of the real with the ideal, of thinking with being, without proving it. The proof indeed is the creative act. The creative act dialectically represents the two concepts. In fact, to think is to create and to create is to be. To be is to create, and to create is to think … to create is nothing else than to think, and to think is nothing but to create (Causare, creare, è essere ed esistere. Attività creatrice e realtà sono tutt’uno. Shelling ed Hegel ammettono l’identità del reale e dell’ideale, del pensare e dell’essere, senza provarlo. La prova si è l’atto creativo. L’atto creativo immedesima dialetticamente i due concetti. Infatti pensare è creare, e creare è essere. Essere è creare, e creare è pensare … creare non è altro che pensare, e pensare che creare). The categories centered on Ens are the ones that find their root in the creative act. They are not the inorganic categories of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Kant; or the categories logically organized as in Hegel, but “categories organized by way of creation.” God is the knot of all relationships in which the real understood as mentality and rapport is concretized: All relations unite in God…. Relation is the essence of God and things.

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A relation is mentality, because every relation requires thought. The relation is perfectly one and it is everything. It is in itself and out of itself. It is a unity and it is supernumerary. It is the Idea radiating from its unity (Tutte le relazioni si uniscono in Dio…. L’essenza di Dio e delle cose è la relazione. E quindi è mentalità: giacché ogni relazione importa il pensiero. La relazione è perfettamente una e tuttavia è tutto. È in sé e fuori di sé. È l’unità e il soprannumero. È l’Idea raggiante dalla sua unità). The apprehension of this dialectic rhythm is the problem running through the Protologia, “The dialectic idea and the term ‘middle’ (mezzo) rule in our concepts…. The ‘middle’ is the characteristic type of the dialectic harmony. Since dialectic is the final cause of nature, the middle, the ‘being in the middle’ (medietà) is their natural character (L’idea dialettica e il vocabolo del mezzo signoreggiano nei nostri concetti…. Il mezzo è il tipo dell’armonia dialettica; e siccome il dialettismo è la causa finale della natura, il mezzo, la medietà è il loro tipo naturale). To exist is “being in the middle” (mediacy, medietà), but medietà between being and nothing would be a becoming, “It is operating, concreating, and being created … interposing” (è operare, concreare ed essere creato … tramezzare). The true and unique mediator is God, “The only dialectic and substantial mediator is the Supreme, God.” The true dialectic mediation is given only in the creative act, “The creative act is dialectic harmony” (L’atto creativo è un’armonia dialettica). While the creative act is the median between Ens and existent, and constitutes the first cycle, the harmonizing is the second and consists in the elevation of the sensible to the intelligible, in the passage from mimesis to methexis: The true dialectic is not found in the reduction of the opposites to sameness, as Hegel said; but in the intellectualization of the sensible. The sensible is an unclarified (undeveloped) intelligible. Its evolution in the order of reality is nature, and especially palingenesis; in the order of the ideal it is science, especially philosophy…. The transformation of the sensible into intelligible is the recognition of the intelligible in the sensible; it is the great work of dialectic (La vera dialettica non consiste già nella immedesimazione degli opposti, come vuole Hegel; ma nella intellettualizzazione dei sensibili. Il sensibile è un intelligibile involuto. La sua evoluzione nell’ordine del reale è la natura, e sovratutto la palingenesia; nell’ordine dell’ideale è la scienza, e sovratutto la filosofia…. La trasformazione del sensibile in intelligibile, cioè il riconoscere nel sensibile l’intelligibile, è la grande opera della dialettica). In other words, the dialectic does not destroy the antithesis, but reaffirms and articulates it, and the articulation is the creative act, “Universal dialectic and

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the categories are founded on the median term of the formula, on the creative act, because it is the connection between Ens and existent” (La dialettica universale e le categorie si fondano sul mediano termine della formula, sull’atto creativo, essendo questo il nesso dell’Ente e dell’esistente). The analogical rapport established in this way between Ens and existent is the mimesis; the methexis constitutes il processo d’inveramento [the process of achieving the truth, of the making or becoming of truth]: Some philosophers place an infinite interval between the sensible and the intelligible, eliminating every convenience between them, and in that way they make impossible the explaining and the legitimizing of the first; consequently, if they do not stop half way, they end with idealism, pantheism, and skepticism. Other philosophers fall into the opposite excess and, confusing sensible and intelligible, take the intelligible as if it were a sensible. These are the sensists, who in that manner annihilate the essence of the intelligible and end in an absolute skepticism. A third system, distinguishing the sensible from the intelligible, admits the existence of a bond, a convenience, an analogy between the two, and instead of deducing with the sensists the intelligible from the sensible, derives the sensible from the intelligible. In order not to confuse the one with the other, fall into pantheism, and maintain the distinction that runs between them, a middle term is needed that would dialectically distinguish and harmonize them. This middle term is the relative intelligible (the methexis) that interposes between the sensible intelligible (the mimesis) and the absolute intelligible (the Idea) (Alcuni filosofi mettono un infinito intervallo tra il sensibile e l’intelligibile, togliendo ogni convenienza fra loro, e rendono per tal modo impossibile la spiegazione e la legittimazione del primo; onde se non vogliono fermarsi a mezza via sono condotti all’idealismo, al panteismo, allo scetticismo. Altri incorrendo nell’eccesso opposto li confondono insieme e fanno dell’intelligibile un sensibile. Cosí i sensisti, i quali annullano per tal modo l’essenza dell’intelligibile e finiscono allo scetticismo assoluto. V’ha un terzo sistema, che distinguendo il sensibile dall’intelligibile ammette tra loro un legame, una convenienza, un’analogia, e invece di dedur coi sensisti l’intelligibile dal sensibile, deriva il sensibile dall’intelligibile. Ma per non confondere l’uno con l’altro e cader nel panteismo, per mantener la distinzione che corre fra loro, ci vuole un mezzo termine che dialetticamente li distingua ed armonizzi. Questo mezzo termine è la metessi, cioè l’intelligibile relativo che tramezza fra il sensibile, cioè la mimesi, e l’intelligibile assoluto, cioè l’Idea). Methexis is the full “becoming true” (verification, inveramento) of the idea; mimesis is the fleeting shadow of the idea. When the privation of the infinite is felt in the mimesis, boredom follows, “The hors-d’oeuvre of hell, which is

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an eternal and infinite boredom” (antipasto dell’inferno, il quale è una noia eterna e infinita). Because the sentiment is the presence of an absence, “the wrapping of an idea,” the study of sentiments is important in ideology, but ideology is a “philosophy that consists of dreaming without sleeping” (filosofia che consiste nel sognare senza dormire), of a “mimetic and phenomenal philosophy” (filosofia mimetica, fenomenale). The “becoming true” (inveritarsi), the “ascending to heaven” (incielarsi) is the effect of methexis: Heaven is the earth in the future. The future of the earth is to become heaven. The earth becomes the heaven as mentality grows, as the intelligent and the intelligible grow. The fatherland of the soul is the earth considered as methexis, because through the methexis heaven and earth reach sameness. Their opposition and distinction is only mimetic. The earth, considered as mimesis, is the fatherland of the body alone (Il cielo è la terra futura. L’infuturarsi della terra è un incielarsi. E s’inciela, crescendovi la mentalità, cioè l’intelligente e l’in-telligibile. La patria dell’anima è la terra come metessi, perché metessicamente il cielo e la terra s’immedesimano. La loro opposizione e distinzione è solo mimetica. La terra, come mimesis, è solo patria del corpo). The palingenesis is the accomplishment of the second cycle: the return. “Nothing returns, everything goes away; or everything returns, but aggrandized and amplified. The palingenesis is the beginning brought to be the end, it is a return of the beginning” (Nulla torna e tutto va; o piuttosto tutto torna; ma aggrandito e ampliato. La palingenesia è il principio innalzato al fine, è un ritorno del principio). It is a return that does not mean the absorption of human being in God, “It is not … the absolute cessation of the mimesis” (non è … la cessazione assoluta della mimesi). In an ulterior description of palingenesis, Gioberti said: The infinite palingenesis is actualized only in God, given the presumption of the infinite. It cannot be actualized in the creature, whose infinity is merely potential. In the actual palingenesis, as the methexis is always traversed by mimesis, the act is mixed with potency, and light is temperate with darkness, so the intelligible would always be limited by the super-intelligible. In the contrary case, the human intelligible would equate the divine, the creature would know the creator as the creator knows itself, the palingenesis would be theosis, and the universe would ultimately be mistaken for God (Non si attua che in Dio, attesa la presunzione dell’infinito; non si può attuare nella creatura, il cui infinito è solo potenziale. Dunque nella palingenesia attuale, come la metessi sarà sempre trascorsa di mimesi e l’atto misto di potenza e la luce temperata di tenebre, cosí l’intelligibile sarà sempre limitato dal sovrintelligibile; altrimenti l’intelligibile umano adeguerebbe il divino, la creatura conoscerebbe il creatore come questi conosce se

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY stesso, la palingenesia sarebbe teosi, e l’universo con Dio si confonderebbe).

In other words, palingenesis is the conquest of consciousness, of mentality: Palingenesis is the principle of consciousness for nature; it is the passage of the spirit from the discrete [the noncontiguous] to the continuum, from time to immanence. What we find in the two cases is the development of mentality, an ascending in the mental hierarchy, but an ascension that is a jump, not a step, or a grade. Through the palingenesis, nature becomes human nature and human nature becomes divine nature (Per la natura esso è principio di coscienza; per lo spirito è trasporto del discreto nel continuo, dal tempo nella immanenza. Nei due casi è sviluppo di mentalità, salita nella gerarchia mentale; ma salita che è salto, non passo e grado. Per la palingenesia la natura si fa uomo; l’uomo si fa Dio). In the palingenesis, space becomes time, the discreet continuum: the palingenesis would establish “the universal dominion of pure mentality” (il dominio universale della mentalità pura). This would be the end of the painful life. Today, everything is sufferance and evil, and their origin is mystery: the mystery itself of creation, “All the world is a personified immense sufferance. Every creature moans,” says St. Paul. Every power groans, because the root of everything is mentality, and mentality finds itself compressed, suffocated by mimesis” (Il mondo tutto è un dolore immense personificato. Ogni creatura geme, dice san Paolo. Ogni forza soffre, perché la mentalità è la radice di tutto, e la mentalità si trova compressa, soffocata dalla mimesi). The human process and the cosmic process constitute the dialectic of liberation. 6. On Goodness and Beauty The dialectic of Gioberti pervades rhythmically all aspects of the human activity. In ethics, the Ens creates through its will the good and, through the human virtue, concedes happiness to the human being. In the essay Del Buono, Gioberti used the ideal formula in the moral activity and the two cycles: The first [cycle] can be introduced in these terms: the free will, by postponing its affections to the law, produces virtue. This expresses the first cycle of morality that corresponds to the first creative cycle, in which the human being makes itself the imitator by subordinating and immolating personal affections to the supreme law, in order to effect the divine creating idea in all things that depend from the human will. The moral sacrifice of the senses to reason and of the human being to God is what constitutes the essence of the virtuous act. The second cy-

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cle of ethics, which corresponds to the last creative cycle, can be reduced to this sentence: the virtues, by reconciling the affections with the law, produce the beatitude. This sentence signifies the rapport of prize with merit, of happiness with virtue, and the apodictic bond that connects them all together. In the present life virtue does not beatify its lovers because the affections like an unwilling horse more or less resents the reins of the law even when the rider more often keep them slackened. This is the way in which the problem in which the Stoics lost their sense can be resolved, and virtue and beatitude agree together, which is equivalent to saying that the individual relative good is agreeable with the universal absolute good, in which the essence of Goodness is found (Il primo, che si può significare in questi termini: l’arbitrio, posponendo l’affetto alla legge, produce la virtú, esprime il primo ciclo della morale, rispondente al primo ciclo creativo, di cui l’uomo si rende imitatore, sottordinando ed immolando alla legge suprema le proprie affezioni, per effettuare, nelle cose che da lui dipendono, l’idea divina e creatrice; sacrificio morale del senso alla ragione e dell’uomo a Dio, costituente l’essenza del-l’atto virtuoso. Il secondo ciclo dell’etica, il quale si riscontra coll’ultimo ciclo creativo, si può ridurre a questa sentenza: la virtú, riconciliando l’affetto colla legge, produce la beatitudine. La qual sentenza significa le attinenze del premio col merito, della felicità colla virtú, e il vincolo apodittico che insieme le collega; imperocché se nella vita presente la virtú non beatifica i suoi amatori, ciò nasce perché l’affetto, come cavallo restio, dal freno della legge piú o meno discorda, eziandio in coloro che piú lo tengono in briglia. Per tal guisa si risolve il problema in cui si smarrí il senno degli stoici, e si accordano insieme la virtú e la beatitudine, che è quanto dire il bene individuale e relativo col bene universale e assoluto, in cui è riposta l’essenza del Buono). An analogous effort in applying the ideal formula to aesthetic activity is found in Introduzione and in the essay Del Bello, in which Gioberti is preoccupied with vindicating the objectivity of the beautiful and with justifying the aesthetic fantasy productive of the beautiful, “The perfect natural beautiful is the full correspondence of the sensible reality with the idea that conforms and represents it” (Il bello naturale e perfetto è la piena corrispondenza della realtà sensibile coll’idea che l’uniforma e la rappresenta). The creatures at their origin expressed their eternal exemplar; this visible correspondence was beauty; sin eliminated it. Nowadays, beauty is achieved more easily by art when “aesthetic fantasy or imagination … transforming into phantasms the intelligible types and giving to the images so conceived a mental life, creates the Beautiful.” This beautiful is distinct from the sublime that consists in the absolute intelligible, meanwhile the beautiful is the intelligible relative to created things.

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY 7. Giuseppe Mazzini

The judgment that Giuseppe Mazzini gave of Gioberti was hard and perhaps unjust. It is difficult to say something definite about Mazzini, the philosopher. If it is true that a history of Italian philosophy without the name of Mazzini would be scarce and deficient, it is equally true that the blueprint of such philosophy is difficult to the point that none of its fundamental concepts appears to be capable of being neatly defined. Mazzini himself, when he wanted to define them, advised us that philosophy is the religion of the individual in the same way that religion is the philosophy of humanity. He stated more clearly: Philosophy is an affirmation of individuality between a religious synthesis that is vanishing and one that is rising; it is a consciousness of the present world enlightened by the rays of a world of the future; it is a determinate criterion of a truth founded on the universal tradition of the past and intending with a method equally determinate to inquire about the future ([La filosofia] è un’affermazione dell’individualità fra una sintesi religiosa che cade e un’altra che sorge: è una coscienza del mondo presente illuminata dai raggi d’un mondo futuro: è un criterio determinato di vero fondato sulla universale tradizione del passato e tendente con un metodo ugualmente determinato a indagar l’avvenire). Clarifying his point of view, Mazzini added that philosophy is “the thought that dominates an epoch” (il pensiero dominatore di un’epoca), but as philosophy it is “a sterile philosophy, an argument of inert contemplation of the individual, unable to modify social conditions, to become incarnate in the human being, and to direct its acts” (una filosofia sterile, argomento d’inerte contemplazione all’individuo, impotente a modificare le condizioni sociali, a incarnarsi nell’uomo, a dirigerne gli atti). Though per se sterile and impotent, philosophy becomes efficacious as religion, if “it grasps that Thought, and reconnecting it to heaven, consecrates it with a sanction of divine origin, establishes it as the supreme norm and goal of human actions, and with it transforms the world” (afferra quel Pensiero e riannettendolo al cielo, conescrandolo con una sanzione di divina origine, e d’avvenire lo pone a norma e intento supremo delle azioni umane, e trasforma il mondo con esso). Philosophy, as a theoretic moment, generates the practical or ethicoreligious moment, “Ideas precede facts and generate them” (le idee precedono i fatti e li generano). In reality, a rigid dialectic philosophy-religion vanished. In Mazzini, philosophy and religion become more confused than connected, because his philosophy is a religion and, on the other hand, his religion is the religious consciousness of human values. If we would look further into what the God of Mazzini is, our embarrassment would increase, “When the cry of your conscience is ratified by the consensus of Humanity, you have God with you; you are certain of holding on

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the truth. One is the verification of the other” (Dovunque il grido della vostra coscienza è ratificato dal consenso della Umanità, ivi è Dio, ivi siete certi di avere in pugno la verità: l’uno è la verificazione dell’altro). God is the profound unity of human beings, the bond of love that cements them, the spiritual substance into which they deepen their own roots. But God is also “the Author of what exists, living thought, absolute” (l’Autore di quanto esiste, pensiero vivente, assoluto). The person that denies God is evil or unhappy, “The person that before a sky full of stars, before the burial of its most beloved ones, before a martyrdom, can deny God is greatly unhappy or greatly wicked” (colui che può negare Dio davanti a una notte stellata, davanti alla sepoltura de’ suoi piú cari, davanti al martirio, è grandemente infelice o grandemente malvagio). God is not demonstrable, It is felt, It is lived. God is reality, truth, and life. God is the presupposition of every thought, of every action, “I … do not speak of God to demonstrate to you that It exists or to tell you to adore It. You indeed adore God, even though you do not name It, every time you sense that you live and that the beings around you also live” (Io … non vi parlo di Dio per dimonstrarvene l’esistenza, o per dirvi che dovete adorarlo: voi lo adorate, anche non nominandolo, ogni qual volta voi sentite la vostra vita e la vita degli esseri che vi stanno d’intorno). The unique positive determination of God that we find in Mazzini is in terms of life, sentiment, force, and action. Every other approximation is uncertain, often contradictory. Writing to Lamennais, Mazzini said that he was a pantheist in the manner of St. Paul who placed God everywhere. On the other hand, he affirmed that God was “intelligence, superior to the created world, cause, and legislator.” Finally, he said again, “Even if God did not exist, the universal credence in It does exist. What exists is the universal need of an idea, of a center, of a unique principle to which to refer the norms of the individual deeds and the secondary principles that rule societies” (quando pure [Dio] non esistesse, esiste universale la credenza in esso: esiste universale il bisogno d’un’idea, d’un centro, d’un principio unico a cui si richiamino le norme delle azioni, i principî secondari che reggono le società). We have in Mazzini a religiosity or a religious sense of moral values, to which traditional elements give a patina of a well-determined faith. In reality, Mazzini would never give up these kinds of affirmations, in which God, when It is not identified with the universal life, is understood as the moral law, the law of duty, the sentiment of duty, “Faith is duty and duty requires a source, a notion superior to humanity, God” (La fede è dovere: il dovere esige una sorgente, una nozione superiore all’umanità, Dio). Dutifulness (doverosità) is not as holy as Kant said; dutifulness is dutiful because it descends from a supreme legislator. The fadeaway of Mazzini’s concepts concerning the rapport religion-morality risks, at times, to make of God a heavenly king, who handles prizes and punishments, and to consider virtue and goodness as means instead of ends of human deeds. “Humanity cannot live without heaven,” he

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confessed, “the sole and bare morality” is not enough for the human being (L’umanità non può vivere senza cielo … nuda e sola morale). “Without God, where would duty come from?” (Senza Dio, d’onde il Dovere?). The selfsufficiency of ethics in the atheist Spinoza is for Mazzini nonsense; it is materialism, “What exists is God, the human law that emanates from It, the duty freely accepted, which flows from that law for all of us, or the Force of things, which practically translates itself into the force and the success of the individuals, in the omnipotence of events. From this dilemma, no escape is given” (O Dio, la legge umana che emana da lui, il dovere, liberamente accettato, che sgorga da essa per tutti noi, o la Forza delle cose, che si traduce praticamente nella forza e nel successo degli individui, nell’onnipotenza dei fatti: da questo dilemma non s’esce). Mazzini was unaware that the Life he praised so much had a strict kinship with that Force of events and things; a kinship stronger than the one with the God announced by Paul. Mazzini’s concepts concerning humanity, the progress guided by an almost Vichian providence, duty and rights, have no different consistency. The strong temptation exists of applying to Mazzini the startling judgment that Gioberti gave about another man, Lamennais, whom he greatly admired for his thought. About Mazzini, the author of Primato morale e civile degli Italiani proclaimed that he had eloquent words, but tenuous thoughts. Mazzini should be judged from another point of view, at the light of his resolute statement, “God created us for action, not for contemplation” (Dio ci creava non per la contemplazione, ma per l’azione). To this principle, Mazzini remained faithful all his life.

Thirty-Three HUMANISM AND SKEPTICISM 1. Giuseppe Ferrari In Giuseppe Ferrari, the most ardent spirit of the nineteenth century, the eagerness for liberation with the inheritance of Romagnosi that animated the men of doctrine and of action of 1789 found new life. Ferrari fought the battle for the renewal of Italy, but with Carlo Cattaneo placed ahead of national independence the problem of justice in liberty, the problem of a social and political reform that would found the new State on a mature reflection on itself. Ferrari, the philosopher, in the earlier time moved on grounds somewhat similar to those of Rosmini, whose tendencies he demonstrated to accept in Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, 1843). In the face of this writing, Cattaneo had the impression that Ferrari rejected the premises of Romagnosi, their common teacher. Gioberti, on the contrary, though a fierce adversary of Ferrari rejoiced when he saw verified his own anti-Rosminian affirmation. Ferrari had written about Rosmini, “His opinions are in disagreement with those of the sensists in appearance alone, not in effect, because the poison of Sensism consists in disavowing that the human spirit has the power of learning the reality that is independent from the spirit” (le sue opinioni discordano da quelle dei sensisti in apparenza, non in effetto. Imperocché il veleno del sensismo è riposto nel disdire allo spirito umano il potere di apprendere la realtà, indipendente da esso spirito). In the polemical dialogues, in the ideal formula, in talking about the possible Ens, Gioberti foresaw the decadence of Rosminianism into atheism, as it happened in Lockeanism, though “John Locke sincerely believed in God.” Once admitted the distinction between logic and ontology, the conclusion seemed inevitable to Gioberti that the being of thought, the ideal being, must be posited as a subjective appearance. Ferrari, refusing the Rosminian metaphysics, felt authorized to exclaim that, though accepting the primality of the ideal being, he did not intend to give up psychology, “Nous ne voulons pas sortir de la psychologie.” Being is certainly the basis of our thoughts; “it generates, directs, and judges them; it is immense, eternal, necessary, and infinite, but it is an idea.” Our statement that being is, does not bring us out of thought, “Thought is the natural seat of being” (Il pensiero, ecco la sede naturale dell’essere). For this reason, as Gioberti anticipated, the fracture between real-

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ity and the human mind was accentuated, relegating thought irremediably outside reality, within an insurmountable incapacity of reaching the absolute and of constructing a metaphysics. Ferrari, inspired by Rosmini, would find Locke and Hume, more than Kant, the Kant who, establishing a metaphysics of the transcendental, “wants to establish being where no-being is, wants the ‘I’ however uncertain, the ‘non-I’ however void, God however annihilated; and with God, he wants grace, salvation, paradise, and perhaps even the inferno.” From Kant, one must return truly to Locke and the Lockeans, liberators of the spirit from any theoretic and practical obstacle. Ferrari once narrated: I will never forget that fortunate morning when, with the book of David Hume in my hand, at the dawn of the sun I saw the dawn of the doubt that I held in my heart from infancy, and the effects separate themselves from the causes, and the sky detach itself from God without falling on my head (Io non mi dimenticherò mai di quel fortunato mattino in cui, col libro di Davide Hume in mano, al sorgere del sole ho veduto sorgere il dubbio, che io tenevo in cuore fin dalla mia infanzia, e gli effetti separarsi dalle cause, e il cielo distaccarsi da Dio senza cadere sulla mia testa). Ferrari took the doubt from Hume but only as a critical instrument, as the means to free himself from every theological and metaphysical dogma: The school of Locke accepted the doubt and found in it new forces to defeat the dogma for a long time unopposed of Christianity. This doubt became the liberator, it was the first principle of free examination and it wounded Christ in heaven, and we were falling necessarily on earth again, in the sphere of facts (La scuola di Locke accettava il dubbio e vi trovava nuove forze per disfare il dogma lungo tempo inoppugnabile della cristianità; e il dubbio era liberatore, era il primo principio del libero esame, e feriva Cristo in cielo e si ricadeva necessariamente sulla terra, nella sfera dei fatti). The whole Filosofia della rivoluzione (Londra [Capolago], 1851), the masterwork of Ferrari, is animated by this need of concreteness and reality, against abstractness and metaphysics. It is not so much skepticism as much as exasperation of the antinomies of logical thought in order to find once more the purity of life in the immediate revelation of the facts. Ferrari insistently returned to the problem of “the re-acquisition of facts” (riconquistare il fatto): The question remains about how long we can rely on the fact when the motion of logic tries to distance us from it. It is urgent to know how I can believe what I see, what I hear, when the reasoning betrays me, confuses me, orders me to respect what I do not see, do not hear, what

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is not…. In order to resolve the problem, remove any obstacle, make philosophy veracious and not to be deceived under the pretext of science, I believed that it was important to re-conquer the fact, and to rest on its basis in spite of every logical and ontological snares (Si tratta di sapere in qual modo possiamo rimanere nel fatto, mentre il moto della logica ce ne allontana; urge di conoscere come io possa credere a ciò che vedo, a ciò che sento, mentre il ragionamento mi travia, mi sconcerta, mi impone di rispettare ciò che non vedo, ciò che non sento, ciò che non è…. Per sciogliere il problema e rimuovere ogni inciampo, e far sí che la filosofia non fosse un inganno, e che ci potesse illudere sotto pretesto di scienza, io ho creduto che importasse di riconquistare il fatto, e di rimanere sulla sua base a dispetto di ogni insidia logica e ontologica). Ferrari does not hesitate to accomplish a courageous overturn, a turn in the opposite direction. While thought reveals to us the contradictions of the world and appears to oblige us to abandon it as a fleeting phenomenon in order to find a solid reality elsewhere, a liberating philosophy would reveal that the contradictions show only the insufficiency of thought that faces this incomprehensible life, which remains as the only solid reality that we possess. We can no longer say, “Since reason cannot grasp the unreachable life, so much the worse for life!” We must say, “Since reason cannot grasp the unreachable life, so much worse for reason!” We should no longer renounce this world for a hypothetical super-world; we shall destroy every super-mundane chimera justificatory of imposed mundane sufferance, in the name of the salvation of the world. It is here that we find the “revolution” of Ferrari. It is in his return to the human vicissitude that he came to be uniquely in contact with Vico, from whom he differentiates not only for some “shadowing” but also in all of his way of constructing a philosophy of humanity. Logic is an unsuitable instrument in the conquest of reality. The human heart itself is inaccessible to thought, “There is something in the human being that is profound and unreachable, which cannot be violated without sacrilege and which commands intelligence itself” (V’è nell’uomo qualcosa di profondo e di inafferrabile, che non si può violare senza sacrilegio e che comanda all’intelligenza stessa). These are the words of the Essai of 1843, but they are already the prelude of Filosofia della rivoluzione, which introduces the antithesis between logic and revelation, that is, between mediating thought and vital immediateness: When in our search for certainty we subject our cognitions to the empire of logic, we realize that they are all contradictory and paradoxical. Far from reaching the truth, we are brought to the absurd. Far from making a verification of our judgments, they are rendered all impossible (Nell’atto in cui per giungere alla certezza sottoponiamo le nostre cognizioni all’impero della logica, scorgesi che tutte sono contraditto-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY rie e paradossali; lungi dal giungere alla verità, siamo condotti all’assurdo; lungi dal verificarsi i nostri giudizi, sono resi tutti impossibili).

This, however, does not mean the absurdity of the world but the impotence of logic. Logic is static, identity, while reality is development, motion. Logic does not seize the concrete individuality, while the existent is individual. From this the conclusion is that it is radically impossible for thought to embrace the world. Worn out by the contradictions of nature, philosophy one day found refuge in the intelligence, with the hope of discovering the truth in ourselves and, after discarding bodies, matter, mixtures, and fusion, fixed its attention on the phenomena of thought. This did not make philosophy happier than before because thought limits itself to the consideration of the exterior phenomena. Material or immaterial is the new image of nature, and we find in us all the incoherence of the exterior world. Things, outside of us, are subject to alteration: now they are and now they are not. Within ourselves, we are never the same. The self continuously changes and rebels against the triple form of identity, equation, and syllogism (Vinta dalle contraddizioni della natura, un giorno la filosofia si rifugiò nell’intelligenza, sperando di scoprire la verità in noi stessi e lasciati i corpi, la materia, il moto, la mistione, la fusione, fissò l’attenzione sui fenomeni del pensiero. Ma non fu piú felice di prima attesoché il pensiero si limita a seguire i fenomeni esteriori; materiale o immateriale è solo l’immagine della natura, e quindi troviamo in noi tutta l’incoerenza del mondo esteriore. Fuor di noi le cose si alterano, sono e non sono; in noi, il nostro io non è mai lo stesso, varia di continuo e si rivolta contro la triplice forma dell’identità, dell’equazione e del sillogismo). What thought could not seize in the world and in the self, it could not even attempt to take in the Absolute, in God, unseizable by definition, because God is infinite and the mind finite. Desperately entrapped in contradictions, logical thought tries in vain to find the salvation of reason in the criticism of every dogma. Every thesis and every position irremediably failed under a new critique, while a synthesis would never become possible. Hegel, the greatest of modern philosophers, is the greatest not when he tries a chimerical synthesis, but when he doubts: When he explains Socrates, Christ, the reformation of Luther, the revolution of France, he forces us to admire him sincerely, not because of his syllogism, but because he is the most powerful observer of the contradictions that have challenged philosophers and legislators (Quando spiega Socrate, Cristo, la riforma di Lutero, la rivoluzione di Francia,

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allora ci sforza a sinceramente ammirarlo, ma non a causa del suo sillogismo, bensí perché egli è il piú potente osservatore delle contraddizioni che hanno agitato i filosofi e i legislatori). Philosophy, as the pretension to systematize reality or as the refusal of the appearance and an appeal to a true reality beyond the appearance, failed. Ferrari stated, “If a philosophy is an impossible enterprise according to logic, philosophy, in spite of logic, is still a senseless deed and it would never be able to free itself from the contradiction that springs up under the weight of reason” (Se adunque una filosofia, stando alla logica, è cosa impossibile, la filosofia, in onta alla logica, è impresa insensata, né potrà mai svincolarsi dalla contraddizione che scaturisce sotto il peso della ragione). If the reason that tries to explain reality would fall into the absurd, the reality in the midst of which we live our life remains most solid. If reason would precipitate, the intuition, the revelation of objects, life, and morality would remain unshaken. On their data, reason would still have some modest instrumental duty. What a captious critique has affirmed to be apparent and illusory reveals finally its veracious and real being. Life in its truth imposes on us, in addition to its theories, its imperative: An internal suggestion tells us that we must live. Let nature protect all races hostile to us; we will fight them; we will act as if the universe could answer our desire, as if the stars that shine in the firmament would have no other mission than to send us a beam of light during the night…. Gales may submerge the ship, reefs may break it, diseases, hunger, and cold may decimate the crew. Indeed, seamen die, sails have ripped…. It is necessary to go forward…. We must act as if there would be a harbor, as if the winds were destined to conduct us, as if the rocks, the sand, the currents were created precisely to keep the crew on the alert. Life wants us to live (Bisogna vivere; tale è la suggestione interna. La natura protegga pure tutte le razze che ci sono ostili; noi le combatteremo, noi agiremo come se l’universo rispondesse alla nostra aspettativa, come se le stelle che splendono nel firmamento non avessero altra missione che d’inviarci un raggio di luce durante la notte…. I venti possono sommergere la nave, gli scogli possono infrangerla, le malattie, la fame, il freddo possono mietere l’equipaggio; nel fatto i marinai muiono, le vele sono squarciate…. Ma conviene avanzare…. Bisogna operare come se vi fosse un porto, come se i venti fossero destinati a condurci, come se le rupi, le sabbie, le correnti fossero create a bella posta per tener desta l’attenzione dell’equipaggio. La vita vuol che si viva). The overturn created by Ferrari is by now complete. Doctrines, theories, rationalizations have value, pragmatically, for the life that manifests itself to us in its immediateness as an imperative without appeal.

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Among metaphysical solutions, the only one that to Ferrari appears to approach the truth is the mystical one, which “searches life where it is and knows that logic cannot penetrate the secret of life with reason or sensations.” Truth is not found in inspiration but in the instinct, “Our destiny rises from the instincts of life” (il nostro destino sorge dagli istinti della vita). Instincts direct us, rule over us; we are never very aware of our actions; we are always acting “as if nature would give satisfaction to human desires.” The rhythm of life is going to be that of manifesting an endless finality. The revelation of our life entails the revelation of the life of others. Life is social life, and in it ineluctably both egoism and charity are met. Ferrari would retrace the steps of the English ethic of sentiment, reducing the moral life, the moral revelation, to interest and duty, to the balance between justice and charity, to the connection between liberty and equality. Jurisprudence as the defense of morality must set up the kingdom of liberty and equality. The revolution, which initiated in 1789, wanted exactly the kingdom of science that by demolishing every barrier and every idol would set up the kingdom of equality. Ferrari’s heroes were Voltaire and Rousseau: If Voltaire represents the vital datum of the revolution under the aspect of truth, Rousseau represents it instead under the aspect of justice…. He is the poet of justice against the ancient society that oppresses and lacerates justice. He wants that society to be destroyed, at any price, even to the point of eliminating the right of property in order to achieve equality (Se Voltaire rappresenta il dato vitale della rivoluzione sotto l’aspetto della verità, Rousseau lo rappresenta invece sotto l’aspetto della giustizia…. Egli è il poeta della giustizia, contro l’antica società che l’opprime e lo strazia, e che egli vuol distrutta, a qualunque patto, dovesse pure distruggere la proprietà per conquistare l’uguaglianza). His conception of the human being of nature “is not found in the Americas, it is in us, everywhere where a human being is. The human being of nature is superior to all the legislators. The sage of the ancient times in comparison with the human being of nature is nothing more than an administrator that people may recall if it governs, and if not, it is a citizen that can vote. 2. Carlo Cattaneo Carlo Cattaneo, also a disciple of Romagnosi, felt like Ferrari the Vichian need of a truth ascertained through the made, researching the concrete positiveness of the made within the world of nations. He inherited from Romagnosi the problem of civilization, and civil philosophy was for him the apex of inquiry. Though he rebelled against the proliferation of dissertations concerning space, time, and the infinite, he exalted scientific research. He said, “The naming of ideas is especially convenient to those vast moral combinations that

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join millions of human beings in a powerful order of thoughts and wills” (il nome d’idee sopratutto si conviene a quelle vaste combinazioni morali che congiungono milioni di uomini in poderoso ordine di pensamenti e di voleri). A worthwhile field of research was the process through which human beings raised themselves from the cave of Polyphemus to the ingeniousness of Archimedes, the study of human societies, their constitution, and growth! “Who would deny that these profound studies … would not pour abundant light on the sorts of human societies and on the secrets of human nature?” (Chi negherà che questi profondi studi … non versino copiosa luce sulle sorti della umana società e sui secreti dell’umana natura?). The method of inquiry must be rigorously scientific, must conform to the process of all the sciences, so to substitute to those vain discussions of metaphysicians and theologians “the unanimity that is the principle of experimental sciences” (unanimità ch’è principio delle scienze sperimentali). Cattaneo once affirmed: No, not the common nature of the first human beings of Vico, nor the innate ideas of the Platonists, nor the pre-established harmony of Leibniz, nor the statue of Bonnet and Condillac, nor the pure reason of Kant, nor the deified ego of Hegel would give us the sincere history of our ideas. It is necessary that philosophy, like any other science, would proceed from the known to the unknown, from the languages, the literatures, the mythologies, the laws, the sciences, and the other great elaborations of mature and associate minds. Philosophy should proceed to formulate cautious conjectures on the first most obscure growing efforts of the individual intellect (No, né la commune natura delle genti di Vico, né le idée innate dei platonici, né l’armonia prestabilita di Leibniz, né la statua di Bonnet e di Condillac, né la ragione pura di Kant, né l’io deificato di Hegel, non ci danno la sincera istoria delle nostre idee. Fa mestieri che la filosofia, come ogni altra scienza proceda anch’essa dal noto all’ignoto; ossia che dalle lingue, dalle letterature, dalle mitologie, dalle leggi, dalle scienze e dalle altre grandi elaborazioni delle menti adulte e associate, proceda a far da ultimo caute congetture sui primi oscurissimi conati dell’intelletto individuo). We need facts and scientific method, or a synthesis of the results of the other sciences in order to place the human being in the proper plane of the reality toward which the whole comes to converge. While in Ferrari, all the phenomena of reality are as if they were to come together in the human reality, in Cattaneo all the phenomena of reality come together so that humanity would find its central place in reality. His is the study of humankind situated concretely within society. Sociology gathers and synthesizes the conclusions of science in order to better illustrate the life and history of humanity. It is within humanism that the pragmatic instance would become true:

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The rapport of dependency of philosophy from science is double: one of method, the other of data. Philosophy should accept from the sciences their course and results, to which thereafter it would apply its work of connection and synthesis: Philosophy should readily accept what the other sciences have discovered, and are continuously discovering concerning human nature and the universe. Philosophy should generously coordinate in its treatises all those new ideas in a manner that the human place within space, time, and the order of the universe would clearly appear…. Philosophy should research and study in all the human deeds, in all times and places, in all forms and conditions of barbarism and civilization, in good and bad performance, what can illumine the secrets so highly inaccessible of human conscience. Philosophy should move from facts in order to arrive at the forces that generated them, and with reason should proceed from the known and the certain to the uncertain and unknown. In the reciprocal relations among all the sciences and in the concordance of their testimonies concerning humankind and the world, philosophy is encouraged to find new foundations for certainty, which should also be more consonant with common sense. All that is true in the other sciences must be true also in philosophy (Accetti dunque e accetti alacremente quanto le altre scienze hanno scoperto, e vanno ogni dí scoprendo intorno all’uomo e all’universo. E coordini sollecita nei suoi trattati tutte quelle nuove idee, sicché appaia luminosamente qual è il posto dell’uomo nello spazio, nel tempo e nell’ordin …. Poi la filosofia cerchi nello studio speciale di tutti i fatti dell’uomo, in tutti i tempi e luoghi, in tutte le forme e le condizioni di barbarie e di civiltà, nelle vie del bene e nelle vie del male, quanto può illuminare i secreti altamente inaccessibili della coscienza umana. Mova dai fatti, per indurre alla forza che li genera; e come ragion vuole, proceda dal noto e certo all’incerto e all’ignoto. Nelle relazioni reciproche fra tutte le scienze, e nella concordia delle loro testimonianze intorno all’uomo e al mondo, ricerchi nuovi fondamenti di certezza, i quali siano anche piú consoni al senso comune. Tutto ciò ch’è vero nelle altre scienze deve esser vero anche in filosofia). Philosophical inquiry must be psychological but, differently from the traditional way of research, its object should not be the individual but the social life, not the solitary human being of the Cartesian meditation, but the soul of the collectivity, the interplay of the actions and reactions of associate minds. Cattaneo laments that the philosophers have always searched the origin of ideas in the individual separate, arbitrarily and violently, from the living grounds on which it moves entangling itself in the rapport with its fellowhuman beings. When we state that the human being is a social animal, we affirm precisely that human being is what it is because it finds itself in the

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midst of relationships with other human beings. To isolate human beings is to falsify them. In Invito alli amatori della filosofia (An invitation to the people who love philosophy), Cattaneo clarified his position: Psychology and ideology research in vain in the solitary mind of the newly born individual the origin of the ideas. In the midst of the excitements and the words of the wet-nurse, the infant moves from the dominion of blind instinct to that of the first confusing sensations. From the earliest dawn of experience our mind sways in the mutual impulses of the associate minds. From the beginning, the ideas of others mixed themselves with ours; they awake ours, guide them, precede them, and oblige them…. Our life is not a contemplation of what appears and what exists; our life is a perpetual reaction of the atom of power and consciousness that are in us to all the forces of nature and humanity (La psicologia e l’idealogia s’affaticano invano a ricercare nella mente solitaria dell’individuo nascente l’origine di tutte le idee. Fra li eccitamenti e le voci d’una nutrice, l’infante passa dal dominio del cieco istinto a quello delle prime confuse sensazioni. Fin dai piú incerti albori dell’esperienza, la nostra mente oscilla tra i mutui impulsi delle menti associate. Le idee altrui s’intrecciano sin dall’origine alle nostre; le destano, le guidano, le precedono, le impongono…. No! La nostra vita non è una contemplazione delle apparenze e delle esistenze: essa è una reazione perpetua di quell’atomo di potenza e di coscienza ch’è in noi, a tutte le forze della natura e dell’umanità). With much penetration and great subtlety, Cattaneo illustrates this collective life of humanity in its various aspects of psychic life. He reveals his limitations when he shows his incapacity to determine the sphere of the psychology of associate minds. As he insists, if it were true that the solitary soul truly is an abstraction, that all one personal ideas are derived from others and that all ideas are born out of a contact with others, then “He is a rare genius who boasts to possess at least one idea that truly did not come to him from others.” If it is true that life is communication; then Cattaneo’s protest of wanting “to over-impose and not to counter-oppose to the psychology of the individual solitary mind” the collective one, has no sense. When the individual solitary mind does not exist, except perhaps in a pathological or deviant case, then the ideology of the individual would have for object only an abstraction. On the other hand, not even the Ideologia della società would have a clearer task. The meaning of the general thesis of Cattaneo remains obscure, “The psychology of associate minds is the necessary link between the ideology of the individual and the ideology of society” (questa psicologia delle menti associate è un necessario anello tra l’Ideologia dell’individuo e l’Ideologia della società). These initial difficulties become more complicated when Cattaneo researches the roots of the development of humanity, opposing the dialectic

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conception of Fichte’s idealism and positing his own theory of antithesis as the method of social psychology. According to Cattaneo, the idealistic dialectic has the original vice of searching the root of the contradiction in the individual mind, while the course of the ideas necessitates the consideration of the various contrasting forces on the ground, “The yeast that ferments the ideas is not prepared in one mind alone…. The current of thought wants an electric battery of many hearts and many intellects” (Il lievito che fa fermentare le idee non si svolge in una mente sola.… La corrente del pensiero vuole una pila elettrica di piú cuori e piú intelletti). The dialogue described by Plato of the soul with itself, even if truly there could be one, would be a pale and bloodless simulacrum of the fecund fight that happens only between adverse multitudes, “An individual person alone can easily fall in the arms of doubt between two ideas not yet mature and certain. For this reason, the vital conflict can never be more resolute and powerful than when two individuals, two sects, or two nations come into collision” (Un individuo solo può ben oscillare debolmente nel dubbio fra due idee non ancora ben certe; ma perciò appunto il conflitto vitale non può mai essere cosí risoluto e potente come quando si scontrano due individui, due sette, due popoli). It was Cattaneo’s failure of not having resolved the rapport between individual and collectivity that made him lose also the possibility of focusing on the rapport between the clash of human groups and the clash of ideas. He could not even clarify better the motion of ideas and their process in the fight between human beings and between nations. Cattaneo certainly did not reduce the meaning of history to a series of battles in which the group that wins is right, and by winning its ideology triumphs. The connection between “interior psychology” and “social ideology” needed to be preliminarily defined which is as much as to say that the dialectic between individual and society and, in society, between group and group, needed to be more deeply analyzed. It was not enough to say that “the study of the individual in the womb of humanity, the social ideology, is the prism that separates into distinct and clear colors the uncertain shallowness of interior psychology” (Lo studio dell’individuo nel seno dell’umanità, l’ideologia sociale, è il prisma che decompone in distinti e fulgidi colori l’incerta albedine dell’interiore psicologia). It was necessary to work with the psychology of the associate minds, showing it in its uncertain dawn, and then try to comprehend the thought of concrete groups, their idealities, and their clashes, with their motives, and with the reasons of their mutations. We find these characteristic limitations of the work of Cattaneo already in the hesitating determination of the rapport between philosophy of nature and philosophy of humankind, which he never fully clarified, though he pronounced strong declaration that “Philosophy is the investigation of the supreme rapport of all things, the study of their concatenation. It is the whole world reflected and unified in the intellect. It is Nature transformed in Idea”

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(La filosofia è la investigazione dei supremi rapporti di tutte le cose, lo studio della loro concatenazione: il mondo riverberato e unificato nell’intelletto: la Natura trasformata in Idea). In this philosophy, no one will exclude the inquiry on the human being, Cattaneo says, because the life of human beings is located within the universe. Civil philosophy would be far from being the constitutive bond and connection of all inquiries. Civil philosophy would be merely a chapter in the reduction of Nature to Idea. 3. Ausonio Franchi Ausonio Franchi, pseudonym of Cristoforo Bonavino, in some of his first works intended to reconnect himself to Giuseppe Ferrari. From the criticism, which some judged skeptic of Filosofia delle scuole italiane (1852), Franchi arrived at the retraction of Thomism in Ultima critica (1889–1893). His first book of philosophy was against Giovanni Maria Bertini, and its anti-Jesuitical and anti-ecclesiastic invective is truly severe. Franchi started the book with an interesting portrait of the Italian philosophical culture of the nineteenth century; he was a useful critic of Condillac and a good messenger of the Kantism of Galluppi, but his exposition is simple and without “the creative vein, which makes original one’s ideas.” He stopped at the logic and at the ideology. He was obliged to recite his lessons and publish his books of philosophy in Naples, under the reign and the police of the Bourbons. For him, Rosmini was a psychologist and “the psychologists are in philosophy what the grammarians were in literature.” The psychologists “analyze, break up, dissolve, dry up,” but they lack comprehension. Italy “shall consider Rosmini one of the principal accomplices of the decadence in which our philosophy continues to persevere.” Rosmini was a retrograde barbarian writer, “a priest and a friar, or the founder of a new Order of Friars and Priests; his books became the dowry of all the schools of seminaries and convents.” Manzoni was ridiculous when he praised Rosmini; but Manzoni was “the apologist of the ethics of the Popes and the worthy panegyrist of the philosophy of Rosmini.” Mamiani was uncertain and worthless. Gioberti deserved laugh, anger, and compassion. “Mediocre and eclectic” were Baldassare Poli and Salvatore Mancino; sterile Giuseppe Bianchetti and Silvestro Centofanti; compilers of manuals were Antonio Giusti, Alessandro Pestalozza, and Antonio Corte. At last, “the Reverend Fathers Luigi Dmowski, Matteo Liberatore, and Luigi Tapparelli … not being aware that, between them, philosopher and Jesuit are the two most repugnant professions and the most contradictory terms, of which there is mention in histories and dictionaries, have philosophized theologizing, and did violence to human reason by obliging it to serve logic, metaphysics, ethics, and the laws of their Society.” All Italian philosophy was under the dominion of the Church, under the shadow of religion, from which it liberated itself only with the radical rationalism that was the vital son of the Reformation:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Socinianism began the liberal element of the Reformation…. It was the true principle that educated the modern world. Acknowledging the autonomy of reason, Socinianism created the new philosophy. It was itself father of Descartes and Spinoza, Bayle and Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, Kant and Lessing, Lamennais and Leroux, Hegel and Strauss, Bauer and Feuerbach. It was the spirit itself of today science. It was rationalism (Il socinianismo, che tolse a svolgere l’elemento liberale della Riforma … fu vero principio educatore del mondo moderno. Riconoscendo l’autonomia della ragione, esso creò la nuova filosofia; esso fu padre di Cartesio e Spinoza, Bayle e Hume, Voltaire e Rousseau, Kant e Lessing, Lamennais e Leroux, Hegel e Strauss, Bauer e Feuerbach; esso è lo spirito medesimo della scienza odierna; è il razionalismo).

According to Franchi, the antithesis that gave flavor to the history of the nineteenth century was the mortal fight between Catholicism and Rationalism. Only on the corpse of Catholicism, would Italy be able to renovate itself, “Let us work, O Italians! Before wishing a free country, commerce, teaching, and administration, let us free our own minds and our own hearts. Let us redeem Italy from the servitude of the soul, if we want to have a fatherland and to be a nation!” (All’opera dunque, o Italiani! E prima di voler libero il suolo, il commercio, l’insegna-mento, l’amministrazione, rendiamo libere le nostre menti e liberi i nostri cuori. Riscattiamo l’Italia dalla servitú dell’anima, se vogliamo avere una patria ed essere una nazione). Franchi’s criticism of Bertini was a work of philosophy and of politics, because in his work “was found … the best of the metaphysical and religious doctrines, which dominated sovereignly in Italy.” The Appendice alla filosofia delle scuole italiane of 1853 was an addition to the previous matters. In it, Franchi ill-treated Gioberti and Gioberti’s critics; he did not believe in philosophy and was not a philosopher. Achille Mauri was vituperated for having written a study on Gioberti, meanwhile “the egregious Mauro Macchi,” disciple of Cattaneo was exalted for his libel against Gioberti, Contraddizioni di Vincenzo Gioberti (Turin, 1852), “a precious model of severe, honest, most diligent criticism.” Ferrari is highly praised, “Oh, who knows what will have happened, if he would have succeeded in saving the fatherland from a great part of the evils, which the ideas of Gioberti generated!” In addition, he ridiculed the Rosminians and Terenzio Mamiani, who up to then had remained untouched, but now Franchi maltreated him and Bonghi, Boncompagni, and other minor members of the “Academy of Italic Philosophy.” Uncriticized remained Bertrando Spaventa for the written memory Dei principii della filosofia pratica di Giordano Bruno (On the principles of the practical philosophy of Giordano Bruno). The Studi filosofici e religiosi del Sentimento (Turin, 1854), was supposed to be in a constructive form, but Franchi arrived at nothing other than to

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a demolition of reason as a faculty positively active in favor of the fecundity of sentiment. The Religione del secolo XIX (1853) and Razionalismo del popolo (1856) constitute a fervent profession of faith in the Enlightenment. It was the faith in the Enlightenment that he proclaimed between 1854 and 1857 in the weekly “La Ragione”: “The principles that sustain the modern society are no longer the supernatural dogmas and the mysterious oracles of a revelator, but the natural laws of Humanity, of which the unique criterion is reason, and unique interpreter is science” (I principii che reggono tutta la società moderna non sono piú i dogmi sovrannaturali e li oracoli misteriosi di qualche rivelatore; bensí le leggi naturali dell’Umanità, di cui unico criterio è la ragione, unico interprete è la scienza). Between 1863 and 1870, Franchi published his own studies on the history of modern philosophy, Letture su la storia della filosofia moderna (Milan, 1863, 2 vols.) and La teorica del giudizio (Milan, 1870, 2 vols.). We said that Ultima critica was a palinode, and in the pages of this book Franchi attacked again Rosmini and Gioberti but from a different point of view, of the most rigid orthodoxy, with the same violence of which we found examples in the books of the rationalist epoch. On the practical level, he condemned socialism, democracy, and humanitarianism, and denounced the dangers of communism, “the last corollary of atheist and materialist science.” Then, he made the last wish, “The unique remedy is for governments and people to return to God, to Christ, and to the Church.” On 12 September 1895, the apostate priest Cristoforo Bonavino closed his eyes forever in the convent of St. Ann in Genoa, where he retired to die. 4. Bonaventura Mazzarella Of a totally different speculative mold was Bonaventura Mazzarella, author of Professione di fede de’ cristiani evangelici d’Italia (Genua, 1857), who joined the Waldensian Church for his hate of the priestly tyranny. His philosophical doctrines are presented in Critica della scienza (Genua, 1860) and in the three books Della critica that competed for the Ravizza Prize of 1864; these were published in two volumes between 1866 and 1868, and, again, with remarkable modifications, in Rome, between 1878 and 1879. In them, not without the influence of Charles-Bernard Renouvier, a return to Kant is present. In Italy, Kant’s critique had been interpreted as dogmatism in the manner of Galluppi, or moderate skepticism in that of Franchi, without even mentioning the misunderstandings of Rosmini or the wild judgments of Tommaseo. Mazzarella had no indulgence for Franchi. The antithesis between a reason purely analytical and destructive, and a sentiment that is constructive in its immediateness, appeared to him absurd and unsustainable, because of the impossibility of a demolishing fully negative, without any light of truth, “How can a criticism sterile and impotent in regard to the truth have the force of freeing us from error, when it is the task of the truth scientifically constituted to free us from it?” (Come mai una critica sterile ed impotente per rispetto alla verità,

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potrebbe aver forza a liberarci dall’errore, mentre sol tocca al vero scientificamente costituito di liberarcene? In Critica, p. 57). The effective task of a positive critique is not the demolition of philosophy, but the determination of the why of philosophy. It is the discovery that reason is not an end in itself, but a means for reaching the goals of the “self,” and this self is an ideal direction, a request. If it is true that we start from the cognition of the self, it is also true that we find the self to be a living, absolute demand. In Critica (pp. 529– 531), Mazzarella stated: The human being, for what concerns its reason, is locked within the ferrous circle of immutability and necessity. By virtue of its freethinking, and of the inextinguishable consciousness of a supreme goal, the human being learns to manage the circle as the support for ascending to the possession of a higher and wider kingdom…. Human beings have a purpose … because they possess a life that needs the fullness of life…. The self does not find its purpose in itself or in nature, because self and nature do not contain, nor can contain the fullness of life God, the eternal Life, can satisfy the human demand and skepticism was defeated, “What the skeptics demand is always a practical element. Ferrari has very well summarized the duty of skepticism, when, after the demonstration that doubt reigns all over, he made an appeal to life” (ciò cui ricorrono gli scettici è sempre un elemento pratico: ed il Ferrari ha ben riepilogato l’ufficio dello scetticismo, quando, mostrato il dubbio dappertutto, è ricorso alla vita). Thought and life are not to be left in a condition of separation, or in a conflict: The element of thought by itself brings to subjectivism, and the element of life by itself remains alienated from scientific thought. The formula capable of reconciling, not of creating, the unity of thought and life, of the speculative and the practical, of the moral and the philosophical, is the formula that possesses in itself the power of winning skepticism and constituting philosophy, or the growth of thought up to a system. I said, a formula that reconciles, not that creates, because no science is possible that did not have previously an experience of life (L’elemento solo del pensiero mena al subbiettivismo, e l’elemento solo della vita resta lontano dal pensiero scientifico. La formula perciò, che fissi, non già crei, l’unità del pensiero e della vita, dello speculativo e del pratico, del morale e del filosofico, è formula che ha in sé ciò che vince lo scetticismo e ciò che costituisce la filosofia, e cioè lo svolgimento del pensiero fino al sistema. Che fissi, e non crei, ho detto, poiché non è possibile scienza alcuna senza una manifestazione di vita che la preceda, in Critica, pp. 543–544).

Thirty-Four SPIRITUALISTS, ONTOLOGISTS, KANTIANS, MYSTICS, AND THOMISTS 1. Terenzio Mamiani. The Academy of Italic Philosophy. The Philosophy of the Italian Schools Though someone of his few disciples celebrated Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere as the last ring in the chain that from Galluppi continued in Rosmini and Gioberti, the agreement was unanimous, among his greater contemporaries and those who came afterward, in stating that the value of his vast philosophical production was nearly null. Rosmini stated that Mamiani’s renovation, Rinnovamento, was “a rare example of incoherence and lassitude.” Without mentioning the negative opinions of Leopardi and Giordani, Bertini definitely opposed Mamiani’s nomination in 1857 for the Chair at the University of Turin, describing him “a little profound and little solid philosopher.” Those people, who were closer to him, like Francesco Bonatelli, Carlo Cantoni, and Felice Tocco, also were not sparing him from their bitter criticism. Spaventa arrived at this conclusion: I am fully convinced by now that the work of Mamiani, his great authority and, as it is the custom to say, his influence has been, especially after 1860, most pernicious to the Italian philosophy. To the sincere, clear, and critical understanding of Galluppi and Rosmini, Mamiani substituted and imposed in all manners dogmatism and rhetoric. His intervention caused the loss or an obstacle to the great way opened by Kant; the confusion within the history of philosophy; the brake or the entanglement of the line of tradition; the mistaken positing of problems; the return to an insipid theism and supernaturalism subsidized by Platonic expectorations; the despise for a true speculative liberty; a misunderstanding of moral autonomy; and the indifference, as if it never happened, toward the great epoch of German philosophy. He gave origin to a clientele that was pretentious, servile, and superficial and to a reaction and rebellion, no less superficial and volatile; to a following of anti-diluvian spiritualists and to a crowd of pre-adamitic materialists or positivists (Ormai sono a pieno convinto che l’opera del Mamiani, la sua grande autorità, e, come si suol dire, la influenza sua

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY è stata, specie dopo il 1860, perniciosissima alla filosofia italiana. All’intendimento schietto e critico del Galluppi e del Rosmini egli ha sostituito e fatto valere in tutti i modi il dommatismo e la rettorica: smarrita o sbarrata la gran via aperta da Kant, sconvolta la storia della filosofia, rotto e intricato il filo della tradizione, sbagliata la posizione de’ problemi, rimesso in onore uno scipito teismo e soprannaturalismo, sussidiato da espettorazioni platoniche, spregiata la vera libertà speculativo, non inteso il valore della morale autonomia, considerata come non avvenuta la grande epoca della filosofia tedesca, e perciò dato origine a una clientela cachettica, servile, superficiale, ed a una reazione e ribellione non meno superficiale e leggera, a un codazzo di spiritualisti antidiluviani e a un formicolaio di materialisti o positivisti preadamitici).

In 1834, in exile, Mamiani published Del rinnovamento della filosofia antica italiana in which, after the criticism of Rosmini, he affirmed the exigency of returning to the ancient Italic tradition, which was the philosophy of experience continued in Romagnosi and Galluppi, even though in Galluppi he missed what was most remarkable. We already saw the bitter reaction of Rosmini who slowly influenced his thought, though the Dialoghi di scienza prima of 1846 are still immature for empiricism and the School of Common Sense. He never overcame empiricism nor ever succeeded in understanding the effort of Galluppi, and Rosmini and Gioberti remained extraneous to him, though he introduced himself as their successor and continuator. In December 1855, inaugurating the academic year of the “Academy of Italic Philosophy” that he founded in Genoa, he told his auditors that Rosmini appeared to him in a vision indicating the true ideal, exhorting him to fight, in the name of the fatherland, against the effects of empiricism and the other dangerous and superficial doctrines, “Intellects and studies at the present are all moving within a blind and gross empiricism” (l’ingegni e gli studj s’avvolgono al presente per entro un cieco e grosso empirismo). From it originated the Confessioni di un metafisico in 1865, the Meditazioni Cartesiane in 1868, and a full series of writing and articles in “Filosofia delle scuole Italiane” the journal he founded in 1870, directed until 1885, with the exclusive task of publicizing his thought, though it was initiated with a program of vast freedom of discussion. This was the program that was supposed to animate the Società degli studi filosofici e letterari, also founded by him, which had the merit of publishing, in its short life, La coscienza e il meccanesimo interiore of Bonatelli (Padua, 1872), Telesio of Fiorentino (Florence, 1872–1874), and Lettere a N. Mameli su la teorica del Giudizio of Franchi (Milan, 1870). If Mamiani’s primitive empiricism was sluggish, equally bloodless was his mature Platonism that gravitated essentially toward the theory of the compenetration of acts, in order to explain perception, and the ontological argument of the existence of God. In regard to perception, Mamiani intended to

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confirm the truth of Galluppi who in the Saggio made the following observation, “If the objects, if the reason of existence, are separate from the spirit, what would build the bridge to cross from thought to existence, to the object?” (Se gli oggetti, se la ragione dell’esistenza son separati dallo spirito, chi getta un ponte per passare dal pensiero all’esistenza, all’oggetto?). With this, Galluppi expressed with an extreme clarity of terms a problem. The answer Mamiani gave was that the perception of the exterior world is the “I” that does not sense but is aware of the “non-I” (la percezione del mondo esteriore è il Me il quale non sente, ma sí avverte il non me). Mamiani explains in this way how this being aware was possible, “The ‘I’ is aware of the joining of our spirit with the penetrating act that originates from extrinsic forces and provokes the sensations in an manner analogous to its own nature” ([il Me] avverte il congiungimento dell’animo nostro con l’atto penetrativo che esce dalle estrinseche forze e provoca le sensazioni in modo analogo alla propria natura). Just as he did not explain the intuitive act with which the mind attains the ideas, Mamiani did not explain what is the basis of the analogy and the possible way of joining of the spirit with the penetrating act. With a mysterious perception, the human being attains the sensible in the same way that it attains the idea with the mysterious intuition. God is seized not in the idea, but in Itself, and though It is seized superficially, not like in Gioberti’s divine creative activity, God is still the guarantor of truth. 2. Luigi Ferri Perhaps, the only person who truly believed in Mamiani—who seemed colorless and uncertain even to Conti!—was Luigi Ferri, the faithfull collaborator of Mamiani. After Mamiani’s death, Ferri founded and directed the Rivista italiana di filosofia, which aimed at continuing with a richer program the philosophy of the Italian schools, Filosofia delle scuole italiane. Ferri was a worthy historian of philosophical thought; his Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en Italie au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1869, 2 vols.) and his studies on Italian Renaissance, at least in part, are still useful today. His theoretical meditation began with a series of letters to Mamiani published between 1857 and 1859, in which he outlined a clear dualism between nature and spirit, mysteriously united in God. Even though in the last analysis, the explanation of Ferri is but a postulate, he explained the correspondence between the two worlds, the sensible, and the intelligible. In Psychologie de l’association depuis Hobbes jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1883), which is the most interesting of Ferri’s works and the one in which the influence of the French spiritualistic psychologism is mostly felt, Ferri accentuated the dualism. He also outlined the analogous correspondence between the world of spirit and that of nature, between the laws of the one and those of the other. At the root of both, according to Ferri, a force exists, the dynamism, which by hypothesis and imagination is unique. Being and thought, or substance of being and substance of thought, are two entities because they have different laws. They are only

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one thing because of their reciprocal correspondence. Gentile, summarizing Ferri’s position, commented: Substance for Ferri is a fundamental law of the universe and it is totally compatible with the opposition and the union of the relative and the absolute, of the finite and the infinite. The ingenuous ease, with which he glides over the arduous problem, is one of the many signs of the power of his philosophical mind (La sostanza per lui è una legge fondamentale dell’universo affatto conciliabile colla opposizione e unione del relativo e dell’assoluto, del finito e l’infinito. L’ingenua disinvoltura con cui scivola sull’arduo problema, è uno dei tanti segni della forza del suo ingegno filosofico). 3. Giovanni Maria Bertini, Luigi Ornato, and the Philosophy of Life With some affinity of position with Ferri, Giovanni Maria Bertini brings us to a wholly different sphere. He was an anxious and sincere thinker, who in the limits of his inquiry profoundly felt the labor of research. His teacher was the Rosminian G. A. Rayneri, more known as pedagogue, but he felt especially the influence of Luigi Ornato, a singular scholar. Ornato was in good rapport with Gioberti, was learned in Greek and a great lover and student of the classic philosophers, particularly of Plato. Among the moderns, Ornato admired and followed Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, whose works he even translated. Of his writings, if they were ever perfectly completed, only the Ricordi of Marcus Aurelius was published in an annotated translation, so that on his positions we can learn only indirectly. Over all, it is in the letters of Gioberti that the Platonism of Ornato transpires. Ornato was adverse to the primitive pantheism of Gioberti, and interested fully in sustaining the reality of the idea that is reached by the intuition of the mind. It was precisely in this that Gioberti found the most serious motive to distance himself from Ornato, from whom later he seemed to dissent even more profoundly. Gioberti, writing to Pier Dionigi Pinelli, while commenting disdainfully on a certain attitude of religious enlightenment professed by the Ornatists, followers of Ornato, accused Ornato of wanting to become the Cousin of Italy, “Signori Ornatisti, if you will wish to fight the ancient faith of Italy, you would remain open-mouthed!” (Signori Ornatisti, se vorrete combattere la fede antica d’Italia ne resterete a bocca aperta!). Then as always, it seemed impossible to Gioberti not to persuade oneself “that Catholicism could not reach an accord with the more talented and more copious increments of human ingenuity” (che il cattolicismo non possa accordarsi cogl’incrementi piú eletti e piú copiosi dell’ingegno umano). When Ornato died, Gioberti much regretted the fact that Ornato had not published his writings. It is only through Bertini, who had been very close to

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Ornato and whose obituary he wrote in “L’Eridano” of Turin in 1843, we can know something more specific on his attitudes. Ornato was adverse to sensism and all its developments and accepted the alternative of Jacobi: Plato or Spinoza, in order to refute completely pantheism. He used to say, “The philosopher is facing this alternative: to admit the null as the origin of the whole, or to acknowledge a living God as father and creator of the whole.” In this it is not reasoning and logical reason that have to decide, but an immediate and free act of credence: In the choice of one of these two great systems, the philosopher cannot determine by any argument of logic…. If the philosopher inclines toward theism instead of nullism, it does that with a spontaneous and most independent act of its will, with which it thoughtfully assents to the true that shines in its spirit. It is in this choice and in this assent that human liberty is exercised in its highest degree (A preferire l’uno di questi due grandi sistemi non può il filosofo esser determinato da alcun argomento logico …; se il filosofo si determina al teismo anziché al nullismo, ciò egli fa con un atto spontaneo e liberissimo della sua volontà con cui egli assente riflessivamente al vero che rifulge al suo spirito, ed in questa scelta e in questo assenso si esercita nel piú alto grado la libertà umana). For Ornato the logic understood as analysis and discourse would have no power at all if it could not find already prepared the material on which to elaborate, material that would precisely be supplied by the intuitive reason (God, the soul) or by the immediateness of the senses: Ornato was convinced that logic, moving from abstract generalities, could not give justification of the supra-sensible truths, it could not make them acceptable to the intellect by way of the mechanism of logic. Considering that philosophy has for its object these truths, the ideas of God, liberty, and immortality of the human soul, he decided to give them another foundation. He admitted that human reason is something different from the faculty of reasoning. He posited, then, reason as an immediate perception of truth and of the supra-sensible, of God as the living Ens, free, intelligent, moral, and provident, and the soul as a substantial principle, free, immortal, capable and worthy of eternal happiness through virtue. Concerning the reality of the exterior world, Ornato agreed with the Scottish School in saying that it is perceived immediately by us in its objectivity (Persuaso l’Ornato dell’impotenza della logica, movente da astratte generalità a dare fondamento alle verità soprasensibili, cioè a farle accettare all’intelletto col solo mezzo del meccanismo logico, e ritenendo tuttavia che la filosofia ha per oggetto queste verità, cioè le idee di Dio, della libertà e dell’immortalità dell’anima umana, egli dava loro un altro fondamento, ammettendo

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY nell’uomo la ragione come cosa ben diversa dalla facoltà del raziocinio, e come immediata percezione del vero e del soprasensibile, cioè di Dio come ente vivente, libero, intelligente, morale e provvido, e dell’anima, come principio sostanziale, libero, immortale, capace e degno di eterna felicità per via della virtú. Quanto alla realtà del mondo esterno ei s’accordava colla scuola scozzese nell’ammettere che esso si percepisce da noi immediatamente nella sua obbiettività).

Just how much of the teaching of Ornato, in preference to that of Gioberti or Rosmini, was absorbed by Bertini, is difficult to say. Certainly his profound and alive drama cannot be reduced to a perennial alternative between the immediateness of Jacobi and the Hegelian mediation. From Ornato, Bertini may have derived the strong interest for Greek thought, especially Socratic and Platonic, to which he dedicated some of his best pages. The spiritual life of his own times, including also the political vicissitudes of the Italian Risorgimento, influenced without doubt his meditation. He was verily thinking about himself and his own vicissitudes when he wrote efficaciously and eloquently about Socrates: Serious are the difficulties that one faces, arduous is the battle one would often have to sustain with oneself, when one first begins philosophizing. Philosophy is the product of human reason; it is human reason itself, actualized and perfected. In man, as he is in reality, not only is there reason: there is fantasy, sense, capacity of believing, and affection. Moreover, education has produced in him a second nature; religious and social institutions, under which he has grown up, have left a profound and indelible mark. Consequently, who begins to philosophize, from the beginning, finds himself in the inevitable contrast with himself: the new man in him, the man of reason, raises against the old man, the man of education and habits, and calls him to judgment. The citizen of the world rises against the citizen of a specific state, dominated by the prejudices and the exclusive and egoistic sentiments of his own Nation. This fight, however, cannot continue for a long time, except in those of limited vision; in strong spirits, but of limited vision, this battle ends with the condemnation and absolute rejection of all that is not purely and totally rational. On the contrary, the strong spirits, clear-sighted and capable of comprehending, tolerating, and embracing with love all that is in the human being, the spirits that, with Terence’s Chremes, could say—I am a man, all that concerns man is my concern. These spirits would soon rise above all contradictions to a region where peace, reconciliation, and love are found. They would recognize that all that exists has its own reason why to exist; they know that the form more or less fantastic in which the idea clothed itself does not reduce the efficacy of the idea itself. They can comprehend the exigencies of human nature, and, without abandoning the

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highest point of view, which they have reached, they still are capable of mentally placing themselves at the level of common fellow men (Gravi sono le difficoltà che si attraversano, ardua è la battaglia che avrà sovente a sostenere con se stesso, chi imprende a filosofare. La filosofia è il prodotto della ragione umana, è la stessa ragione umana attuata e perfetta. Ma nell’uomo, qual è in realtà, non vi è soltanto la ragione: vi è la fantasia, vi è il senno, vi è la facoltà di credere, vi è l’affetto. L’educazione inoltre ha prodotto in lui una seconda natura, e le istituzioni religiose e sociali sotto cui egli stesso è cresciuto, vi hanno lasciata una impronta profonda e indelebile. Quindi è che colui che incomincia a filosofare, si trova da principio in lotta inevitabile con se stesso: in lui l’uomo nuovo, l’uomo-ragione, sorge contro l’uomo vecchio, contro l’uomo dell’educazione e dell’abitudine, e lo chiama a giudizio: il cittadino del mondo sorge contro il cittadino di un dato stato, dominato dai pregiudizi e dai sentimenti esclusivi ed egoistici della sua Nazione. Ma questa lotta non può durare a lungo se non negli animi deboli: negli animi forti, ma poco veggenti, essa finisce con la condanna e con reiezione assoluta di tutto ciò che non è puramente e prettamente razionale. Al contrario gli animi forti, chiaroveggenti e capaci di comprendere, di tollerare, di abbracciar con amore tutto ciò che vi ha nella natura umana, gli animi che sanno dire col Terenziano Cremete “homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” non tarderanno a sollevarsi al di sopra di tutte le contraddizioni in una regione dove tutto è pace, tutto è conciliazione ed amore. Essi riconoscono che tutto ciò che esiste ha la sua ragion di esistere; essi sanno che la forma piú o meno fantastica in cui s’involge l’idea, non nuoce all’efficacia di questa: essi sanno comprendere le esigenze della natura umana, e, senza abbandonare il punto di vista a cui si sono elevati, sanno collocarsi mentalmente in quello degli uomini del popolo). These are the words that Bertini read in 1854 at the Academy of Sciences in Turin, and published in 1857. The Idea di una filosofia della vita is of 1850; the Storia critica delle prove metafisiche is of 1856–1857. These two works represent the extremes between which Bertini’s meditation moved, from the initial mystical theism to the successive rational theism. This was a development instead of a crisis or a radical mutation. It was a coherent deepening, in which the page we quoted gives the tone, meaningfully showing how the successive mutations were already present in Bertini. At the same time, it clearly reveals the impossibility of admitting the constant and immutable “religious faith” of Bertini, of which some scholars have spoken. In the writing of Idea di una filosofia della vita, Bertini intended to demonstrate that human dignity is “entirely rooted on the communion of the human being with God, on the liberty and immortality of the spirit” (è fondata interamente sulla comunione dell’uomo con Dio, sulla libertà e immortalità dello spirito). With it, Bertini wanted also to show that these theses were the

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bases of every religion. These were theses that “were problems of a rigorous doctrine, at the outside of which people could find only nihilism, the suicidal of human being as a thinking being” (sono altrettanti problemi d’una dottrina rigorosa ed una, fuori della quale non trovasi che il nullismo, il suicidio dell’uomo come essere pensante). With these positions, Bertini was moving away from Ornato and Jacobi. Philosophy is the science of reality and of everything that pertains to reality, as well as of the consequences relative to knowledge and human life. His was an exclusion of every critical position, of Kant, or Galluppi, or Rosmini, positions all vitiated by the circle of wanting to examine the validity of reason of whose validity one begins with doubt. This did not exclude that, afterward, Bertini’s process began to oscillate between the process of Descartes’s meditations (excluding the hyperbolic doubt) and that of Samuel Clarke’s demonstration of the existence of God. Having distinguished between mental concepts, whose object can be non-subsistent, and real concepts whose object exists, Bertini examined the concept of something. He showed how “if something is thought, something exists, even if the thought of that something is a negation or a doubt” (se qualcosa si pensa, qualche cosa esiste, quand’anche il pensiero che se ne ha fosse una negazione o un dubbio). We would deny, recall the doubt, or admit the something. By denying or doubting, we would not be able to exclude the reality of the illusion, of the act that deceived itself. Something must exist. From here, Bertini, again with a Cartesian process determined the limitation of being, and found implicitly the reality of the infinite. It was clear how the thought of the finite presupposed the thought of the infinite, even if this thought were taken only as the anxiety that forced us beyond any limit. Having, precisely defined knowledge as vision, as a being related to the subject, its consequence was the reality of the infinite: If knowing is an immediate seeing, free from any passion and action of the one who sees, the consequence is that the thought or the knowledge of the infinite can only be the immediate vision of the infinite. Answering, therefore, the question, we say that the thought of the infinite implies the existence of the infinite itself, because we cannot see what is not. It may be said that this is a false seeing, a vision solely apparent and imaginary. In order to imagine seeing something, we must think this something; to imagine seeing the infinite it is convenient to think of it, to sense it in the way we have explained. The infinite is immediately and immutably manifest to the spirit (Se il conoscere è un immediate vedere, scevro da ogni passione ed azione del veggente, ne segue che il pensiero o la conoscenza dell’in-finito non può esser altro che l’immediata vista dell’infinito. Rispondendo adunque alla questione diciamo che il pensiero dell’infinito importa l’esistenza dell’infinito stesso, poiché non si può vedere ciò che non è. Si forse che questo è un falso vedere, un veder solo apparente ed immaginario. Ma per imaginar di vedere una cosa conviene pensarla; dunque per imaginar di ve-

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dere l’infinito conviene pensarlo, cioè intuirlo nel senso che abbiamo finora spiegato. L’infinito adunque è immediatamente e immutabilmente manifesto allo spirito). This reasoning, once more, though in a dogmatic position and formulation, is substantially Cartesian. Bertini’s next deduction moves instead away from the possibility of the Cartesian position. He said, “To be thought means something existing in a mind; now, something cannot exist in a mind only as existent in that mind, but it must exist in the mind in a manner to show itself to the mind as something existent in itself” (esser pensato vuol dire esistere ad una mente; né può una cosa esistere ad una mente solo come esistente a quella mente, ma deve esistere ad essa, e mostrarlesi come esistente in sé). It is a deduction rooted as well on the logical priority of the infinite in respect to the finite that thinks it: It is possible that a person would remain in doubt of its own existence and thought, but could not doubt the reality of the infinite. Though it is true that the mind could not affirm this reality, if it would not exist and think, this same true would find its basis on the principle that the nothing cannot act. If the mind cannot think of a nothing that acts, this is due to the reason that my mind cannot think anything else than the infinite and what is similar to it and depends from it. Then, the principle receives ultimately its validity from the idea of the infinite (Quindi è che si può bene lasciare in dubbio la propria esistenza, il proprio pensiero, ma non già dubitare della realtà dell’infinito; e quantunque sia vero che la mente non potrebbe affermare questa realtà, se essa medesima non esistesse e non pensasse, tuttavia questo vero medesimo si fonda sul principio che il nulla non può operare, e il non poter la mia mente pensare il nulla operante proviene dal non poter essa pensare altro se non l’infinito, e ciò che ha con esso qualche somiglianza e dipendenza; talché quel principio riceve in ultimo la sua validità dall’idea stessa dell’infinito). In this way, Bertini arrived at the absolute, not through the immediacy of Gioberti’s intuition, but through a reasoning that gives him the existence of God as an infinite being, autarchic, closer to the famous Aristotelian saying nóesis noeséos, the knower of all knowable, than to the God of Christianity. Bertini senses the alternative of his own thought that, at this stage, wants to maintain in full the unity of philosophy and religion, “If the whole being and life of the Infinite consists in the knowledge and the love of Itself, then consequently by knowing and loving Itself, Its being and life, It does not know and love any other thing than Its knowledge and love.” Different from Bertini, Gioberti posited in the intuition the human being as the witness and the intrinsic part of the creative action; he put human beings in such a contact with God to be able to say that God reveals to them in

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part, at least, its divine work. Bertini began with proposing the hypothesis of a God that is personal, living and trinitary, admitting that in It, a mysterious plurality and society of persons exists, in whose reciprocal knowledge and love wisdom, the absolute sanctity of God, would consist. This plurality of persons in which the abstract concept of divine life is concretized is no more incomprehensible than the Absolute of the Pantheists, which is personified in the various human subjects and arrives at self-consciousness. In this plurality is found the answer to the difficulty why pantheism was devised [in order to reconcile divine infinity with divine life] (Una misteriosa pluralità e società di persone, nella cui reciproca conoscenza ed amore consisterebbe la sapienza, la santità assoluta di Dio. Questa pluralità di persone in cui si concreta il concetto astratto della vita divina, non è piú incomprensibile di quel che lo sia l’As-soluto de’ Panteisti, che ne’ vari soggetti umani si personifica e perviene alla consapevolezza di sé; in essa trovasi lo scioglimento della stessa difficoltà per cui venne escogitato il panteismo). Having excluded per absurdum both pantheism and ingenuous anthropomorphism, Bertini felt to have demonstrated, though negatively, the trinitarian unity of God. This did not imply the rational knowability of God. After the determination of the reality of the infinite as the reality of the absolute reality, Bertini does not deduce the finite from the infinite, but ascertains the actual existence of the finite, indisputable at least as appearance and certain at least in the thinking “I.” The finite is contingent, because creation is free. Could God “not to create,” if God “is eternally in the act of creating?” Moving away from Gioberti, it did not help to clarify the reciprocal position of finite and infinite. Bertini had to return to the consideration of the accentuation of the absolute divine liberty, when his attitudes changed in respect to dogma, and he placed the accent of his inquiry on reason. The task of the philosopher is a process strictly rational. In Storia critica delle prove metafisiche di una realtà soprasensibile, Bertini abandoned and disproved in the name of the purely philosophical theism the mystical (dogmatic) theism. Having posited once more the existence of the infinite as the presupposition of the thought of the finite, he excluded the a-cosmic pantheism and the naturalistic one for the impossibility of justifying the two terms of reality, the One and the many, and their synthesis. He also rejected mystic theism for the absurdity of an infinite love that loving itself, in itself wears itself out. What remains is a philosophical theism in which “the divine life consists … in the full knowledge that God has of things and in the perfecting action that It exercises over them” (la vita divina [consiste] … nella piena conoscenza che Dio ha delle cose, e nell’azione perfezionatrice che egli sovr’esse esercita). Bertini, at the end, concretizes his philosophical theism in terms strictly Leibnizian, but immediately specifying that

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in Leibniz’s thought free creation is not at all justified, “If the multiple exists in virtue of a metaphysical necessity, is it not superfluous and irrational to use “creation” to explain its existence? It is commonly said that the concept of creation appears to lodge in the system of Leibniz, given that he always speaks of it in a metaphorical way.” These were metaphors derived from having accepted theological elements, “without exposing them to any critical scrutiny.” To what critical solution Bertini himself arrived, it is impossible to say, since it did not appear anywhere in any way in any of his works. 4. Francesco Bonatelli The most acute representative of a Christian spiritualism tinted with Platonism was Francesco Bonatelli, whose inquiry Johann Friedrich Herbart’s psychological researches influenced and the speculations of Rudolf Hermann Lotze. Bonatelli, more than to a metaphysical synthesis, aimed at the clarification and deeper examination of particular problems. He was a subtle thinker who loved to gather and analyze the various aspects of the questions that he would not abandon until exhausted in all their possibilities. In addition, he was doing this with such dialectic virtuosity that he manifestly seemed to have greatly enjoyed it. Historians defined Bonatelli as a phenomenologist—well known are his affinities with Franz Brentano—not for his fragmentary inquiries but for bringing the attention to converge on consciousness as the focus of spiritual life and of its manifestations. Consciousness, for its full transparency to itself, by way of which it seizes itself as it is in every one of its acts, constitutes the ubi consistam of inquiry. For Bonatelli, this inquiry is phenomenological, since he wishes to avoid the solution of gnoseological problems, but at the same time, the inquiry itself rises from considerations merely psychological. The central point of his speculation was the affirmation, in the human being of what is pure mentality (intellect, consciousness) distinct from a psychic mechanism, from a psychicism operating on the natural plane. In his first significant work, Pensiero e conoscenza, published in Bologna in 1864, Bonatelli, contrary to Herbart, sustained the necessity of maintaining the unity of the “I” and the multiplicity of the psychic events. With constant insistence, he distinguished in the soul “a duplex way of life, one subject to mechanical, blind, and fatal laws; the other, though also regulated by laws, capable of passing over mechanical laws and using them advantageously as instruments.” Here are liberty and mechanicism, impassibility and passion, pure thought and sensible psychicism. Through this duality present in us, we have the answer to the need apparently contradictory that Bonatelli posited as the condition of knowledge, “The knower cannot obtain the notice of a thing whatsoever, if that thing does not modify the knower, if the thing does not produce in the knower some alteration. The knower cannot know anything whatsoever, if it does not remain impassive in respect to the thing, and the

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thing in respect to it” (Il subbietto conoscente non può avere notizia d’una cosa qualsiasi, se questa non lo modifica, cioè se non produce in lui qualche alterazione. Il subbietto conoscente non può conoscere una cosa qualsiasi, se egli non resta assolutamente impassibile di fronte a questa, e questa di fronte a lui). The solution of the difficulty implicit in this antinomy would be found only in the distinction between consciousness (thought, pure mentation) and sensibility. Sensation is not knowledge; knowledge is the consciousness of the ideal object. Bonatelli, in his major work, La coscienza e il meccanismo interiore (1872), precisely wrote: Consciousness as such is unalterable in respect to the thing that falls in it, the representation. If this was not so, if the simple act of consciousness was the composite result of an action and reaction, and not a simple “being present,” then no knowledge would be possible, and we would have to resign ourselves without hope to the darkness of a limitless and absolute skepticism. Consciousness … receives within itself the pure form, which is the essence … or, in other terms, the ideality of the thing, the pure possibility, all that a thing is, and that within it is conceivable by a mind, after the abstraction from its real and concrete subsistence and actuality (La coscienza come tale è impassibile rispetto alla cosa che cade in essa, ossia alla rappresentazione. Se ciò non fosse, se anche l’atto semplice della consapevolezza fosse il risultato composto d’una azione e d’una reazione, e non una semplice presenzialità, la sarebbe fatta pel conoscere, e ci dovremmo rassegnare senza speranza alle tenebre del piú sconfinato e assoluto scetticismo. La coscienza dunque … accoglie in sé la pura forma, che è quanto dire l’essenza … ossia, in altri termini, l’idealità della cosa, la pura possibilità, tutto ciò che una cosa è, che in essa è concepibile per una mente, fatta astrazione dalla sua reale e concreta sussistenza e attualità). Consciousness, and by saying “consciousness” Bonatelli always intends only the intellect in its purity, does not undergo the object, is not modified by it and, on the other hand, consciousness does not, at its own turn, mold or modify the object. If this would happen, knowledge would not be possible in both cases. Bonatelli returns to insist on it, also for the knowledge of oneself: The proper nature of the act of consciousness is to separate the psychic act from its real matrix and to transfer it to the field of ideality. Hence, the sentiment, as soon as it becomes object of consciousness, receives the character of being representational, which means that it is thought in its possible essence, or possibility, or quiddity, as some people may say (La natura propria dell’atto di coscienza è di staccare il fatto psichico dalla sua matrice reale per trasportarlo nel campo dell’idealità, onde anche il sentimento, non sí tosto è diventato oggetto di coscienza,

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riveste il carattere di rappresentazione, il che vuol dire che è pensato nella sua essenza possibile, o possibilità, o quiddità che dir si voglia). To think is to judge, to seize the being of the thing in its essence, to bring the thing back to itself in its verity. In an article of 1874, Bonatelli clarified this point: Thought is pure mirroring. What thought posits or takes, affirms or denies, is not something identifiable with thought as if it were its flesh and grew with it, but something that refers back to thought and is apprehended for what it is. An image that perhaps approaches the nature of thinking more than any other could be this one. Let us imagine any object whatsoever and that this object would separate itself from itself, doubling itself. Then, again, let us imagine that the separate double would wish to return to itself in a guise that it would fit together and return to be one with the original. This is a representation of the process of thought in its roots: from this, it is evident that thought is essentially a referring and a judging (Il pensiero è pura specchialità. Quindi ciò che pone o toglie, afferma o nega, non è immedesimato e come a dire concresciuto con esso, sibbene riportato a se stesso e perciò appreso per quello che è. Un’immagine che piú di qualunque altra … forse s’accosta alla natura del pensare, sarebbe questa. Figuriamoci un oggetto qualsiasi, il quale si stacchi da se stesso raddoppiandosi e quindi ritorni a sé, in guisa che il suo reduplicato torni a combaciarsi e immedesimarsi coll’originale, ecco figurato il processo del pensiero nella sua radice: il quale da ciò si vede come sia essenzialmente un riferire, un giudicare). The formula of consciousness—he would say elsewhere—is: A equals A, or reflection. In these considerations, two points remain obscure: the rapport between the psychic mechanicism, exterior to consciousness, and consciousness itself, and the nature of the object that is thought and its rapport with the existent. Bonatelli, who, in more than one place, continued Rosmini, exasperated some of Rosmini’s difficulties, which all came to surface in the interpretation of the intellective perception in its relationships to the existence revealed by the sentiment. Bonatelli was unable to reconcile or compose, through consciousness, the dualities, and the aporias whence he originally started. Unfortunately, his difficulties are not less when he faces the problem of the liberty of thought as cognitive liberty. Thought is the return of itself to itself; it is an auto-formation and almost an auto-generation, it is consciousness-generating consciousness (la coscienza generatrice di se stessa): It is the prerogative of thought that of possessing itself…. In this possession of itself, which is not simply a folding of itself on itself, but

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY almost an exiting from itself and at the same time a re-entering within itself, I believe is found that essential character of thought that raises us above any mechanical necessity (È prerogativa del pensiero quella di possedere sé medesimo.… In questo possedimento di se medesimo, che non è solamente un ripiegarsi sopra di sé, ma quasi un uscir di se stesso ed a un tempo rientrare in se stesso, credo riposto quel carattere essenziale del pensiero, che solleva al di sopra d’ogni necessità meccanica).

If the affirmation of the thing were necessitated, if the judgment would not be born from spontaneity, if thought “would not compenetrate the object with its spontaneity, if it would not accept it freely,” then consciousness would again be a mechanism, a necessity, and an automaton. From this comes Bonatelli’s conclusion of the fundamental liberty of conscience: We have not said that the thinker must become free from logic. Yes, we say that it must accept it freely. In the case it would not possess this liberty, it would be a logical machine, not a knowing subject; it would materially think the truth, but this for the thinker would not be a cognition (Non diciamo che il pensante debba scuotere il giogo della logica, sí, diciamo che deve accettarlo liberamente. Qualora e’ non possedesse codesta libertà, sarebbe una macchina logica, non un soggetto conoscente, penserebbe materialmente il vero, ma senza che questo fosse per lui una cognizione). Here too such liberty appears to be nothing but the affirmation of an a-logical root of thought, from which certainly it is impossible to see how a valid cognitive act can proceed. What remains as a successful product of Bonatelli’s meditation is the need to safeguard the originality and spontaneity of consciousness. This was a constant need for Bonatelli, and it was at the root of the doctrine of the infinite reflection of acts, which he interpreted in the theoretical and moral fields, for the precise purpose of demonstrating the irreducibility of the activity of the spirit. Having consciousness of an object it means, as it means to Bonatelli, not to sense an object or to be modified by it, but to sense its being present, its presentiality, as something else than the subject. In this case, the act of conscience implies consciousness not only of the object but also of the subject being conscious of it. If consciousness is never given without consciousness of the term to which it refers and of the act with which conscience refers to it, it would then seem that the reflective act would at its own turn necessarily become object, and so on to the infinite. We would then have two absurdities: a conscience not conscious of itself, or an infinite reflecting, without any beginning, and an analogous reasoning made in regard of the practical activity. To turn oneself toward an object without willing to will, it would not be a true will but a desire. The decision or the act of the will, in order to be moral,

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must depend on a previous act, and so on to infinity. According to Bonatelli, this infinity has no need of being in actuality. Consciousness needs, beside the primary reference to the object, an oblique or secondary reference to the act itself. Infinity is an infinite interpenetration of the spirit in itself, without dispersion in an infinite succession. While in an actual infinity there would be only dispersion, “only with this infinite return over itself, the proper nature of the conscience is truly expressed” (soltanto con questo infinito ritorno sopra di sé, è veramente espressa la natura propria della coscienza). 5. Giuseppe Allievo and Francesco Acri The Platonizing spiritualism, which in so many different forms found its most significant expressions in Bertini and Bonatelli, accentuated its own mystical conclusions both in the pensive research of Giuseppe Allievo and Francesco Acri, and in the prolix writings of Augusto Conti and Baldassarre Labanca. Giuseppe Allievo, a student of philosophical and pedagogical problems, was director of the journal “Il campo dei filosofi” from 1868 to 1872. A critic of Hegelianism and tied in many ways to Rosmini, Allievo conceived reality as a dialectic process in the plane of thought and in that of being. Reality is a motion from the one to the many and from the many to the one, a solid circle in which the process becomes conquest, and a development, in which the single moments of the ontological and logical planes arrive to correspond reciprocally through the synthesizing power of nature (syntheticism, il sintesismo della natura): The principle of multiplicity in the one, of the difference in the identical, of the concordant harmony, of the dialectic and organic power of synthesis, is the fundamental typical formula in reference to which we must compare all ideas and all things as to a model. It is the supreme law that rules the world of thought and that of action (Il principio del molteplice nell’uno, del vario nell’identico, della concorde armonia, del sintesismo dialettico ed organico, è la grande forma tipica su cui vanno esemplate tutte le idee e tutte le cose, la suprema legge, che governa il mondo del pensiero egualmente che quello dell’azione). What exists is the harmonic connection of all entities in being, of all monads, which are not closed in themselves, but connected under the justification of the synthesizing power (syntheticism). At the center of reality, at the point where the bonding of the whole happens, we find the human person, which, within the constellation of all the other persons, bows before the divine one: The human person, by way of his intellective virtue is placed in rapport with the whole system of beings, and from it, it arrives to the concept of the cosmic order founded on the essence of things. From the proper universality of its reason, the human being draws the value and the

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As the most solid point of his doctrine, Allievo held the principle of personality, which he defended against Hegelians and Positivists. He would certainly have reached more vital levels if, beginning from the person who concretizes itself in consciousness, he were to have truly researched the root of those processes of thought and being that, without any explanation, he postulated. Few are the works of Francesco Acri and his fame is not due to them but to the translation of some of the Platonic dialogues. For him, to translate Plato was not only an act of faith in “the pagan prophet of Christ” (il pagano profeta di Cristo), but also a long daily colloquy with the philosopher. It was a constant effort to penetrate Plato’s thought and makes it Acri’s own so that it would again gain life and germinate. Having been at the school of Vito Fornari and Basilio Puoti, he may be at times fastidious for his use of terms and constructs, but at the end, he is suggestive in his effort to incarnate in contemporary words the ancient thought. Being also a fervent Catholic, Acri saw faith as the conclusion and the premise of the rational process. A premise, in addition to integration, is the process of Acri’s thought, in which his ratiocinations are many times the translation into logical terms of sentimental attitudes. An example of this is his insurgency against the materialism of Jakob Moleschott or Moriz Schiff, the deniers of immortality, with the argument that the death of the soul would go against a need intimately felt by everybody. For this reason, but regretfully for this alone, the disavowers of immortality, the materialists and the positivists are in error. Acri showed himself a historian of thought and an efficacious polemist in the fight against Fiorentino and the Neapolitan Hegelianism, but he never arrived at an organization of his own thought. He derived from Plato the theory of an ideal plan, and considered all the ideas to be connected and implicated reciprocally in a koinónia that Plato, instead, excluded in the Sophist. The impossibility of grasping the infinity of rapports, of reaching rationally the real Ens (God), and of taking part in the creative act, everything banishes us among the phantasms of things that veil and hide the idea: Videmus in aenigmate, we see through enigmas. Our unique and certain heaven is a God present ab aeterno in every human mind, even though we are unable of knowing and seeing as God sees and knows, “Every science is … consciousness of an infinite ignorance…. Trembling comes from a doubting intellect, hope, and faith from an agreeable and humble heart” (Ogni scienza è … coscienza d’infinita ignoranza…. Il tremore viene dal dubitoso intelletto, la speranza e la fede dal cuore musico ed umile).

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6. Augusto Conti and Baldassarre Labanca In vain, we would search in Augusto Conti or in Baldassarre Labanca the dignity that we found in Allievo or the suffered meditation of Acri. Not only was Conti a feeble theoretician of the common sense, but also a superficial and poorly informed historian. What probably saved him and gave him fame were his style and literary taste, though they were less worthy than those of Gino Capponi or Raffaello Lambruschini were. For Conti, evidence, love, and faith are the three fundamental criteria. They correspond to the relations of the human being with itself, others, and God. Evidence is the accord between conscience and truth; love is the accord between our truth and the commonly accepted tradition; faith is the accord of truth with Catholic authority. At its own turn, evidence is immediateness, without any basis or logical justification; it is sentiment, or affection. The metaphysics of Conti centered on the concept of harmony understood as the bond that ties the multiplicity of things. This harmony was a relationship that revealed itself as a mystery. In this shadowy enigma of the world, the mysticism of Conti exhausted itself, at the end, in flowers of rhetoric. Labanca, too, speaks of dialectic, and covers it as well, in the synthetic moment, with a bashful veil of mystery. In reality, Platonism was degenerating into a vague skeptical mysticism. The philosophy of Rosmini and Gioberti found its last dignified expression in Bertini, while in Bonatelli, who was open to new needs, it expressed its authentic efforts of research. Others, the Kantians, found a solid ground for an inquiry in the history of thought and culture, meanwhile the Hegelians alone and the Positivists were able to offer a truly new word. Acri had the force of his own faith, his own culture, and his own sincere torment. Conti had no new truth to announce. The vaguely Platonic mysticism, into which the remnants of the adventures of Mamiani descended, though it sustained itself with literary worth, was now dying among rhetorical embellishments. 7. Return to Kant: Carlo Cantoni, Francesco Fiorentino, Felice Tocco, and Giacomo Barzellotti We have merely mentioned the historical research in the history of philosophy and culture that characterized the attitude of the Neo-Kantians and which is their principal merit. Today, after so many decades from their publication, anyone can still turn with profit to the inquiries of Carlo Cantoni, Francesco Fiorentino, and Felice Tocco. These inquiries constitute the greatest title of nobility of the Neo-Kantians of Italy in comparison with the degeneration of the Platonic, skeptic, and mystical spiritualism. For what concerns their speculative position, we have no reason to classify Cantoni or Giacomo Barzellotti among the Kantians instead of the Platonists. Gentile did not hesitate to place among the Platonists Cantoni who of the Italian Neo-Kantism wanted to be the leader.

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The return to Kant manifested itself in the cultural German world as a reaction to materialistic naturalism, to the dictatorship of a science of nature that denied all values of the spirit. Unfortunately, what of Kant was selected anew was not his constructive motive, the metaphysics of the transcendental, of the immanent supersensible, which was so powerfully remarkable in the structure of the three critiques. We saw that on one side the useless work of philological exegesis was accentuated and on another the negative moment of dialectic. The Italian situation was even worse. The Kantians of Italy brought the question of the critique to the level of problems that were totally unknown to them. While limiting their horizon to questions merely within gnoseology, quite often the Italian Kantians let them fall into that of psychology. What redeemed them was their historical analysis, and this was certainly not due to chance. Since the way to metaphysics was closed, morality was reduced within the ambient of a religious dogmatism and the unique field within which the spirit could apply itself was the history of its own constructions, of the human world to which Vico had turned already his attention. Even in order to penetrate this world, a more vigorous consciousness of what was the effective meaning of the Kantian synthetic activity a priori of thinking, or, if we wish to speak in Vichian terms, of the conversion of the true into the made (verum ipsum factum), was necessary. The Italian Neo-Kantism, and not only the Italian, possessed no such consciousness. Carlo Cantoni was “the most acute interpreter of Kant’s doctrine” (disciplinae kantianae interpres subtilissimus), disciple of Bertini, founder in 1899 of the “Rivista Filosofica” that continued the “Rivista” of Ferri. In his studies on Vico and Vichians (Turin, 1867), Cantoni showed incomprehension of the verum-factum, and even assumed a manifest demolishing role in regard the creator of the Scienza Nuova. According to Cantoni, the Scienza Nuova appeared corrupted from the beginning, and the reason was that he could not see in what manner geometry and history could be reduced to the common principle of the correspondence of the true and the made. This was an amazing incomprehension in someone who proclaimed himself the defensor acerrimus of Kantian philosophy. In 1869, with an essay published in “Nuova Antologia” Cantoni compared Mamiani and Rudolf Hermann Lotze and, in a significant manner, exalted Lotze for the distinction between the world seen as a natural mechanism, which is the dominion of scientific reasoning, and the teleological consideration, which is essentially the work of sentiment. Cantoni magnifies the value of Lotze for his comprehension of the distinction and for the effort of overcoming it. It is not clear exactly where Cantoni could see the synthesis between science and sentiment, except than in the appeal to God except than in the appeal to God. His great monograph on Kant (Milan, 1879–1884, 3 vols.) was born out of the two elements. The work is characterized by a continuous oscillation between a total adhesion to Kant and a moving away from him, a motion that often assumes characters of opposition and lack of understanding.

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A clear document of this is Cantoni reproaching Kant for having neglected the psychological analysis. Cantoni observed, “This brought the effect that Kant neglected the psychological, direct, and profound analysis of many questions that are strictly connected with his critical problem, and which, in my opinion, cannot be resolved without the psychological inquiry.” How an empirical analysis could weigh on the Kantian question of value is something impossible to comprehend unless we were to bring Kant down to the level of the English Empiricism, which is exactly what Cantoni did more than once. Kantism is not even better understood when, based on a natural and inescapable belief, the existence of the real in itself is reaffirmed, or when, in moral philosophy, the Achtung of Kant is reduced, not even to “a reflected sentiment” of Humean type, but to an immediate sentiment. Regrettably, this would bring Kantian morality down to the plane of the most ingenuous empiricism, and turning Kant upside down, God would not be postulated from duty, but duty from God. In Cantoni, the need for concreteness, sentiment or experience, was not a worthless, but an acute motive, and the necessity of seeing deeply into the rapports of this need with the Kantian a priori was certainly not meaningless. The problem is that Cantoni did not arrive at a synthesis, trapped as he was in the same difficulties of Mamiani and Ferri, the teachers he admired and loved. Positivism on one side, and idealism on the other, by reacting against the spiritualist positions were the only ones to answer the question, reformulating it in radically new terms. If Cantoni was shipwrecking in the artificial attempt at reconciling in a Kantian manner Platonism and empirical needs, Francesco Fiorentino, fluctuating among diverse instances, revealed the continuous oscillations of his position that was, in a succession, Giobertian, Hegelian, and Positivist. The trace of this oscillating is visible in the successive editions of Fiorentino’s manual of philosophy, of which he himself spoke with energy in La filosofia contemporanea in Italia (Naples, 1876), at the time of the polemic of Acri against Spaventa, Imbriani, and Fiorentino: I began to study philosophy very early in life … and when I had in my hands the philosophy of Capocasale, I became Capocasalian. In 1847, I was lucky to get in loan the Logic of Galluppi … and became a passionate disciple of Galluppi. I have always been like this, full of enthusiasm and passion…. When I obtained the Fragments Philosophiques of Cousin and, I became a staunch follower of Cousin. When I came to Catanzaro, I brought with me the works of Gioberti, works that I had since the year before, and figure it out for yourself how much I became an enthusiastic supporter of Gioberti! He was all for Gioberti when, concerning the studies of Paolo Emilio Tulelli on Tommaso Russo, he exalted the Italic philosophy of Vico and Russo. His first essay on Il panteismo di Giordano Bruno (Naples, 1861) was dedicated

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to Marianne Florenzi Waddington, the vulgarizer of the Bruno oder über das Natürliche und Göttliche Prinzip der Dinge (1802) of Schelling. It is in that work that some of the characteristic attitudes of Fiorentino are already delineated. Having then met Spaventa, he abandoned Gioberti for Hegel, turning again later to Kant. As a professor in Bologna, he examined Greek thought, Plato, and Aristotle, in Saggio storico sulla filosofia greca (Florence, 1864), Vico, and then Kant. As Gentile observed accurately, Fiorentino at last found his own road with the writings on Pomponazzi, Telesio, and the Renaissance, with historical and philological researches, all done within the motivation and the need of connecting and conciliating Positivism with Idealism, of which he felt the real presence in some intimate affinities. In the prolusion of 1877, in Pisa, on Positivismo e idealismo, Fiorentino pointed out in the two movements an extreme attitude, one of disdain for the factual, another of disdain for the idea. He concluded, “Idealism can be empty and positivism blind, when they don’t come together” (l’idealismo può essere vuoto, il positivismo può essere cieco, se scompagnati l’uno dall’altro). In Telesio and in Elementi di filosofia, Fiorentino showed being always more conscious of the positivistic exigency, without consciously developing and deepening fartherly his affirmations of principle. Hence, the polemic between the supporters of the idealism and those of the positivism of Fiorentino was, at least in part, ineffective. The reason is that he wanted the historical inquiry to be positive, or concrete, and all substantiated with the facts in which the idea became flesh. He wanted to comprehend those facts at the light of the idea that gives them life and meaning. Felice Tocco was a disciple of Fiorentino and Spaventa. From both of them he inherited the love for the historical research on Renaissance philosophy, but with Fiorentino, he shared in a particular way the interest for Kant and the concrete philological inquiry. His studies of Plato and Bruno, his editions of the philosophers, are part of the fundamental works on that specific field of research. In his inquiries on medieval heresies and on the Franciscan movements, he avoided being involved in philosophical questions, exclusively studying the religious facts. In the opinion of Gentile, the reason for this tendency has to be found in “a vague motive of mysticism that can tenuously combine itself with the cult, not too fervent, for the Brunian naturalism and the natural sciences placed on the altars by Kant in the first critique.” We should admire in Tocco the philological care and the rigor of the historical method, though what is regrettable in him, more than the absence of a central animating idea, was the lack of a precise point of view. He could certainly not derive a fixed position from his Kant, whom he acutely exposed and examined in the aesthetics and the analytics, almost totally neglecting the dialectics and, consequently, the other two critiques. Tocco’s limitations are clearly noticeable when one pays attention to the reproach that he made against Kant for neglecting “any psychological theory, when the whole doctrine is founded on psychological data.” Kant, in Tocco, becomes a total em-

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piricist, and the synthetic power of the spirit seems to be reduced to, and within the limits of, the Lockean reflection. Another individual who decisively loved the return to Kant was Giacomo Barzellotti. Though, at first sight, he appears to have common interests with Tocco for the history of religious thought and phenomena, he sensibly presents a completely different mental attitude. A man of letters, instead of a philosopher, in David Lazzaretti (Santi, solitari e filosofi, saggi psicologici) he wanted to do concrete psychology. He always loved, not erudite things, but literary representations of personality figures reconstructed in their complexity. Tocco handled the history of thought with rigor of method and wealth of erudition, Barzellotti loved, instead, psychological history and through it aimed at reaching artistic expression. 8. Neo-Thomism. Gioacchino Ventura A consideration in itself is due to the new flourishing of Thomistic philosophy during the second half of the nineteenth century, of which the most brilliant representatives were Giovanni Maria Cornoldi, Matteo Liberatore, Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, Gaetano Sanseverino, Tommaso Maria Zigliara, and Salvatore Talamo. Augusto Conti, discussing the movement of rebirth of Scholasticism, to the names already mentioned, added that of Gioacchino Ventura of Raulica, whom he already had connected also with Gioberti and Rosmini. As a friend of Rosmini Ventura tried to persuade Lamennais of moderation, and believed to be able to bring into the Church the rising need of democracy. He fought in France the narrow-minded supporters of tradition, but at the same time was merciless in opposing the developments of modern thought against the authority of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, particularly, St. Thomas. In Saggio sull’origine delle idee e sul fondamento della certezza that is a violent polemic concerning the problem of knowledge against Bonald, he stated, “The obstinate war that for more than three centuries has been going on between idealists and materialists, traditionalists and rationalists, dogmatists and skeptics has no reason, no motive, and no goal. The only effect of all this is that from the period of the Renaissance the Christian science on the fundamental points of philosophy has been abandoned.” For Aristotle and Thomas, this is true; for Plato and Descartes, this is false: The philosophy of the eighteenth century has been impious because the philosophy of the seventeenth century had already abandoned, at least in respect to the principles, the paths of faith. The philosophy of the eighteenth century showed so much fierce hatred against religion because the philosophy of the seventeenth century had claimed itself independent from every religion…. The philosophy of the encyclopedists was Voltairean before Voltaire. The Voltairean movement of the eighteenth century was the natural logical consequence of the Cartesian movement.

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How can we separate Descartes from Luther? As children of the same tendency, they were the fathers of an equal evil. The unique salvation of human society is found in “the ruin of the false philosophy and the restoration of the true philosophy,” which is precisely the scholastic philosophy, the other philosophy being only a perversion of thought. In Saggio della filosofia antica nelle sue relazioni col dogma della creazione (ch. 1, p. 7), he said: The history of philosophy is the history of the perversion of the human spirit that wants to guess, to know God, the human being, the world, through reason alone. It is impossible to deduce a different conclusion from a serious study of the history of philosophy (La storia della filosofia altro non è che la storia dei traviamenti dello spirito umano, che vuol indovinare, conoscere Dio, l’uomo, il mondo, per la sola ragione, Egli è impossibile trarre una conclusione diversa dallo studio serio della storia della filosofia). To the human quest, God alone would answer: God is not perfectly known by anyone except by God; hence, it is Its duty to communicate such an idea to us. God did it, as it was convenient to God in one Word alone, and by means of that unique and divine Word, It has spoken, revealed, and taught us Its incomprehensible nature, more and better than all the books written by human beings…. God … said, “I am who I am” (Dio non è perfettamente conosciuto se non da Dio medesimo, onde spetta a Lui il comunicarci tale nozione. Ed egli lo ha fatto siccome conveniva, in una sola parola, e mediante tale unica e divina parola egli ci ha detto, ci ha rivelato, ci ha appreso la sua incomprensibile natura, piú che tutti i libri usciti dalla penna dell’uomo…. Dio … è Colui che è). Around the half of the century, the Domenican Father Giacinto Faicco, presenting in Naples the translation of Filosofia Fundamental (Naples, 1851) of Jaime Luciano Balmes extolled “the sublime doctrines of the angelical Doctor Aquinas, the Archimedes of the metaphysicians, the source of philosophical knowledge.” No different position on Thomism was assumed by Vincenzo de Grazia, who in the mentioned Prospetto di filosofia ortodossa bitterly censured Rosmini for his subjectivism and for the arbitrary interpretation of St. Thomas. De Grazia’s Prospetto and Su la logica di Hegel (Naples, 1851) were welcomed with great praises by Taparelli, in 1852, in the Civiltà Cattolica. Gaetano Sanseverino gave the imprimatur to the book on Hegel. In Prospetto, De Grazia translated and commented on St. Thomas, but also highly praised the Neapolitan journal La scienza e la fede. In this journal, “the principles of St. Thomas are exposed with great clarity and correctness” for the confutation of the errors “that infest the philosophical writings of beyond the Alps, opposing to the frail arguments of modern rationalism, the solid and

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considered procedures of reason in the theories of Christian philosophers.” In his research, Amato Masnovo has demonstrated that the true initiator of the Italian Neo-Thomism was Vincenzo Benedetto Buzzetti, who, in Piacenza, carried on a constant didactic activity in favor of the restoration of the teachings of the Doctor Angelicus. This does not mean that the eighteenth century ignored St. Thomas. The treatises of Gian Giacomo Leti, Ferdinando Maria Secco, and G. A. Ferrari were only simple expositions of Thomas’s doctrines. At this time, on the contrary, Thomism was used for a double criticism of the residues of the Enlightenment, and of the positions of Rosmini, Gioberti, and their disciples, in which modern thought was reaffirmed, albeit within the ambit of Catholic restoration. We see now Liberatore attacking the disciples of Locke and Condillac, and those of Kant, Rosmini, and Gioberti. On the last ones the criticism of Serafino Sordi in Saggio intorno alla dialettica ed alla religione di V. Gioberti (Piacenza, 1846), in I primi elementi del sistema di V. Gioberti ((Milan, 1850), and in Lettere intorno al N. S. sull’origine delle idee dell’Abate Antonio Rosmini (Monza, 1851) also centered. Sordi was one of the collaborators of the “Civiltà Cattolica” who confirmed the accusation against Gioberti of having for fear of skepticism completely destroyed the knowing subject, restating it as unique in the whole divine being, and falling into the most pure pantheism. This was also the criticism of Liberatore, who found in the doctrines of Gioberti a pure pantheism, “This pantheism is not peradventure just derived from the words, which by rigor of the sentence, are pantheist, and now remind of Spinoza, now of Fichte, now of Schelling, now of Hegel, and seem to renew the most ancient Vedantic doctrine. This pantheism, truly, comes directly from the same fundamental principles on which the whole system rests.” Sordi was directly connected with the activity of Buzzetti, and diffused this impulse in the Piacenza’s journal Aloisianum, where also Massimiliano Anselmi and Giovanni Cornoldi carried on their activity. Cornoldi was also collaborator of Civiltà Cattolica, a critic of Rosmini and Gioberti in Il Rosminianismo sintesi dellOntologismo e del Panteismo, in addition to being an expositor of Thomism. Tommaso Maria Zigliara taught in Rome and, after 1851, continued his activity with the group of the Civiltà Cattolica, in particular with Taparelli d’Azeglio, Liberatore, and Cornoldi. In Naples, there were Gaetano Sanseverino, Domenico Sordi, Nunzio Signoriello, and Salvatore Talamo. The encyclical Aeterni Patris of 4 August 1879 proclaimed from the Cathedra of St. Peter the Thomistic Renewal, which found a successful instrument of diffusion in the “Accademia Romana di San Tommaso d’Aquino.” Adverse to the traditionalism of the Bonalds and Bonnettys, the NeoThomism in some of his supporters, as in Liberatore, showed itself benevolent toward some manifestations of modern thought, for instance toward the Baconian induction. For this reason, Neo-Thomism took the motto “vetera novis augere et perficere” (Let us increase and improve the old discoveries with new ones). In philosophy, Thomism kept the theory of abstraction as the con-

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dition sine qua non of the doctrine of knowledge, the Thomistic doctrine of the soul as the substantial form of the body, and the theory of hylomorphism as the conception of the whole reality understood as the result of act and potency. Without doubt, in agitating discussions, in the promotion of the study of a thought still rich with possibilities, the Neo-Thomistic movement exercised a conspicuous influence on the Italian thought of the nineteenth century.

Thirty-Five THE HEGELIANS 1. The Hegelians of Tuscany. Augusto Vera In 1867, Spaventa wrote, “Hegel and the other German philosophers before him were perhaps known more than they are now. In Naples, they were known even before 1848. In addition to Galluppi, the old Ottavio Colecchi studied and interpreted them in his own way. Stefano Cusani, Giambattista Ajello, Stanislao Gatti, and my friends, Antonio Tari and Giambattista Calvello, also studied them.” The first articles of Cusani that appeared in “Progresso” (1832–1846) are those of 1837. Even outside the Neapolitan circles, without mentioning Rosmini and Gioberti, the thought of Schelling and Hegel generated discussions and interest throughout Italy. Marianne Florenzi Waddington was Hegelian and translated Schelling. In Tuscany, interested in Schelling and Hegel were Gino Capponi and Giambattista Nicolini, who was encouraging his friend Giovanni Lorenzo Morelli to translate also something of Schelling. Stronger Hegelian influx is sensed in Domenico Mazzoni and Giambattista Nicolini. Mazzoni, a long time teacher in Pistoia, visited Germany and contacted various disciples of Hegel. After returning home, Mazzoni based his lessons on the doctrines of Hegel, which he copied and summarized when preparing a history of philosophy as philosophical propedeutic. Even with all this, Hegelianism remained extraneous to his “old and sleepy conscience of a priest,” and he did not even notice the radical difference of Hegelianism from the traditions of orthodox Scholasticism. Giambattista Passerini, an ex-priest, troubled and exiled, who decided later to follow Zwingli, met Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hegel in Berlin. He too most often did not go beyond the surface of the Hegelian philosophy. In Pensieri filosofici (Milan, 1863), he exalted Hegel and professed himself a pure pantheist, while condemning as “bastard and barren” French eclecticism and psychologism. Only two positions are possible: pantheism and Christian supernaturalism. Christian supernaturalism was looked at as a religion, not as a philosophy, and philosophy is the one that must resolve the religious question, “Religion is the philosophy of the people; philosophy is the religion of the learned” (La religione è la filosofia del popolo; la filosofia è la religione delle persone colte). For him, philosophy was pantheism. Against the theolo-

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gians, he said, “Eternity does not start at a fixed hour, at death. We are actually within eternity, if we know how to comprehend it and raise ourselves to the region of the absolute” (L’eternità non comincia a ora fissa, alla morte. Noi siamo già attualmente in essa, purché sappiamo comprenderla e sollevarci alla regione dell’assoluto). The true center of the nineteenth century’s Hegelianism was Naples, where the last teachings of the old Galluppi had become extraneous among the new tendencies that had conquered the youth. We saw elsewhere the debate that surrounded Galluppi’s thought, and the work of Colecchi, Gatti, Cusani, and Ajello has been mentioned. Stanislao Gatti was the one who in 1863 in the journal Rivista napolitana began to exalt Augusto Vera, who had already been teaching in Naples for two years and was an Hegelian of European fame. Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz dedicated a monograph to Vera as the interpreter of Hegel. Raffaele Mariano, the hagiographer instead of biographer of Vera, unsuccessfully asked himself many times where the originality of Vera was to be found. Writing to Mamiani, he objected: Vera is not a simple translator, nor the one who wrote only the great commentary on Hegel. I repeat, he is the expositor and the interpreter of Hegel. As expositor and translator, in his publicizing Hegel, he did not limit himself to reproducing and repeating Hegel’s teachings, but added to them the spontaneity and the originality of his own meditations. From the modern Aristotle, as Hegel has been called, Vera took not the letter but the spirit. Vera brought out this spirit free from the formalism in which it was wrapped up, and tried to show it as it truly was in itself. Thus, passing through Vera’s mind, Hegel is made anew and perfected (Il Vera né è un semplice traduttore, né è solo colui “che il gran commento feo.” Dell’Hegel egli è, replico, l’espositore e l’interprete. Come tale, nel divulgare l’Hegel non stette pago a riprodurre, a ripetere le cose da questo insegnate; ma vi aggiunse la spontaneità e originalità del proprio pensiero. Dell’Aristotele moderno, come lo si è chiamato, ei s’appropriò non la lettera, ma lo spirito, il quale trasse fuori dal formalismo ond’era avviluppato, sforzandosi di mostrarlo qual era realmente di dentro. Sicché, passando attraverso la mente di lui l’Hegel esce rifatto e meglio compiuto). What does this remaking of Hegel imply? Vera began his writing activity in France, joining the group of radical traditionalists, and extolling Joseph Marie de Maistre, Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald, and Pierre Simon Ballanche. In 1845, for his doctorate, he presented two theses at the Sorbonne, on Problème de la certitude and Platonis et Hegelii de medio termino doctrina (On the doctrine of the middle term in Plato and Hegel). In this last work, Vera recognized the greatness of Hegel, but was unable to overcome serious difficulties and to be aware of Hegel’s “Pure Being and Nothing are the same”; the passage from the Idea to Nature; and the overturning made by

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Hegel in beginning his philosophy not from Being, but from the Idea. Vera confessed that what evaded his understanding was “this unity of being and knowing that is assumed to be happening in the unity of the Idea” ([ciò che sfugge è] questa unità dell’essere e del conoscere, che si pretende realizzare nell’unità dell’Idea). He became the most accredited champion of Hegelian orthodoxy, in his translations, introductive essays, comments, and in the Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1855), which is doubtless his major and most important work. Considering the value of Hegelianism is in the system and The Phenomenology of Spirit can be understood only in the light of the Logic, Vera insisted on the necessity of penetrating deeply into the system, of looking at it from the inside, without excluding any of its parts, accepting the whole. By excluding any part of it, or by criticizing it from the outside, one would lose its meaning. For this very reason, Vera remains faithful to the ideal plan, to the logical machine, which, although being a process, results already complete and perfect in itself. This logical plan or progression that is and constitutes the structure itself of Being—hence, logic becomes theology—is, for this precise reason, distinct from the existent, in an insuperable dualism. This is the return of the worse Platonism, which is destined to conclude and end in a mystical tendency. On the other hand, the insuperable distinction between Idea and Spirit, between being and thinking, breaks the unity of the Hegelian system, which Vera exalted, but cannot seize in the reality, the reality itself of the whole. For Hegel, the movement of thought is the same as the movement of things. The whole reduplicates in the existent in itself, and in the real in the Idea. Thought and being follow the same law. It is a Platonism ingenuously concluded in the exaltation of Hegelianism as the complete and definitive revelation of the world of ideas, “Hegel’s philosophy is the only true philosophy, the absolute philosophy” (la philosophie de Hegel est la seule philosophie véritable, la philosophie absolue). The Hegelian philosophy—having become the contemplation of an ideal world completed in itself, the contemplation of a rhythmic progression from unity through diversity to diversity-in-unity—presented itself as “essentially religious,” but also as a true religion. Hegelianism became the absolute religion (religione assoluta) to which Vera dedicated his extreme labours turned toward the identification of Hegelianism and Christianity. Resting on this understanding of Hegelianism is Vera’s attitude toward the rapport between religion and politics. Vera dealt this theme in Cavour e libera Chiesa in libero Stato and particularly in the polemic that he had with Heinrich von Treitschke, between 1875 and 1876, in which he sustained the necessity of a religious renewal for a political renewal: Religion is the foundation of States…. Religion makes and regenerates nations…. Without a religious renovation, every revolution and political reform is infected with sterility…. No doctrine is more dangerous than the pretension of believing that religion and State progress their own ways, that each can think and act for their goal, as best as they

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY think and like…. The most urgent thing to be done by a nation that intends to rise and renovate its life is not education, nor it is knowledge, but the renovation of its religious spirit (La religione è il fondamento degli Stati…. È essa che fa e rigenera le nazioni…. Senza una rinnovazione religiosa, ogni rivoluzione e riforma politica è infetta di sterilità…. Nessuna dottrina piú dannosa quanto quella che pretende religione e Stato poter andare ciascuno per la sua via, ciascuno pensare ed agire a sua posta, come meglio gli pare e piace…. Ciò che vi ha di piú urgente per un popolo che intende risorgere e rinnovare la vita sua, non è l’istruzione, e neppure il sapere; ma il rinnovamento dello spirito religioso).

Vera was participating in meaningfully meetings with the moderates of Tuscany, the like of Lambruschini and Capponi, revealing finally the detachment of his mental position from authentic Hegelianism. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he remained the translator and expositor of Hegelianism. Spaventa, in 1861, wrote to his brother Silvio, “Vera understands only Hegel, and he understands him very superficially” (Vera non intende che Hegel e l’intende molto superficialmente). Pietro Siciliani, in 1868, writing the review of Spaventa’s Principi di filosofia and making a comparison between the two professors of Naples, without conviction talked about Vera: More royalist than the King, more Hegelian than Hegel, he believed that the philosopher of Stuttgard has planted by now the columns of Hercules of philosophy, beyond which no person can make a step ahead without getting involved in boring and useless repetitions. In the eyes of these Hegelians pure blood, we Italians are, have never been, and perhaps will never be anything but theologians…. To speak with these Hegelians about Italian philosophy, about evident philosophical attempts in our ancient history, medieval and modern, it would be as if we would speak about the Chinese civilization to a most refined, pretentious and witty Parisian. 2. Bertrando Spaventa Bertrando Spaventa possessed a completely different mentality. From his first researches, he was laboriously occupied in finding the development of the Italian philosophical consciousness, not for a sense of narrow nationalism, but for the conviction, “If philosophy is not a vain exercise of the intellect, but the real form of the human life, in which are condensed and find their true meaning all the previous moments of the spirit, it is natural that a free people would recognize itself and possess the true consciousness of itself also in its philosophers” (Se la filosofia non è vana esercitazione dell’intelletto, ma quella forma reale della vita umana, in cui si compendiano e trovano il loro vero significato tutti i momenti anteriori dello spirito, è cosa naturale che un

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popolo libero si riconosca ed abbia la vera coscienza di se stesso anche ne’ suoi filosofi). The universality of truth becomes concrete in its specific conquests, because “the true and concrete life of the universal spirit is not the formal identity of all nations, but the various and distinct manifestation of its content in the national differences” (la vita vera e concreta dello spirito universale non è la formale identità di tutte le nazioni, ma la manifestazione varia e distinta del suo contenuto nelle differenze nazionali). This is as much as saying that the proper nature of a people is the concrete situation within which its thought would develop and would thus characterize it. Precisely because this thought is a veracious thought, even with its specific color, it would come into touch with the manifestation of thought of other countries, connect with them, and find among them its own place. With the above assumptions, Spaventa intended to oppose two erroneous positions. The first position conceived the studying of foreign philosophies as a mere importation of systems already made, since “there is the necessity of a commerce of ideas in the same way that there is the commerce of commodities,” as Luigi Palmieri, the faithful successor of Galluppi at the Neapolitan Chair, professed while solemnly inaugurating in 1861 the academic year. Palmieri, discussing the new direction to assign to the Italian universities (Nuovo indirizzo da dare alle università italiche, Naples, 1861), declared, in the name of that cited necessity of exchanges, that it was impossible to condemn every study of foreigners. He was recommending that the study would remain extrinsic, as it was, for instance, in the teaching of Vera. Palmieri’s words were meant also to sound as an admonishment to Spaventa who, in a very different and more profound sense, was envisaging the spiritual collaboration among nations. The second position against which Spaventa would clash was worse than the first: it was bigoted. The holders of this position intended an Italian philosophy to be the mere and blind repetition of our own thinkers, detached from the life of the human thought. It was bigotry, not love for the fatherland. It was interior blindness, the incapacity of reliving the Italian thought in all its richness. The Italian thought as thought had to come in communion with the whole thought, bringing to it its contribution and participating in those of other cultures. In 1868, Spaventa, with great force, was proclaiming that the problem was a problem of interior freedom, of self-criticism; the necessity was emerging for the Italians to free themselves from authoritarianism, and move from laziness toward a free discussion: Oh bigotry! I believe that we Italians need more than the Germans and the English the interior, moral, religious, scientific, and philosophical freedom that would make us politically, externally, and in the open air a free people. We do need it, believe me, because we have at home, as a thing or a person, our greatest enemy, the enemy of the free spirit, the spiritual and infallible authorities—Pope Pious and Pope Mazzini (O

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Paolottismo! Io credo che noi italiani abbiam bisogno, piú che i tedeschi e gl’inglesi, di libertà interiore, morale, religiosa, scientifica, filosofica, per poter esser liberi politicamente, esteriormente, all’aria aperta. Ne abbiam bisogno, perché abbiamo in casa, come cosa o persona nostra, il nostro piú gran nemico, il nemico dello spirito libero, l’autorità spirituale infallibile—Papa Pio, Papa Mazzini).

Spaventa reiterated in 1861 that only if the Italians were to become conscious of themselves, of their own history, they would truly find their philosophy, and they would see it mirrored in all the European philosophy where it germinated. They would find the European philosophy at work in the major Italian philosophical consciences of the nineteenth century. Only by returning to ourselves and in ourselves, and by being reflected in human thought, “only in this way we will produce in the world of thought … an Italy that would be stable, not an Italy that is imaginary, Pelasgic, Pythagorical, Scholastic, and so on, but a historical Italy; an Italy that would have its deserving place in the common life of modern nations” (solo cosí noi faremo nel mondo del pensiero … un’Italia che duri, non un Italia immaginaria, pelasgica, pitagorica, scolastica e che so io, ma un Italia storica; una Italia che abbia il suo degno posto nella vita commune delle moderne nazioni). Being a Hegelian because of personal reflections and not because of extrinsic influences Spaventa wanted to ascend to his logic through his phenomenology, repossessing his individual philosophical consciousness through the history of Italian thought. He reconstructed the history of Italian thought at the light of an idea and connected it with the development of the European philosophy. Then he challenged the adversaries accusing him of exalting foreign doctrines with an ingenious task. With clear conscience, he wrote to his brother Silvio about the course he taught in Naples in 1861–1862, in which the meditation that troubled him for a long time was coming to its completion: I think that I have already told you about what I am now doing. It is an introduction sui generis to philosophy. What I said, in a convenient manner, comes down to this: We, Italians, carry a certain prejudice in our national conscience—if we can call it national—a prejudice born out of our own conditions in many and many years from the past to the present. This prejudice consists in a little false concept that we possess of the European philosophy in general as well as of our own thought. The lack of freedom had the effect of making us a secret to ourselves. We must fight this prejudice; we must show that this false conscience is wrong. What has the European thought achieved? What has the Italian thought achieved? Truth, Bruno would ask, is it beyond our horizon? This is my phenomenology (Credo di averti detto quello che sto facendo ora. È una introduzione sui generis alla filosofia. Io ho detto, ma in modo conveniente: Noi abbiamo un certo pregiudizio nella nostra coscienza nazionale—se si può dire nazionale—il quale è nato

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dale stesse nostre condizioni da tanti e tanti anni in qua. Questo pregiudizio è il concetto un pò falso cosí della filosofia europea in generale, come del nostro stesso pensiero. La mancanza di libertà per tanto ha fatto, che noi diventassimo come un segreto per noi stessi. Questo pregiudizio bisogna vincere, questa falsa coscienza bisogna far vedere che è falsa. A che è arrivato il pensiero europeo? A che il pensiero italiano? La verità, direbbe Bruno, è sopra il nostro orizzonte? Questa è la mia fenomenologia). He applied himself to this phenomenology since his first affirmation of Hegelianism, since 1850, when as an exile in Turin, he could publish in “Rivista italiana” the article “Studi sopra la filosofia di Hegel.” In this article, he affirmed more programmatically “the Italian philosophical thought was not put out on the pyres of our philosophers, but changed location, and continued in another land and in minds that were freer. Thus, to search the Italian thought in its new fatherland is not a servile imitation … but the reconquest of what was ours” (Il pensiero filosofico italiano non fu spento sui roghi de’ nostri filosofi, ma mutò stanza, e si continuo in piú libera terra e in menti piú libere; talché il ricercarlo nella sua nuova patria non è una servile imitazione … ma la riconquista di ciò che era nostro). His study of the German thought of the nineteenth century became as such the guide to the probing of the Italian thought. From this, the studies of 1852 and 1853 on Bruno emerged, among which particularly challenging was the one concerning morality in Spaccio della bestia trionfante, a worldly morality, concrete, most human, but transfigured in the intellectual love that animates human beings in their wholeness and overflows beyond what is human in Eroici furori. From this, the finding again of Bruno in Spinoza and this conclusion derived, “The metaphysical scheme of Bruno and Spinoza is identical, or at least, one is the precursor of the other.” Spaventa had turned his interest to Campanella in 1854 when Alessandro D’Ancona published in Turin two volumes of writings of the philosopher from Stilo. D’Ancona introduced the volumes with a long essay in which, although acknowledging Campanella as the prophet of the future and mentioning his influence on the successive thought, he placed his effort in exonerating the philosopher from the accuses of conjuration against Spain, and, unfortunately, avoiding altogether the inquiry on the fecundity of that philosophy. He had concluded: It would be the complement of this work to diligently examine how much Campanella, situated between the decadence of ancient philosophy and the birth of the modern, how much, I say, he inherited from that and contributed of his own to this. Unfortunately, this detailed task would not reach its true and useful end, unless it would include a wider spectrum by incorporating the similar researches of the Italian philosophers contemporary to Campanella (Sarebbe prezzo dell’opera esami-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY nare diligentemente quanto Campanella, posto in mezzo al decadere della filosofia antica ed al sorgere della moderna, quanto io dico ereditasse da quella e legasse di proprio a questa. Se non che questo minuzioso lavoro non otterrebbe il suo vero ed utile fine, se non estendendosi a piú larghe vedute, ed operando simil ricerca su tutti quanti i filosofi italiani del tempo).

Such a task was actually assumed by Spaventa who inserted into the erudite researches of Vito Capialbi, Francesco Palermo, and Silvestro Centofanti his robust interpretation, which, acknowledging in the philosopher the conjuror, analyzed and revealed the first lines of his complex personality. D’Ancona had rhetorically celebrated Campanella as “the giant of the attempted philosophical innovation, a giant in the divination of a better future” (gigante della tentata innovazione filosofica, gigante nella divinazione di un futuro migliore). Spaventa focused on this greatness and identified it in the affirmation that would be Cartesian afterward, of subjectivity: subjectivity in the senses, in the experience, and in the consciousness of oneself. Empiricism and rationalism were already delineated in Campanella in the conception of the notitia abdita (concealed knowledge) interpreted as notitia sui (knowledge of oneself) and notitia addita (added knowledge) as notitia aliorum (knowledge received). Into these distinctions, we may gape at Descartes, Locke and, beyond Locke, at least in part, Kant; we may gaze at Bruno’s idea of substancecause, which is in Spinoza, but points beyond Spinoza. Gentile commented, “The concept of the spirit will be born in the modern philosophy from the unity of Campanella’s subjectivity—knowing is being—and from Bruno’s substance-cause. Spaventa soon discovered that G. B. Vico had achieved this unity already for the first time in Italy” (Il concetto dello spirito nascerà appunto nella filosofia moderna dall’unità della soggettività campanelliana, cognoscere est esse, e della sostanza-causa bruniana: unità che lo Spaventa indi a poco scoprirà, già raggiunta, e per la prima volta, in Italia da G. B. Vico). Spaventa studied Vico before 1847, but it is probably around 1860 when he determined that his vision was that the Scienza Nuova established the beginning “of the new metaphysics … not of being, but of the mind—not mere ontologism, nor psychologism, but transcendental psychologism,” not substance alone, nor knowing alone, but Reality as Subject. In one word, Vico was symmetric with Kant, philosopher of the thought that creates and regulates the world. In 1868, Spaventa wrote to Angelo Camillo De Meis: This idea of the importance of Vico and Kant, and of a certain extemporaneous relationship between the two—between the new science and the critique of pure reason—is, or at least has been, my favorite piece (lit. my war-horse); or, if you don’t like the image of me as warrior and rider, I would say, my diploma of nobility; or, if this aristocratic phrase also bothers you, then freely say my discovery (Questa idea qui del

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valore di Vico e Kant, e di una certa relazione estemporanea tra di loro—tra la scienza nuova e la critica della ragione—è, almeno è stato, il mio caval di battaglia; o, se non ti piace l’imagine di me guerriero e cavalcatore, diró il mio diploma di nobiltà; o, se anche questa frase aristocratica ti disturba, di’ pure la mia scoperta). 3. The Circulation of Thought For Spaventa, the result of the required historical research in its most peculiar aspects was the thesis that the Italian philosophy, after vast discoveries, had emigrated outside Italy in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. It was a polemical thesis against Rosmini and Gioberti, counterfeiters, at the most, of the idealistic German philosophy. Rosmini, as Spaventa openly affirmed and then confirmed in his polemic with Tommaseo, did no more than repeat Kant, except that afterward he condemned him “for bad faith or ignorance” (per mala fede o ignoranza). After his admission that in Rosmini was also Kant, and that the European thought had flown in some ways into Italy, Spaventa successively noticed the positive aspects of Galluppi and Gioberti, bringing into focus the doctrine of “the circulation of the European thought” (circolazione del pensiero europeo). This European thought was born in Italy, developed in Europe, and returned to Italy, its cradle, with the major exponents of the philosophy of the nineteenth century. Galluppi is all taken by the gnoseological problem that he derived from Kant, bringing an answer, “without knowing it, to the query of Vico.” At first sight, Galluppi “seems a pure empiricist, a second Locke, pure psychologist.” As such, Galluppi appeared to Spaventa, “With all of this, Galluppi is Kantian; he is Kantian, almost without knowing it, almost against his own will, because of a force superior to his own will” (E con tutto ciò è kantista; è kantista quasi senza saperlo, quasi suo malgrado, per una forza superiore alla sua volontà). This may be the reason why Galluppi does not give justice to the synthesis, because he himself cannot become conscious of what is to be found in knowledge, besides what is sensible, and of what not merely sensible is in his own sensibility. On the other hand, about Rosmini, Spaventa says, “Rosmini is Kantian with greater consciousness. He believes to be more Kantian than Kant. If we listen to him, he is the one who has discovered the synthetic a priori judgment, not Kant; that of Kant is an artificial judgment” (Rosmini è kantista con maggior coscienza. Anzi crede di esser piú kantista di Kant. A udirlo, il giudizio sintetico a-priori l’ha scoperto lui, non Kant; quel di Kant è un giudizio posticcio). If we consider the rhapsodic Kantian enumeration of the categories, Rosmini has certainly the merit of having attempted at a deduction. His problem is that in making the deduction, he used the synthesis of the idea of being and sensation, so that, far from going ahead of Kant, he slipped behind, falling into pre-Kantian positions. In 1857, Spaventa decided to face the problematic Gioberti and studied him thoroughly, composing a profound monograph that was published in its

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first part in 1863, La filosofia di Gioberti, vol. 1 (Naples, 1863), which remained the only one in print. Spaventa saw in Gioberti’s oscillation between Pantheism and Hegelianism the culmination and the summation of the long labour he has been analyzing. Gioberti sums up in himself the anterior moments of thought, Galluppi and Rosmini, in the same way that Hegel sums up Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. We may even say that, because the anterior moments to pure knowing, like Cartesianism and Lockeanism, the clarity of Bruno, and now I can say it of all our philosophers of the Risorgimento, of Campanella, Telesio, Cesalpino, Cremonini, and Zabarella, did not originally display themselves in Italy, Gioberti sums them all up or better reproduces them, perhaps confusedly and often only as coexistent with new moments, with the moments of pure knowing (Gioberti compendia in sé i momenti anteriori, cioè Galluppi e Rosmini, come Hegel compendia Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; anzi, giacché i momenti anteriori al puro conoscere, il cartesianismo e il lockismo, la chiarezza di Bruno, e ora posso dire di tutti i nostri filosofi del Risorgimento, di Campanella, di Telesio, di Cesalpino, di Cremonini, di Zabarella, non si erano spiegati originalmente in Italia, Gioberti li compendia o meglio riproduce, confusamente e spesso come soltanto coesistenti coi nuovi momenti, coi momenti del puro conoscere). In Spaventa’s reconstruction, Gioberti is in accord with Hegel, at least for the aspect in which ontologism becomes the philosophy of mind, where the ideal formula signifies the coincidence of the human being and God in the pure act of creating. If we break the cycle that unites Ens and the existent, if we posit the divine process as already completed outside of human participation, then the Ens closed in Itself is impervious to human beings; It is without development, without effective creating activity in rapport to the world. If the rhythm between the divine and the human is a rhythm of participation; if, as Gioberti states, the rhythm “descends from Ens to the Existent and re-ascends from the Existent to the Ens,” then the human flows on the divine and the circulation of being illumined by the ideal formula comes about to signify the spiritual process, the reflection, the reality as the pulsation of the absolute Mentality. Spaventa concludes that God has become absolute spirit, God is the absolute relation and connection; God is the absolute Psyche or the absolute Mind. Protology is called also analysis of the constitutive principle of the human spirit. The problem of philosophy is the problem of the spirit, and its standard is the transcendental psychologism (Assoluta relazione o connessione, è l’assoluta Psiche o la Mente assoluta. La protologia è detta anche l’analisi del principio costitutivo dello spirito umano. Il problema della filosofia è il problema dello spirito, e la sua nuova bandiera è il psicologismo transcendente).

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Concluding the lessons on La filosofia italiana, in 1861 in Naples, Spaventa was finding again Hegel, his Hegel, in Gioberti, in his Gioberti. He summed up the course: For Hegel, Reason is self-consciousness, or is an absolute spirit taken as the absolute Principle…. For Gioberti, the absolute Principle is the absolute Spirit or the absolute Mind, whose moments are infinite objectivity (Nature) and subjectivity (Spirit). To create and re-create are the two cycles. Their unity is the true Idea of Gioberti. The true idea of Gioberti is not being but creating, not Ens but Spirit. The creating act is dialectic, absolute dialectics, and dialectic is the organism or the ideal life. Philosophy, as faithful reproduction of such organism is at its turn dialectic; it is in its own way creating. This rethinking, which is creating, is true thinking, it is science. Science is the fullness of the creative act, the absolute reality of the spirit (Hegel: Ragione conscia di sé o assoluto spirito come Principio assoluto. Gioberti: il Principio assoluto è l’assoluto Spirito o la Mente assoluta, i cui momenti sono l’oggettività, natura, e la soggettività, spirito, infinita: il creare e il ricreare: i due cicli. La loro unità è l’Idea vera giobertiana. La vera Idea giobertiana non è lo essere, ma il creare, non l’Ente ma lo Spirito. Atto creativo è dialettica, assoluta dialettica: e dialettica è l’organismo o vita ideale. La filosofia, come riproduzione fedele di tale organismo, è dunque essa stessa dialettica; è, a suo modo, creare. Questo ripensare, che è creare, è il vero pensare: la scienza … pienezza dell’atto creativo: la realtà assoluta dello spirito). In Principii di filosofia of 1867, Spaventa was insisting, always in reference to Gioberti, “God is seen as the absolute spirit, or Creator, with whom human beings ally themselves in the spiritual activity of a perennial participation in creation. It is not about an intuition “direct and gratuitous” that faces an Ens object, but a true mentality that is sameness in difference, the consciousness of which has laboriously reached the conquest of intimacy to such a point of transfiguring it into a Mind. This is Hegelianism. The Hegelianism that Spaventa has tried with all his power to make his, beyond all the difficulties and the obstacles of the system. Vera had exalted logic as the ideal system, perfectly organized and completed. Spaventa planted the center of his reflection on thinking thought, on the concrete subject as consciousness that moves on to the conquest of itself. The question was how to bring about the connection of the ideal system, the Idea, with the thought that does the search. The question was about the query and the answer, about the mind and the truth. At the end of the essay Dottrina della conoscenza di Bruno (1865), Spaventa observed: Bruno says two things, which are true. The infinite cannot give a finite gift of itself, and, being the infinite, it is right that it is infinitely pur-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY sued. Bruno did not understand the unity of the absolute power that is the absolute act (the Infinite), nor the skepticism that is dogmatism (the knowledge). He did not know how by way of encircling it is possible to arrive at the center. In order that such understanding could be possible, it was necessary that dogmatism and skepticism would show themselves indistinctly per se in all their new power, as Cartesianism and Criticism. Spinoza represents the eternal solution without a problem and Kant represents the eternal problem without a solution (Bruno dice … due cose vere: l’infinito non può donarsi finito, e, essendo infinito, conviene che sia infinitamente perseguitato…. Ma egli non ha saputo intendere né l’unità dell’assoluta potenza che è assoluto atto (l’Infinito), né lo scetticismo che è dogmatismo (la conoscenza); non ha saputo come circuendo si possa arrivare al centro. Perché fosse possible tale intendimento, era necessario che dogmatismo e scetticismo si mostrassero per sé indistintamente in tutta la loro nuova potenza, cioè come cartesianismo e criticismo. Spinoza rappresenta l’eterna soluzione senza problema; Kant l’eterno problema senza soluzione).

At this point, the problem of Spaventa was going to be faced: how to reconcile the query with the answer, the spirit with the truth. In Studi sull’etica di Hegel of 1869, he asserted that the reconciliation was in Hegel, “The unity of Spinoza and Kant is Hegel; and the unity of the absolute immobile and the relative restless mobile is the subject…. Now, the great value of Hegel is to be found in his logic and all his philosophy is the understanding of the subject.” In reality, the reconciliation that Spaventa needed was derived from his own problem of interpreting Hegel, which he felt to be the problem of connection between phenomenology and logic, between thinking thought and Idea. According to Spaventa, thinking thought and Idea were the same experience of the absoluteness, the verification that consciousness does of itself as an absolute transparency followed by the understanding of the subject as the verification, not simply of consciousness but, in thought, also of the mind that verifies itself. In the double verification, Spaventa found the whole Hegel. The self-verifying is self-producing, it is the same self-producing of the absolute, and of the subject that searches, “My cognitive act and my search of the Absolute must be the Absolute’s act and search. It is a search because it is verification, and a person searches itself meaning to verify itself. The act of the Absolute is not truly an act, it is not Its act, unless it is also mine. This is the necessity of the subject.” This is to create together, and in it all residues of objectivism are resolved. Where are the Hegelian logos, the idea in itself, the objective and almost petrified system of rationality? It was on this that Spaventa’s meditation had to labor more intimately in order to show being as “essentially an act of thought,” the spectator (thinking) also as the actor, retracing more profoundly

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Gioberti’s problematic of the rapport between being and intuition. This precise complete immersion of the Idea in the concrete act of thinking, this contemplating “in the true and absolute humanity the concordant cooperative creative act” was implying a full “humanity of the Absolute.” Deriding the Platonism of Mamiani, Spaventa took from Hegelianism the harsh adherence to the limit that turns the most rigid historicism into the strongest naturalism. He himself in 1867 clearly understood faithfulness to history as positiveness, and in this sense, he also understood the value of positivism. Against the dualism of Mamiani between being and duty, he appealed to the cruel unity of the Hegelian ethics. Against some theses of Rosmini, he confirmed, in his course of anthropology of 1863–1864, the unity between soul and body, between spirituality and organism: The real unity of the organism is the soul. The soul would be a result, if the organism were to be posited already made, as already existent without the soul, and only thereafter productive of the psychic processes. Things are not so, the organism and the soul are together posited and develop together, because the organism that develops is soul that develops (L’unità reale dell’organismo è l’anima. L’anima sarebbe un resultato, se l’organismo si ponesse già bell’e fatto, come già esistente senza l’anima, e poi gli si facesse produrre i processi psichici. Ora ciò non è, organismo e anima si pongono e si sviluppano insieme, perché organismo che si sviluppa è anima che si sviluppa). This absolute humanism, this rigid adherence to spiritual actuality in its historical concreteness forced Spaventa to consider the value of experience. In Principii di filosofia, he wrote, “Without experience, we cannot have any information about things” (Senza l’esperienza non si può avere nessuna notizia delle cose). In 1881, in the introduction to Esperienza e metafisica, again deriding abstract and dogmatic constructions, he noted: Many years ago, an unlimited, ingenuous trust in speculation and metaphysics existed. Indeed, it was too much. It was a trust a priori, as they used to say in those times and still in our time. Its real intendment was not understood then and is not yet understood now. An overflow of formulae existed. To be declared a philosopher, it was enough to have a formula. It was acceptable to use formulae, but people must have forgotten that the formulae are the last results, the summing up of speculation, not the mere beginning, foundation, and presupposition. Otherwise, there is no reasoning, no proofs. It would be like talking by oracles. I want you to reason and give proofs (Tanti anni fa fiducia illimitata, ingenua, nella speculazione, nella metafisica: troppa anzi. A priori, come si diceva e si dice ancor oggi—senza intender bene il senso di questa parola. Formole a precipizio; basta aver in mano una formola per esser dichiarato filosofo. Formole, benissimo. Ma esse-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY sono il risultato finale, la somma della speculazione, non il cominciamento, il fondamento, il presupposto. Se no, non si ragiona, non si prova, si parla come oracoli. E a ragionare, a provare vi voglio).

A critique of experience was needed, because experience cannot remain closed in itself, “The experience by itself cannot resolve its own contradictions.” Experience would not presuppose anything, because it possesses its conditions as immanent in itself. We have a radical elimination of all entities and of all things that are located beyond the concreteness of action. 4. Minor Hegelians. The Crisis of Hegelianism: Antonio Labriola and Francesco De Sanctis Together with Spaventa and Vera, the third of the celebrated “Hegelian trinity” was Tari, a teacher of aesthetics. Antonio Tari embraced varied interests, which his strange and imaginative style reflected. He reconciled his Hegelianism with a mystical faith in an absolute and ineffable transcendent thought as all wrapped in the abysmal silence, “the companion of the primeval macrocosmic Nothing” (compagno del primiero macrocosmico Nulla). As “an unknown witness of the unknown God” (Ignoto confessore del Dio ignoto), of the Unmentionable, Tari could see in the Hegelian rhythm of becoming “the rhythmic reflection, the pulsation of something that transcended it, of an unnamable x, or unqualifiable Real” (il ritmico riflettersi, la pulsazione di qualche cosa che lo trascende, di un’x innominabile, o Reale inqualificabile). In Tari, absolute immanence converted into an absolute transcendence, since the absolute goes necessarily beyond the restricting limitations of thought. Thought, closed in its perennial becoming, postulates an inexhaustible and unreachable infinity. Thought is “like a flame that, if conceived absolute, would be in need of being connected to an absolute combustible, which would have the office, not so ignoble as we may think, of performing passively a consumption (which means burned or denied).” This was to resolve Hegelianism in mysticism, denying at the same time, the preeminence of thought because “thought is just abstractness” (il Pensiero non è che astrattezza). In this mystical outcome, what was coming to be accentuated was the religious aspect of the thought of Hegel, as Vera had underlined it. To this point referred also the other bizarre Hegelian, Pietro Ceretti of Intra, to whose fame little contributed the voluminous writings on Hegel’s system, or the pitiful efforts as illustrator and commentator of Pasquale d’Ercole. The unpreachable Conscience, in which Ceretti intended to resolve the logos of Hegel, is compared usually to the Unmentionable of Tari. The absolute reality, of which the logic is only the scheme or extrinsic and superficial manifestation, is posited beyond the dialectic process, beyond history. The Hegelian dualism between process and Reality, between a becoming and a system in itself complete, was resolving in an accentuation of the absolute Spirit of which the logical development, apparently only a development, remained as an extrinsic

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and insufficient manifestation. For this purpose, Tari was appealing to the Kantian noumenon and to the will of Schopenhauer, “I feel secure on the words of my witnesses, from the Noumenon of Kant to the Wille of Schopenhauer, from the Unconscious of Hartmann to the Unknowable of Spencer” (dal Noumeno di Kant a Wille di Schopenhuaer, dall’Inconscio di Hartmann allo Inconoscibile di Spencer ho fideiussori cui fumano i mustacchi; e sto sicuro). The problem is found when one would conceive the absolute as a totality in itself ineffable, besides being spiritual, then the process is an apparent process, and the dynamism of thought rests estranged both to the becoming and to Being. Spaventa avoided this aporia, appealing himself to the thinking thought in its concreteness, while d’Ercole slid from the mysticism of Ceretti in a naturalism almost positivist, positing at the root of nature and spirit a Being logico-metaphysical. His approach was mentioned as being very close to the Indistinct of Ardigò. The oscillation between naturalism and mysticism was the common characteristic of many Hegelians, from De Meis, who by wishing to insert medicine into the philosophy of nature, became persuaded that the Hegelian system was only a “construction, abstract and bizarre”; from Nicola Marselli who would arrive openly at a pure positivism; to the Socratic figure of Sebastiano Maturi, always faithful to both Vera and Spaventa, always ready to repeat, “Being is creating, reality is creation, no thing is created, [and] everything is itself creation.” No longer was possible to speak of things as a quid petrified in its fixity: The category of “things,” this garden of ignorance, no longer exists in true speculative thought…. All reality is activity essentially free and clever productivity. The whole universe is activity, life, and eternal, processual, and absolute ingenuity (La categoria della cosa, questo asilo della ignoranza, non c’è piú nel vero pensiero speculativo…. La realtà tutta quanta è attività essenzialmente libera e geniale produttività. L’universo tutto è attività, è vita, è libertà, è genialità eterna, processuale, ed assoluta). Marianne Florenzi Waddington, on the contrary, appeared fully involved in the religious tones of Hegelianism. She dedicated her books to Mamiani and Maffei, accepted in 1849 the dulcified madrigals of the old Schelling, and despised the materialism of Feuerbach, but discussed his Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, reaffirming that Hegel “considers the human being as a true person that raises itself up to God through a process of the spirit, which in its energy is infinite.” Her conclusion in the essay on the immortality of the soul (Florence, 1868) was the proclamation that “the immortality is a necessary consequence of the absolute value of the human person.” Immortality should not be seen as “a means for a system of prizes or punishments established by a Being superior to the human nature.” Elsewhere, in Saggi di psicologia e logica (Florence, 1864), with lyrical accents she confessed:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY I imagine the universal soul as an ocean of souls, in which each soul is placed and to which it participates in the same way that the individuals of the ocean participate in the life and peculiar conditions of that immense abyss…. As the inhabitants of the ocean cannot live in any other element, so we cannot live in any other manner than directly aspiring to the eternal, the divine, and the universal (Mi rappresento l’anima universale come un oceano di anime, in cui ciascuna sta, e a cui partecipa come gli individui dell’oceano partecipano della vita e delle condizioni peculiari di quell’immenso abisso…. Come dunque gli abitanti dell’oceano non possono vivere in altro elemento, cosí noi non possiamo vivere che aspirando direttamente all’eterno, al divino, all’universale).

While the Hegelianism of the marquise was lyrical among mystical nimbuses, others, like Pietro Ragnisco, were seriously deepening themselves into fruitful historical studies or, like Antonio Labriola, were insisting on the limit that Florenzi was finding disgustingly overcoming in Feuerbach. Labriola, after some Herbartian experience, gave himself to the research on the significance of Marxism. A place by itself in the Hegelian period of Italy is reserved for Francesco De Sanctis, who read and meditated Hegel and Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz, albeit for the scope of moving away from them and condemning all those doctrines that saw in art the “manifestation of the idea,” “the ideal,” a “specific idea,” with the consequence that the form would become an accessory to the concept. Conversely, for him the form was at the center of aesthetics, the living form was all that counts, and previous to it there was only chaos, “Before the form existed, what came before the creation existed, the chaos” (Innanzi alla forma ci sta quello che era innanzi alla creazione, il caos). Content is not prior, form is not posterior; not even, form beside content; but form as concrete, living, and unique reality. Focusing on this, Croce demonstrated that an implicit philosophy was present in all these ideas of De Sanctis, but he denied that it was already a philosophy and that it was the unique path to that philosophy. In Estetica (1922, p. 412), Croce gave his judgment on De Sanctis: said, “If a person were to begin to meditate on these words, it would see doubts and problems multiply everywhere; he would notice holes and gaps everywhere. Compared to a few philosophers of aesthetics, De Sanctis would appear to be lacking in his analysis, order, system, and inaccurate also in the definitions.” De Sanctis’s experience, however, was undoubtfully a great one. As a critic, he certainly possessed a profound subtlety, on which could very well be implanted, as it actually happened, a rich philosophical elaboration.

Thirty-Six POSITIVISM 1. Salvatore Tommasi and Pasquale Villari The idealistic reaction that characterized the Italian culture of the beginning of the twentieth century has always misjudged, under the impulse of polemic, the positivistic flourishing that Italy experienced especially for the impulse of Roberto Ardigò. Croce explained that people considered superficially positivism as “a negation of philosophy, or more truly an effort to substitute a naturalistic and agnostic philosophy to the idealistic philosophy, and to the speculative method the extraneous one of physics and natural sciences.” Whether we were to consider in positivism the method of experience or refer to it as the attempt at constructing a metaphysics, we would always have before us motives that are not new to the Italian thought and are not strange to the cultural tradition of the country. On the other hand, it would not be exact to see in positivism exclusively the reaction to idealism. If we must talk of a reaction, it would be proper to refer to those last pale forms of spiritualism, from Mamiani to Conti, in which the beautiful soul of our rhetors was breathing its last breath. The positivistic method was erudition in the field of historical sciences. At times, it was an excessive erudition but constituted a useful and strong example of severe research, a precious discipline of inquiry. In the field of philosophy, it was a call for the return to the concreteness of experience, for the awareness of the physical limit that comes with every spiritual act. Positivism meant the need of human studies and problems, the appeal to the corporeity of the world of humankind, where the idea is an empty word if it is not incarnated in an earthly vessel. It would be good to recall the positivistic motive that imposed itself to the most serious individuals among neoKantians and Hegelians, from Fiorentino to Spaventa, and to name the most typical representatives of an Italian Leftism, such as Salvatore Tommasi or, at a different level, Antonio Labriola. It may be inexact to speak of a true and proper positivism of Cattaneo whose fundamental positions, method of inquiry and interest for sociological research remain considerable. The consideration of the spiritual evolution of Salvatore Tommasi is certainly more characteristic. In Istituzioni di fisiologia (Napoli, 1847) Tommasi had begun to profess openly a theistic finality, in which the activity of the spirit, completely detached from the corporeal substratum, is presented as “the determined and

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free causality of personal actions.” In 1865, discoursing about Le dottrine mediche e la clinica, he seemed to have abandoned every spiritualistic philosophical presupposition, claiming for the “objective and natural” sciences full independence from any metaphysical speculation and presupposition not integrally explainable with experience. With an exaggeration suitable to a convert, he stated, “The law of the natural sciences … is generality, but the generality obtained from the particulars” (la legge nelle scienze della natura … è il generale che si è svolto dai particolari). Nothing is found in the intellect that was not previously found in the senses (Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu). As a surgeon, he realized that he was even more involved in positivism, and he felt condemned to be a materialist. Given that our senses deal with nothing but active matter, he declared that nothing is, save active matter. This was truly a methodological premise more than a metaphysical conclusion. Tommasi knew that the materialism expressed in his words meant simply faithfulness to experience: We cannot surpass the boundaries of experience. If metaphysics believes so, it can very well go beyond experience, and we will respect its decision. Metaphysics should let us do what we want to do, because we have already demonstrated that we can do things, contrary to the reproaches thrown at us. You may very well call the progresses made by natural science material progresses; but, let me tell you, these material progresses, in their materialness, have such power that, in a little more than a decade, have renovated the spirit of the world (Noi non possiamo sorpassare i confini dell’esperienza. La metafisica, se crede, passerà oltre, e noi la rispetteremo, ma a noi ci lasci fare, perché, al contrario dei rimproveri che ci si fanno, abbiamo già mostrato di saper fare. Si chiamino pure materiali i progressi promossi dalla scienza naturale; ma nella loro materialità hanno tal potere che lo spirito del mondo ne è stato rinnovato in pochi lustri). The inaugural oration of the academic year 1865, titled “Il materialismo moderno,” established the beginning of a speculative revolt in the Neapolitan University that had already seen Spaventa’s Hegelianism imposing itself and dominating over the remains of Giobertianism. This naturalism, although with its many resonances in that field of metaphysics which it declared to be willing to respect, introduced itself especially as a scientific method, “standard of discretion, seriousness, and adaptation” (insegna della modestia, della serietà e della rassegnazione). It would not remain discreet or adaptable when it affirmed that it had accomplished grandiose conquests and imposing progress, which have finally returned humankind back to the reading of the great book of nature. Another physician, Arnoldo Cantani, discussing “Positivismo nella medicina” (1868) observed that the reading would clearly tell man that he did not possess any longer any privilege in the unceasing vicissitude of nature and that “the life of the universe would continuously move forward imperturbably

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over his corpse” (la vita dell’universo avanza imperturbabile sopra il suo cadavere). The affirmation made in the field of historical studies by Pasquale Villari in La filosofia positiva e il metodo storico (1865) corresponds to the affirmation of Tommasi in the medical field. Villari stated: The positivistic philosophy is renouncing, for now, the absolute knowledge of the human being, or all absolute knowledge, but without denying the existence of what it ignores. Positivistic philosophy studies only social and moral facts and laws, patiently verifying the inductions of psychology with history, and searching within historical laws the laws of the human spirit. Positivistic philosophy gives up the study of the human being in abstract, outside space and time, composed only by categories and empty forms. It studies a living human being, mutable in a thousand fashions, moved by a thousand passions, limited under every aspects, and nevertheless full of aspirations toward infinity (La filosofia positiva rinuncia, per ora, alla conoscenza assoluta dell’uomo; anzi a tutte le conoscenze assolute, senza però negare l’esistenza di ciò che ignor Essa studia solo fatti e leggi sociali e morali, riscontrando pazientemente le induzioni della psicologia colla storia e ritrovando nelle leggi storiche le leggi dello spirito umano. Cosí non si ostina a studiare un uomo astratto, fuori dello spazio e del tempo, composto solo di categorie e di vuote forme; ma un uomo vivente e reale, mutabile per mille guise, agitato da mille passioni, limitato per ogni dove, e pure pieno di aspirazioni verso l’infinito). In these writings, the author intended to prescribe only a method, a temporary suspension of metaphysical studies, but soon explained that his contemporaries considered metaphysics as what astrology was in previous times, meaning that metaphysics was destined to vanish forever. In reality, one kind of metaphysics was going to disappear. A new metaphysics, though modest and hidden, was implicit in the naturalism of Tommasi and in the positivism of Villari. This human person with its limits, viewed as “a transitory form in the eternal cycle of nature … a molecule in the immensity of the world,” this human being was renouncing for now and forever the absolute infinite spirit of which this human being was supposed to be an efficient collaborator. To the certainty of a divine collaboration, contemporary human beings have substituted the melancholic seriousness of an earthly vocation. 2. Aristide Gabelli, Nicola Marselli, Andrea Angiulli, Pietro Siciliani, and Nicola Fornelli In a tone not much different, Aristide Gabelli in the preface of 1869 to his work, L’uomo e le scienze naturali, partially already published between 1857 and 1866, observed, “About human beings and their many attitudes, I have been often obliged to form a concept less satisfactory than the one metaphys-

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ics has trained us to accept.” Gabelli, too, wanted to study the human being, in its psychic reality, capturing the human life within the human rapports, aside any other preoccupation, persuaded “that only from the human nature it is possible to deduce adequately the foundation, the character, and the direction of the moral sciences.” He insisted on the human limitations, the feebleness of reason, but recognized at the same time consciousness in its interiority as the source of knowledge. He defined consciousness, “The bending over that we do of our sight on ourselves” (quel ripiegare che noi facciamo il nostro sguardo sopra di noi). He conceded that the love of oneself is the fountainhead of action, but he added, “Human beings love per se their family, their city, their nation, and the whole humanity.” This was going beyond what any effort of the associative psychology could explain in a satisfactory manner. More observations and suggestions we will find in the work of Gabelli, a work so composed in its calmness because he nurtured it with the active love for humanity that he concretized as an involved pedagogist. During those same years, the Hegelianism of Nicola Marselli, who had already previously manifested the need of giving up metaphysics and listening instead to facts, changed into positivism. He had seen in the Hegelian philosophy of history the weapon with which to fight the religion of the transcendent. In Scienza della storia (Turin, 1873–1880), Marselli elaborated a naturalistic or materialistic (if we consider the terms he used) monism, inserted within the frames of a surviving, never dead, nostalgia for logicism and Hegelian inspiration. Coming originally from Gioberti’s school was Andrea Angiulli, who in his youth in Naples was subject to the fascination of the teachings of Spaventa, of whom later he was a colleague and the successor. Traveling first in Germany, then in France and England, Angiulli gradually abandoned idealism and began to elaborate his own scientific metaphysics that could be confused, perhaps improperly, with the various manifestations of positivism. In 1868, with a work on La filosofia e la ricerca positiva, he took definitely a clear position for the first time. He pronounced himself against Hegel, accusing him of dogmatism and of nullifying the effective development of reality, through his apparent dialectic. Reality is instead fully grasped by the positivistic philosophy, which, having banished every aprioristic metaphysics, even the materialistic, has maintained itself firmly between facts and experience, “Phenomena, therefore, and experience, they are indeed the basis of positive philosophy” (Fenomeni dunque ed esperienza, ecco la base della filosofia positiva). A materialistic apriorism, by being materialistic, does not cease from being an apriorism; it does not cease from pretending to reach the last causes, the essences, and the things in themselves. In Angiulli’s eyes, this kind of criticism of a dogmatic metaphysics did not exclude either the legitimacy of the need in every human being of finding an answer to the supreme philosophical questions, or the possibility of constructing metaphysics. This metaphysics would have to be the result of experimental researches, a con-

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struction on the data of experience, a kind of conclusive system of the sciences, and a progressive systematization that adheres to the evolution and relativity that we find in the experience. On the other hand, a scientific progressive morality, or “progressive betterment” (migliorismo), corresponds to the process of cosmic evolution. This migliorismo is like a perennial ideal conquest that finds the bases of its social actualization in the solution of pedagogical problems, of which Angiulli was particularly concerned. This pedagogical orientation was, the characteristic of many among the most eminent thinkers of the Italian positivism. They made it appear that, though they believed in a universal determinism, there was in it still a place for a human insertion capable of orienting, admittingly in a limited sector, the cosmic becoming. By way of a curious inconsequence, the many turns around or naturalistic interpretations of Hegelianism continued to maintain a deterministic teleological position, but at the same time affirmed of wanting not only to comprehend but also, at last, to transform reality. Pietro Siciliani was effectively oriented toward positivism. He intended to demonstrate that positivism was the recent development of the GalileoVico tradition but did not pretend to resolve it either in a form of integral phenomenism or in any return to metaphysics. He took instead an intermediate position that would admit a certain species of Kantian noumenon that could somehow determine the foundation for the exaltation of the sacred character of human personality. The pedagogical Italian positivism began with Nicola Fornelli and his interest in Johann Friedrich Herbart. Luigi Credaro contributed to making Herbart known, whereas Saverio de Dominicis attempted at the rigid adaptation of the theory of evolution. 3. Roberto Ardigò The individual who almost personified in his extensive activity the loftiest spirit of Italian positivism was Roberto Ardigò. From the cathedra of Padua and from his works, he was the indefatigable proclaimer of a truth of which he made himself ardent apostle and candid priest. After a long period spent in meditation, he detached himself from the priesthood in the Church of Christ when abandoning the ecclesiastic garments appeared as much necessary as the conclusion of a syllogism. When the last veil of abstract religiosity that still obstructed the seizing of the rhythm, which regulates thought, fell, he caught “the formation of the ideas, so-called intellectual, at the confluence of different sensible representations.” In that precise moment, as he narrated, His thought gave up the anxieties of doubt and rested on the safety of its positiveness. It acknowledged that the human gnosis was only the loftiest form of the naturalness that continues gradually diminishing to a minimal point in the descending ladder of the animal realm. This is the biological function, in which culminates, through absolute and per

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Religious faith had been for Ardigò “the ideality of the apostolate for goodness” that was not the product of a suffered theological search but a quiet possession of a criterion of morality. The day when another truth appeared to him capable of freeing him from any doubt, and which was also an equally safe basis for morality, he accepted and systematized it without any further doubt and sufferance. He confessed, “The moral idealities have over me the same authority they had before. Religion for me is not remorse and it never troubles me, not even minimally. On the contrary, it is a remembrance full of poetry, the remembrance of a vanished beautiful dream” (Le idealità morali hanno sopra di me lo stesso impero di prima…. La religione per me, non è un rimorso, che mi turbi mai minimamente: sibbene una rimembranza piena di poesia, come un bel sogno svanito). No unknowability, no noumenon erects itself like a sphinx eternally mute to human demands against Ardigò. If the human conquest were always to be relative, the unknowable would be gradually made knowable, because it is always something that can, or must fall, now or later, within the boundaries of our knowledge. The error of Herbert Spencer has been that of hypostatizing an abstraction; he made the relative unknowability an entity in itself within an order different from that of the experience in which it really happens. Ardigò objected: If reality is the above-mentioned residue, then it is an integrating element of the same cognition from which it was obtained. In such case, reality will not be the Unknowable, which is the opposite of the datum of cognition. If reality is not that integrating element, then, in this case, we will not find it at all (o la realtà è il suddetto residuo, e allora essa è un elemento integrativo della stessa cognizione, dalla quale è ricavato, e non quindi l’Inconoscibile che è l’opposto del dato di cognizione: o non è quell’elemento, e allora non si trova in nessun modo). In conclusion, reality is the limitation of our knowing, because something always remains hidden to us. We are aware that what is unknown today will be known tomorrow, because the unknown is always relatively unknown, it is part of an experimental reality, incapable of justifying religion. The relative unknown may be an unknowable reality that falls under a non-empirical order, and then, even assuming its existence, it would certainly not be possible for us to talk about it. Ardigò said, “The Unknowable is only the reciprocal transcendence of the sensible; it is a rapport, not a thing” (L’Inconoscibile … non è che trascendenza reciproca dei sensibili: è, insomma, un rapporto, non

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è una cosa). He insisted that the Unknowable could not set up a religion, which is in itself the mystical adoration of a hypostasis of the unknown. Ardigò wanted to oppose a unity to every distinction of two orders of reality, the unity of nature, which is known in its concreteness through experience. In a programmatic lecture in Mantua in 1869, he supported, “Independence of reason in science, a positive method in philosophy, everywhere nature around us, in the world of matter as well as in that of the spirit, a psychophysical concept of the soul: these are the great teachings we found in Pomponazzi.” In La Psicologia come scienza positiva of 1870, the principle celebrated in Pomponazzi—“il senso e l’esperienza sono la bilancia della verità” (sense and experience are the scales of truth)—is subjected to an articulation and to a specific programming. The point of departure of scientific knowledge is the fact, the given of experience. Science in its laws grasps what is common in the facts, classifying and abstracting. Any other pretense or attempt will bring us to metaphysical mythology: Science searches for facts. Through observation and experimentation, science finds, describes, and verifies them. Science contrasts and separates the facts according to similarities, placing them in some distinct groups, because of which it would derive the first generalities. Thereafter, science will compare among themselves the first generalities and distribute them according to categories in order to abstract loftier generalities. Science will gradually repeat this process until it will find, if it is successful, the unique generality that is at the top of all and connects them all into a system. This is the way science is obtained, and because of this method science becomes a great synoptic table or classification of facts (La scienza va in cerca dei fatti. Osservando e sperimentando li trova, li nota, li accerta. Poi li confronta, e li distribuisce secondo le somiglianze e ne forma dei gruppi distinti, sui quali leva le prime generalità. In seguito paragona tra loro queste generalità prime, e le distribuisce in categorie, e ne astrae delle generalità superiori: e ripete il lavoro, di grado in grado, fino a trovare, se vi riesce, quell’unica, che sta in cima a tutte, e le collega in un solo sistema. Cosí si forma la scienza: la quale, per tal modo, viene ad essere un grande quadro sinottico, o una classificazione dei fatti). We should never abandon the grounds where we can find the phenomena. Science and philosophy in their functions of coordination and synthesis are natural formations, in which we began from the “divine” objectivity of the fact, so to arrive at the humanity of an abstract ideal: Facts have their own per se reality. It is an inalterable reality that we are obliged to affirm as we found it. It is a reality that comes with the absolute impossibility of being changed by subtraction or addition of parts. A fact is divine…. On the contrary, the abstract is what we pro-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY duce: we may make it more specific or more general…. The abstract, the ideal, the principle is what the human beings produced. (Il fatto ha una propria realtà per sé. Una realtà inalterabile, una realtà che noi siamo costretti ad affermare tale quale è data e la troviamo: coll’assoluta impossibilità di toglierne o di aggiungervi nulla. Dunque il fatto è divino…. E l’astratto invece lo formiamo noi: possiamo formarlo piú speciale o piú generale…. Dunque l’astratto, l’ideale, il principio è umano).

It was in the text of Psicologia that Ardigò began setting down through the concept of the unity of the psychophysical substance the bases of his construction. The beginning point is sensation, which is the primary datum, from which all the successive determinations and distinctions will derive. In the sensation the antithesis subject-object, outside-inside, “I” and “non-I” are not yet present. Sensation, because everything is reduced to sensations, is truly the originary indistinguishable, the primitive Indistinct: Being in its intuitively perceptive conception, is pregnant with every reality.... The whole subsists, as a universal and unique substratum, in an infinity of co-existences and successions correlative among themselves, and expressing in various ways the essence of being, both as substance and as force, in every thing and in every fact. This whole reveals itself in the psychic effects, in which correspondently the formation of the heterosynthesis or of matter, and of auto-synthesis or of the psyche emerge (Nella sua concezione intuitivamente percettiva, pregna di ogni realtà…. Il tutto che sussiste, quale substratum universale unico, in una infinità di coesistenze e di successioni fra loro correlative, ed esprimenti in vario modo l’essenza di esso, e come sostanza e come forza, e cioè in ogni cosa e in ogni fatto: e rilevantesi negli effetti psichici, nei quali in corrispondenza emergono le formazioni dell ’etero-sintesi o della materia, e dell’autosintesi o della psiche). Matter and force; the “I” and the “non-I”; the auto-synthesis and the heterosynthesis are the processes in which the universal rhythm of nature manifests itself. This rhythm presided over the formation of the solar system; we find it in every sector and aspect of our experience. This rhythm is the process due to which the distinct derives from the indistinct, which, if taken, cannot be explained “because explanation is distinction, and distinction is negation of the indistinct. The Indistinct is the sameness of the immediate and is never eliminated by the distinction, which does not destroy sameness.” Sameness always remains. The absolute fundamental unity, which is required in order to have naturalness, demands as well sameness. The theory of psycho-physic substance of Psicologia was becoming in La formazione naturale nel fatto del Sistema solare (1877) the theory of the In-

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distinct, losing in determinacy what was gained in extension. In Psicologia, the beginning point was the concreteness of sensation in which the two processes were rooted in the differentiation originating the “I” and “non-I,” as posterius in respect to the primitive unity of sensing. In La formazione naturale nel fatto del Sistema solare, experience, in the originary indistinction of matter and force, on which all concrete distinctions germinate, loses its priority. The reason is that Ardigò believed to have reached a fact more solid than that of the psycho-physic substance. In reality, the psycho-physic substance remained the effective ubi consistam of his system: The distinct of matter implies the continuity of co-existence of space, and the distinct of force implies the continuity in succession in time. Given that in reality matter becomes the same as force, the conclusion is that any real thing will be able to be represented by the point of intersection of two lines (Se il distinto della materia implica il continuo della coesistenza ossia dello spazio, e il distinto della forza il continuo nella successione ossia nel tempo: e nella realtà la materia si immedesima con la forza: ne viene che un reale qualunque potrà essere rappresentato dal punto di intersecazione di due linee). In other words, any real thing will find itself at the point of encounter between space and time, between matter and force. This natural and fundamental fact, the temporalization of space or the coincidence, anterior to any distinction between temporal and spatial (“I” and “non-I”), would precisely be the sensation. We read in Unità di coscienza, “The elementary sensation is a datum that is certain, and from it the positive science can take its beginning” (la sensazione elementare è un dato certo, dal quale può prendere le mosse la scienza positiva). It is from this datum and in it, but not beside it that the various natural formations develop. Humeanly—Ardigò cites Hume with honor—the “I,” psychism, objects, bodies, everything is in its way to becoming distinguished and condensed through processes of successive distinction. It is always a question of phenomena, which group together, connect, and condense on the original and unique background of the Indistinct: “Positing the psyco-physical substance, we have overcome idealism, we have indicated that … the psychophysical datum of sensation … is indifferently subjective or objective, it is anterior to what is called “I” and “non-I.” It can become the one or the other by means of the mechanism of the cognitive process … through which the sensible appears now internal, now external.” Briefly, matter and spirit are not primary data but successive formations that are determined in the cognitive process. Concerning the Fatto psicologico della percezione (1882–1886), Ardigò again writes: Positivism, ascertaining and developing the previous doctrines of Locke, Hume, and other associationists … has demonstrated that materiality and mentality are not primitive and simple concepts, but the

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY unique results from different combinations of the common indifferent elements of the cognitive representation. Positivism has demonstrated that spirit and body, to which materiality and mentality separately refer, are not ultimate, separate, and opposed substances, but only separate groups of distinct series of sensitive phenomena, which were formed in the mind as the effect of the psychological intense activity (Il positivismo constatando e sviluppando le dottrine precedenti di Locke, di Hume, e degli altri associazionisti … dimostrò che la materialità e la mentalità sono concetti non primitivi e semplici, ma risultati unicamente da combinazioni diverse degli elementi comuni indifferenti della rappresentazione conoscitiva; e che lo spirito e il corpo, ai quali la mentalità e la materialità separatamente si riferiscono, non sono sostanze ultime opposte ma soltanto gruppi separati di serie distinte di fenomenalità sensitive, formatisi nella mente per effetto del lavorio psicologico).

Ardigò truly wanted to go back to Hume, but waited to free him from his implicit subjectivism, depersonalizing completely the Indistinct, and avoiding the fall into any form of absolute phenomenalism. If we wish to give value to his words, it will be only on the background of consciousness, within the limits of a consciousness lying underneath everything, that this process of distinction has meaning. Everything is formed because of sensation and sensation is consciousness, even though not yet the affirmation of a definite subject before an object. Consciousness, in its dawn, would be the obscure sensation that is immanent to primordial nature, but it is still and always sense. Ardigò often states Nature in terms that are almost like those of Bruno, and in the meaning above used, but, at other times, he appears to have forgotten such a fecund position. Another point of the doctrine that Ardigò posited concerning the attempted reconciliation of order with chaos is not without difficulty. The universe, or better the universal process, which advances from the Indistinct to the distinct, does not proceed at random but according to a plan, a profound necessity, an intimate order. He stated, “The wisest rationality always exists, even when we could say that there is disorder in the parts, and that these parts fail in their scope.” This order is merely a mechanical order, and it excludes all finality: The greatest wonder in the order of nature, as we know it today, consists in the prodigious diversity of things, which compose it, and the inexhaustible variability of forms, which continuously succeed each other. It is the result of a simple mechanical activity, of nothing but collisions and motions (La maggior meraviglia nell’ordine della natura, quale oggi si conosce, sta in ciò, che la diversità prodigiosa delle cose, che lo compongono, e la variabilità inesauribile delle forme, che vi si vanno continuamente sostituendo, è il risultato di un semplice lavoro meccanico, cioè di null’altro che urti e movimenti).

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It is not a providential plan but a mechanical accommodation, like a fistful of dice that are agitated and thrown (come un pugno di dadi, che si agitano e si gettano); in every distinction of the distinct there is the virtuality of infinite accommodations: Experience reveals to me not only this propriety of the Indistinct of distinguishing itself within an order, and of doing this for an intrinsic natural necessity. It reveals to me also, at the same time, that its virtuality is not just for an order alone, but also for an infinity of orders (L’esperienza non mi rivela solo questa proprietà dell’indistinto, di distinguersi in un ordine, e ciò per necessità intrinseca ossia naturale. Mi rivela anche, nello stesso tempo, che la virtualità sua non è per un ordine solo, sibbene per una infinità di ordini). In every distinction, an infinite opens and then closes. The antithesis orderchaos is composed. From all this, liberty is not born, though contingency is stated. Liberty is asserted only with the admission of a conscious decision, which is what Ardigò implies in La psicologia when he concludes, “The human being, in the specialty of acts that characterize it, follows the inspiration of an ideality. The human being tends to incarnate a form that does not exist, and in a certain way, to drag it out of nothing. And this is equivalent to saying that its work is a creation” (L’uomo, in quella specialità di atti che lo caratterizza, segue l’ispirazione di una idealità: tende, cioè, ad incarnare una forma che non esiste, e a trarla in certo modo dal nulla. Che è quanto dire la sua opera è una creazione). Order exists in reality. It is a rhythm or a uniform movement of an aspect of reality; a guise or direction of the process of distinction in the womb of the Indistinct. Now, then, as Ardigò loves to repeat— verum ipsum factum—sensation is the only one “of which we have consciousness.” Then again, given that, in the distinct, the subject corresponds to the object, the rhythm of experience comes to correspond to the rhythm of objective reality. The wave of experience is “the logical imperative,” the rule of the logic. Ardigò insists repeatedly on the relativity of logic, as in Relatività della logica umana (1881), and considered it in diverse kinds of mental organization. These organizations, according to Ardigò, find some limitations, which constitute the categories, which are now devoid of any transcendental signification. Here, let us refer to the precise terms used by Ardigò in La ragione (Padua, 1894), ch. 10: If some soft dough is pressed from above to come out of a certain hollow cylinder, whose bottom is closed, save for a hole of a certain size and form, what would issue from the cylinder would have the size and form of that same hole. This gives you a general idea of Immanuel Kant, with the only difference that he considers the schemes of the psychic conception as transcendental forms of the subject, meanwhile they instead depend from the physical functionalism of the cerebral or-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY gan, and they are nothing else than the rhythms of experience (Se della pasta molle, premuta di sopra per uscire dal disotto di un cilindro cavo, inferiormente chiuso, deve passare per un buco di una certa grandezza e forma, al di fuori non potrà apparire se non colla forma e grandezza determinate dal buco medesimo. Qui insomma siamo colla idea generale di E. Kant; colla differenza soltanto, che egli considera gli schemi della concezione psichica, come forme trascendenti del soggetto, mentre invece essi dipendono dalla funzionalità fisica dell’organo cerebrale, e quindi non sono altro che ritmi dell’esperienza).

Ardigò exposed for the first time his ideas on practical philosophy in the article “Morale dei positivisti” that appeared on 28 April 1878 in Rivista Repubblicana of Milan. We find in this article always alive his fervid enthusiasm for idealities, and a clear awareness of the ties of human communication, without which to speak of moral life would have no meaning. Ardigò’s ethics insists on three points: independence from creeds and from presuppositions of a metaphysic or theological nature; reality of the existence of idealities; and morality consisting in sociality. He clarified by saying, “The ideality that imposes absolutely itself on the human will and dominates his egoistic tendencies is affirmation of morality. The egoism that rules human actions is negation of morality” (L’ideale, che s’impone assolutamente al volere dell’uomo, e ne domina le tendenze egoistiche; ecco l’affermazione della moralità. L’egoismo, che regola le sue azioni; eccone la negazione). The ethical universal is sociality. Does the social nature of human beings justify and truly form a basis for the morality of sociality? The history of human idealities confirms that such a consideration does not yet justify the value of a norm. The same principle of sociality, in order to obtain fully its significance must find its profound roots in a moral conscience. 4. Simone Corleo Simone Corleo from Salemi, a solitary Sicilian thinker, in which is reflected something of the old philosophical tradition of Monreale and Palermo, in “Rivista di filosofia scientifica,” showed delineations of affinities and discordances with positivism. The Sicilian schools that existed in eighteenth century were open to Spinozian influences with Vincenzo Miceli, and in Benedetto D’Acquisto, predecessor of Corleo at the University of Palermo, and author of Sistema di Scienza universale (1850), Leibnizian hints were present, though his book was all dedicated to the construction of grandiose metaphysical structures. Corleo shared an affinity with the positivists, particularly in their point of departure: “The unique starting point of science is observation. Which one is the goal that the scientist must choose to attain? Which method should it select so it could move steadily from the observation to this goal? This is where our differences will begin” (La base unica della scienza è nell’osservazione.

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Quale però il fine che si deve prefiggere lo scienziato e quale metodo per arrivare sicuramente dalla osservazione a questo fine? Qui cominciano le nostre differenze). With his metaphysical temper Corleo could not stop at the facts; he aspired at the superior synthesis in which philosophy, in the classical significance of the term, consists. His Filosofia universale (Palermo, 1860–1863, 2 vols.) and Sistema della filosofia universale, ovvero la filosofia dell’identità (Rome, 1879) constitute, in the multiple mass of his writings, the two greater attempts at a total systematization of reality. The fundamental and definitive law of whole reality is the principle of identity, which gradually through experience reveals itself to us in its completeness. Necessity and universality are only needs, anticipations of the same identity, while the constant elements of the representation become the type and the norm of successive elements (priorizzazione, prioritizing). The process of thought, the duty of science, is this continuous process of identification. In Filosofia universale (vol. 2, p. 411), we read: Science searches the absolute in the empirical. Science intends to decompose complex facts into their necessary elements, into those that are identical, or at least proportional, and which when gathered are identical to the entire whole, like the elements of a numeration and of a mathematical measure. The principal defect of the empiricists is that of remaining in the complex and indecomposed fact, or of performing an incomplete analysis of it, and by so doing, they do not arrive at the identity or proportionality of the elements, from which alone the entire whole must necessarily result. If they were to arrive at the whole, they would already be in possession of the necessary and the absolute, and could not say, as unfortunately they say, that a thing is only what the senses affirm, given that with precise elements there would be a correspondent whole (La scienza tende a trovar l’assoluto nell’empirico, cioè tende a decomporre i fatti complessi negli elementi necessari, in quelli che sono identici tra loro, o almeno proporzionali, e che sono insieme identici col tutto intero, come gli elementi della numerazione e della misura in matematica. Però il difetto capitale degli empirici è quello di rimanere nel fatto complessivo e indecomposto, o di farne tutt’al piú un’analisi incompleta, perché cosí non giungono sino all’identità o alla proporzionalità degli elementi, da cui deve necessariamente risultare l’intero; imperocché se vi giungessero sarebbero già in possesso del necessario e dell’assoluto, né potrebbero dire, come dicono purtroppo, che la cosa è soltanto perchè i sensi l’affermano, essendoché con elementi precisi non può non resultare un tutto corrispondente). From the unity of substance, which is the Identical, the one per se subsistent, unreachable in its unity that is the Act, which is always the same Act, intransi-

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tive, we move to the plurality, which is identical to the sum of the many unities (entities), which is the Unity. In Sistema della filosofia universale (par. 86), Corleo says, “The One is always One, always the same One, and Plurality is identical to the collection of the many individual units. Plurality is not a different thing from such a collection, nor it is the production of a single one alone of the single units” (L’uno è sempre uno, sempre lo stesso uno, la pluralità è identica alla collezione delle unità, non è una cosa diversa da essa, né è la produzione di una sola di esse). Quality is reduced to quantity. God is the eternal One in opposition to the temporal units variously aggregated. We have an absolute Pythagorism that becomes a materialistic atomism, in which God has no place, and quality remains inexplicable. The activity of the most important disciples of Ardigò, such as Giovanni Dandolo, Giovanni Marchesini, and Giuseppe Tarozzi, in its more significant expression, falls outside the nineteenth century not only chronologically, but in the development, in the needs felt, and in its new awareness. It would be vain, hereby, to separate those first movements or those manifestations that, though nearer in time to the teacher, received their adequate light from ulterior developments. We cannot remain silent about the work of divulgation of the ideas of positivism that the “Rivista di filosofia scientifica” performed, beginning in Turin in 1881 and continuing until 1891, under the editorship of the psychiatrist Enrico Morselli. Collaborators were persons of different origin and inspiration, like Barzellotti, Labanca, and Gaetano Trezza, the skeptic Trezza, more literatus than philosophus, but the tone of the journal remained predominantly positivistic, though often it gave manifestations of naturalism and materialism. An example of this was Giuseppe Sergi, who was contradicted by another collaborator of the same journal, Ettore Regalia. A pure materialist was Cesare Lombroso who contributed to the diffusion of the ideas of Jacob Moleschott, introducing, in 1869, La circolazione della vita. Moleschott taught in Turin, while Moriz Schiff was in Florence, whose ideas were continued by his disciple Alessandro Herzen, whose phrase, “The spirit is matter in its melting condition” (materia in isgelo) attracted attention. While Enrico Fermi was denying free will and moral responsibility, Alfonso Asturaro, through evolutionism, was explaining mechanically the passage from the moral of egotism to the one of disinterest. Among the vicissitudes of the positivistic school, Angelo Brofferio deserves a place apart. He was a learned researcher, full of curiosity in psychological and gnoseological problems, and concerned with the demonstration that the a priori is like the accumulated experience in the history of the race. The relativity of knowledge, which he affirmed, if in the scientific ground precluded the reaching of the absolute, in the moral ground allowed the basis for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, in favor of which credence spiritism appeared to offer a confirming experience. The autumn and the winter that to a famous historian appeared to have descended and enveloped German thought at the end of the nineteenth century

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appeared also to have been falling over the successors of the philosophy of the Risorgimento. In men like Spaventa and Ardigò, the flame of philosophy was certainly not dead when, fighting in opposite grounds, they affirmed the agelong exigency of its limits and at the same time the generous impulse of transcending them. From their discordant concordance, the most significant forces of the twentieth century were to be nourished. In the vast and inexhaustible Crocean research, in its humanism, came to converge and find satisfaction the most vital positivistic exigencies, while in the construction of Gentile the idealistic Fichtian instance enjoyed an enthusiastic return. In Bernardino Varisco, Piero Martinetti, Francesco De Sarlo, Pantaleo Carabellese, and many others, some of the most robust attitudes of the nineteenth century were preserved and prolonged.

Part Seven ITALIAN THOUGHT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Chapters 37 and 38)

Thirty-Seven EPILOGUE: REBIRTH AND DECLINE OF IDEALISM 1. Orientations of the Italian Philosophy At the end of a vast and detailed history of contemporary philosophy in Italy, a Swedish scholar, Alf Nyman, introduced the individual philosophical positions in a series of almost facetious but sufficiently indicative formulations. Nyman underlined the measure in which different national and European ingredients became part of the elaborations more or less systematic of Italian philosophers, from Francesco Bonatelli and Roberto Ardigò to 1960s. The result was a Herbartian Bonatelli instead of Rosminian, a debtor to Lotze instead of to Herbart. Nyman presented Ardigò as depending from Comte more than from Pomponazzi, from Spencer more than from Comte, and in spite of the “rhythm” of being, directly from J. Stuart Mill. Giovanni Marchesini, just to take the most affectionate disciple of Ardigò, was made to derive, on one hand, from psychologists like Frédéric Paulhan, Laurent Dugas, and James Sully, and on the other hand, from the book of Guglielmo Ferrero on I simboli (Turin, 1898); nothing, instead, from Hans Vaihinger, and very little from Ardigò. Tarozzi was said to be tied to Alfred Fouillée and, particularly, to Bergson, not to Bonatelli or Ardigò, from whose school he came. Nyman’s observations should be kept present under a double profile: for the efficacy with which they underlie the strict connection of the official Italian positivism with the European culture, or its clear dependency from theories circulating outside Italy, and for the energetic emphasis on an univocally characterized choice concerning the dominant topics and personalities. We should mention two names alone: Mill and Bergson. This means that—and the testimony is important, as the one that comes from a non-Italian scholar, educated in Germany at the school of Vaihinger, and who has remained in touch with the great worldly philosophy—the Italian Positivism was not provincial, or isolated in the contemporary cultural context. At most, it could be said that it was constantly stimulated by instances destined to be resolved in the directions that were irrationalistic, contingent, of “criticism of science,” and perhaps “idealistic,” instead of rigorously “scientific,” rationalistic, or even “materialistic.” The instances of Marchesini and Tarozzi are exemplar

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for their opening toward contingent positions and Pragmatism. In reality, the last decades of the century saw the progressive wearing out of the major positions that accompanied the formation of the Unity of the Kingdom of Italy. In Southern Italy, the Hegelianism in the early writings of Spaventa was loaded with revolutionary thrills and, in its own way, was a “philosophy of the revolution.” In 1850, Villari was writing to Spaventa, “To make Hegel understood in Italy would be regenerating Italy.” This Hegelianism opened progressively itself to a “positive” problematic, even though anti-positivistic, if we want to use the terms of Antonio Labriola. It is true that Spaventa commented bitterly the multiple “cycles of waltz” of individuals like Pietro Siciliani, who was always at the margin of contrasting positions, with the illusive program of intermediating between them, and especially with the coquettish pretence of appearing contemporary. Spaventa also lamented the defection of the acute and honest Andrea Angiulli, who arrived at his own positivism through a series of German (from Feuerbach to Du Bois-Reymond), French (Comte), and English (the Mills) experiences. With all of this, Spaventa understood the importance of Darwin, the necessity of considering the problematic of the Herbartians, and felt the need of discussing the philosophies of experience. Raffaele De Cesare, right after the death of Spaventa, wrote in Fanfulla della Domenica on 4 March 1883, mentioning, “For fifteen years he has been studying modern positivism in the three schools, German, English, and French.” Traces of this intense discussion exist. It is possible to make many accusations against Spaventa. He did not give always a clear formulation of his thesis and did not present always a rigorous systematization of his views, but one thing we cannot say against him, that he maintained provincial limits or was of narrow views. Certainly, the seductions of his true “Gioberti” did not allow him to be insensitive. He felt strongly the fascination of the national philosophical tradition, not only of the rebellious thinkers of the Renaissance, but of Vico, Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti, although re-interpreted in an European language through Kant and Hegel. We cannot forget the historical situation when he had to delineate the “circulation” of thought under the double urgency of the happenings in the political actual process and of taking a polemic position within that same political process. This does not mean that he elaborated his historical vision and historiographic formulation at the service and in favor of politics, as “cultural politics.” This means instead that we cannot understand some of his positions outside the urgency of that Italian revolution at the center of which he found himself up to the time when he returned to Naples, and beyond. To discuss Spaventa and his historical interpretations in terms of the metaphysics more or less of Gioberti, in a pretended rigorous analysis of speculative structure, means to prevent our serious understanding of his vicissitudes. In some ways, his itinerary was exemplar, especially if we pay attention to the variation of his polemic: from the fight against the minimal “renewal” of Mamiani and of the “Italian philosophy” in a Platonic key, to the more gradual discussion with positivism, with the awareness

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of the importance of the adversaries. A parallel and in a certain measure symmetrical position was that of Francesco de Sanctis, who from a minute study of Hegel was destined between 1872 and 1882 to move to the activism of focusing on the new scientific exigencies by now dominating the horizon of the European culture. Famous was the inaugural oration in Naples of 16 November 1872, “Science is the reconstitution of the limits of consciousness, the rehabilitation of all the spheres of life…. Society cannot live a long time on ideas that do not generate and do not organize” (La scienza altro non è se non ricostituzione de’ limiti della coscienza, la riabilitazione di tutte le sfere della vita … la società non può vivere lungamente sopra idee che non generano, che non organizzano). This oration and the conference in Rome on 11 March 1883 constituted the precise terms of such a situation: At one time, our spirit was disposed to the search of ideas and concepts of things, the esprit des choses, the philosophy of history, of language, of jurisprudence. Today, we have a real interest in studying things in themselves, in their exteriority, in their nature, and life. The foundations of our education were grammars, logic, and metaphysics…. Today … we want the laboratory diagnosis also in the sciences of the spirit (Una volta il nostro spirito era disposto a cercare le idee o i concetti delle cose, l’esprit des choses, filosofia della storia, filosofia del linguaggio, filosofia del diritto. Oggi prendiamo un vivo interesse a studiare le cose in se stesse, nella loro esteriorità, nella loro natura, nella loro vita. Le basi dei nostri studi erano grammatiche, logiche, metafisiche…. Oggi … vogliamo il laboratorio anche nelle scienze spirituali). De Sanctis was well aware of the significance of all the movement of thought that spoke so much about science, method, facts, in opposition to too much talking about ideas, speculations, and systems. Unfortunately, on rigorous philosophical ground, it was necessary to oppose to “vaporous metaphysics” some rigorous logical views, some clarifications of method, some organic structures of plans for research and, finally, some hypotheses or general views. On the contrary, superficial generalities and rash generalizations came to dominate on the ground on which the new combination of specific inquiries, critical reflections, and comprehensive views was supposed instead to happen. If the demolition of hurried idealistic or spiritualistic constructions had been easy, very difficult had been instead the synthesis until when, because of their roughness, the new more or less conscious metaphysics brought people to regret the ancient ones, more polished and subtle. 2. The Heritage from Positivism For the most part the tendency of the Italian positivism of the nineteenth century remained that of building true and proper “cosmogonies” instead of con-

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structing “philosophies of nature.” The irresistible temptation of identifying philosophy with a discourse on the first principles, on the formation of the solar system, on the origin of life, and on other problems and concepts of this kind possessed certainly great relevance. The approach the positivists loved to use was not that of a proper chain of reasoning connected to experimental data but that of moving by jumps, as if on the wings of fantasy instead of with the subsidies of the intellect. In 1883 De Sanctis wrote: If Darwin were only a naturalist, his influence would have remained in that specialized circle of studies. Darwin was not only the historian, but also the philosopher of nature and from the natural facts and laws extracted a complete theory concerning the most important problems of our existence…. As Hegel’s name before, so Darwin’s name became the standard of all the similar doctrines that appeared afterward, positivism, realism, and materialism…. The days of my life, I spent reading the works of Charles Darwin were the most beautiful! (Se Darwin fosse stator solo un naturalista, la sua influenza sarebbe rimasta in quella cerchia speciale di studi. Ma Darwin non fu solo lo storico, fu il filosofo della natura, e dai fatti e dalle leggi naturali cavò tutta una teoria intorno ai problemi piú importanti della nostra esistenza…. Come innanzi a lui Hegel, il suo nome fu bandiera di tutte le dottrine affini che sorsero poi, positivismo, realismo, materialismo…. Giorni belli della mia vita furono quelli che io spesi a leggere le opere di Carlo Darwin). Less enjoyable must have been certainly the days spent reading some “cosmogonic novels,” in which the principle of becoming was extended in arbitrary and generic forms to the whole nature. When Nyman, apropos of Ardigò, indicated the Spencerian component, he underlined the tendency, very strong also in the writings of sociology and morality, of reducing the concrete anthropological and psychological analysis at the exclusive advantage of more audacious cosmological visions. It was Spencer, not Comte and even less Cattaneo, who influenced Ardigò toward an old metaphysics instead of a modern positivism. Ardigò himself, not by chance, had the opportunity several times to declare that he did not move at all in the footsteps of the major European positivists. In 1882, presenting the first volume of the Opere complete, in the most famous one, La psicologia come scienza positiva (Opere, vol. 1, p. 58), which appeared first in 1870, Ardigò confessed: From my youth, of all the philosophers, I have studied only the ancient metaphysicians, for a long time and with total application. To this, I have added the study of the natural sciences that I did instead on the most recent publications. My positivism is the effect of my individual inquiry. The methods and the data learned in the natural sciences moved and helped me. On my natural initiative and with my poor

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forces I applied the methods to philosophical questions that, for my practice with books of metaphysics, had become most familiar to me. Wrong are those people who called me a Comtean or a follower of any other positivist author. I have never read any book of A. Comte. Of all the other positivists I read some passages from a book of J. Mill, some other passages from two books of S. Mill. Afterward I read also the first part of the book of H. Spencer, First Principles, in which I noticed some fundamental ideas different from mine and that I had to condemn. Of the few other ideas I know of foreign positive doctrines that are in fashion, I must say that they are only lucky guesses occasioned by notices found accidentally and read in scientific periodicals (Dei filosofi ho studiato—ma a lungo e con tutta la lena, e fino dalla prima giovinezza—solo i vecchi metafisici. A questo studio ho accompagnato poi sempre quello delle scienze naturali, che ho fatto invece sulla letteratura piú recente. Il mio positivismo filosofico quindi non è che l’effetto della mia indagine individuale, mossa e aiutata dai metodi e dai dati appresi colle dette scienze naturali, e applicata, per mia propria e naturale iniziativa e colle sole mie povere forze, alle questioni filosofiche, che, per la pratica fatta nei libri dei metafisici, mi erano divenute famigliarissime. Perciò hanno torto quelli che mi chiamano comtiano, o seguace di altro autore positivista. Non ho mai letto nessuno dei libri di A. Comte. Di tutti gli altri positivisti ho letto solamente qualche tratto di un libro di J. Mill, di due di S. Mill, e piú tardi della prima parte dei Primi Principi di H. Spence, nella quale poi notai delle idee fondamentali diverse dalle mie e che ho dovuto riprovare. Le poche altre idee, che pure conosco delle dottrine positive straniere in voga, non sono che indovinamenti occasionati dai cenni accidentalmente incontrati qua e là nei periodici scientifici). This, in its complex, was true. Ardigò stood where the old metaphysics and the recent scientific results, reached and made known by others, were coming together, with the effect of producing a most fragile “philosophy of nature” in which the mediation between facts and ideal order was slipping away. The gain over the “philosophies of nature” of Hegelian origin was very little and their difference did not seem remarkable. “Rhythms” and “trilogies” could at times reveal subtle ties of kinship. Ardigò himself once cited with great respect the Turin’s prolusion of 1863, when Jakob Moleschott, discussing the unity of all life (L’unità della vita), confessed: Today, though for many years I have been no longer a docile partisan of Hegel, I will try to apply my trilogy to the development of the science that studies life. In my attempt at doing this, I must underline at first the fact that in this scientific research the different time periods are less noticeable, less identifiable, and especially less exclusive than the great partitions of the universal history with which they don’t coin-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY cide (Oggi, avvegnaché da molti anni io non sia piú docile partigiano dell’Hegel, pure mi accingerò ad applicare la mia trilogia allo sviluppo della scienza che studia la vita. Ma ciò tentando fa d’uopo rilevare a tutta prima che in questo campo scientifico i periodi diversi sono meno scolpiti, meno limitati e sopratutto meno esclusivi che quei grandi stadii della istoria universale, con cui inoltre non coincidono).

Moleschott was a scientist who followed the path that went through Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, to whose “immortal work” he sang a hymn at the beginning of the physiological observations in Lettere fisiologiche concerning the circle of life. In 1852, Moleschott had covered this subject in Der Kreislauf des Lebens. Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe directly addressed to Baron Justus von Liebig, author of Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologie. Ardigò read Moleschott’s book when it appeared in Italian, in 1869, in the translation of Cesare Lombroso. The reference to the materialist Moleschott and, through him, to Hegel— a similar discourse could be valid also apropos of Moriz Schiff, “a monist closer to the idealism of Hegel than to the materialism of Haeckel”—is not by accident. Ardigò praised at least once Villari as his precursor, who in 1854 in the essay Sull’origine e sul progresso della filosofia della storia, referring to the “triadic rhythm” of Vico, Hegel, and Comte, pointed out the need of “somehow moderating, with an a posteriori research … the method held during most recent years in Germany of constructing a priori science.” The universal rhythms must not force the facts because the facts develop and unfold by themselves according to laws. Moleschott, by now Professor of Physiology in Turin, in the prolusion of 1863, observed: You know that the followers of Hegel went crazy about the use of trilogy. No matter how much they have abused this tripartite division, they have elevated this privileged number to mean (I dare to say) a logical sacred formula. We cannot deny that at times a profound reason would emerge from actually applying this principle, which in their hands assumed the aspect of a rational machine (Voi sapete i seguaci del Hegel andar perduti per la trilogia. E per quanto abbiano abusato della divisione tripartita, elevando il numero prediletto al significato direi quasi di un santo logico, non si può per questo disconoscere che talvolta una ragione profonda risplenda dall’attuazione di cotesto principio il quale nelle loro mani assume l’aspetto di una macchina razionale). It is possible to comprehend that a scientist of Hegelian origins would pass from factual observations to the affirmation of “profound and universal relationships” of fundamental “order, connection, symmetry,” and of “absolute laws of natural necessity.” What is instead not justifiable is that a “positivist” would be pleased with a philosophy of nature so equally ingenuous and dog-

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matic. On Hegel, Ardigò wrote, “His philosophy, no matter how admirable, is not the philosophy of the future.” It happened that the positivism of Ardigò possessed the strong flavor of a “theology” turned upside down into “a philosophy of nature” through an operation less conscious than the one used among the Hegelians. 3. Positivism and Socialism We know by now that the mentors of many of the first positivists and “materialists” were Hegelian: of Villari as well as of Angiulli, of Schiff as of Moleschott. Not so for Ardigò who, in the complex, remained extraneous to Hegel. Thus, the lesson of the ancient metaphysicians and his own theological mentality gave to his “naturalism’—it should be necessary to insist by saying to his “philosophy of nature”—the flavor of certain “cosmogonies” of the late Renaissance filtered through a Romantic atmosphere, and made noble by a “scientific” language, at times, with a vague Spencerian taste. In this sense, the line of the positivism of Ardigò diverged more and more from the forms of “positive philosophy” or “materialism” that matured through the dissolution of Hegelianism. If Ardigò’s positivism had in common with those forms incongruities and limitations, it had none of their solid logical structure, dialectic rigor, or “real” humanism. In 1898, against the “historical materialism,” Ardigò sentenced: The power by which the animal is and acts is the power of nature, which invests the animal and obliges to act in multiform directions, while transforming itself variously in the organism of the animal. Let us assume that this power is the light of the sun, and let us reduce to it the materialistic conception of history in place of the economic reason. Yes, let us say the light of the sun, but understood in such a way that to it we would be able to reduce the fact of the impulsive ideality of the human being (La forza, ond’è, e agisce l’animale, è quella della natura, che lo investe e lo sforza ad agire in sensi multiformi, trasformandosi variamente nel suo organismo. Poniamo che sia la luce del sole, alla quale si dovrebbe ridurre la concezione materialistica della storia, anziché alla ragione economica. Alla luce del sole, intesa in modo che ad essa si possa ridurre il fatto della idealità impulsiva dell’uomo). These are Ardigò’s words extracted from a writing inserted by Alessandro Groppali in his work on Roberto Ardigò, la Sociologia e il Materialismo storico. It should be underlined that the expression “la luce del sole” is taken in substitution of “la ragione economica.” It is obvious that all of this had little to do with Marx. Not equally obvious is the fact that the great merit of Ardigò’s positivism was that of offering, with an aspect of scientific respectability, a good surrogate to the traditional religion, to those groups of middle

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culture Italians who had brought about the Unity of Italy in fighting against the Church. On the contrary, what contributed to the creation of many ideological and political confusions, and helped to discredit positivism and socialist thought, was the decision of establishing a connection between this type of positivism (of “la luce del sole” substituting “la ragione economica”) and Marxism. In this sense, it would be sufficient to think of the many triadic combinations discovered by Enrico Ferri in his famous work of 1894, Socialismo e Scienza positiva: Darwin-Spencer-Marx. In it, we read, “The scientific and political work of Karl Marx … completes the great renovating triad of the scientific modern thought, with Darwin and Spencer. Alas, they stopped halfway from the last conclusions of religious-social-political order, which they could have derived from their indestructible premises of fact.” Ardigò was certainly not Ferri, but it was always under the label of “positivism” that we saw such an amusing medley introduced, in which Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, Marx, and Spencer went arm-in-arm to listen to the Sermon of the Mountain and to venerate Tolstoy. It was to this “positivism” that the leaders of the labor movement addressed the request to obtain the doctrinal instruments and the ideologies to oppose “the grotesque lies that buttress the hill-top castle of the bourgeoisie” (alle grottesche menzogne che fungono da barbacani alla bicocca borghese). This, at least, is what Filippo Turati was writing in 1892 in one of the first number of Critica Sociale. While presenting a work of Ardigò, Turati went to praise Villari who had ordered the introduction in the schools’ programs of the teaching of the theory of Darwin, and appeared to have set Villari against—everybody can see with how much truth—the “Grand’Oriente of Rome” and the “Venerable Brothers of the various Lodges.” Others were writing that positivism, a scientific philosophy, has become, in the second half of the nineteenth century, what materialism was in the eighteenth century, a philosophy, in other terms, which, while it has the consent of the greater part of the educated population, possesses in itself the requisites needed for the solution of social conflicts. There was a time when religions were everything, the philosophies counted for nothing…. Today, the age of revealed religions is no more…. No longer being possible to rely on the safety of the ultra-sensible, the intellects have understood the necessity of relying on nature itself, on facts. Thus positivism was born, which is the philosophy of facts, in opposition to the traditional metaphysics, which is the philosophy of abstractions (È diventato, nella seconda metà del secolo XIX, quel che fu il materialismo nel secolo XVIII, una filosofia, in altri termini, la quale, mentre raccoglie il consenso della maggior parte delle persone colte, aduna in sé i requisiti che si richiedono per risolvere i conflitti sociali. Una volta le religioni erano tutto, le filosofie niente…. Oggi l’era delle religioni rivelate sembra chiusa…. Non potendosi piú aspettare la salute dal soprasensibile gli intelletti hanno compreso la necessità di chiederla alla natura stessa, ai fatti.

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Nacque cosí il positivismo che è la filosofia dei fatti, in antitesi alla metafisica tradizionale, che è la filosofia delle astrazioni). Of this equivocation, socialism and positivism were going to pay the price. At the root of all this were the conditions of Italy that, after having accomplished the Unity, was at the mercy of unbalances and backwardness, which were reverberating and reflected in the inadequate analysis of the situation and in the absence of an adequate position taken with critical consciousness. Resentment and discouragement, bitter invective, but also a greater penetration was found in individuals of other theoretic origin, perhaps Hegelian, certainly not positivistic, even if opened to the comprehension of the meaning of the new ideas. Persons like Spaventa, Villari, and, at the end of the century, Labriola, and the young Croce, were capable of impatient or exasperating positions, but little inclined to confusions and equivocations. The paragraphs of Ardigò, presented in 1892 with so much emphasis by Turati, from Senso comune e suggestione, wished to illumine the origin of ideas, “which, too, are a natural formation in the field of the human thought,” were an exceptional example of equivocations. The ideas, connected with the process of the whole, proceed by themselves in a reality that proceeds at different autonomous parallel planes. For the positivist, “The fact of mental formation is analogous to any other natural formation.” Mental formations are necessary elaborations of groups of illuminati, “The ideas of our culture are slow formations due for the most part to the most laborious work of a few privileged minds. Then they suggested them to their contemporaries, and these passed them on to those who are born from them” (Le idee della nostra cultura sono formazioni lente dovute massimamente all’opera faticosissima di poche menti previlegiate, suggerite ai coetanei, e da questi a quelli che nascono da loro). The rapport between ideas, idealities, situations and human groups, “inferior” or “superior,” offered no great light to those who heard the Paduan prolusion of 1888 on the subject matter of what thought is. The philosopher said, “Thought is produced in the brain like lightning in the clouds, like phosphorescence in a substance, which, when rubbed, becomes luminous” (Il Pensiero si produce nel cervello come il lampo nelle nubi, come la fosforescenza in una sostanza, che stropicciata si fa luminosa). We must realize that though positivism as an ideology of socialism was born and died in an ambiguity, the work of Ardigò was influential, because it rejected all separation between the proceedings of philosophizing and those of the scientific inquiry. Philosophy has no instruments or privileged objects of its own; philosophy must tie itself to the sciences; it must not substitute and continue theology. No matter how “barbarian” Ardigò’s polemic against the theological-metaphysical mystifications was, it was efficacious. His last short writing, when he reached nineties, “Natura Naturans,” of 17 September 1918, was a moving piece that revealed how strong “the call of the

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forest” (il richiamo della foresta) was within him. His conception of the world adapted very well to the urgencies of all those peoples, and of that class of peoples who constituted the greater part of the organizing elite of the Italy of the post-Unity period. 4. The Crisis of Positivism The positivism of Ardigò was an ideology suitable to United Italy, to the new Kingdom of Italy achieved with the symbolic capture of Rome, in 1780, through the Breccia di Porta Pia, the breach that the Italian troops made in the walls of the city. This event ended the temporal power of the popes, which Giordano Bruno, as the new sort of saint on the deconsecrated altars, had foresaw and celebrated previously. In 1897, Gaetano Salvemini, with his usual humor, presented an article, “Il partito socialista a Imola,” in the journal Critica Sociale, in which he explained: To be a socialist it is enough to have a good heart, believe in the evolution, be very intelligent, desire the regeneration of the all inhabited and uninhabited universe, and be ready to suffer for the idea…. When the innkeeper wants to make the stew with the hare but has no hare, it uses the cat. This is what we did, wanting at all costs to make a socialist stew, in the absence of the proletarian hare we have cooked the bourgeois cat, small, thin, if we wish, but bourgeois (Basta avere buon cuore, credere nell’evoluzione, essere molto intelligenti, desiderare la rigenerazione di tutto l’universo abitato e disabitato, sentirsi pronto a soffrire per l’idea…. Quando l’oste vuol fare lo stufatino di lepre e non ha la lepre, ci mette il gatto; cosí noi, volendo fare a tutti i costi lo stufatino socialista, in mancanza della lepre proletaria abbiamo cucinato il gatto borghese; piccolo, magro, se si vuole, ma borghese). Salvemini indicated perfectly the components of the positivist socialism and its “monkish way,” or Lorianism as Gramsci would have called it. Lorianism could mean a conglomerate of Darwinian evolutionism, Spencerian sociology, and the comfortable feelings of Ardigò. Turati wrote: When we were young, after having freed ourselves from the Christian Catholic mythology, we were driven by the impetus of the juvenile reaction to even more nihilistic negations. We were searching the psychological ubi consistam that is an indispensable necessity for all those individuals that nature predisposed to “taking life seriously.” Roberto Ardigò was the one to give us some of the most solid stones with which to build our mental and moral character…. A providential event made us the simple correctors of the printer’s proofs of the “Morale dei positivisti,” which was then published in the Rivista repubblicana of Arcangelo Ghisleri. From this derived the custom of spiritual and per-

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sonal rapport with the Teacher. This left a profound mark in our existence (Quando giovani, liberatici appena dalla mitologia cristiana cattolica, portati dall’impeto della reazione giovanile a tutte le negazioni piú nichiliste, cercavamo tuttavia quell’ubi consistam psicologico che è una necessità imprescindibile per tutti coloro cui natura predispone a ‘prendere la vita sul serio’, fu Roberto Ardigò che ci porse alcune delle pietre piú solide del nostro edificio mentale e morale … un provvido caso ci fece semplici correttori di bozze della Morale dei positivisti, che si pubblicava allora nella Rivista repubblicana del Ghisleri; ne nacque una consuetudine di rapporti spirituali e personali col Maestro, che lasciarono una traccia profonda nella nostra esistenza). The Gospel of Ardigò, naturally, came with the science of Darwin and Spencer. For Ardigò, “Scientific socialism was made possible and was determined by the event of the new philosophical and sociological positive doctrines, particularly by that organic complex of methods and views, which are gathered in the double bundle of Darwinian and Spencerian theories.” The “positivism” of the socialist Salvemini was a completely different thing: its character was anthropological and historical, not a naturalistic one. Salvemini traced his line back to Cattaneo, not to Ardigò, and not even to Spencer, but he did not remain extraneous to Labriola, nor completely to Marx. Unfortunately, the positivism of Cattaneo, rich as it was and tied to the most solid Italian tradition, though it was new, had no profound effectiveness. Destined to reemerge during moments of crisis, of decisive historical choices, it remained always an isolated case, a cultural event, which was stimulating but captivating only a minority. Even the most enlightened positivists of the twentieth century, Rodolfo Mondolfo, and especially Alessandro Levi, came to Cattaneo, but with the curiosity of historians instead of with the adhesion of disciples. His defeat, and that of Salvemini his unique important follower, was certainly not a negligible document for the understanding of the situation of the United Italy, which preserved with its post-Risorgimento anticlericalism also a deep bigoted vocation. The celebrated letter of 1868 of Bertrando Spaventa to Angelo Camillo De Meis on “Paolottismo, Positivismo, Razionalismo,” in its acrid and suffered irony, is, like many other things of that most acute man, to be kept and always meditated upon. Spaventa did not miss the heredity of conformism, the need of a devout subjection, the lack of openmindedness, and the defect of an authentic critical spirit, which seemed to him to assign to United Italy the task of “educating eunuchs for all the seraglios of the old and new worlds.” In Italy, the need of a spiritual infallible authority was felt always; the need of a Pontiff, it would not matters, if called Pious IX, or Mazzini, and, at another day, Benedetto Croce. Instead of precise, laborious rational processes, what was always needed, was a religion of spirit, of nature, and at the end—why not?—of liberty. How can we not think of an act of admiration before the conclusive page of the renowned text in “Morale dei

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positivisti,” about looking at the redness of a rose (guardando il rosso di una rosa)? At last, just a veil, the veil of abstract religiosity, constituted the impediment for me to see distinctly what within me generated unconsciously the system of positive doctrines. Once I removed this last veil, I was ready for the new orientation of my thought, which in this way abandoned the anxieties of doubt and rested on the safety of its own positiveness. I acknowledged that human knowledge is the loftiest form of the naturalness, which continues descending down to a minimum in the descending ladder of the animals. It is in this biological function that culminates, through absolute and per se necessary causations, the virtuality that initially reveals itself in the proprieties of the atom. I realized that any reality that can be imagined outside of this eternal cycle was no part of science (Un velo, ancora in ultimo, il velo della religiosità astratta, mi impediva di vedere distintamente quello che in me si era inconsciamente ingenerato, il sistema delle dottrine positive. Tolto questo velo, me le trovai pronte per la orientazione nuova del mio pensiero, che cosí cessò dalle ansie del dubbio e si riposò nella sicurezza della sua positività; riconoscendo, che la gnosi umana è solo la forma piú alta di quella naturalità, che si continua, digradando fino ad un minimo, nella scala discendente degli animali; è la funzione biologica, nella quale culmina, per causazioni assolutamente e per sé necessarie, quella virtualità, che si svela inizialmente nelle proprietà dell’atomo. E che qualunque realtà, immaginata al di fuori di questo circolo eterno, è estranea alla scienza). In “Natura Naturans,” in 1918, Ardigò identified the Indistinct with the creative nature (natura naturans) of Spinoza. Ardigò said, “The natura naturata (created nature), which is for us the Distinct, proceeds from the necessity of the Nature of God, which is the Indistinct” (La Natura naturata—e cosí per noi il Distinto—proviene dalla necessità della Natura di Dio, cioè, dello Indistinto, come noi diciamo). 5. Positivism and Irrationalism At the end of the nineteenth century, Ardigò’s kind of positivism was already in an advanced stage of crisis. Apart from Ardigò, it was without robust personalities, and in the same Ardigò, it had assumed too much the characteristics of a capsizal of a primitive theological view in the naturalism not alien to religious inflections. The group of students of particular disciplines, historical, glottological, anthropological, social, and pedagogical proceeded on their own. The philosophers by profession or, if we wish, the professors of philosophy, began very early to feel the nostalgia for other ideal certainties, for other spiritual dimensions. The philosophers reduced the previous melding of sci-

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ence and philosophy founded mainly on the exercise of reason to second-hand notions, until it translated into a critique of the scientific inquiry and of its instruments, destined to reach the situation in which the value of science itself became the object of a discussion quite superficial and extrinsic. Croce identified the lowest level reached by the official Italian philosophy to have been at the end of the century. He recognized the lifeless and plaintive spiritualism in which Terenzio Mamiani, dead in 1885, prolonged the last Platonic efforts, and the rough and coarse production of Enrico Ferri and Achille Loria that corresponded to the eclecticism of Augusto Conti, who lived until 1905. At the same time, the positivists in crisis, nostalgic for ideals, troubled themselves elaborating ideal positivisms, as Giovanni Marchesini, or gave way to that criticism of science that would consolidate in a new divorce from philosophy. Giuseppe Tarozzi did exactly this. In his major work, Della conoscenza del fatto naturale e umano, of 1896–1897, he placed himself in line with Ernst Mach, Etienne Emile Marie Boutroux, and especially Bergson. With greater rhetoric and less depth, he joined this movement of the destruction of reason that, after a long professional philosophical career, brought him into the arms of faith. This was the edifying conclusion of a large part of the positivist philosophy that already at the end of the century was reduced to a mediocre homily. Croce underlined correctly “the emptiness that was raving in the thought … of the Italians under the influence … of the positivism” of the nineteenth century, and indicated its direct consequences in the spreading of pessimism and depression. He did not make equally evident the intolerable rhetoric of the “beautiful souls” (anime belle) storming in the pages of the philosophers, who with minor art and efficacy were imitating the compositions of the preachers of the Catholic religion, which they so often had opposed. Any person who still dwells in a generic defense of the Italian positivism, without telling definitely the period, without distinguishing the different positions in the different moments, precludes to itself the possibility not only of comprehending the reason of a cultural crisis, but also of penetrating a precise historical situation. In 1899, the book of Marchesini, La crisi del positivismo e il problema filosofico, that of Erminio Troilo, Il misticismo moderno (Turin, 1899), and an anthology of the writings of Tarozzi on indeterminism and freedom, appeared contemporaneously in printing. The tone of these works was always the same. Troilo confirmed, with the statistical data of Professor Enrico Morselli in his hand, the increase in the number of lunatics and idiots, and with the data of Professor Angelo Mosso, he observed that those affected by tuberculosis were in increase. Having thus established a progressive aggravation of physical degeneration and moral depression, in Il misticismo moderno, pp. 310–311, he came to conclude: With true knowledge of laws and phenomena, with true knowledge of the grandiose determinism of nature, we can and must try to eliminate everything that for the fatal necessity of things, of life, and of the past,

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY constitutes a power of resistance in our process toward the future…. This is the true characteristic of the human evolution, conscious and willing, which should not be afraid or stop in front of a morose and blinding production. Human evolution knows and can explain the kind of mysticism that is an enormous mass of suggestions and confusions, of flashes, and mysterious shadows (Nella conoscenza vera delle leggi e dei fenomeni, del determinismo grandioso della natura, noi possiamo e dobbiamo tendere ad eliminare tutto ciò che per la fatale necessità delle cose, della vita, del passato, sta a formare la forza di resistenza verso l’avvenire…. È ciò la vera caratteristica dell’evoluzione umana, evoluzione cosciente e volente, la quale non deve quindi, non può impaurirsi, arrestarsi di fronte ad una produzione morbosa ed acciecante, ch’essa conosce e spiega, come è il misticismo; di fronte a questa massa enorme di nebbia e di suggestioni, di bagliori e di ombre misteriose).

Troilo saw the crisis of society, the approaching of the mystical and irrationalistic currents. He proclaimed the ironclad determinism of natural laws, and concluded with the certainty of the triumph of ideals, “We are the ones who must develop in ourselves forceful energies, healthy energies, intellectual and moral, which will bring truly us closer, under the patronage of science, to the desired goal of a humanity. It is a better, more righteous, more evolved goal: a loftier humanity and free.” All the complex of the problems imposed by the analyzed situation, the why of the crisis, the way to a resolution of the rapport between natural laws and human actions, the manner of finding again renovating energies, did not interest the philosopher. For Troilo, it was enough to glean over some facts in order to conclude with an impressive ending. Marchesini as a positivist was more acute and subtle, more successful in defining the failure of positivism, its internal crisis, contradictions, and impotence. The rhetoric of ideals was equal to that of Troilo, and equal was the optimism and the edifying vocation, “Of this universal and continuous process, in which the empire of truth and goodness invigorates always itself, the reason of the philosopher, illumined by the light of facts should be teacher and guide.” This scenario of glorification of science almost equaled the choreographic creation at the Scala of the “Ballo Excelsior” of Luigi Manzotti and Romualdo Marenco. Tarozzi, who to “the conception of the natural deterministic uniformity” substituted “the conception of the phenomenon infinitely different offered by the experiment itself,” continued the same scenario. Here from a research derived that intended to demonstrate “the logical connection between cosmological indeterminism and moral liberty,” celebrating the felicitous union between positive philosophy and “liberalism,” at once humanitarian, and patriotic. He wrote, “To these two scientific and ethical ideals, indeterministic positivism, and humanitarian liberalism, I would now dedicate my work and my devoted thought.”

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In 1899 a century was dying in bad conditions, and another one was born particularly tragic for Italy. The sages, at least these sages, with their strange thoughts, were not dedicating their work to the amelioration of the destiny of humankind. It was not by chance that some of them could pass serenely and safely through various vicissitudes, almost made immortal for their “sublime” detachment, which for the most was only pure incomprehension. Gramsci would have said that these were admirable examples of “Lorianism.” 6. The Crisis of Marxism Croce, in Storia d’Italia (pp. 161–162), narrated: The philosophical awakening that the survivors of the classic idealistic philosophy had tried to promote against the overwhelming positivism was primarily effectuated instead in Italy through Marxism and its historical materialism that, born from Hegelianism, was preserving within itself the fundamental concept of dialectical historicity. For having used concepts no longer sustainable or obsolete in their forms, and having those same individuals aged and become timid, and thus lacking of the impetus, which is the sentiment of one’s own force and reason, they began to lose the previous strong appeal. These last scholars wasted their time searching the frail and less original part of idealism, its theological residue, the so-called rapport of thought with being, of nature and spirit with Logos and God, and other similar things. Though they mentioned the historical dialectic, they did not understand it— otherwise they would have, in virtue of it, cleansed and purged themselves from any theologism—and left it inoperative and inert. In historical materialism, a new energic element invested again the history of human societies, and attempted at an explanation of such history from within, connecting it with the greater practical and moral problems of the new age. Relevant traces of a schematic and eschatological philosophy of history were present in the conception of Marx, but what was missing was the necessary complement and corrective presence of logic, no longer formalistic, capable of satisfying the needs perceived by Kant and Hegel of a speculative logic. However, with that deficiency and this defect, historical materialism was something hot and alive, while on the contrary the philosophy of the last Hegelian epigones had become frigid and dead. This was so true that even positivism, offering resistance to the attacks of these Hegelians, could force such frail oppositions to agreements and transactions, but could not oppose historical materialism, to which it succumbed. Herbert Spencer, whom everyone was reading and citing as the supreme authority, when Marx became known in Italy, no longer was cited or read, and was completely forgotten. Only some positivists, recently converted to Marxism, like the magus of Tasso, mixing the two laws that were

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY badly known to them, in an impious and profane way, tried to harmonize Marx, Spencer, and Darwin. A hurricane of censures hit it so badly that not even one of its young small trees survived in that ground where he thoughtfully planted them (Il risveglio filosofico, che, contro il positivismo soverchiante, i sopravissuti della classica filosofia idealistica avevano invano tentato di promuovere, per essersi valsi di concetti non piú sostenibili o invecchiati nelle forme, e per essere invecchiati e fatti timidi quegli uomini stessi, e perciò scarsi d’impeto, che è sentimento della propria forza e ragione, si effettuò invece primamente in Italia attraverso il marxismo e il suo materialismo storico, il quale, nato dallo hegelismo, ne serbava in sé il concetto fondamentale della storicità dialettica. Quegli ultimi scolari si erano persi dietro la parte caduca e meno originale dell’idealismo, il suo residuo teologico, la cosidetta relazione del pensiero con l’essere, della natura e dello spirito col Logo e con Dio, e simili; e anche quando non avevano omesso di enunciare la dialettica storica, non l’avevano intesa—ché altrimenti si sarebbero, in virtú di essa, spacciati e purgati di ogni teologismo—e l’avevano lasciata inoperosa e inerte. Nel materialismo storico, questo elemento energico investiva di nuovo la storia delle società umane, e procurava di spiegarla nel suo intrinseco e congiungerla col maggiore problema pratico e morale dell’età nuova. Persistevano nella concezione del Marx tracce rilevanti della schematica ed escatologica filosofia della storia, e le mancava il necessario complemento e correzione di una logica non piú formalistica, e che soddisfacesse le esigenze sentite dal Kant e dallo Hegel di una logica speculativa; e tuttavia, con quel vizio e con questo difetto, essa era una cosa calda e viva, laddove la filosofia degli ultimi epigoni hegeliani era stata fredda e morta. Tanto vero che il positivismo, resistente ai colpi di costoro e costringente i deboli oppositori a patti e transazioni, non resistette al materialismo storico, e presto giacque disteso a terra. Erberto Spencer, che tutti leggevano e citavano come somma autorità, conosciuto che fu in Italia il Marx, non fu piú né citato né letto, e discese in un completo oblio. Solo qualche positivista di recente convertito al marxismo, mescolando, come il mago del Tasso, in uso empio e profano le due leggi a sé mal note, cercò di ‘armonizzare’, a suo dire, Marx, Spencer, e Darwin; ma gli venne addosso tale uragano di censure, che neppure uno dei suoi alberelli rimane sul suolo nel quale aveva pensato di piantarli).

It is a beautiful text; in reality, it is a moving autobiographical page. It is the encounter of Croce with Labriola, with the still alive polemic attacks against Enrico Ferri and Loria. Croce placed the Marxism of Labriola and his hard anti-positivistic battle between the end of De Sanctis and Spaventa and the cultural renewal of the twentieth century. Particularly in the 1890s, Croce saw

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catching fire “in the Italian youth the strong passion for the doctrines of Socialism,” not for humanitarian reformism, but for Marxism, because of the Marxism’s ability of “looking always at effectual reality beyond its appearance.” In this sense, Croce considered the work of Labriola after 1890 to be decisive: Labriola, in the 1890s, discovered Marx, and in the lectures on philosophy of history, which he was giving previously at the University of Rome, began to teach Marx. In the previous series of lectures, he was vacillating between theories of historical facts, ethno-psychology, and naturalistic conceptualization on the model of linguistics. With the discovery of Marx, he began to teach instead with the zest of the person who had finally found the faith for a long time searched elsewhere. He taught the Marxist philosophy of history, the historical materialism, as it had been conceived by the teacher and exposed or systematized by Engels and his German followers (Circa il 1890, il Labriola scoprí da sua parte il Marx; e, nei corsi di filosofia della storia, che teneva nell’Università di Roma, e nei quali dapprima aveva ondeggiato tra le teorie dei fattori storici, della etno-psicologia, della concettualizzazione naturalistica sul tipo della linguistica, si diè a insegnare, con lo zelo di chi abbia finalmente trovato la fede per lungo tempo invano cercata altrove, la filosofia marxistica della storia, ‘il materialismo storico’, secondo era stato concepito dal maestro ed esposto o sistemato dall’Engels e dai seguaci tedeschi). Labriola soon disappeared, but before this happened, Croce moved away from his influence. Croce had to make his own the idea of the crisis of Marxism, approaching Georges Sorel at the same time and turning his attention from the discussion of economy and history to the foundation of an aesthetic of the intuition, alienating his great friend and teacher. The decade spent in the shadow of Labriola, the reading and the discussion on Marx by Croce and, in another form by Gentile, assumed a significant particular relevance, and weighted substantially on the vicissitudes of the Italian thought of the twentieth century. Today, any student who would read carefully the letters of Labriola to Bertrando Spaventa should search what remains of the rapport of Labriola with the Spaventa brothers and Croce. Thereafter, he should compare the results of its search with the correspondence of Labriola with Engels and the exponents of International Socialism. This student would become aware of the true European horizon of the work of Labriola, his rooting in things, and the decisive contribution that it brought to the elimination of positivism. Positivism was quite diffuse among the philosophers of profession, though it had no scientific value, and had inherited instead the most abused rhetoric of the old schools of humanities. The golden line of the Italian philosophical wisdom went, in our opinion,

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through Spaventa, Labriola, and Croce. This does not mean the heredity of specific doctrines because often it was instead a matter of a clear antithesis. What we mean is that in these men we can place an active elaboration of culture, an original culture at the European level. From these three individuals we can hear a voice that had a valid appeal also outside Italy. In these philosophers, the most alive debate of the thinking and productive Europe was present not only as an increase of recent information but as an active reelaboration and translation into the national language. On one hand, the positivists in the style of Tarozzi, with the program of moving out of determinism, were making every effort to free philosophy from the ideal of scientific rigor, which constituted the highest title of nobility of positivism. On another hand, the students of Marx, from Labriola to Croce, and, afterward, from Gentile to Mondolfo, were individuating the knot of the discussion in the problem of praxis, of action in rapport to knowledge, of the human being and its doing, of freedom and history. Analyzing carefully the facts, we may see that the abandonment of Labriola by Croce happened at this table. It was from this point on that Croce approached idealism through a revision, not only of Marxism, but also of Hegelianism. From here came, at a certain time, the influence of the actualism of Gentile over Croce. From here came Croce’s complex mental vicissitude along more than half a century of history of Italy. In reality, his problem, which was a problem of praxis, of the action of human beings in history, in its rapport with rational knowledge, was the great problem of the Italian philosophical culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. This problem, after Labriola and Croce, became the problem of Gramsci. In a way, this was “the Italian version,” often with much “speculative aroma” and with many mystifications, of the problem that was agitated in the most advanced positions of the European thought. 7. The Crisis of Science The discussion took a precise tone: if there is only one reality, a natural motion, or a spiritual process; if everything proceeds according to a rigorous rhythm that “science” determines independently from the individual manifestations with which it manifests itself, then what is the meaning of the human being and what is the possibility of its action? If nature is mistress, if history is mistress over all humankind, what is the worth of the human being, here and now? For Croce, the fact that other persons would call reality, beyond its appearances, Spirit and not Nature, was a thing of an importance greater than it truly was. He himself, though in a contorted manner, showed some doubt concerning this, when, dealing with Marx, observed that “reality, no matter how much it was referred to as materialistic in words, it was in effect idealistic” (la realtà, per materialistica che fosse definita nelle parole, si rifaceva, in effetto, idealistica). A different kind of question existed: whether we could subsume or not the process, the becoming, the multiplicity of facts under a complex of laws, in a rational wholeness. Was the “science” of the positivists

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or the “logic” of the real of the idealists truly embracing with a rigorous conceptual structure the whole? People were saying that in order to act rationally, we needed knowledge, science, and foresight. Prevision implies a process whose rhythm is predetermined. If the motion of reality is predictable, it is also predetermined; but if it is predetermined, the revolutionary praxis has no sense. The capitalistic world would explode when reaching the necessary limit of its contradictions. The “crisis of reason,” the liquidation of science, assumed the function of defense of the human action and of the meaning of the human being. Within positivism, this evince as “critique of science.” This “critique” could move in various directions: as an ulterior determination of the meaning of “science,” of its methods and laws; as a more exact definition of the rapport between knowledge and action, human beings and things, no matter whether these things were due to nature in the present or to the weight of the past. Beside these positive directions, “the critique” could mean, and it meant, an unbecoming and superficial elimination of scientific knowledge, of the reasoning reason, in the name of intuitions, of cognitive forms sui generis, of privileged levels of knowledge connected with amazing powers of action. All the various “crises” which were then mentioned (of positivism, Marxism, science, values, and reason) were all based on this ambiguity. Positivism, and the Pragmatism that developed within it, polarized between a need of logical and methodological close examination and the liquidation of scientific knowledge, in favor of a magical activism. Together with a research on the meaning of scientific “laws” and with an inquiry concerning the process through which the “sciences” were historically constituted, the flourishing of a disorderly activism was sensed, in which actions were not linked to a complex mediation of rational knowledge, but to a magical formula and a foolish illusion. People believed that it was possible to escape the jaws of the vice of scientific determinism, not through science itself, but through the proclamation of the “bankruptcy of science” (bancarotta della scienza), through a strange germination of mystical deliriums, spiritist fantasies, and theosophical dreams. In a symmetrical way, many individuals concluded the revolt against the weight of history, which began with the liquidation of the “philosophy of history” and the refutation of the eternal laws of historical becoming, with the crisis of all dialectic conceptions of reality, as if they were a camouflaged theology. At the end, the various forms of “actualism” constituted the most coherent outlet of the advancing new mysticism. Then again the solicitations of the great metaphysics of the nineteenth century continued to make their presence felt: terms like “science” and “history”—we ought to have said “Nature” and “Spirit”—implied views of the world that were loaded with an interpretive universal importance. The battle between these “visions” would proceed a priori. Even the most audacious spirits, after having revealed that the pretended “god” of the adversary was only an “idol,” instead of abolishing and demolishing also theirs, retained it, almost as a demonstration of its truth. After having discovered that the “science,” which the positivists adored but

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did not cultivate, was a mystification, many Italians believed to have the permission of assuming as an explicative universal principle a “history,” which was the exact corresponding element, born from the same womb of that “science.” In that same way, the Spirit, which substituted Nature, was the other term of an inseparable “metaphysical” couple. Lenin, in 1894, stated, “By being unsuccessful in the studying of facts, the new age invented new general theories a priori, which remained always unproductive.” They were words against the science-metaphysics, against “the immanent laws of historical necessity” understood as “the mystical underhand work” that moves the human “puppets.” On the contrary, the discovery of Marx consisted in the affirmation that “every historical period has its own laws.” Marx denied the idea that the laws of economical life could be identical for both the past and the future. If we were to schematize to the extreme, we could say that from the conflict between “positivism-philosophy of nature” and “idealism-philosophy of history,” and their crisis, in addition to “the critique of science,” derived the actualistic activism and the “magic” of the Pragmatism, like that of Papini and Prezzolini. Within this frame, the proper effort of Benedetto Croce was that of getting out of the antinomy without sacrifying “science” or “reason,” and accentuating once more the connection of theory-praxis. On one hand, we could search the foundation of all the limits of that connection in the equivocal manner of conceiving “science,” “history,” and the function of “philosophical” logic. From this, we could envision the acceptance of the so-called critique of science in its worse aspect and the refusal of the philosophy of history; from this, the “idealism” and the equivocations of the “distinctions” and of the “forms” of the Spirit derived. On another hand, we could find out the why of the constant attention brought to the historical experience and to “the world of human beings.” Finally, the reduction of philosophy within the borders of “methodology,” the effort of connecting praxis to rational knowledge in order to modify reality, the polemic against irrationalism and decadentism, and the need of a refusal of idealism gave to Croce’s work an unmistakable character. It attributed to Croce a determinant influence on all the Italian life of the twentieth century. 8. Benedetto Croce and His Formation At the beginning of the new century Croce was already a mature man with a long experience in the field of these studies. He was born on 25 February 1866 and, after the tragic end of his parents and sister in the earthquake of Casamicciola of 1883, he went to Rome. He stayed with Silvio Spaventa, a cousin of his father, and in Rome, he found in Antonio Labriola more than he found in the teacher, the man capable of giving him back confidence and value in life. He started very early to write on erudite arguments of literature and art with a taste and an acuteness that he kept during all his life. Philosophy was born in him as a critical reflection on a concrete research, as the

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awareness of problems of method and general questions. His first philosophical work attempted at the understanding of the meaning of historiographic inquiry, and of the value and sense of history. His first interlocutor and first polemic aim was an egregious historian and, among the positivists, one of the most representatives, whom Ardigò himself saluted with respect as a precursor, Pasquale Villari. In 1893, Croce published the memorandum on “La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte,” introducing a tense discussion with the supporters of history as science, a discussion to which, a few years later, Gaetano Salvemini, among others, also participated. Later, in 1919, Croce wrote that with that “puerile work” he wanted to contribute to the breaking of the “hard ice of positivism.” In Primi saggi (pp. 8–9), he observed: At that time, the most famous philosopher followed in Italy was Spencer … and with him many other positivists and evolutionists, both foreigners and fellow citizens…. My first critical position was configured in opposition to that disorderly and impetuous bad trend. I was specifically in opposition to those of its forms that invested and upset the principles themselves of the studies of literature and history that I cultivated (In quel tempo, il filosofo che godeva maggior fama e seguito in Italia era lo Spencer … e con lui tanti altri positivisti ed evoluzionisti, forestieri e nostrani…. La mia prima affermazione critica si configurò, dunque, come opposizione a quell’andazzo disordinato ed impetuoso, e segnatamente a quelle forme di esso che investivano e travolgevano le ragioni stesse degli studi, da me coltivati, della letteratura e della storia). Doubtless, in 1893, Croce saw the problem of history as a problem of “narration.” Is it possible to deny that all this work … tends to the production of narrations of what has happened? The reduction of history went under the general concept of art. Already in 1895, discussing the philosophy of history, Croce fought especially the idea that history could be the expression of the designs of a Providence, or a manifestation of the “rhythm of Reason, Idea, and universal Becoming.” At the time, he made an affirmation to the substance of which he remained always faithful (ibid., pp. 67–68): The assumption of a pre-established design within history would logically lead to fatalism, individual convenience, and slothfulness. Even though this assumption, in practice, has not produced serious damages, the reason is that human beings are driven by their own interests and sentiments much more than by their fallacious theories. We are the ones who make history. We keep in mind the objective conditions in which we find ourselves, but with our own ideals, efforts, and pains, without the allowance of unloading this burden on the shoulders of

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY God or the Idea (L’assunzione di un disegno prestabilito nella storia condurrebbe logicamente al fatalismo, all’accomodant-ismo e alla individuale neghittosità; e, se anche non ha prodotto in pratica danni gravi, la ragione di ciò è, che gli uomini si lasciano guidare assai piú dai loro interessi e dai loro sentimenti che dalle loro fallaci teorie. La storia la facciamo noi stessi, tenendo conto, certo, delle condizioni obiettive nelle quali ci troviamo, ma coi nostri ideali, coi nostri sforzi, con le nostre sofferenze, senza che ci sia consentito scaricare questo fardello sulle spalle di Dio o dell’Idea).

These words appeared in 1895 in a context in which, with some references to the Labriola of the so-called Herbartian period, we could see the very significant names of Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Georg Simmel (Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften), to which Croce in Primi Saggi (pp. 186–188) attached that of Heinrich Rickert. On 1 December of that year, at the Accademia Pontaniana, Croce discussed the concept of Kulturgeschichte (and the recurring names were Simmel and Dilthey), a concept that he again rejected in 1909 with one of those argumentations he loved sincerely, but that constituted his greater weakness as philosopher: Either culture is understood as a theoretical human activity, and then it falls under the histories of art and philosophy, or is understood as a practical human activity—perhaps even directed to the promotion of the theoretical activity—and then it falls under the histories so-called social or political or moral, or simply history. No third choice is possible (O la cultura s’intende come attività teoretica dell’uomo, e allora rientra nelle storie dell’arte e della filosofia; o s’intende come attività pratica —magari, indirizzata a promuovere l’attività teoretica—e allora rientra nella storia che si dice sociale o politica o morale, o storia senz’altro. Tertium non datur). The mystics of numbers and the reverence for dichotomic premises cannot stop a wise parenthesis and the insinuation of two doubts, one on the premise and another on the eventuality of a third choice. In any case, the Crocean problematic, strictly linked as it was with the circle of the European discussion, opened itself up to the Marxism of Labriola. In 1902, writing in the Paris’ Revue de synthèse historique, Croce attributed to his friend the merit “de la renaissance des études relatives à la théorie de l’histoire” in Italy. He praised particularly Labriola for having introduced the historical materialism of Marx within the courses taught at the universities, “L’un des tout premiers (dès 1889), si non peut-être le premier, dans l’ensemble des Universitées européennes.” Croce acknowledged in July 1899, after the breaking away from Labriola, that his was an initial enthusiasm, “It was the enthusiasm that the first ap-

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proach to the genial work of a writer like Marx generates … with disgust for the pedantry, the sophisms, and the vacuities of his successive disciples.” They are the words of the preface to the first edition of Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, Saggi critici (Sandron, Palermo, 1900). Labriola is “as always the best of friends,” but the polemic and the division happened. Croce emphasized carefully that his was not a conversion from Marxism to anti-Marxism but an ulterior clarification of himself to himself. As he would remember in the cited article of 1902, always as an adversary of a philosophy of history, “a materialistic philosophy of history would have renewed, in a worse fashion, all the errors of the old idealistic philosophy with its preconceived plan” (Une philosophie matérialiste de l’histoire aurait renouvelé, en les aggravant, toutes les erreurs de la vieille philosophie idéaliste à plan préconçu). After this remark, Croce continued with the honorable mention of the work of Gentile, La filosofia di Marx, partially published in 1897 and definitively in 1899, as the work that evinced “la construction métaphysique de la jeunesse de Marx, telle qu’elle apparait en particulier dans ses observations sur Feuerbach.” Gentile had dedicated the book to Croce with the following paragraph that emphasized the point of divergence between the “two friends and philosophers” in a quite interesting manner: To you I dedicate this work. You know already the origin of this work, in which you will find many concepts discussed together in our frequent disputes…. I admire in you the fortunate accord of the speculative faculties with the historical ones, and the need that the principles be alive in facts and that the facts come together to compose an ideal organism. You are the most rare example in Italy of the realism so easy to preach and so difficult to understand. From your realism, it appears to me that this idealism, in which my thought has found peace, does not differ at all (A voi che conoscete l’origine di questo opuscolo, nel quale ritroverete molti concetti già insieme discussi nelle nostre frequenti dispute…. Il felice accordo che ammiro in voi, delle facoltà speculative con le storiche, del bisogno de’ principij che vivano ne’ fatti, con quello dei fatti che s’adunino e compongano in ideale organismo, è in Italia rarissimo esempio di quel realismo cosí facile a predicarsi e cosí difficile a intendersi, dal quale a me pare che non differisca punto questo idealismo, in cui s’acqueta il mio pensiero). Gentile sensed his difference from Croce, from the “realism” of Croce, and at that time he introduced himself as “Hegelian and disciple of the Hegelians of Naples.” According to the words published by Croce in July 1947, after so many years and so many differences, Croce was still making his own Gentile’s thesis of the “substantial Hegelianism of Marx.” Because he was Hegelian, Gentile could see in Marx the philosopher who succeeded “in gathering the most beautiful flower of Idealism and Materialism. This was the flower of

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concrete reality and concrete concepts that always substitute the abstractions of both Hegel and Feuerbach.” Gentile concluded the book expressing the wish for a philosophy sincerely realistic, even if presented under the name of Marxism, “The interest of science is not found in names. If some of the most important ideas of Hegelianism have peradventure penetrated the minds because of the enticement of Marx’s name, welcome also to Marxism!” (Non sta nei nomi l’interesse della scienza; e, se alcune tra le piú importanti idee dell’hegelismo fossero penetrate nelle menti per l’allettativa del nome di Marx, buona fortuna anche al Marxismo!). By comparing the last pages of Gentile’s essay with the first of the dedication to Croce, we become aware that, in the discussion between the two thinkers, Croce, by now detached from Labriola, brought into the dialogue the echo still alive of the concrete dissolution of “historical materialism.” Croce’s approach to the Idealism, on which Gentile was insisting, was of a kind quite different from that so dear to Gentile. Croce had rebelled against positivism and its deterministic “philosophy of nature” in the name of the human initiative and the autonomy of human activities and productions. He left Labriola and Marxism for the suspicion of a new determinism of history, the mistress of all human beings, and approached Gentile by claiming autonomy of art and free human activity. Obviously, something else existed for which Labriola reproached acutely and harshly Croce. The preponderant interest of Croce was cultural, but Labriola called it “literary.” The way that Labriola looked at political involvement was marginal in Croce. The work of Marx for Croce, as well as for Gentile, was reduced to a philosophical contribution and translated without residues in “cultural” terms. That the revolutionary action itself, weighing more or less on the historic course and on the social structures, would react on the philosophical level and could illumine the problem of the rapport of theory-praxis, or anyway repropose its terms, escaped Croce. Unfortunately, later, Gentile, reconsidering the problem, through identification without mediation, reduced himself to a blind activism, which happened to be offensive in both human and theoretical levels. Toward the end of 1898, Labriola made this observation to his friend and disciple: When you say that you do not agree or disagree concerning the politics of the proletariat, you, in short, say that you are discarding the 95% of the conditions necessary to be interested in this so-called crisis of Marxism. Personally, in this, I am ferociously socialist and ultrapositive. If Marx were only a professor—and this would have been the other 5%—I would be interested in him as much as I am interested in the logic of Wundt, that is, for professional reasons. Now, given that you are interested only in this 5% … I think that you must have interest and care, in order to proceed in your pacific occupation of an unprejudiced researcher, not to be confused with those for whom Marxism and anti-Marxism are symbols and standards (Quando tu dici che,

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circa la politica del proletariato, né convieni né disconvieni, tu dici che, insomma, passi sopra al 95% delle condizioni che occorrono per interessarsi di questa cosiddetta crisi del marxismo. Io in ciò sono ferocemente socialista e ultrapositivo. Se Marx fosse stato solamente un professore—ciò sarebbe stato l’altro 5%—io m’interesserei di lui quanto m’interesso della logica di Wundt, ossia per ragioni professionali. E dal momento che tu solo di questo 5% t’interessi … cosí devi avere interesse, per proseguire nella tua occupazione pacifica di spregiudicato ricercatore, di non essere confuso con quelli per i quali il marxismo e l’antimarxismo sono simboli e bandiere). When Croce made public this letter in 1938, he intended in reality to underline not only the theoretical, but also the “practical” and “partisan” character of the reactions of Labriola, and, at the same time, the insufficiency of criticism. With this, in some measure, he demonstrated his own distance from Marx and Labriola, from their scientific concepts, and from their way of understanding in history the knot of thought and action. Gentile, on his part, through an immediate identification of praxis and thought, was going to arrive, in a discourse of 31 March 1924, to what the Italians called “filosofia del manganello” (the philosophy of the bludgeon). This certainly would generate, in those who could think of the events to which the expression alluded, a sense almost of horror, “Whatever the argument used may be—either the sermon or the bludgeon—its efficacy, at the end, can only be that of forcing a human being inwardly and persuading it to agree” (Qualunque sia l’argomento adoperato—dalla predica al manganello—la sua efficacia non può essere altro che quella che sollecita infine interiormente l’uomo e lo persuade a consentire). 9. Characteristics of Croce’s Philosophy If Gentile was often the philosopher of verbal identifications and solutions, Croce was always solicitous especially about distinction, conceptual clarity, justly remembering the task assigned by Herbart to philosophy: Bearbeitung der Begriffen. From the beginning, Croce moved mostly in the ambit of negations and polemic determinations, showing what is not art, what is not right, reducing the positive to classifying system; art is knowledge, knowledge of the individual, intuition. By so doing, Croce built with the danger of precluding to himself, with the profound unitary root of distinctions, the process of reality, without being able of individuating in their particularities the plans and structures of the real. His studies on historical materialism, rich and important in their critical part and testimonies of his sincere passion for economy, closed with a deluding conclusion. His was the repeated awareness of the sense of the useful in the vicissitudes of human beings, and “the recommendation to historians to pay attention to the economic life of nations, and to the imaginations, ingenuous or artificial, that take their origin in it.” The

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thought of Marx and the teachings of Labriola constituted certainly for Croce a permanent stimulus, the traces of which could be identified all along the arc of his productivity. During those same years when he immersed himself in those studies, he felt also the need of defining and placing, among human activities and productions, art, literary criticism, and language. We would never adequately comprehend the significance of the initial steps of Croce, between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth century, so long as we would continue to place him in rapport with Italian events alone, like the crisis of positivism, Labriola, De Sanctis, and perhaps Vico. This is what Croce wanted certainly, but we know that in the change of his studies on the concept of history, German “historicists” were influential, and on the “crisis” of his Marxism, Sorel weighted much. Likewise, even before the formulations of his aesthetic theses, the orientations, discussions, and systematic works of the last German nineteenth century contributed to the formulation of problems of aesthetics and linguistics. We should not forget that the answers that in the process of time he gave to the most serious questions of history and art, though they involved a long preparatory period, in the conclusions they assumed almost an unexpected character. He wrote in 1893, in Contributo alla critica di me stesso, “While I was deeply meditating for an entire day,” that he discovered the solution of the problem of history, which “was like a revelation” of himself to himself that allowed him to see “the logical origin of multiple erroneous trends.” In the 1908 interview, drafted and published by Renato Serra, Croce dared to confess that he began with the intention of confirming the thesis of Villari. He was ready to state that history is a science; and that his essay was already in the hands of the printer, even ready for the press. “In a flash of light,” he became aware that “history could not be science, it must be art; science is about the abstract, while history, like art, is about the concrete” (la storia non può essere scienza, ma deve essere arte; perché la scienza è dell’astratto, e la storia è, come l’arte, del concreto). This anecdote and this remembrance are not important. What we should notice are some typical characters of the Crocean fashion of proceeding. He reached conclusions through the confutation of series of erroneous positions, assumed as being all the available solutions. He affirmed new and resolutive positions through a complexity of negations, not necessarily exhaustive. He demonstrated without positively arguing, often founding demonstrations, by a vicious circle, on postulates, or on foundations in need at their own turn of demonstration. As he did for history (history is not …), so for poetry Croce began with a refusal: the refusal of poetry’s reduction to something else. Thus, in Primi Saggi, pp. 9–10, we read: Positivists and evolutionists considered poetry, art, and beauty a pleasure of the senses, a pleasure due to psychic associations, a pleasure of habits and dispositions of hereditary origin, not different from the useful, except perhaps for its resonance or illusion of usefulness. Some of

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the people at that time would define the origin of poetry, art, and beauty in the sexual instinct or attributed them to the beastly prehistory, or described them as a sort of refined and immaterial libido (La poesia, l’arte, la bellezza erano tenute, dai positivisti ed evoluzionisti, piacere dei sensi, piacere di associazioni psichiche, piacere di abitudini e disposizioni ereditarie, non diverso dall’utile se non forse come risonanza o illusione di utile; e non mancavano coloro che le riportavano addirittura all’istinto sessuale o alla preistoria animalesca, e le descrivevano come una sorta di libidine affinata e svaporata). As history could not be reduced “to the monotonous repetition of some political, social, and different institutional schemes, and to the action of some general laws,” so poetry could not be reduced to the processes from which it originated, or to the techniques used. Croce refused the reduction of the term to the moments of which it was the result and the conclusion; he refused the clarification of it through the acquisition of the awareness of its profound complexity and of the rapports in which it is involved. Consequently, the positiveness of his research risked becoming extremely exiguous, or extremely ambiguous. This kind of research would hesitate between the collocation of a fact within most general and abstract frames, and the surreptitious introduction of unjustified theories and interpretations. We find in this the limit of Croce’s philosophy, from which also derive his continuous searching for ulterior determinations, the concretizing, and the ascertaining of himself in the reality of specific experiences. Croce initiated always with a determined inquiry. He is the historian who reflects on his own work, on the methods with which he works, and on the logic used in the accomplishment of the work. On the other hand, among his conceptual instruments, general rules of method, and the particular, concrete, and ascertained data, he does not care or definitively refuses to admit the presence of determinations of a constant texture, lines of development, outlines, “figures,” liable to being rationally determined and studied. All this, on the historiographic level, is a “sociological schematism” to be rejected. Something analogous to this can be found in all the “parts” of the so-called Filosofia dello Spirito, where the “speculative concept”—as he calls it—is juxtaposed to the concrete of experience, and little matters that “the four words” are solemn terms like the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This is Croce’s limit. He overcomes it only because of his lucky incongruity and native ingenuity, through observations and specific analyses that he inserts between the multiplicity of facts and the most general views of “the pure concepts.” His analyses are constituted as specific interpretations of reality, as valid or not as they may be, but certainly more solid than those “trinities” or “quaternities,” which we could find in abundance, in Rosmini and, at a lower level, in the manuals of Augusto Conti. Fortunately, Croce was successful in telling what art was not (that is, in confuting erroneous theories); he was equally successful in the analyses of the same kind than those in the studies in

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Letteratura della nuova Italia. These studies form an important history of the Italian culture after the Unity, a work symmetric to that of Gentile on the origins of contemporary philosophy. Croce, the critic of the history of culture, has probably given the best of himself as historian (and philosopher) of culture, with everything of mobile and complex, and if we want of vague and indefinite, which comes with the term “culture.” 10. Croce and Gentile In 1949, in an open letter to Croce, Ugo Spirito insisted on Croce’s dependence on Gentile. Citing the confession of Croce from Croce’s Contributo alla critica di me stesso, Spirito said, “You are the first follower of Gentile and you opened the school that thereafter flourished beginning with the second decade of the century,” and then let Croce speak: My mental condition is as an idealist that of following De Sanctis in aesthetics, Herbart in morality and in the conception of values, of rejecting Hegel and metaphysics in the theory of history, and in the general conception of the world. Still as an idealist, I am naturalist and intellectualist in gnoseology. These elements are not harmonized or confused among themselves; they are preferably placed side by side as in an order that is provisional and lacking. Reflexes of these elements can be seen already in some articles I published before I was twenty, and … in my first philosophical writings on the concept of history and literary critique (La mia condizione mentale di idealista desanctisiano in estetica, di herbartiano nella morale e in genere nella concezione dei valori, di antihegeliano e di anti metafisico nella teoria della storia e nella generale concezione del mondo, di naturalista e intellettualista nella gnoseologia, questi elementi non armonizzati ma nemmeno confusi tra loro, e piuttosto messi l’uno accanto all’altro come in un ordinamento provvisorio e lacunoso, si possono vedere già riflessi in alcuni articoli da me pubblicati prima dei vent’anni, e poi … nei primi scritti filosofici sul concetto della storia e sulla critica letteraria). From this, Ugo Spirito deduced that Croce’s initiation to philosophy was due to Gentile’s influence. Doubtlessly, after 1899, and for a few years thereafter, Croce was indebted to the friend of that time. His accentuated idealism, the system of Filosofia dello Spirito, and a the mode of doing philosophy quite extraneous to the Crocean temperament could be called debts to Gentile, but it is also out of discussion the very initial and determinant influence of Labriola. This influence already in the period 1893–1895 constituted a clear speculative orientation, which was successively defined between 1895 and 1899, without sensible influences from Gentile. While Gentile was deeply involved with Donato Jaja and Spaventa, Croce was dealing with De Sanctis, but with an extreme alertness for the thought coming from abroad, especially from Ger-

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many. This thought dealt with philosophy of language, psychology, psychology of nations, theory of aesthetics, and philosophy of culture and history. In this, too, and more than in one case, we must return to the Labriola of the Herbartian period, to which Croce confessed to owe a lot. We should never forget the faithful and constant attachment of Croce to the two problems of poetry and history that were the axis of all his meditations, for all his life, and in a manner much different from those of Gentile, whose undeniable influence became relevant especially through the publication of Aesthetics, during the first decade of the twentieth century. Croce had planned his book of aesthetics as a treatise analogous to the treatises on linguistics. In a letter from Naples of 14 December 1899, Croce presented to Alessandro D’Ancona his plans in a very clear and interesting manner. He wrote that he was drafting a “treatise on aesthetics,” which he intended to complete with a second book on “the history of aesthetics.” His intention was to complete and publish the two volumes by the end of 1900. It is known that in 1900 only the Tesi fondamentali di un’Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale appeared in Atti dell’Accademia pontaniana. One volume that dealt with theory and history was printed by Sandron of Palermo in 1902. The primitive design survived. Croce had declared to D’Ancona that his “treatise” would have been something different from both the “metaphysical” and the “empirical and perceptive” aesthetics heretofore produced. His ideal was to treat aesthetics just as linguistics was treated. He added, by jesting, that he did not intend to scare D’Ancona nor that he wanted to be judged by him a perverted reprobate. He told him, “To leave the facts in favor of words, it is bad; but to rise from the facts to the ideas, to place beside the historical considerations of the facts the scientific considerations of their laws, is it really so bad? I cannot persuade myself to believe this.” Not less interesting, was his declared tie with De Sanctis’s problematics. It was a need for ideas that brought him to “fight much” in defense of De Sanctis. He was disappointed that De Sanctis was a Southerner. He would have preferred De Sanctis to be from Veneto, or Lombardy, or Tuscany, so “to be able to defend his intellectual heritage without being accused of a stupid regionalism.” This was an accusation made against Croce but that he knew was not deserved. His book on aesthetics would have demonstrated the absurdity of such a charge. He declared quite proudly, “It is impossible to construct a system for the sheer motive of regionalism” (Non si costruisce un sistema per regionalismo). In relation to Croce, we should use an extreme prudence when talking about regionalism and an exclusive national tradition. Something has been already said about Herbart and the Herbartians, and we mentioned Dilthey and Simmel, in addition to the students of linguistics after Wilhelm von Humboldt, such as Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal. It is true that Croce already spoke a lot about Vico, and that in 1901 wrote the essay “Giambattista Vico primo scopritore della scienza estetica.” If we want truly to reconstruct

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the ground on which the first Estetica was born in 1902, it is necessary to extend the cultural area on which it germinated far beyond the borders of Italy. In this way alone, it would be possible to re-assign adequate dimensions to the distinction between internal and external, the classification of the sciences, the determination of art as intuition-expression, as a moment of the fantasy, of the representation, in the domain of the theoretical activity, but before the formation of a judgment of truth or falseness. In Estetica, p. 18, Croce wrote: Intuition is the unspecified unity of the perception of the real and of the simple image of the possible. In the intuition, we do not oppose ourselves to the external reality as empirical beings, but certainly objectified our impressions, whatever they may be (L’intuizione è l’unità indifferenziata della percezione del reale e della semplice imagine del possible. Nell’intuizione noi non ci contrapponiamo come esseri empirici alla realtà esterna, ma oggettiviamo senz’altro le nostre impressioni quali ch’esse siano). There is much to be said about this “moment” in the life of the “spirit” that is intuition-expression, language, “theoresis,” “interiority,” in respect to which the work as a real product is a practical fact, “external,” completely inessential, a pure mnemonic expedient. This is a fundamental knot of Croce’s thought, to which the Crocean theory of art remained under many respects faithful, and around which came to pivot the whole “Filosofia dello Spirito.” In this, De Sanctis’ contribution was important, especially in the formulation of the problem. The problem was proposed from the viewpoint of the reader, of the critic, not from the angle of vision of the one fabricating the work. This fabricator would attempt at the “knowledge of the product,” at the reconstruction in the mind, and to which, by the end, the “external reality” of the product may be inessential and secondary to the effort of decoding its meaning, its constructive “real” process, in all its steps. It is difficult in this initial affirmation of Croce between 1899 and 1902 not to perceive other echoes. The name of Dilthey does not appear in the first Estetica, but the Einleitung in die Geistewissenschaften, which is of 1883, is mentioned, cited, discussed, and not completely rejected in the writings of 1893 and 1895. The thematic matter of the “spiritual, living, interior, historic world,” which is “life” gathered in a manner different from the “exterior” that is objectified, described, and which is “nature.” All these motives, even if not accepted as such, were familiar to Croce in 1893, and they faced multiple solicitations. He recognized ,“These elements are neither harmonized nor confused among themselves; they are rather placed side by side as in an order that is provisional and lacking,” but, this must be emphasized, they all have a common quality, with a constant preoccupation. They must clarify the world of the “spirit,” the “sciences of the spirit,” their methods, in differentiation from those of the sciences of nature. They must clarify the life of the spirit with an accentuated attention on the world of art and history, as authentic

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manifestations of “life,” to be seized in interiority, through a sort of Einfühlung. This is not extraneous to the necessity of “classifying” the sciences of the Spirit, of determining the order, and, at the same time, the constitution, the structure of the spirit, in a manner of individuating the collocation of art in comparison with the other forms and activities of the life of the spirit. All this was found in the Estetica of 1902 within the frames of a first systematic organization that necessarily had to be articulated and that successively disappeared, not without first determining some of the themes destined to remain constant in the Crocean thought. These themes were the theoretical character of art, the active character of knowledge, the pre-logical character of aesthetic cognition, the wearing out of the activity of the aesthetic knowledge (art) in giving “interior” or “mental” form to the given (link of intuitionexpression). They included the theme on the irrelevance of the “exterior” expression (the work in its corporeal reality) in respect to the artistic activity (theoric activity kept well distinguished from the practical activity, which in the case of art is completely unessential). It is obvious that this complex of general theses had the need of a whole series of general assumptions capable of justifying them. The combination intuition-expression-language and the irrelevancy of the “exterior” expression implied the acceptance of a gnoseology of an idealistic kind, which reinforced the reduction of the artistic production to an “interior” fact. The assertion of the pre-logical theoretical character of art in its rapport with logics implied a classification of forms of knowledge of the neo-Kantian type. The mode itself of understanding “nature” and “exteriority” implied the taking of a position concerning “science,” which for positivism meant the complex of the sciences of nature. It was essentially a revival of a “transcendental” logic, and even conceding that it was a radical “reform,” it was still a reduction arriving to the refusal of the meaning of mathematical logic, and of all formal logics. On the other hand, Marx offered some suggestions through the economic inquiry and, in a completely different field, “the philosophies of life” were effecting on the practical ground the modification of the traditional classification of the forms of making, through the new consecration of the useful. Giovanni Gentile, from the pages of Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, reviewing in 1902 the volume of the friend, observed, “It is a philosophy sincerely idealistic, because it places in the spirit the only reality that could be the object of science; dynamic, because it conceived this reality as essentially active; and critical, because it excludes the possibility of any metaphysics.” He continued clearly exposing the systematic structure of the work: Croce conceives … the spirit as a system of four moments or grades, each one presupposing the previous, of which it would be the integration. Two of these moments constitute the theoretical activity of the spirit, of which they are the first two grades: one consists of the intuitive activity, which is apprehensive of the singular and of the individ-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY ual; the other consists of the intellectual activity, which is apprehensive of the universal. One is the principle of intuitions, the other of concepts. The two forms of practical activity bring out the other two grades: the economical that is the activity of wanting to achieve a goal, and the moral or ethical, which is the activity of wanting to achieve a rational goal. Thus, there can be intuition without concepts, but no concept without intuition; there can be concepts without will, but not vice versa; and will without morality, but no morality without will. In any case, the spirit is activity; passivity is the opposite of the spirit, which the spirit overcomes with its energy. Passivity is the pure given, the impression that shows traces of the first form of the spiritual activity in so far as it is expressed and intuited (Il Croce concepisce … lo spirito come un sistema di quattro momenti o gradi, ciascuno dei quali presuppone il precedente e ne è integrazione. Due di questi costituiscono l’attività teoretica dello spirito, e sono i primi: l’uno consistente nell’attività intuitiva, apprensiva del singolo e individuale; l’altro, nell’attività intellettuale, apprensiva dell’universale: l’uno principio delle intuizioni, l’altro dei concetti. Gli altri due gradi son dati dalle due forme dell’attività pratica: l’economico, ossia l’attività del volere un fine, e la morale od etica, che è l’attività del volere il fine razionale. Cosí può esserci intuizione senza concetto, non concetto senza intuizione; può esserci concetto senza volontà, non viceversa; e volontà senza moralità, non questa senza di quella. In ogni caso lo spirito è attività; e la passività è l’opposto dello spirito, che lo spirito vince con la sua energia. Passività è il puro dato, l’impressione, che risente la prima forma dell’attività spirituale in quanto si esprime e s’intuisce).

Gentile indicated clearly the structure of the work, and grasped its consequences: denial of any metaphysics, of nature or history, in order to make place for a “gnoseology of the principles of the natural sciences” and a “historical methodology.” In the last analysis, the theory of art and linguistics determined some of its aspects in a program. After all, Croce himself intended exactly this first systematizing: a point of departure that, among many advantages, inserted itself quite properly in the contemporaneous thematic ambiance so rich with Neo-Kantian motives. What became a negative factor in the ulterior Crocean elaboration, especially during the period of the strictest collaboration with Gentile, was the idealistic component. Not a minor obstacle, however, was represented by the classifying structure itself that was too general and scarcely functional, of which it was difficult to seize the connection in the concrete of experience. In Croce, we have an admirable process of an always more refined analysis in specific fields of research, a constant effort for defining these fields of research in their structures and for offering valid instruments of knowledge, but tied together with a never defeated embarrassment derived from those most general categories. Croce many times spoke of a progressive verification of the “instruments” and of an eventual adaptation

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or renewal of them. Actually, the mediation between the “four words” and the concreteness of experiences has been always lacking. Naturally, the force of Croce has not been lacking; he has successively made in evidence with much penetration the characters and the lines of the aesthetic experience in the diverse moments of time; and he has distinguished specific zones within this same experience. What has instead been missing has been the passage from the general forms to the specific structures that were introduced surreptitiously and with different methods of inquiry. The lack of this passage has also created an obstacle to the rigorous formulation of all single inquiries according to defined lines and has impeded the possibility of grasping the meaning of constancy in them. It has precluded the deepening of definite connections between different zones of experience. It has diminished the fecundity itself of the grandest Crocean capability of particular analyses and precise syntheses. Croce’s stiffening attachment to his first systemic construction, or at least to some of its aspects, closed several other routes and denied the full utilization of an immense amount of research. Fragments of linguistics, outlines of rhetorical doctrines, most refined and most beautiful reflections on poetry, and vital pages on problems of critical methodology remain. Admirable chapters of history and profound moral meditations still can be read. Unfortunately, we cannot affirm that the author composed all of this in organic and functional frames, allowing us to perceive the textures and interconnections of the various fields of experience, and their reciprocal relations in the dynamic of the processes and in the consistency of the different moments. Most deplorably, we did not constantly receive from Croce that same method of which he gave notorious examples. In 1919, Croce acknowledged that his treatise of 1902 had no longer a valid and primary impact on his own mind. This was true. Regrettably, as he had not provided us with the new “historical methodology” capable of substituting the philosophy of history that he had discarded, so he did not present us with those treatises in which he supposedly would have particularized the progress of his reflections, and given us adequately functional instruments substituting the generalities of his originary categories. The essays and the notes that he would progressively write on the lyricism of art, on poetry, literature, and oratory could very well be connected with his historical researches (on the “baroque,” on “popular poetry,” and so on), but they would never be completely free from the general presuppositions established in 1902. These works would never clarify their rapports with those presuppositions and would never allow the formulations of those new views whose urgency is felt continuously in the Crocean pages. They would not even permit that Croce would liquidate the parts less fortunate of his “system,” as they could be found in the logic (but not only in the logic). In other words, the “new” philosophy of which he was the advocate was never developed, and of it what remains are sketches in a nutshell, and only about some parts. This has been the trouble with Croce’s thought all along the twentieth century. Having Croce been the major manifestation of the Italian culture of

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the twentieth century, at least up to World War II, the trouble, difficulties, and limits of his own thought reverberated, not always in a positive way, in the whole of the Italian philosophical debate. It happened that Croce, who was so much the strenuous assertor of “reason,” found himself frequently included among those who destroyed reason. 11. Rebirth of Idealism In 1893, Croce “reduced” history to being subsumed under the concept of art. His originary intention was different. He wanted to support the thesis of Villari on the scientific possibility of history. We saw that the crisis overcame him at the same time when his work was ready for printing. He told us, “I ran to the printer. Stop, please! Dismantle the work! Indeed, I was dismantling all my past!” (Corsi in tipografia. Scomponete! Era tutto il mio passato che scomponevo). In reality, the crisis was wider, it had European dimensions, and it found expression in Croce. “Science” and, if we wish, a “science” equivocal in its significance, often elevated to a “metaphysical force,” but nonetheless “science,” was substituted by art, “life,” “spirit,” a profound dynamism of the real to be grasped with privileged instruments, the like of intuition. The world was moving toward the celebration of what is internal in opposition to what is external, of what is fluid in respect to what is static, of the Spirit (with the capital S) in contrast to matter. The Crocean anecdote narrated by Renato Serra (and Luigi Ambrosini) assumes the value of an exemplar. For Italy, it was a sort of prologue. On 2 February 1896, Ferdinand Brunetière of the Académie Française gave a notorious lecture, whose title was most meaningful: “La renaissance de l’idéalisme.” On one hand, in his oratory, Brunetière analyzed the errors of positivism, its defeat, and, on the other hand, presented, in its various characteristics, the return of the “ideals,” even the most vague and uncertain ones. “Spiritism, occultism, magic, neo-Buddhism, and neo-Christianity: what is the significance of these doctrines? Their form has without doubt something bizarre, disturbing, and I dare saying unhealthy that could easily become dangerous.” The need for “ideals,” if unsatisfied becomes deformed and degenerates into strange superstitions. The necessity springs up of returning to the authentic ideal, to the so-called “useless professions” and “life of mandarins,” the demand of religiousness and of eliminating the “fossils of anticlericalism.” The conclusion of Brunetière, which had the form of a homily, was in substance—and the author recognized this—un peu bien opportuniste. “Let us all try to be idealist … in our own interest, given that we cannot protect ourselves from the dangers that are menacing over us in any other way than by opposing to ideas nobler and loftier ideas.” Previously to this, he had observed, “It would be impossible to triumph over socialism unless we oppose to it a moral ideal superior to the one that at the present constitutes its strength.” On 28 February 1903, at the Royal University of Naples, Gentile read his prolusion to “La rinascita dell’idealismo,” a quite serious and acute

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piece of writing. Gentile gives witness to the fact of an actual crisis of the world culture that preceded the Italian one. He said: Our spirits are no longer pleased with those minute inquiries concerning the particularities of nature and history. They want substantial truths. We all feel the emptiness present in every particularity as such. Nature as a monotonous and colorless succession of forms is dislikeable. History is agonizing since it is reduced to a cemetery, through which, mute and diaphanous, art, science, virtue, and right wander like vain ghosts (Gli spiriti non si appagano piú delle indagini minute dei particolari della natura e della storia, e cercano verità sostanziali; si sente il vuoto che è in fondo a ogni particolare come tale; e si vede che è pur disamabile la natura come monotona e scolorita successione di forme, ed è dolorosa la storia, ridotta un cimitero, per cui l’arte, la scienza, la virtú e il diritto si aggirino muti e diafani come vani fantasmi). However, different kinds of idealism existed. Gentile rejected the idealism of mystical tendencies, vitalistic and rhetorical as it was, and accepted that of Spaventa and Hegel. In the notes to the prolusion, at the time of printing it, Gentile referred repeatedly to the first volume of La Critica. The year 1903 was most significant in the history of Italian culture. Antonio Labriola now sixty years old, suffered unbearably in his sickness and died on 4 February 1904. His disciple and friend, Croce, was beginning to give life to the publication of the journal La Critica (1903-1943) that for almost one and a half century followed, and often guided the culture and the life of Italy. Croce was starting with Gentile with a most solid collaboration, in an intense dialogue, the violent interruption of which, about a quarter of a century thereafter, constituted another precise point of reference in the cultural vicissitudes of Italy. Always in 1903, in Florence, Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini began to publish Leonardo, the journal that gathered many heterogeneous elements. Leonardo was destined to posit itself in an ambiguous rapport with Croce’s thought. The journal was successively continued through another periodical, La Voce. If we today were to return to the reading of the program announced for La Critica with the date of 1 November 1902, we would have the strange impression that the most vulnerable point was exactly the one of which the author was most proud of and that constituted the merit that was universally attributed to him. The journal was positing “a specific order of ideas” according to which to adjudicate the products of culture not based on specialized or erudite contributions, but based on a comprehensive vision of the whole. Croce recognized the importance that the universities had assumed after the Unity of Italy in the field of “control” and “information,” and for the “method of research and documentation.” In the journal, he had professed himself “an honest supporter of what is called historical method or philological method,”

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and advocated a general awakening of the philosophical spirit through a conscious return to the traditions of thought that the Italian revolution had interrupted. In the philosophical spirit of the past, the idea of the spiritual synthesis, the idea of humanitas, radiated. This auspicated return was a motion in the direction of idealism. He was so ardently convinced that he wrote about himself, “Given that philosophy can be nothing but idealism, he is a follower of idealism” (poiché filosofia non può essere se non idealismo, egli è seguace dell’idealismo). These, however, were words more suitable to Gentile than to Croce, including with this also the motive of return. This new idealism was so important for him that he felt the need of defining it. He wanted this idealism to be a cautious idealism, capable of giving a reason for every step and, in a summary, a critical idealism, or an idealistic realism, or even an antimetaphysical idealism, adverse to the “mystical reactionary currents,” and to those of “Jesuitic-Voltairian” origins. Some years later, Croce came to profess even Kantism: What did Kant want? To make the complete inventory of the human spirit, before resolving questions of metaphysical nature. For this reason, it is said that modern philosophy, because of the impulse given by Kant, must be gnoseological, or, as I prefer saying, must begin from the philosophy of the spirit, in which, afterward, in my opinion, it would find not only its beginning but also its end (Che cosa voleva il Kant? Fare l’inventario completo dello spirito umano, prima di risolvere questioni propriamente metafisiche. E perciò si suol dire che la filosofia moderna, seguendo l’impulso di Kant, deve essere gnoseologica, o, come io preferisco dire, deve cominciare da una Filosofia dello spirito, nella quale poi, a mio avviso, avrà non solo il principio, ma anche la fine). Extremely cautious, then, was Croce. The first duty he assigned especially to La Critica was that of assessing the most recent Italian culture, as he did for the Italian literature and Gentile did, in remarkable pages, for the Italian philosophy. Unluckily, that idealistic credo was full of dangers. Gentile continued on his road with coherent rigidity to the last developments of “actualism,” proposed a radical “reform” of Hegelianism, and in the pure act of the spirit resolved making and thinking, matter and spirit, unity and multiplicity, to the point of annihilating everything in a God, at its own turn, already resolved in the absolute immanence of the Act. We could charge Gentile for the mystical conclusion of a reflection that, at a certain moment, could equally have turned into an absolute empiricism, after the destruction of distinctions and mediations. We cannot reproach him for having been timid or lacking speculative coherence. The conclusion of the radical choice he made at the beginning is found at the end of his meditation. The wholeness of the pure Act in front of the infinity of the experience spread in the concreteness of determinate connections, in the definitude of specific sciences. Ugo Spirito would say, “Phi-

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losophy as science, or science as philosophy.” Croce was and remained far removed from all of this, solidly rooted in the distinction. He wanted to make up “the complete inventory of the human spirit,” at the same time declining to accept the total planning of exaggerated metaphysical “philosophies of history.” He sensed the limitation of the “positive” researches of the historical school and was fearful of the snares of idealism. For this reason, he spoke of a realistic and critical idealism, or of an idealistic realism, and concluded his work rejecting idealism in the name of absolute historicism. In actuality, after 1902 and almost for an entire decade, Croce could not subtract himself from the influence of Gentile and did not even know how to remain indifferent, at least in principle, to the general movement of “the destruction of reason” in which, with some exaggeration but not without motive, Georg Lukàcs placed him. The ones who vigorously contributed to this “destruction” were instead the groups that found their expression, from 1903 onward, in Leonardo and other Florentine periodicals, all or in part connected with the work of Giovanni Papini. Croce looked at Papini, in the beginning, with benevolence, considering him an ally in the common battle. He wrote about Papini and Prezzolini as of “souls that are spirited and inebriated by virtue of ideas, vivacious and mordant writers.” He praised them as the defenders of the idealism “in the form given to it by Bergson as philosophy of contingency, freedom, and action.” Croce praised them, which is noteworthy, since Croce himself was not alien to Bergsonian positions. Papini and friends moved in a more ample and significant arc of action: from Kierkegaard to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, from Pascal to Bergson and Blondel, from James to Peirce and Dewey—and then from revolutionary syndicalism to nationalism (and perhaps racism), Buddhism, modernism, magic, theosophy, and all the most extravagant and absurd adventures this century ran its course. It is shocking at times to find in pages, which are “rhetorical” even in their printed format, anticipating by decades, not only the bizarreries, but also the most impressive audacities in the Europe between the two wars, and with them the worse seductions and execrable follies. It began with the suppression of the moon’s Romantic clarity and ended with the exaltation of a fratricide war and a massacre. In the thoughtlessness of an irresponsible youth, it all started with the joke of appealing for the moment in which “the rational animal would give up its place for the creative animal,” and it ended in recognizing the creative animal in a Duce or a Führer. In 1906, Prezzolini, who was not yet Crocean, answered the observation of Croce, discussing in this fashion La Critica: It does represent … an integrated historical method and a corrected positivism. It accepts of these two all the rationalist part and it fights the positivists not because it considers them to be rationalist, but because it judges them as bad rationalists (Essa non rappresenta … che un metodo storico integrato e un positivismo messo a posto; accetta di questi due tutta la parte razionalista, e se combatte i positivisti non è

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All together this was not without truth, and was the best possible praise that one could give to La Critica. Prezzolini, however, did not believe it a praise, since he added, “In the future history of Italian culture it would not mark the moment of a profound and revolutionary change of methods” (Nella futura storia della cultura italiana non segnerà un momento profondo, rivoluzionario dei metodi). On the contrary, “revolution” was the vocation of Prezzolini, Papini, and the youth of the time: Croce is saying that the illusion of the youth is found in imagining the world as dough, which everyone can mold according to his own desires. Could we not say that this is effectively true for the youngsters and it is really becoming a dream for the elderly, simply because they no longer have the necessary strength to mold the world to their own willpower? (Il Croce afferma che l’illusione dei giovani consiste nell’immaginare il mondo come una pasta molle, che ognuno può foggiare a suo capriccio. Non potrebbe darsi invece che ciò sia effettivamente vero per i giovani e che vada diventando realmente un sogno per i vecchi, semplicemente perché non hanno piú la forza necessaria per foggiare il mondo a loro volontà?). The myth of “the youth” that reached its highest points during the twenty years of Fascism (ventennio fascista) certainly found in the program of the journal Leonardo one of its basic documents: A group of young people, wishing for liberation, wishing universalism, aspiring to an intellectual superiority” coming together “in order to intensify their own existence, elevate their thought, and exalt their own art.” In their own life, they were “pagan and intellectualist, enemies of any form of Nazarene servilism and plebeian submission.” In their thought, they were “personalist and idealist, superior to any system and limit, and convinced that every philosophy was nothing but a personal way of living, denigrating any other existence save that of thought” (Un gruppo di giovini, desiderosi di liberazione, vogliosi di universalità, anelanti ad una superiorità intellettuale … per intensificare la propria esistenza, elevare il proprio pensiero, esaltare la propria arte. … nella vita … pagani e intellettualisti … nemici di ogni forma di pecorismo nazareno e di servitú plebea. Nel pensiero … personalisti e idealisti, cioè superiori ad ogni sistema e ad ogni limite, convinti che ogni filosofia non è che personale modo di vita—negatori di ogni altra esistenza di fuor dal pensiero). Croce took them seriously, and he was right. They were not the causes, but

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the symptoms of the real movement of the European crisis. Though their attitude was not always serious, it happened that they said things and agitated ideas destined to have relevance for decades in the future. The error was in judging them at times in an excessively positive manner and, especially, in encouraging them. 12. Pragmatism and Its Different Forms Croce was not the only one evaluating “the youth” of the new century in a positive way. In some measure, James and Peirce, Sorel and Bergson and, in Italy, serious and unpretentious students like Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni, or men of lofty sentiments and fine moralists like Giovanni Amendola, Gaetano Salvemini, Renato Serra, and even Piero Gobetti, who for a while collaborated with “the group,” gave them credit. In reality, Papini, with singular sensibility, and Prezzolini, with an uncommon penetration, knew how to choose some profound exigencies of the times and give them a vivacious expression in Italy. By a careful observation, we could say that they seriously were neither pragmatists, nor idealists, nor futurists, nor fascists, nor all the other things to which they in time converted, in guises always more or less fastuous. Someone among them constructed the theory of the morality of the ápoti, of those who do not drink [meaning that they do not accept everything they are told]; but, at a certain limit, to drink everything or not to drink anything [in that sense] become equivalent positions, equally evasive. Concluding, we may acknowledge certain validity to all those peoples who, with techniques still elementary but efficacious, brought on the Italian zones those products that were widely circulating on the European and world markets. The Pragmatism propagandized in the Florentine clubs was certainly not a valid thing. Most valid, though among themselves much diverse, were the theories of James, Peirce, and Schiller, the theses of Ernst Mach and, in Italy, the analyses of Vailati and Calderoni. In order to conclude on the effective cultural contribution of the group of Leonardo for at least a decade, we must discard the theosophy that triumphed in the philosophical Library of Florence, with its followers of spiritualistic, magic, and Buddhist attitudes. We must discard the idealism of Balbino Giuliano and the hymns to life and to the superman more or less consciously Dannuntian. What would remain is Pragmatism, in all its varieties, with all its companions. Concerning this, a clear distinction between one form of Pragmatism and another is necessary, between Papini on one side, and Vailati and Calderoni on the other. Having immediately grasped some themes from James and the French pragmatists, Papini deduced a sort of primacy of the will and brought it to the extremes of magic. One of his friends wrote an ideal motto, “To discover a priori the world … modify it … modify our own organism … heal our body … construct our own sensations … mold our own ideas … create God with our prayer and our faith (scoprire a priori il mondo … modificarlo … modificare il nostro organismo

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… guarire il nostro corpo … costruire le nostre sensazioni … modellare le nostre idee … creare Dio con la nostra preghiera e la nostra fede). Papini proclaimed, “The art of creation that had been prepared already and announced elsewhere.” Papini and Prezzolini forced the convergence of what appeared a contribution to the “power” of the “spirit” toward that art. The Kantian a priori, the romanticism of Novalis, the idealism of Berkeley, themes from Nietzsche, representing the factors with the sign of the “the will to believe” (volontà di credere), and similar labels more or less descriptive formed the modalities of this living art of creation. Later, Sorel would lament that James gave credit to these among his so-called interpreters, who, anyway, had the merit of provoking and making known the works of two students of a completely different character and value, Vailati and Calderoni. These two also professed themselves pragmatists in the manner of Peirce, recognizing in his Pragmatism a fruitful conclusion and a renovation of the problematic of positivism. Until 1904, Vailati admonished Papini: Truth and laws … are the tracks on which facts and in particular our actions must move. Given your instinct of liberty, you are brought to conceive of the human being as a ship that creates its own course since it has no trails ahead of itself, but only those behind, which it has itself made (La verità, le leggi … sono rotaie su cui i fatti, e in particolare le nostre azioni, si devono muovere; tu dal tuo istinto di libertà sei portato invece a concepire l’uomo come una nave che crea la propria rotta e non ha solchi davanti a sé, ma solo dietro, cioè quelli che ella stessa fa). Vailati, who died still young in 1909, directed his major interests toward problems of mathematical logic, after a period of collaboration with Giuseppe Peano, and of history of science. In the field of history, he defined the significance and the values of scientific inquiries in the context of philosophical researches. In Scritti, p. 63, he wrote: The history of science has taught us how the great enemy of any intellectual progress has been always the tendency of mutilating and distorting nature to fit on the bed of Procustes of traditional preconceptions. It has showed how what we call preconceptions are scientific doctrines and theories corresponding to a previous stage of development of human knowledge. The history of science has alerted us against the danger inherent in the belief that, because a hypothesis or theory has been useful and fertile in the past, must therefore continue to remain such also for the future. Scientific theories and doctrines are not like persons toward which we have an obligation of gratitude for the services they may have rendered to us in the past. They must be abandoned without piety and remorse as soon as they are recognized as being inadequate to the duty for which they had been formulated (La

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storia della scienza insegnandoci come la gran nemica di ogni progresso intellettuale sia stata sempre la tendenza a mutilare e a svisare la natura per farla entrare nel letto di Procuste dei preconcetti tradizionali, e mostrandoci come quelli che noi chiamiamo preconcetti non sono che le dottrine e le teorie scientifiche corrispondenti ad uno stadio anteriore di sviluppo delle conoscenze umane, ci pone in guardia contro il pericolo inerente al credere che, perché un’ipotesi o una teoria è stata utile e feconda in passato, deve perciò solo continuare a rimanere tale anche per l’avvenire. Le teorie e le ipotesi scientifiche non sono come delle persone a cui siamo in obbligo di serbar gratitudine per i servigii che ci possono aver reso in passato … debbono essere abbandonate senza pietà e senza rimorso non appena vengono riconosciute inadeguate all’ufficio pel quale sono state foggiate). The problems of history and of the value of science became problems of methodology, logic, and analysis of language (ibid., p. 65): An erroneous affirmation, an inconclusive reasoning of a scientist of the time past can be as worthy of consideration as much as a discovery or a genial intuition, if they serve equally to throw light on the causes that have accelerated or retarded the progress of human knowledge or to place into focus the way of acting of our intellectual faculties (Un’asserzione erronea, un ragionamento inconcludente di uno scienziato dei tempi trascorsi possono essere tanto degni di considerazione quanto una scoperta o un’intuizione geniale, se essi servono ugualmente a gettar luce sulle cause che hanno accelerato o ritardato il progresso delle conoscenze umane o a mettere a nudo il modo d’agire delle nostre facoltà intellettuali). Positivism appeals to the methods of the sciences: let us examine them and historicize the scientific progress in its conquests as well as defeats. In a discussion on the matter, Vailati looked at the problems of the rapport between scientific knowledge and historical process. His discussion on “prevision” and “verification,” on knowing as foreseeing the conceivable, if it refers us to Peirce, also makes us in touch with his younger friend, Calderoni who, coming from juridical studies, was prevalently concerned with moral problems and like him involved in the effort of distinguishing the valid aspects of the pragmatist currents. Calderoni’s principal merit was his indication, in the form of Pragmatism practiced by him and Vailati, of a consequent reform of positivism, a positive deepening of scientific knowledge, an effort for a more profound analysis of the many fields of experience and the different kinds of language. Among the best of the century are the pages that Calderoni wrote on questions of words, on prevision, on the rapport between economy and morality, on the will, on values, and evaluations. Calderoni was superficially critical

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of Marx and the historical materialism, without being aware of it, in his major work Disarmonie economiche e disarmonie morali (whose subtitle is Saggio di una estensione della teoria ricardiana della rendita). In this book, he offered analyses and comments that at times met with some of the most interesting aspects of problems aimed at the connection of moral evaluations and idealities with historical situations and economic rapports. Deplorably, with the premature deaths of Vailati and Calderoni, the echo of Pragmatism remained tied to a misunderstood James, and to a “criticism of science” conducted in an approximate manner. Though it appeared paradoxical, Croce too, in a fragment on logic of 1905 of Lineamenti di una logica come scienza del concetto puro said, “The natural sciences and the mathematics move within the useful, the comfortable, and the economical.” Trying to free himself from the difficulty presented by the sciences, Croce placed himself closer to Bergson, and perhaps Papini, instead of Peirce, Vailati, or Calderoni. It is impossible not to dismiss the extreme gravity of his conclusion, which placed the whole mathematics and all the sciences of nature outside of thought. In Lineamenti (p. 84), Croce stated, “Philosophy does not excel, like a superior thought, the inferior one of naturalistic abstractions. Philosophy is thought, the only thought, facing what is not thought” (La filosofia non sorpassa, come un pensiero superiore, quello, inferiore, delle astrazioni naturalistiche; ma è il pensiero, il solo pensiero, di fronte a ciò che non è pensiero). In the same book, on page 123, we see the reference to the Florentine journal Leonardo and to Papini. Later, starting with the Logica of 1909, indicated as “second edition” of the Lineamenti of 1905, the reference to Papini disappeared. In G. Vailati and M. Calderoni, Il Pragmatismo (pp. 238–239), Calderoni, also in the name of Vailati, spoke severely about Croce and Bergson: They [Croce and Bergson] are wrong when they take seriously the affirmation that what the scientists are admitting to exist as arbitrary in science in the most recent theories of knowledge constructed by them, would take away from science its character of true science. Croce is deceiving himself thinking that it is possible to reach a “truer” knowledge, by rising from “partial” and “artificial” concepts of science— pseudo concepts—to the one he calls “pure” concept, universal. He does not appear to see that this “pure” concept is in reality equally as the “intuition” of Bergson, the indistinct, the indiscriminate, and the unconscious. He does not see that by freeing science from what is presumed arbitrary in science, he frees himself from all and any knowledge (Hanno il torto di prendere sul serio l’affermazione che quel tanto d’arbitrario che le piú recenti teorie della conoscenza costruite dagli scienziati sono costrette ad ammettere nella scienza, tolga alla scienza stessa il suo carattere di scienza vera. Il Croce s’illude che si possa giungere ad una conoscenza ‘piú vera’, col risalire dai concetti ‘parziali’ e ‘artificiali’ della scienza, (pseudoconcetti!) a quello che egli chiama il concetto ‘puro’, all’universale; quasi che questo con-

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cetto ’puro’ non fosse in realtà, al pari della ‘intuizione’ di Bergson, l’indistinto, l’indiscriminato, l’inconscio; quasi che liberarsi dal presunto arbitrario insito nella scienza non fosse liberarsi da ogni e qualunque conoscenza). 13. Philosophy in the Universities Sorel pointed out that futurism was the conclusion of the pragmatism that was found in Papini. The other kind of pragmatism of Vailati and Calderoni was instead consciously radicated into the development of positivism. This pragmatism produced no wide influence, was attacked on one side by the neoHegelian idealism and on the other by the extreme points of irrationalism, but continued to move along a line of positive inquiries, which, even in their isolation, constituted one of the more valid aspects of the Italian philosophical culture of the twentieth century. The movement included positivists open to a wider problematic, neo-Kantians, and rationalists, who tried to concretize the philosophical analysis in specific fields. Its members denied that the “philosopher” could enjoy privileged forms of knowledge, save those derived from experience and reason. They distrusted the “intuitions” and the “pure concepts.” Because they were faithful to the positive inquiry conducted in a rigorous manner and because obliged to fight on many fronts, it is impossible to give of them even a rapid mention above and beyond an enumeration of names and works, which are not always easily classifiable within the traditional division of currents and specializations. In any case, during the first decades of this century, and it would be a shame to forget it, a small phalanx of individuals existed. In the Italian Universities, this phalanx of little shy teachers, most of the time remained without any echo in the country, represented various general tendencies, similar in their rigorous mental discipline and constant independence of judgment. The works of these individuals, even if in forms intermediate, perhaps remote, contributed to the preservation of the valid aspects of worthy traditions and to the initiating of productive researches. Thus, the work of Paolo Raffaele Troiano would not be forgotten, some themes on “fiction” in the writings of Giovanni Marchesini would still be remarkable, and the critique of experience of the phenomenologist Cosmo Guastella would impress with some interesting passages. Within the arc of Italian philosophical production some contributions and attempts of greater significance appeared. The reflections of Calderoni more than once connected with those of Erminio Juvalta who reached positivist positions coming from Kantism, author of pages on morality of rare discernment. Ludovico Limentani, disciple of Ardigò, in deducing remarkable suggestions from Pragmatism, gave original contributions on “prevision” in the field of social sciences and on ethical formalism. Francesco De Sarlo, without being a positivist, made the center of his “philosophy” the psychological inquiry and a phenomenological research of his own, repeating in a very independent manner some aspects of Franz Brentano’s thought. De Sarlo

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constantly fought Bergson and all the attempts of attributing to philosophy means of a privileged knowledge. In the way of specific researches in philosophy of jurisprudence or philosophy of science for those interested in further studies, we do not wish to leave unmentioned, among others, scholars like Alessandro Levi or Federigo Enriques. With this, we intend to remind that in the midst of so many human crises and ideas, the conservation was carried out in the Italian culture, especially in the Italian Universities, of a basic core, solid though not ostentatious, which can prove the continuity unbroken even by dramatic vicissitudes. 14. Philosophical Debates. Religious Restlessness A wave of irrationalism, in diverse forms and expressions, from the philosophies of life to pragmatism, historicism, and renewed idealism, characterized a large part of the Italian culture up to the time of World War I and beyond. A careful analysis would have to consider relevant facts like the modernist crisis or the developments of Socialist thought. Remaining interested in a “conventional” view of the philosophical disciplines, what were mostly evident were the accentuation of religious exigencies and a progressive abandonment of the positions of positivism. This is manifest not only in minor figures, which could have been subject to opportunism and vanity, but also in individuals seriously thoughtful and sometimes of an uncommon level. Sincere was certainly the restlessness that accompanied Giuseppe Tarozzi from the original positivist initiation to the comforting haven of faith, while his itinerary is the exemplar mirror of an event that transcended him. Truly, he loved to declare constantly himself a disciple of Ardigò, but in his long activity, he teared down one by one the different parts of the system of the teacher, rejecting in full his spirit. The lines of the long journey, always accompanied by an abundant inclination for the rhetoric of ideals and of “anime belle” (the chosen souls), went through Bergsonian indeterminism, ethical idealism, “freedom of the spirit as revelation of infinity in consciousness,” and an intensification of research on the themes of faith. Another speculative disposition, another different force, was demonstrated by Bernardino Varisco. He was still tied to the positivists in his major work, Scienza e opinioni of 1901, and thereafter increasingly taken by the problem of being, unity and multiplicity, existence of particular subjects (and solipsism), of Being as a personal God, in books with significant titles: I massimi problemi (1909), Conosci te stesso (1912), and Dall’uomo a Dio (1939). From his tormented pages problems of great concern, and perhaps always actual, emerged, but they were inserted in an archaic context, with preoccupations far removed from the contemporary consciousness, foreign to the problems of the time. Hence, though admitting the validity of some intervention in the discussion of modernism, some insignificant nationalistic manifestations, and some dubious political conceptions, his work remained substantially removed from the active culture of the time. This is something that, in part, can

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also be affirmed about another major figure, Piero Martinetti, a personality agitated by a constant and intense religious inspiration, though faithful to the defense of the “scientific” character of philosophy, which in his opinion had its own foundation in the sciences. Revealed religions, with their symbols, represented an imperfect knowledge that was destined to be resolved in the rational cognition proper to philosophy. The task of philosophy, in addition to the gathering of the complex of all the particular researches, was that of performing the superior synthesis. The process that brought from the monadic reality of the individual to the total vision of the absolute was philosophy’s concern. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge fell substantially outside the philosophical horizon, which was involved in showing the ladder through which, by way of progressive syntheses, manifold reality ascended to the supreme Unity, meanwhile the manifestation of experience was resolved in the Truth of what stood beyond the historical level. Following a fashion supported and diffused by Schopenhauer (a philosopher very dear to Martinetti), Martinetti began from the study of India’s religious thought so much that his first work, in 1897, was the analysis of the Sankya system. In particular, he studied Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer, but also other figures “not actual” and “detached” like Africano Spir. In philosophizing, Martinetti found the way and the exercise of “wisdom” and a “personal” mystical practice of thought, “Each one of us is prisoner within his own thought like in a tower” (Ciascuno è chiuso nel suo pensiero come in una torre). The tone of high religiosity in his pages, so much inclined to a crude polemic with mundane (political) interferences originated precisely from the above. From the same source sprung his “religious” resistance to Fascism, his contacting modernist groups, the rejection of idealism, and the harsh polemic with Catholicism, or rather with the Catholic Church after the Concordat. Concerning this, he wrote Ragione e fede (1934) and Gesú Cristo e il cristianesimo (1934). From the same positions came his serious work as a moralist, Breviario spirituale (1926), but also the impossibility (non-feasibility) of his major writings, Introduzione alla metafisica (1904) and La libertà (1929). Notice that his non-feasibleness was due not to the harsh and rebellious impossibility of Nietzsche, but to an insuperable distance from humankind. His was an appeal to everything that the world cannot give, the continuous nostalgia of another world, a nostalgia expressed without rhetoric with the modules of the rational discourse and the support of solemn testimonies. 15. Croce and the “Philosophy of Spirit” Norberto Bobbio, considering the problem of the non-actuality of Martinetti, said a few correct things. Comparing the refusal of positive religions by Croce and Gentile with that of Martinetti, Bobbio observed how the first two denied positive religion on the theoretical level but admitted it at the practical one. As mythical forms suitable to the unlearned, religion was useful, but not true. Martinetti, on the contrary, though considering religion fundamentally true,

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condemned it precisely for its suitability to a pretended social function, “A system of truth that must free itself from the superstitious practices that became the components of the truths” (un sistema di verità che debbono essere liberate da pratiche superstiziose che le compongono). From this, also at this level, we see the distance of Martinetti from the thought of his contemporaries (una frattura piú che una giuntura col pensiero contemporaneo). Bobbio added, “Martinetti openly declared of not having given his oath of fidelity to the fascist regime for religious motives,” which was another confirmation of his detachment, not from Croce alone, but from the living part of the contemporary culture. This is certainly the reason why the Italian philosophical debate left aside all these “solitary” and “noble” positions, which more than anachronistic were ahead of their time. In this way, the Neo-Scholastics and the Neo-Thomists, given their historical sensibility, after having dealt with positivism within Europe, came to a confrontation with the Neo-Idealism within Italy, with Croce and Gentile. Between 1902 and 1909, Benedetto Croce developed a complete “Philosophy of Spirit,” historically placing it between Vico and Hegel. Croce, according to the opinion of his friend Gentile (Scritti vari, vol. 1, p. 169), during this time was removing from the Estetica of 1902 some “naturalistic” residues, acquiring finally (in the edition of 1909) “full and firm awareness of its idealistic character.” Croce, with the Estetica of 1902, intended to create an autonomous work, capable of exhausting all philosophical problematic. Thereafter, under the pressure of new needs, he articulated his own system, which grew out as a reaction from the same conception of art. Logica was added to Estetica between 1905 and 1909, and the Filosofia della pratica: economica ed etica between 1907 and 1909. In 1907, Croce confessed: These three volumes have not been conceived and written all at the same time, in which case they would have had an order and disposition partially different. When I wrote the first, I was not thinking of giving to it the companions that afterward I wrote, and therefore I planned it all closed in itself…. After having specifically exposed all the philosophical sciences, I see many things now with greater clarity and better connection, and quite differently. A certain perplexity and some inexact concepts, which can be found in some points of the Estetica, would not have any place in it. For all these reasons, the three volumes, in their substantial unity of thought and the goal to be achieved, have their own proper physiognomy and show the traces of the different moments of life in which they were written. They should be ordered and must be considered in the progressive order in which they were chronologically published (Certo, i tre volumi non sono stati concepiti e scritti tutti in una volta; nel qual caso avrebbero avuto ordine e disposizione in parte diversi. Quando scrissi il primo, non pensavo di dargli i due compagni che poi gli ho dati; e perciò lo disegnai chiuso

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in sé stesso…. Molte cose ora, dopo aver esposto particolarmente le varie scienze filosofiche, vedo con maggior chiarezza e nesso migliore, e alquanto diversamente; e una certa perplessità e qualche concetto inesatto, che sono in alcuni punti dell’Estetica … non avrebbero ormai piú luogo. Per tutte queste ragioni i tre volumi, pur nella sostanziale unità del pensiero che li anima e del fine che si propongono, hanno ciascuno fisonomia propria, serbano tracce dei momenti diversi di vita nei quali sono stati scritti, e si dispongono e debbono essere considerati in ordine progressivo secondo le date di pubblicazione). In reality, the “system” completed the inventory of concepts of the fundamental forms of reality within a circle regulated by a rhythm according to an immutable sequence: beautiful and true, useful and good (bello e vero, utile e bene). In the two moments of the individual and the universal, the spiritual activity, which is knowledge and will, and which resolves in itself all the real, eternally completes its own life. It is not in this skeletal and little significant classification, or in some famous “verbal” definitions that risk at times of becoming wordplays that the value of the Crocean work consists, even though some arid schemes have rooted themselves too much in memory. Croce’s significance, for its good as well as for its bad, must be searched in the polemic of the pars destruens, or in the most fertile analysis of an experience gathered from the most distinct fields delimited a priori within their boundaries. We must recognize that these boundaries were often established in some arbitrary modes. The Estetica found its “vigor” (“nerbo,” as Croce himself says) in the critique of the physiological, psychological, naturalistic, and metaphysical reductions. In the same way, the Logica placed its strongest effort in the criticism of the theoretical value of the sciences of nature and the knowledge of the concrete value of the mathematical sciences. Logic pretended to clarify the rapport between science and philosophy, taking advantage of the contributions of an extremely simplified pragmatism, in which the character, “practical” or “economical,” of science was understood in a completely unsatisfying manner. This difficult point was central because upon it depended the notion itself of “science,” and therefore of philosophy, and the rapport between “praxis” and “thought.” Placing without adequate penetration of the matter scientific knowledge within the uncertain area of the “pseudoconcepts,” while leaving unresolved the problem of the rapport between concept and experience, was making the “distinction” between practical and theoric, between thought and action, equivocal. The symmetric architecture to which Croce appeared to have attributed so much weight was failing. The point is that quite serious general theses were accepted, and they were accepted surreptitiously. By denying true and proper “cognitive” power to both the sciences of nature and the mathematical ones, Croce, more than it has been said, was coming to join those who had debated the rapport between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, and with more decisively irrationalistic movements than they did. He was coming to accept the meta-

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phors of the “internal” and the “external,” which were circulating in wide areas of contemporary culture. He was coming to accept as acquired results some theses implying “metaphysical” presuppositions of a great consequence. He offered as given a conception of reality as a process (history, storia) of a “spirit” (or life, vita), in a certain rapport with some “forms,” according to a determinate rhythm. The theory of the pseudo-concepts placed the knowledge through “concepts” on a level that reminded us too much of the Bergsonian intuition and the deriving counter-opposition between the “science” of the abstract (and of the external) and the “metaphysics” of the concrete (of the internal). All of this was admitted not after a deepening of the structures of the various fields of experience, but through a strange oscillation between rapid transpositions on a transcendental level of empirical observations and “reductions” re-projected on the experience and beginning from an a priori not rigorously constituted. “Reductions,” like that of “rights” (jurisprudence, diritto) to “economy,” operated in Filosofia della pratica, were bringing in themselves implications loaded with significance, but the too abstract and classifying manner with which they were made was emptying them of their possible power. At the conclusion of the volume of 1909 on the Filosofia della pratica, the author tells us that his task was completed, because the “system” of the “Filosofia dello Spirito” was finished. At this point, he stated, “The exposition of the whole Philosophy is completed because the Spirit is the whole reality.” Meditating on these pages, the reader feels a sense of dissatisfaction, as if he had received an elusive answer that avoided taking a position in a precise discussion and invited a total refutation. At the end of his long fatigue, Croce noticed the possible presence of the mentioned dissatisfaction and spoke of delusion, which he attributed to the fact that his logic penetrated the mystery, and revealed “a Reality … less poetical than another one, all surrounded by mystery” (Filosofia della pratica, pp. 409–412). The delusion was not to be found here. The delusion was rooted on the suspicion that the problems given as resolved were only problems artificially posited; that reality (with the small “r”) was still there, beyond those logical architectures; that the instruments offered to work on that reality were of little use; that the task of inquiring was different from the defining-classifying virtuosity demonstrated. Croce, as the great thinker he was, must have sensed all this, and if he was concluding that, with the completion of the system, the clarification (explanation) of reality was completed, he actually ended the system with other more solemn words, believing of having dissolved the mystery in a total system. He added: No particular philosophical system can enclose within itself all that can be matter for philosophizing. No philosophical system is definitive, because Live itself is never complete…. Truth is always surrounded by mystery, it is always ascending to loftier altitudes, which, like Life itself, would possess no climax (Nessun particolare sistema filosofico può mai chiudere in sé tutto il filosofabile; nessun sistema filosofico è definitivo, perché la Vita, essa, non è mai definitive…. La Verità è

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sempre cinta di mistero, ossia è un’ascensione ad altezze sempre crescenti, che non hanno giammai il loro culmine, come non l’ha la Vita). We have life and form, life and reason. “Philosophy” answers the problems posited by history in its process. “Every philosophical system resolved a group of problems historically given” (un sistema filosofico risolve un gruppo di problemi storicamente dati). The tension that characterizes the Crocean work between 1901 and 1909 is exactly this effort of individualizing, considering “un gruppo di problemi storicamente dati,” within the analysis of a real situation, and attempting at carrying on the complex of the inquiry within structures—not derived from historical concreteness—that are given by general, philosophical, abstract, and already worn presuppositions. In Croce, something exists like a hiatus, a secret dissent, between the richest analysis of the vast sectors of experience and human culture, and the “system” established during the first decade of the century that can genealogically be connected with Vico, De Sanctis, and Hegel, and was never completely abandoned or modified. Leaving out of consideration the genealogy, which is debatable at least in part, the authentic “philosophy” that circulates in the concrete analyses is other than what derives from the extremely simplified play of “distinctions” and “the four words.” In the philosophy, together with the precise discussion of cultural facts and experience, the “concepts” are placed into focus, which may be extremely “impure,” but are preciously useful for the understanding, for connecting and clarifying the multiple manifestations of human work and vicissitude. In the interplay, a few most abstract ideas are juxtaposed, and their development is often stated instead of demonstrated. It is difficult to fully say how much light the meditation of Croce—a meditation truly “heroic” in its insistence—has thrown on the concrete problems of criticism of the arts, on the aspects and the characters of “poetry,” on the modes of approaching it, on the necessary distinctions for the comprehension of a large area of human experience. Not minor is Croce’s subtlety in the analysis of human actions, in the determination of what should be understood with the words sentiment, passion, intention, volition, and so on. The same rare capacity demonstrated by Croce in the pages of the Letteratura della nuova Italia of delineating some unforgettable portraits of human beings and places is found also in the psychologist, the moralist, and the critic who delineates the guises through which one arrives to the comprehension of a literary work, and in the historian who clarifies the instruments which he uses for the penetration and reactivation of the past. As these analyses and histories would be valid, if placed back within their boundaries (even if, per adventure, these boundaries would be different from those the author thought), so the “philosophy” that sustains them, which is present in them, and which Croce gradually determines and formulates, preserves its force and value. This alone is the “philosophy” for whose reason Croce has acted in profundity on the Italian culture, dominating it for decades, and not the skeleton or scheme in which he believed to recognize himself. This was the systematic scheme to

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which somehow symmetrically corresponded the historical scheme, or genealogy, at the conclusion of which he placed the “filosofia dello Spirito.” We are not required to discuss Croce’s constant and subtle use of De Sanctis, to underline the significance of the two famous books on Hegel (Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel, published in 1907, but already completed at the beginning of 1906) and on Vico (La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico, published in 1911, completed in 1910, and preceded by numerous Vichian essays). It is important to notice that the two works on Hegel and Vico constitute two key-points for a more profound penetration of some themes of aesthetic, the conception of the dialectic of opposites, and its pretended correction through the connection of the distinct. How little Hegelian was the “reformation” of Croce; how much “Kantian flavor” remained in him—as Gentile said—would be noticed by any person reading the pages closest to the drafting of the first Logica. In this “return” to a Hegel so different from the one met during the years of Labriola (and of Marx) we must place the very difficult and equivocal “systematizing” of the “filosofia dello Spirito.” The dialectic that possesses nothing of the dialectic of Hegel is overturned tortuously and laboriously in a “philosophy of life,” in which the eternal “forms,” distinct and connected, of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness preside to the infinite process of life (Economics). 16. Origin of Actualism. La Voce. First Divisions among the Idealists In 1909, Benedetto Croce declared his system concluded. Some time before, on 20 December 1908, the publication of La Voce had begun which in its various vicissitudes documented with eloquence the changes of the Italian culture and society between the preparation to the war of Libya and World War I. No matter how we judge the so-called “Catholic civilization of the Italian Idealism” (and this is not the place to deal with that thorny problem), it would be very difficult to separate its vicissitude from the contrasted affirmation of the Crocean cultural hegemony. Doubtlessly La Voce expressed many different motives: Crocean, non-Crocean, and anti-Crocean. First-rate personalities wrote their opinions, though foreign to Croce’s thought. Enough to think of Gaetano Salvemini who brought up vital interests and orientations, far removed from the positions reached by Croce. Nevertheless, it cannot be said (as it has been said in order to deny the “Crocean” character of La Voce of Prezzolini) that intuitionism and pragmatism were antithetical to Croce’s idealism, instead of that they, too, were internal to it and constantly connected with it, in a tension never eliminated. The truth is that Croce, after separating himself from Labriola, after the proclaimed crisis of Marxism, placed himself at the center of the tumultuous agitation of ideas that characterized the first decade of the century, with the effort of domineering, clarifying, controlling, and reducing it within definite schemes. Not even the orderly elegance of La Critica succeeded in hiding the

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interior toil. The multiplicity of tendencies manifested itself in full in La Voce and often exploded with violence. To follow its ways and within that urgency of themes to recognize the faces of the persons and the lines of their doctrines means to reconstruct in all its particulars the life of the difficult years of Giovanni Giolitti’s period, of the Libyan enterprise, and of the events that preceded World War I. In its greatest merit, La Voce was not only extremely sensible, at a cultural level, to the tendencies that were agitating the country, but also contributed to the position taken by many Italian intellectuals, some of which, destined to operate between the two wars, it influenced. Without La Voce, many aspects of Gobetti would risk being incomprehensible and so would be for some early positions of the young Gramsci. No matter what, Gramsci was correct when he considered La Voce an aspect of militant Croceanism, although the journal was not just that. At times, it was the battlefield against Croce, the manifestation of an unsatisfaction with Croce. Serra, who favored neither Croce nor La Voce, allowed the journal to publish a part of his celebrated comparison between Croce and Giosuè Carducci. Not even Giovanni Amendola and Giovanni Boine, just two names among the most significant ones with diverse tendencies that appeared in the pages of the Florentine periodical, were truly sharing the spirit of La Voce. It is to La Voce that we must also recognize the merit of having evinced the tension internal to the Crocean system, by hosting the voice of dissidents, of a dissidence opened on common ground, or that accepted the terms of the discussion. By gathering the various texts of criticism to Croce, from Boine and Serra to the disciples of Gentile, one would have obtained, for the most part, the most important themes of the Crocean polemic during the period preceding the publication of Gramsci’s prison notebooks (Quaderni del carcere). In La Voce, at least under its philosophical profile, something more can be found: the coming forward of actualism. Actualism was at its peak between the end of World War I and the Conciliation between the Roman Church and the Italian State. Present was also an incipient autonomous affirmation of all those forms of irrationalism that would gradually manifest their appeal until World War II. On those pages barely appeared even Benito Mussolini, whose philosophical culture—neither great nor profound, no matter what now various parts professed—agitated by strange combinations of Darwin and Nietzsche, flirted with James and Bergson. It is useful for those who are searching for a history of “ideas” to know that it was in La Voce that all the legion of “actualists” (those who were and those who would be) made their appearance, from Guido De Ruggiero to Vito Fazio-Allmayer, from Adolfo Omodeo to Armando Carlini. It is in La Voce, between November 1913 and January 1914, that the discussion between Croce and Gentile concerning “l’idealismo attuale” took place. Croce called this “a discussion between philosopher friends,” but it was the one discussion that opposed to Croce Gentile and his thickening group of followers. The Sicilian Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano in 1875 and

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died in Florence in 1944. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, was a student of Jaja, and, through Jaja, of Spaventa, whom he studied with passion and whose works he partially collected and published. Of the Hegelianism of Spaventa, Gentile absorbed many liberal themes. Between 1897 and 1899, he discussed the philosophy of Marx, connecting himself with many works of Labriola and Croce on the same theme. Using the research for his thesis of 1897–1898, in which he analyzed Rosmini and Gioberti, he wrote a volume of great importance with the precise title of Rosmini e Gioberti. The lines of his interests and his formation were by this time clear, but they became ulteriorly clearer in his historical essays. In 1898, he presented as a thesis of proficiency to the Istituto di Studi Superiori of Florence the first nucleus of the book Dal Genovesi al Galluppi that appeared in 1903 in the edition of La Critica, in which, from 1903 onward, the strongly polemical essays on La filosofia in Italia dopo il 1850 were published. In them, he gradually took position in relation to the many Italian currents to end, at last, in the position of a renewed Hegelianism. During this same time, he dedicated himself to works of great importance (editions and critical studies) of the national philosophical tradition, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. He attended especially to the thinkers of the Renaissance; republished and egregiously commented Giordano Bruno. In Gentile, too, the methods of the historical school and the inspiration of the renewed Hegelianism converged. Between 1903 and 1909, he participated vividly in the religious discussions and polemics on modernism, Il Modernismo e i rapporti tra religione e filosofia (Bari, 1909), analyzing works of William James, Etienne Boutroux, Lucien Laberthonnière, and getting at the heart of the matter between philosophy and religion. He was a thinker with a profound religious sensibility, who, while considering positive religions a stage of the life of the spirit [mind] destined to resolve itself in a clearer philosophical vision, conceived philosophy as the culmination point of the spiritual process in which all “religious” needs would find their fulfillment. In this sense alone, he meant to refute modernism. He was fundamentally a conservative in practice and thought to assign to positive religions the propedeutic task at the level of the unlearned. He opined that religions could not be touched without any damage, and considered a useless hindrance the connection of philosophy with religious credence. Modernism, which was so dangerous at the institutional ground, was becoming useless at the speculative level, where it could represent only the permanence of an equivoque. This does not exclude the fact the many suggestions of Laberthonnière or of the first Blondel could be found in the maturation of the thought of Gentile. Gentile was a strong collaborator of Croce during the first years of La Critica and in introducing the great classics of philosophy in a historical orientation quite characteristic (through the collections published by Laterza). He actively took part in the discussions on the teaching of philosophy and on education in general, obtaining much sympathy due to his warm eloquence

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that derived its efficacy from the rhetorical ornaments themselves. Unlike Croce, Gentile was a man of education and brought into his academic teaching some themes of his “idealism,” conceiving education as an immediacy of rapports with the students, all unified in one concept through discourses highly stimulating. At the University and Philosophical Library of Palermo, Gentile constituted the first nucleus of his disciples. It was at the Philosophical Library of Palermo that, during the winter of 1911, Gentile gave those lectures which in 1912 were published in the Annuario of the Library with the title L’atto del pensiero come atto puro and thereafter again in 1913 in the volume La Riforma della dialettica hegeliana. The organic work Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro appeared in Pisa in 1916, then in 1918, and lastly in Bari in 1920. The orientation of his thought was defined in its complete aloofness from that of Croce and at the same time, the merits and defects of his school were characterized. Serra acutely remarked: Though Gentile in the problems of aesthetics and history has remained extraneous to the true original moments of Croce, he has remained with him in the line of Hegelianism and Spaventa, from which the actual idealism proceeds: a fortunate motto and a formula a little ambiguous (Se Gentile è rimasto estraneo ai momenti veramente originali di Croce, nei problemi dell’estetica e della storia, è rimasto nella sua linea di hegelismo e di Spaventa, da cui esce l’idealismo attuale, motto fortunato e formula un po’ ambigua). Having made the above remark, Serra added, “It is with Gentile that many young intelligent individuals, good writers, went.” Again in Scritti (Firenze, 1958), vol. 2, p. 589, he analyzed the actualists: [They are inclined] to use certain formulas and we may say some tricks, which succeed in the formulation of all the questions for no purpose within some schemes of a desolate monotony, which seem dialectic, but at the bottom are merely verbal…. In addition, everyone can add to them something of their own creation, jokes, or rhetoric, showing an air of spiritual passion or pedantic superiority. They often show a superficial and still tormented ambition of separation from others, of excelling others, and of being original ([Inclini] all’uso di certe formule e quasi diremmo trucchi, che riescono a impostar tutte le questioni a vuoto, sopra degli schemi che sembrano dialettici, e in fondo sono veramente verbali, di una monotonia desolante…. Ognuno poi ci può aggiungere di suo un po’ di abilità o di goffaggine e retorica, un’aria di passione spirituale o di superiorità pedantesca; spesso una superficiale e pur tormentosa ambizione di staccarsi dagli altri, di superare, di esser originale).

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As Serra observed quite crudely, all these student-disciples reverberated on the entire group this theoretical and artificial sensation united to a historiographic superficiality. One of the better disciples, who thereafter would detach himself from Gentile for political reasons (and, in part at least, for the same motives from Croce), was Adolfo Omodeo. In Lettere 1910–1946 (Turin, 1963), writing to his wife, Omodeo with great penetration emphasized the extrinsic nature, the inadequacy, and the anti-historicity of a great part of the historiography of this school—and he mentioned De Ruggiero and Fazio Allmayer—which represented the preponderant activity of the young followers of Gentile. This group of young philosophers followers of actualism gathered in Palermo around Gentile at the Philosophical Library, and, with its exaggerations, provoked Croce’s reaction toward the end of 1913. The first critical article appeared in La Voce and it was explicit, “My dear friends of the Philosophical Library of Palermo, and you who are the first among all in valor as in friendship, your actual idealism does not convince me.” Croce was stating once more his own “hostility” to any metaphysics, even to the “Metaphysics of the Mind,” though proclaiming his faithfulness to “distinction.” Croce’s words thundered: You are insisting on this point: “We must be careful not to transcend the act.” Listen to me. If this would mean that we should not introduce in the act of the spirit any abstract distinctions, that we should not fragmentize the act into a series of factors and faculties, which then are reunited in an abstract cooperation, our consent could continue. I, as well, am staunchly holding that the forms of the spirit take their meaning one from the other, and that the will does not exist and is not conceivable without thought, nor thought without will, nor thought without fantasy, nor fantasy without thought, and so on. It is from this that I posited in the spirit the concept as circularity and recourse. The meaning, however, that you are attributing to actuality [attualità, the act in action] is not this. The act, in the way you conceive it, is not going against the distinction made abstract, but against all distinctions, because for you the distinction itself is abstract. You do not affirm the concept to be concrete (unity in distinction), but you do affirm concreteness without concept (Voi battete su questo punto: che bisogna guardarsi dal trascendere l’atto; e se ciò significasse che non bisogna introdurre nell’atto spirituale distinzioni astratte, frazionandolo in una serie di fattori e di facoltà e riunendo poi queste in un’astratta cooperazione, il consenso continuerebbe. Anch’io ho per fermo che le forme dello spirito prendono significato l’una dall’altra, e che la volontà non esiste e non è concepibile senza il pensiero, né questo senza quella, né il pensiero senza la fantasia, né la fantasia senza il pensiero, e via discorrendo: donde il concetto che svolgo dello spirito come circolarità e ricorso. Ma il significato che voi attribuite all’attualità non

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è questo: non è rivolto contro la distinzione resa astratta, ma contro ogni distinzione, poiché per voi astratta è la distinzione stessa; non affermate il concetto concreto (unità nella distinzione), ma la concretezza senza concetto). The attualisti were, therefore, mystics. According to them, Croce was still attached to naturalism, still respectful of a reality in se. The terms of their discussions were often artificial and abstract. The same accusations that Gentile made against Croce were made thereafter against Gentile by his own disciples, when Gentile, having stated, “The act must be conceived as the reality in its infinity, as the whole,” wished to say something more about it. Ugo Spirito, in Dal mito alla scienza (Florence, 1966), who was perhaps the most consequential among Gentile’s followers, refuted all accusations to his teacher (pp. 320–321): The whole cannot be defined because of the principle of noncontradiction, and, if metaphysics wants the task of defining the whole, then metaphysics is truly finished and irremediably ended. Gentile could not keep faith to the principle of the indefinable character of the act and began to define it. This implied not only the denial of the principle itself, but also the denial of the other principle of the unity and infinity of the categories. In order to define the whole, Gentile had to reactivate in some way concepts sui generis, categories, conceived as attributes of the whole, and only of the whole. The whole is spirit, dialectic, act, history, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The whole is art, religion, and philosophy. This is a series of definitions of the whole and they cannot remain juxtaposed. They must articulate themselves in a metaphysical system understood in the traditional sense of the term, as in the General Theory of Mind as a Pure Act (Il tutto non si può definire, per la contraddizione che non lo consente, e, se la metafisica vuole avere lo scopo di definire il tutto, la metafisica è davvero finita e irrimediabilmente finita. Gentile, tuttavia, non ha avuto la possibilità di tener fede al principio della indefinibilità dell’atto e ha cominciato a definirlo. Il che ha implicato, non solo la smentita del principio stesso, ma anche la negazione dell’altro principio della unità e infinità delle categorie. Perciò, per poter definire il tutto, Gentile ha dovuto ripristinare in qualche modo concetti sui generis, categorie, concepiti come attributi del tutto, e soltanto del tutto. Il tutto è spirito, il tutto è dialettica, il tutto è atto, il tutto è storia, il tutto è tesi, antitesi, sintesi: arte, religione, filosofia. Una serie, quindi, di definizioni del tutto che non potendo rimanere giustapposte, debbono articolarsi in un sistema metafisico inteso nel senso tradizionale del termine: la Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro). In 1913, Croce made the most acute observations on the “theological” charac-

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ter of Gentile’s thought and on its conversion into an “absolute positivism.” Then Croce defined it “a philosophy that proposed the destruction of philosophy” (una filosofia la quale si propone di liquidare la filosofia), silencing finally the philosophical disputes, which are always involved in distinctions. This was truly the best result of a rigorous attualismo: to apply oneself totally to experience, elaborating it concretely, and thinking it in the “sciences.” The alternative result, in the direction of the Pure Act (Atto Puro) could be only in terms of theology or mysticism. Gentile, as Spirito said, reproaching him, in his effort of mediating concrete Logos and abstract Logos, not only had to reintroduce the triad of art, religion, and philosophy, but also equivocally had to reconsider the same thematic, against which he first moved. On the other hand, it was not so difficult for Gentile to use Croce against Croce, whose historicity—and the philosophy destined to become an abstract moment of historiography—was in contrast with the categories that, at their own turn (think of the useful), were problematic in their rapports. In reality, the discussion of 1913–1914 revealed the double soul of the “idealism” reborn: the part that descended from Hegel and the internal tension between “historical reason” and irrational tendencies. Unfortunately, in the situation of the extreme crisis of positivism, in the languor of all spiritualisms, in the uncertainties of the historical materialism, the only position capable of a cultural hegemony, the “Neo-Hegelian” one, was mirroring in its interior travail the quietless motions of time, without being able to compose and resolve them, by imposing a clear cultural direction. The breach, still hidden between Croce and Gentile, would become the most notable expression of the situation and would constitute the breaking of a difficult equilibrium. Gentile—hence his confidence, optimism, and even success—abandoned himself to the wave of events, convinced by a historicism capable of justifying everything that the Act (Atto) continuously translates itself into the made (fatto). His philosophy was supposed to become the passionate transcription (or the rhetorical reduction) of the bitter process of events in the triumphal course of the Spirit. His patriotism, nationalism, and even fascism, would be pervaded by the conviction, reduced to a terribly ingenuous confidence, that the happening of things is always the epiphany of the Spirit. Croce’s words of 1913 were prophetic: My dear friends, I fear that you are returning to a theoretical and ethical indifference…. Life to me does not appear like a comedy of ambiguities, of people who believe themselves bad and are good, of tears erroneously shed and that can be dried up with a smile or a caress, as we do with children who believe themselves greatly culpable and are not. Life appears to me as a tragedy, in which, through disgrace and dolor, goodness and truth are laboriously created, and, through the destruction of individual happiness, a painful serenity is created, which can also be happiness—perhaps, true happiness—but that refuses to be called with this name that sounds too idyllic (Io temo che voi, miei cari

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amici, torniate all’indifferentismo teoretico ed etico…. A me … la vita appare non come una commedia di equivoci, di gente che si crede malvagia ed è buona, di lagrime versate per isbaglio e che si possono asciugare presto con un sorriso e una carezza come si usa verso i ragazzi che si credono grandemente colpevoli e non sono; ma come una tragedia, nella quale, attraverso l’onta e il dolore, si crea faticosamente il bene e il vero, e, attraverso la distruzione della felicità individuale, si crea una serenità dolorosa, che sarà anche felicità, anzi la vera felicità, ma che quasi si sdegna di essere chiamata con questo nome, che le suona troppo idillico). It is 13 November 1913. Croce is by now an isolated individual. His work appeared to have been completed. On the vigil of the European tragedy (and after the war of Libya), he had the sensation of a catastrophe. The special issue of La Critica of 20 November 1914 concluded the twelfth volume with the general index. At the precise point when he was concluding ten years of work, Croce obscurely perceived that the tension around him was also internal to his thought and that many of those who abandoned him (or attacked him), often did nothing else than exasperate his own positions. Did this mean that his cultural supremacy (direzione) ended or, worse, even failed? For a philosophical balance at the eve of World War I, it may be instructive to read some of the comments of Serra, in Scritti (vol. 2, p. 588). From the time of the Libyan War, and concerning the conception of history, Serra had already declared himself far from the positions of Croce, whose theological providentialism he had rejected. In 1914, Serra sensed, though he did not mediate, the insufficiency of all the idealistic culture and was aware of the profound roots of the impressive emerging wave of irrationalism. He could also see the absolute lack of valid spokespersons in the battle of ideas that the idealists generated: the dissatisfaction caused by the rebirth of idealism, in Italy, found no other different positions. The efficacy of Croce seemed “superficial” to Serra, who noticed that it was a rebellion of costumes, “Yours is a rebellion of costumes instead of thought to the banality of positivism; the need of a culture somewhat more serious, with a more definite language…. Finally, a generic orientation toward an idealism, which is partially conjoined with the literary fashion (French) of spiritualism” (Una certa ribellione, piú di costume che di pensiero, alla banalità positivistica; l’esigenza di una cultura un po’ piú seria, con un linguaggio piú preciso…. Infine quell’orientamento generico verso l’idealismo, in cui confluisce un po’ di moda letteraria, francese, dello spiritualismo). Regrettably, beside Gentile and his followers, whom he reproached of clumsiness (goffaggine) and affectation (retorica), Serra could not see in Italy anything else: The remnants of the official philosophy are like a burden that is felt … only as ennui…. The only names we can recall are those of dead per-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY sons like Acri and Tocco…. Of Ardigò, we remember only that he exists as a political and anticlerical institution instead of a thinker, no matter whether or not this is right. All the other scholars are truly dreadful, and with their conceits in letters and rhetoric, they ensnare us in their journals and sometime in the daily newspapers. These are the like of Calò, Tarozzi, and Chiappelli who aspire to obtain the same glory than Barzellotti (Il resto della filosofia ufficiale è un peso morto, che si fa sentire … solo come noia…. I nomi che ci sovvengono sono di morti, come Acri e Tocco … e di Ardigò rammentiamo solo che esiste, piuttosto come una istituzione politica e anticlericale, che come un pensatore; e sia questo ingiusto o meno. Ma terribile cosa sono gli altri; ornati di lettere e di eloquenza che ci insidiano nelle riviste e talora nei giornali; i Calò, i Tarozzi, i Chiappelli che aspirano alla gloria di Barzellotti). 17. Contrasts and Diffusion of Idealism

Antonio Aliotta, discoursing La reazione idealistica contro la scienza (Palermo, 1912; and with some modification, London, 1917), could not efficaciously contrast the various manifestations of “the destruction of reason” that he had analyzed without true understanding. His failure was that of not having sufficiently distinguished in their depth the range of positions and especially of not having been always aware of the need of the “rebirth” of idealism and of the effective structures of scientific thought. Aliotta, influenced by the thought of De Sarlo, was interested in psychological inquiries and attacked Croce, but without effectiveness, in L’estetica del Croce e la crisi dell’idealismo (Naples, 1917). He progressively moved from a spiritualistic theism to a radical pluralism and experimentalism in La Guerra eterna e il dramma dell’ esistenza (Naples, 1917); La teoria di Einstein e le mutevoli prospettive del mondo (Palermo, 1922); Il problema di Dio e il nuovo pluralismo (Città di Castello, 1924). A free-and-easy treatment of definite scientific problems and easy solutions of serious moral dramas could not contribute to consolidating philosophical positions antithetical to the many forms of idealism. In reality, many of the adversaries have been taken as well within the magic circle of what was a multiple attitude more than a single position. It became manifest that the contraposition between science (or scientific knowledge, or experimentalism) and idealism could have no meaning, given the multiple significance of the counter offered terms, all different in their meaning and value. The idealistic offensive, so interconnected with the wave of irrationalism, overthrew positions that were even more solid, as in the case of the historical materialism. Instead of removing Marx out of the way, idealism hit certain pretended integrations of Marx, which were authentic destructions of Marx. Labriola strenuously contrasted positivist socialism and the ambiguity that could hide in some Marxist versions, more than in Darwin and Spencer. He

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had strongly rejected the thesis of the crisis proposed by Sorel and Croce. The influence of Sorel and Croce, nevertheless, continued to progress, and some simple pragmatist conclusions got what they deserved. In 1905, Giuseppe Rensi announced in Critica Sociale, “The idealist movement, as it does not destroy but integrates positivism, so it does not nullify the philosophical premises to socialism, but gives them new nourishment and comfort” (Il movimento idealista, come non distrugge ma integra il positivismo, cosí non sottrae le premesse filosofiche al socialismo, ma piuttosto dà ad esse nuovo alimento e conforto). Rensi, “the skeptic believer” as Ernesto Buonaiuti called him in 1945, was an inconsistent writer, always sincere in his restlessness, but always in crisis. His singular skepticism was substantiated by research and faith united and was the conclusion of his own theorizing temperament. He lived between 1871 and 1941 and was a militant socialist and an exile in Switzerland, moving during the first decade of the century between Hegelianism, Indian mysticism, and skepticism. Of Rensi, we could read Le basi economiche dell’amore (Milan, 1986) in the editions of Critica Sociale; Gli “anciens régimes” e la democrazia diretta, introduced by Arcangelo Ghisleri and published in Bellinzona, in 1902. The tragedy of the war caused him to formulate paradoxically a skeptic “system” in Lineamenti di filosofia scettica (Bologna, 1919) that he paralleled with a series of political analyses in La filosofia dell’autorità (Palermo, 1920), which is not without ambiguities in an age of ambiguity. The curve of this atheist—Apologia dell’ateismo (Roma, 1925)— of this skeptic so full of faith, of this irrationalist always ready to rationalize his mysticism was concluded in a sort of a religious abandon to the absurdity of reality. The Rensi “case,” a moving figure of a tormented thinker, constitutes a kind of case-limit, not isolated, of a socialist “philosopher” in the crisis between the two wars: lost, restless, and without any point of support. Almost by contrast, the work of one of the major students of the philosophy of the twentieth century emerged in Italy: Rodolfo Mondolfo. Mondolfo, born in 1877, was indefatigable since 1899 in an activity not yet concluded [in 1966]. He embraced the historical studies at the school of Felice Tocco, but ideally, he was the disciple of Roberto Ardigò. He was deeply attentive to the studies of the eighteenth century, collaborated with Critica Sociale starting in 1903, and was without any doubt the major Italian scholar on Engels, subtle interpreter of Marx, and a penetrating reader of Feuerbach. In connection with Filippo Turati, he occupied an important place in the “revision” of Marxism in Italy and the contemporaries considered him the spokesperson in the dialogue initiated by Labriola and then dominated by Gramsci. As the eminent historian of philosophy that he was, Mondolfo around 1908 elaborated his “liberal” interpretation of the “philosophy of the praxis.” He did not escape the idealistic influence that was destined to continue also in his major historiographic production after 1926 concerning Greek thought, through a characteristic

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thematic (Greek historicism, the infinite in Greek thought, the value of the individual in Greek thought). If it is true that Mondolfo’s work criticized the interpretations that of antiquity had been given by the historiographic “idealist” tradition, it is also true that his criticism consisted in extending to the ancient world those conquests that for the “idealists” have been (and remain for him) alive and valid conquests of the modern world. We should not speak of this here, but of the fact that a thinker like Mondolfo, an expert knower of Marxist texts, a socialist of rare temper, connected himself, in the most original moments of his reading of the Marxist classics, with the work of the “idealists.” This was done not in order to return to the Hegelian matrices of Marx, but for the influence of the positions taken by Croce and Gentile on the Italian culture. This influence could not be considered extraneous to the double discussion that Mondolfo did of both the theses of Labriola and of certain doctrines of Gramsci. When we think of the theoretical positions of Mondolfo and his evaluation of Leninism, it is difficult not to remember the rapport posited by Croce between “thought” and “action” in history. Mondolfo, in Sulle orme di Marx (Bologna, 1923), wrote against the revolutionary syndicalists: For the syndicalists, the creative free will posits its own myth, for instance, the myth of the general strike. For the historical materialism, “the reverse of the praxis” is always possible: the previous activity, in its results, becomes condition and limit of the activity that would follow, but which posits itself as in opposition to what pre-exists, and intends to overcome it dialectically. In this, the knowledge of the conditions and limits is the essential part of the development of the will. The practical moment is not detached from the critical moment. This difference is in rapport with the difference of the philosophical presuppositions that, in the historical materialism, are given by the voluntarism of Feuerbach, while in Sorel’s syndicalism are given by the modern contingent voluntarism (Per i sindacalisti la volontà creatrice pone liberamente il suo mito—per esempio, il mito dello sciopero generale; per il materialismo storico c’è sempre il rovesciamento della prassi: l’attivita precedente, nei suoi risultati, diventa condizione e limite dell’attività successive, che però si afferma come opposizione a ciò che preesiste, e tende a superarlo dialetticamente. Quindi la conoscenza delle condizioni e dei limiti qui è parte essenziale dello sviluppo della volontà: il momento pratico non si disgiunge dal momento critico. E questa differenza è in rapporto con la differenza dei presupposti filosofici, che sono nel materialismo storico dati dal volontarismo del Feuerbach, nel sindacalismo sorelliano dal moderno volontarismo contingentistico). Observe how in the manner of understanding the revolutionary praxis, the dialectic, that Mondolfo did not move away from Croce, or at least the Croce

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of La storia come pensiero e come azione, meanwhile he opposed Lenin and Gramsci. In 1919, Mondolfo wrote in Sulle orme di Marx (vol. 1, p. 111): By this hour, Lenin perhaps is already convinced that if in order to conquer the power in any historical moment it is enough to use audacity and violence, in order to establish socialism, on the contrary, things would be much more complicated (Lenin forse a quest’ora è già convinto che se, per conquistare il potere, può bastare l’audacia e la violenza in qualsiasi momento storico, per attuare il socialismo le cose sono un po’ piú complicate). The reversal of the praxis (rovesciamento della praxis), the revolutionary praxis for Mondolfo presupposes the exact correspondence between “the spiritual maturity of the revolutionary classes” and “the maturity of the physical conditions.” For him, the revolution is possible because it is prepared in all its parts and “is incumbent as a historical necessity.” The revolutionary will and the decision of “changing the world” are reduced to the verification of a change in progress. In order to preserve the freedom of human beings from the revolutionary “violence,” the recourse is made to the necessity of the historical course of events, to the ineluctability of things. While the criticized self-criticism of things (autocritica delle cose) of Labriola re-emerges, the “rovesciamento della praxis,” the reversed praxis, becomes void of any effective revolutionary charge. 18. The Thought of Gentile and the Critics Mondolfo’s discussion and Croce’s intensive meditation on history brought us by now beyond World War I to those decades of a more rapid “crisis” of ideas that are collocated between the two wars, when the process of dissolution of one “order” and the fall of one “reason” proceeded with a more rapid rhythm. World War I could deserve a single discourse as the testing bench of the Italian “philosophers,” but this could be long and complex. The isolation and the “neutrality” of Croce, the patriotism of Gentile, the bitter experience of Serra, the nationalistic and imperialistic rhetoric of many, either idealists or not, were truly an odd experiment. These elements foresaw the resistance of exiguous groups, the moral failure, and the instrumentation of culture, which punctuated the fascist period until the catastrophe of World War II. Perhaps only the detached seriousness of Croce, the participant sourness of Serra, and the measured serenity of the sincere experiences that Omodeo could gather with a great sense of humanity passed the “examinations” of 1914–1918. Outside of this, we would look perhaps in vain for a loftier moral or historical reflection consigned to pages of relief that are immune from rhetoric or propaganda. The end of the war and the tragedy of the after-war saw a profound mutation even of the philosophical orientations of the country. In the years between 1919 and 1925, and then until 1929 and beyond, the hard po-

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litical vicissitudes influenced deeply the positions to be taken: on one side, skilled adaptations, and rapid evolutions, and on the other, movements of rebellion, desperate discomfort, or isolation and silence. The proem written by Gentile for his new journal, Il Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, carries the date of 10 October 1919. Since 1918, Gentile had succeeded on the Roman Chair of Philosophy the modest but learned Giacomo Barzellotti. Gentile’s “different teaching places” punctuated very well the stages of his thought. From 1901 to 1907 he taught at the Lyceum of Naples, collaborated intensely with Croce and helped in the “rebirth of idealism.” From 1907 to 1914, in Palermo, between the University and the Philosophical Library, he completed his “reform” of Hegelianism and the birth of Actualism, while he also began his theoretical separation from Croce. From 1914 to 1918, at the University of Pisa, where he succeeded Donato Jaja, he systematized his “attualismo” and began writing his theoretical work of major relevance, the Sistema di logica (whose first volume born out of the lectures given, he published in Pisa in 1917). When he left Pisa, the most constructive period of his production was concluded. After he finished the historical works and had defined the lines of the “system” (the complete Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere appeared in 1922–1923; the Filosofia dell’arte in 1931), Gentile assigned to himself the achievement of two goals. He wished to publicize and defend his conception of reality, and the practical and political activity he had assumed as the “reformer” of the Italian School system and as the theoretician—not always and not always fully followed—of the fascism in power. He did this by concretizing ideas and plans that have been of Croce, too. His Logica, by underlining the dialectic between abstract Logos and concrete Logos, formulated a theory of error that assigned to the Act, to the thinking thought (pensiero pensante), truth, in a kind of Eternal Presence, in an absolute Subject that resolves everything in itself. Error and evil, on the contrary, are collocated in the past. Error and evil are the made, the past, what has been thought already. All of this, at the end, converged into a curious philosophy that contradicted itself and created the obstacle for an ulterior development. In Sistema di logica (vol. 2, p. 329), Gentile recognized: A philosophy like this may appear to deny, in a Jacobin mood, the past, because it leaves nothing behind and orients us toward the future. It may also deny the future, because reality for it is action, and the act is the present from which we cannot move into the future. In comparison with it, as in a comparison with the God of the old theology, the future itself is a past (Una filosofia come questa può parere che con anima giacobina neghi il passato, poiché non si lascia nulla alle spalle e ci orienta verso il futuro. Ma può anche parere che neghi il futuro, poiché la realtà per lei è atto, e l’atto è il presente da cui non si passa al futuro; quel presente, in confronto del quale, come in confronto di Dio per la vecchia teologia, il futuro è … un passato).

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When actualism went beyond the affirmations of an absolute immanence, of the act in the Act, of the thinking Subject of the abstract-concrete and actmade antithesis, it faced an infinity of single problems juxtaposed without mediation to the pure Act of Thought. Gentile wrote in Sistema di logica (vol. 2, p. 340): The most benevolent of my critics observed that my philosophy is a theologizing philosophy, still all taken by the thought of God, of a God differently interpreted but still always a God, like the one that used to fill up the brain of the theologians, and could remove from it all other thoughts. In fact, the theological problem does not change, no matter how it is called, metaphysical, logical, gnoseological, or problem of being or thinking. [My benevolent critic said to me,] You call it the problem of the act, but it is always the same problem of the theologians: the unique problem, the greatest problem, the supreme problem to which all other problems could be reduced. [Remember that] The philosophy that wishes to be a serious and positive work of the spirit must concern itself with specific particular problems, it does not know “the problem” (La tua filosofia—mi fa notare il piú benevolo dei critici—è una filosofia teologizzante, ancora tutta presa dal pensiero di Dio; di un Dio battezzato diversamente, ma che è pur sempre Dio, che riempiva il cervello dei teologi, e ne scacciava ogni altro pensiero. Giacché il problema teologico non cambia, se si chiami metafisico, o logico, o gnoseologico, problema dell’essere o del pensiero. Tu lo chiami problema dell’atto, ma è sempre il vecchio problema dei teologi: il problema unico, o massimo, il problema per eccellenza, a cui tutti gli altri si riconducono. E la filosofia che sia lavoro serio e positivo dello spirito, non conosce il problema, ma i problemi determinati particolari). The alternative was offered with precision. Gentile accepted it as “the selfcriticism of this [his] philosophy” and insisted on the uniquely live problem (unico problema vivo). He made his choice in favor of the theological direction, not aware that he too was giving the mortal blow to the theologizing philosophy, emptying it, as all mystical positions have always done, of its content. Gentile, an illustrious historian of philosophy, as Croce was an unbeatable historian of culture, aside of any illusion, had destroyed all possibility of an autonomous, self-sufficient philosophy. Piero Gobetti wrote in Ordine Nuovo: If philosophy is history, why do we have philosophy? The immanentists have eliminated transcendence with the question, “If the world is God, why God?” Why do we have a system, when we believe only the problem? If philosophy is identified with history, then there is no more philosophy outside of the development and resolution of the problems of actual experience. This observation alone justifies the validity of

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY philosophical systems throughout time, and, by excluding the metaphysical dramatization reduces the system to its value of experience. To be able to sustain this position without falling into skepticism or in a new metaphysics of identity is, in our opinion, the problem with which the new speculation must deal (Se la filosofia è storia, perché la filosofia? È la domanda con cui gli immanentisti hanno liquidata la trascendenza; se il mondo è Dio, perché Dio? Perché il sistema quando crediamo solo il problema? Se la filosofia si identifica con la storia non c’è piú filosofia fuori dello svolgimento e della risoluzione dei problemi dell’esperienza attuale. Solo questa osservazione dà ragione della verità dei sistemi filosofici attraverso i tempi; ed escludendo la drammaticità metafisica riduce il sistema al suo valore d’esperienza. Sostenere questa posizione senza ricadere nello scetticismo o in una nuova metafisica dell’identità: ecco a parer nostro, il problema che la nuova speculazione si deve affacciare).

His most acute students, especially Spirito and Calogero, would again present these precise questions of Gobetti to Gentile later on, in a different form, but with urgency, in the years near the World War II. In 1923, Gobetti, in Rivoluzione Liberale, was directing a bitter and pungent article “I miei conti con l’idealismo attuale” to Lombardo Radice, retracing, under the pressure of the events, his intellectual history. In that same year, Spirito was publishing his booklet Il nuovo idealismo italiano, which he modified some years later and sent to the printer with a title partially changed. Gobetti was insisting on the extreme ambiguity of the attualismo of Gentile, on its becoming reduced continuously to the concrete experience in order to avoid a reduction to an absolute tautological generalization, “I have always accepted from Croce the resolution of philosophy into history, and its limitation to the methodological moment. I have understood Gentile’s identification of pedagogy and philosophy as negation of pedagogy and its resolution to the concrete experience…. In its practical simplification, Gentile’s philosophy characteristically shows its limits and its absolute lack of adherence to reality.” As for Spirito, he indicated the roots of attualismo in “the new concept of philosophy, whose concreteness was found in the affirmation of history and pedagogy.” He had easy play in showing the limits of the critics, from the Neo-Scholastic Emilio Chiocchetti to Pantaleo Carabellese who was fixing his meditation beyond Bernardino Varisco and outside of the circle of auto consciousness of the actualists. Spirito was already aware that the novelty of attualismo was not to be found in the magic circle of a gnoseology that founded the metaphysics of the mind, but in a new way of conceiving philosophy, or of dissolving a certain image of philosophy. Many individuals, adversary, or unprepared followers, remained stranded in the problematic of the subjectobject, of the “I” that posited the “non-I,” of the Spirit that made the world, of the more or less autonomous reality of nature and things. Calogero and Spirito, and in different ways Fazio-Allmayer and Giuseppe Saitta, tried to

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focus on the fundamental novelty of attualismo, its radical way of thinking about philosophy, its “resolution,” and, if we wish, its “destruction” of philosophy so to obtain its rebirth in new forms. The followers of Gentile, and not them alone, appreciated his energy, faith, and optimism, his living with profound self-consciousness the educational rapport in such a way as to elevate it to an exemplary experience of spiritual life. This aspect seduced, in some later years, Calogero, and in spite of a rhetorical overabundance, constituted the matrix of the greater part of the “moralistic” reflection of Gentile’s followers. It was this insistence on doing, on praxis—though a praxis sui generis, spiritual—that chose to collocate itself on a different level than the empirical doing. This missionary tone, this “moral” inspiration, in the immediate after-war, around 1920, attracted the youth, and for some years, Gentile’s movement increased the number of its adherents. Until the tragic years between 1923 and 1925, Gentile had a large following, and not even the criticism of the “official” philosophers, some of which were quite sharp, could stop his appeal. The proem to the Giornale critico of October 1919 is pervaded, not only by the anxiety of renovation, but also by a candid confidence: As we are just coming out of the great tragedy of the war, our souls are still full with the horror of having seen death and are vibrant with the anxious desire of living. All survivors are inspecting themselves, and are recognizing amazingly each other. With the scene in their eyes of a world in ruins … they instinctively embrace life once more. Each one is returning to his place with his own particular joy, so much more intense as much as the sacrifices were bitter, as much as more acute was the pain of renunciation. There is the egoism of individuals, the egoism of classes, and a rebellion against everything that goes above any particular interest and forms nonetheless the greatness and the power of the human being: the universality of spirit…. However, this is a simple deceptive vision, and if we look under the surface, we should not fear the future (Appena usciti dalla grande tragedia della guerra, gli animi sono ancora pieni dell’orrore della morte veduta e vibranti d’ansiosa brama di vivere. I superstiti si cercano dentro di se stessi, quasi meravigliati di potersi ritrovare; e con lo spettacolo negli occhi di quel mondo sconvolto … si affrettano istintivamente a riabbracciarsi alla vita; ognuno al suo posto con la sua gioia, tanto piú intensa quanto piú duro fu il sacrificio, piú acuto il dolore della rinunzia. Egoismo d’individui, egoismo di classi, rivolta contro tutto ciò che sovrasta all’interesse particolare, e forma tuttavia la grandezza e la potenza dell’uomo: l’universalità dello spirito…. Ma è una semplice apparenza, e chi guardi oltre la superficie non può temere l’avvenire). In 1919, Gentile could see a faith springing up from everywhere. He said, “It is a robust faith, of which all religions and the political or moral programs of

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life try to benefit; it is the faith in a reality different from the material one, different from the one that we have; it is the faith in an idea” (una fede robusta, di cui tutte le religioni e i programmi di vita, politici e morali, procurano di profittare: una fede in una realtà diversa da quella materiale, da quella che c’è: la fede nell’idea). This for Gentile was philosophy, or preferably attualismo, the perfect identification of reality with ideality: The progress of philosophy from antiquity to our time has consisted always in a greater spirituality of its object and in the always more intimate identification of the act with which we think and the act with which we make reality. This identification produces one act alone, whereby reality coincides perfectly with the ideal…. This is a historical and actual idealism, an anti-Platonic and immanent idealism. Philosophy like poetry is personality. Philosophy is making real one’s own history (Il progresso della filosofia dall’antichità a noi, consiste nella sempre maggiore spiritualità del suo oggetto e nella sempre piú intima immedesimazione dell’atto con cui si pensa e del-l’atto con cui si realizza la realtà: immedesimazione in un atto solo, onde la realtà coincide perfettamente con l’ideale…. Un idealismo storico e attuale, uno spiritualismo antiplatonico e immanentistico … la filosofia come la poesia è personalità … filosofia è realizzare la propria storia). This actualism, which could become anything at all, in that moment, was an act of faith and hope. In the first volume of the Giornale critico, Benedetto Croce with his “Note d’estetica” had the place of honor, and his collaboration did not stop at the first volume. In it, Adolfo Omodeo published his studies on Christianity. In 1919, in Ordine Nuovo, the young Palmiro Togliatti was speaking about Gentile “as the most illustrious and followed teacher of the Italian philosophical school” and, though evincing his limits and hard positions, was placing him among “the courageous and consequent thinkers,” accentuating his criticism of naturalism. In a short time, after a heavy toil, the fractures of the Italian cultural world became most clear. On the philosophical grounds, the contrast reached cruel stages. Croce moved to an anti-fascist position; political authorities suspended the National Congress of Philosophy of 1926; a more bitter conflict began between Croce and Gentile; De Ruggiero, Lombardo Radice, and Omodeo detached themselves from Gentile. All these facts added to the battle of ideas a new tension that reflected on all the philosophical production. The barbarous murdering of two thinkers like Gobetti and Amendola by the hands of fascists revealed the total tragedy of the moment. All individuals were touched by the wave of irrationalism of the beginning of the century. If we were to survey the indices of the collaborators of La Voce from 1908 to 1914, we would see together the names of Mussolini and Amendola, Papini and Croce, Gentile and Salvemini, Banfi and Prezzolini, Serra, Boine, and De Ruggiero. They all united in something common to all. After 1925 the frac-

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tures multiplied. Labels, like irrationalism, activism, idealism, were of no help, because for their amplitude they became meaningless. To explain conflicts and alliances, professions of faith or “systems” are of no avail. When an order crumbles, when a crisis invests a complete situation, it touches all participants. This shipwreck, this vanishing of objective points of reference, at a certain point, places every reason of accord or disaccord in an answer from the conscience, in an essentially human reaction. Rather than of a “return to reason,” we must speak of a return to things and to the humane substance of human beings. 19. The Crisis of Idealism. Philosophy between Wars Periodization is useful. Dates can be advantageously used as points of reference in vicissitudes that are full with allusions and hidden meanings. When freedom of expression is suppressed, language is in cipher, and the usual maps of navigation are no longer valid for an orientation. To read a philosophical text of 1927 with the same criterion used for a work of 1924 could be a source of error. The names of Plato and Epicurus have not the same value in contexts that are separated by centuries, or in different historical situations. When Croce re-published Labriola, and the version of the Manifesto, in the vigil of World War I, it was necessary to use caution and expediency. When reading some of his pages of introduction, it would be convenient to be aware of the above observation and not to understand them as if they had been written twenty years before or ten years after. Between 1925 and 1926, the Italian political situation changed; fascism triumphed, with everything that such triumph entailed. The “conservative” opposition of Croce, his defense of a cultural tradition, of a history of Italy, of a liberty, was immediately expressed in the Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915, drafted between June 1926 and October 1927. This was also an evaluation of the Italian culture after the Unity and of the twentieth century in particular. Croce contemporaneously returned to the themes most dear to his meditations, art, and history, with a new sensibility, with the consciousness of being by now the leader of the other Italy, of the Italy that must be saved, but also with the foresight proper of great spirits. Facing fascism and the outburst of brute irrationalism that fascism expresses, Croce returned to the meditation on the meaning of history, on the course of history, and on the forces that operate in history. If he, without pity, attacked anti-historicism as the triumph of blind irrational forces, in the manner of spelling out the rapport between thought and action, he kept constantly present the other danger, which until 1925 drove him to be indulgent toward fascism: the revolutionary praxis, communism. It is difficult to comprehend Croce’s reflections on history until the appearance so important of 1938 of La storia come pensiero e come azione without referring to the great unmentioned challenger—Marxism—always present, always valued, and always in opposition. Between 1938 and 1939,

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Croce published again Labriola’s work and the Manifesto, through a subtle cultural operation, but also not without remembrance of the old affection. These were the same years when, in prison, Gramsci, in the Quaderni del carcere, was developing symmetrically and exemplarily another vision of history, another interpretation of the history of Italy, of human action, capable of challenging the Crocean interpretation and of renovating radically the cultural direction of the country. In the meantime, between the two wars, around Croce and La Critica, some ex attualisti also operated. Events and profound moral reasons had induced them to reconsider the great problems. Omodeo, but even more De Ruggiero, using the canons of Croce’s historiography, dealt with moments and positions of relevance in the culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reached the point of going even beyond the borders established by Croce’s doctrine. In the philosophical field, in 1925, De Ruggiero published the Storia del liberalismo europeo, which represented the most vibrant protest of the Italian intellectual world against the dissolution of the Italian Parliament on 3 January 1925. If he was so near to Croce in putting expeditiously aside many vital currents of the contemporary thought, of the Crocean positions De Ruggiero sensed soon also the limitations and advocated the rights of a new rationalism, more observant of the concrete and the finite. De Ruggiero’s moral closeness to Croce concluded, in a theoretical distance destined to manifest itself more clearly and widely with the approaching World War II. An open dissent was actualized after the end of the conflict, in Il ritorno alla ragione (Bari, 1946). In the political realm, the sorrowful detachment of Omodeo from Croce in 1944 possessed something that would remind us of the painful division from Gentile. During the years of the crisis, Croce and the “absolute historicism” came under the attack of several groups. The relativists, like Adriano Tilgher, who had dedicated himself to the clarification of the philosophical significance of the theater of Pirandello, challenged them. Contemporaneously, the skeptics like Rensi, and the attualisti found them too mixed with naturalism and tied to a “positivistic” thematic. The traditional Catholic currents, vice versa, charged them of relativism. The fascists rebuffed them for the respect to reason and the polemic against blind activism. Simultaneously, concerning attualismo, an event still more complex developed, which, for clarity, we should distinguish in at least two periods: before and after 1929. This means before and after the Conciliation between Church and State, which, in spite of the obsequiousness of Gentile to the regime, contributed to the division of his following into two sides. One group of people, by accentuating the religious instances of the teacher and their own personal exigencies of thought, moved progressively closer, though in individual ways, to Catholicism. Another group of individuals, faithful to a radical immanentism and to a convinced secularism, found themselves isolated in the philosophical (and political) scene and felt obliged to radicalize their positions in attualismo to the extent of overcoming them

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completely. In this sense, the year 1929 became an important date. After this time, students who never hid the complexity of their needs, and the unsatisfaction of the solutions given by attualismo, developed in an autonomous manner their own doctrines. These students were, for example, Armando Carlini and Augusto Guzzo, so very different in their reflections and processes, both open to motives far removed from attualismo, but strongly critical of the rapport to idealism in general. A pre-existentialist thematic echoed in them, and they absorbed some positions dear to religious existentialism. On the contrary, people like Fazio-Allmayer or Saitta, among the most faithful to the teacher, deeply sensitive to moral and political problems (even to militant politics), accentuated immanentism and secularism in a truly violent polemic (especially in Saitta) against the Catholic Church. Spirito and Calogero, who were younger, more perceptive, and more restless, could better than anyone else gather the meaning and the limits of attualismo, decisively capable of going beyond it at all its levels, having brought the discussion to the heart itself of idealism, at the pretended meaning it was supposed to have, of a radical renovation of philosophizing. Spirito, without middle terms, faced immediately the problem of the rapport between science and philosophy, reducing philosophy into science, but simultaneously elevating science to philosophy. He became aware (and this is his merit) that this duality, or antithesis, which was outlining itself in the modern world, was hiding a misunderstanding and an error. At the same time, he showed how the synthesis that he foresaw was destined to change the meaning and the value of both terms. Calogero instead was showing that the equivocation was inherent in the idealistic gnoseology. Having freed the philosophical inquiry from the snares of pseudo-problems and surreptitiously metaphysical claims, he brought reflection back on more humane grounds: on humanity, as a human intertexture, as a complex of rapports to be perennially established between human beings, and as a “dialogue.” He forced himself to clarify the modes of these positions, the sense of the “rules,” the value of a polycentricism capable of exorcising any attempt at monadism. Keeping these directions, philosophy was abandoning the generalization of great speeches; it was becoming concrete in precise problems and in definite fields of experience. Philosophy was coming to study language, logic, jurisprudence, morality, economy, and history, in their real determinations. In this way, the increasingly accentuated isolation in which the idealists of attualismo found themselves after 1929 helped a more solid penetration of the problem. Often, the progress of time and the variation of the events greatly attenuated the doctrinal distances between the followers of Croce and Gentile. In many cases, the two great philosophers never broke their personal friendly rapport. If the dissolution of idealism and its overcoming from within proceeded in progressively more effectual and radical ways between 1929 and the outburst of the World War II, the polemic coming from the outside rarely resulted persuasive. Some “realistic” instances, some gnoseological discus-

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sions (which, being unconsciously controlled by idealistic presuppositions, were without results), and some discourses on solipsism gave no definite fruits. The efforts and the activity of writers like Francesco Orestano (or Carmelo Ottaviano) had relevance especially at the level of the cultural politics of fascism. More agile, and shrewd, Catholic students, Neo-Scholastic or not, tried to find the possibility of utilizing, and neutralizing, the idealistic thematic, which was by them considered the obligatory path of contemporary thought. Thinkers like Gaetano Chiavacci (of Gentilian positions) and Arangio Ruiz (of Crocean positions), though remaining set apart, but not without some echo, variously connected themselves to the different conflicting currents of thought. Their idealistic instances, no matter how different, connected these scholars to the exceptional inheritance of Carlo Michelstaedter. He was born in Gorizia in 1887, committed suicide in 1911, and authored a book in 1912, La persuasione e la retorica, in which it is possible to find many themes destined to circulate widely under the influence of the philosophy of existence. When the European situation became grimmer, the Italian internal situation became heavier, and the philosophical production manifested more directly insufferable and rebellious attitudes toward the dominant positions. Philosophy, then, concerned itself with human values, the tragic quality of life, liberty, and chance, authenticity found in one’s own self in opposition to objectification, dehumanization, and alienation. Here, too, the reaction moved in more than one direction: as a need of a return to “reason” in the sense of the Enlightenment, and as a catastrophic exasperation of “the destruction of reason.” It is perhaps as impossible to cut clearly the two orientations as to establish the precise limit between the positions of revolt and those against which the revolt moved. The movement of ideas and culture is always extremely complex. The philosophies of existence had, in Italy, a variety of manifestations. Existentialism combined with the orientations of the Catholic or Catholic sympathizers among the attualisti and the spiritualists; offered weapons to the anti-idealistic polemic; developed with an extreme rigor outside every religious thematic; and expanded in extremely open positions, as in the case of the most significant thinker in this line, Nicola Abbagnano. Many, as Antonio Banfi did, took advantage of the philosophies of existence circulating in Europe in order to allow a greater breath to the progressive rarefaction of the Italian philosophical atmosphere. Among all these people, Enzo Paci tried to demonstrate—as he did with effectiveness—how much some aspects of Croce, like the useful and the vital (the economical), were similar to those that the philosophy of existence manifested. World War II exploded on an Italian philosophical scene that was full of hints, covered allusions, and extinct illusions. Croce was apparently isolated as a symbol and as an abandoned teacher of morality, was in reality present in the widest area of scientific researches, and was always offering valid instruments for aesthetics, history, and literary criticism. The completely relevant

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Italian culture was in debt to him, if not completely dominated by his modes of thinking. Alone, in spite of the appearing political solidarity with the fascism, Gentile extended his polemic to scholars gone to embrace forms of Catholic spiritualism, to “realists” of archaic formation, and the epigones of positivism. He even disputed the most faithful disciples, like Ugo Spirito, who in their works were dissipating the last myths of idealism. Other thinkers, through works apparently historical, were inserting again into the discourse disquieting spirits like that of Feuerbach. Antonio Banfi and his group of young and very active disciples circulated particularly within the Italian culture some suggestive voices. All talk was done in the shadows—there was fascism and there was war. Things that one could not say in his own name were said through the mouth of others; one name was mentioned, but another was meant. In philosophy, too, a ciphered discourse was diffused; it was so hermetic that not even today we can easily interpret it in its true sense. The only certain thing was that the enthralling castle of idealism was in ruins, after having imprisoned for decades the Italian philosophers, who were all, without exception, discoursing on the shadows of things, in a fictitious world, with imaginary problems, which were often also absurd. With the waning of idealism, no longer the shadows or the ideas were advancing, but the things themselves in their nakedness and cruelty. After so much talk about history and historicism, the awareness of all students revealed that the “historicisms” were many, and contradictory, and that, actually, all had been locked out of reality and experience, in “histories” of ideas and pure acts of thought. Now, things, experience, history—as the mistress of human beings, even though made by human beings—were bursting and swarming around all the survivors. The most sincere books of the time, but not the exercises of the academies, were full of a tragic sense, of the need of “true” things, of reality, and of an infinite weariness due to fictitious words and problems. If irrationalistic positions were spreading still as the expression of a cruel burst of violence, people had the impression that the Neo-Idealism and the old Positivism, together united, were dissolving like fog. Previously discarded and ridiculed researches were reconstructing again their reciprocal and proportional dominion. The sciences of nature, logic, sociology, psychology, and the problems of a history, no longer lost in clouds of ideas, but rooted on things, needs, and real forces, were moving out of their somber hidings. At last, the specters were receding, while humankind was expiating cruelly the formerly accepted and asserted illusions. 20. Toward a New Problematic The past, in order to return to be present in the historical reconstruction, must be enough removed so to become subjected to an adequate prospective collocation. It must allow the determination of profound connections and junctions, in the silence of controversies and immediate reactions. As it used to be said, history is not about the events too close to us. The discourse on the last dec-

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ades after World War II could begin with the announcement that the specters have returned; too many “philosophers” have also returned, not without advantages, to the enthralling castle to fight among the shadows, and to discuss the shadows of things. Philosophers, in the best hypothesis, are mistaking information for elaboration of thought. A discourse of this kind, which would be fine elsewhere, would risk substituting controversy with history. Summing up the philosophical situation of the first decades of the twentieth century, we must limit ourselves to registering the wave of turbid irrationalism that invaded Italy, as well, and the intense dialogue between Croce and Gentile, destined to involve the Italian culture, even the one that, for reasons to be specified in each case, both rejected. To this dialogue, the reflections of Gramsci that matured in those decades but circulated only after the war were connected. Gramsci’s work concerned as it were with the cultural hegemony of Croce and with the need for its substitution was also actually the greater real contribution to the constructive critique of the Italian national culture within the frame of a reconstruction of all Italian history. It was a work most precious. The Gramscian work assumed the highest relevance for its precise indications and methodical suggestions, and was the most fruitful after the crisis of idealism. If they were to start from here, new students would be able to trace the history of the national philosophy that Italy does not yet possess and to base this new history on completely new assumptions, proceeding through paths very different from the ones traversed so far.

Thirty-Eight By Paolo Fabiani and Giorgio Pinton

WITH GARIN, ON ITALIAN THOUGHT FROM 1943 TO 2004 Garin’s History of Italian Philosophy ended with the chapter on the rebirth and decline of Idealism. This new chapter will not pretend to walk on the new paths indicated by Gramsci and vaguely suggested by Garin for a different history of Italian thought from the Risorgimento onward. This chapter represents the wish of keeping on with Garin, using his words and works, in tracing some few feeble lines and shadowy visions of the complicated political and cultural life of Italian thought from the end of World War II to that of one of the great philosophers of Italian philosophy and of the culture of the Renaissance. Garin’s History of Italian Philosophy is not the History of Philosophy that he published with Vallecchi Editors in 1945 as a textbook for the Italian schools. The importance of this distinction shined for the understanding of the interview of Garin for the Corriere della Sera of 5 August 1998 and the debate that surrounded it. On 11 April 1999, Renzo Cassigoli visited and questioned Garin for L’Unità on several historical periods. On the Renaissance, Garin said that it was similar to the Greek world in its beginning; it was a different reality “emerging from history to place itself like an island beyond time” (emergere dalla storia per porsi come un’isola al di là dal tempo). As Cassigoli wrote, Garin defined the miracle of the Renaissance in these words: Peoples continue to speak of rhetoric and humanistic studies, of English medieval logic and Parisian physics, without being conscious of the transformation that happened in a brief cycle of years between the “Last Judgment” and the “School of Athens,” between the dreams of Alberti and the cupolas of Brunelleschi, between the caves of Leonardo, the forests of Ariosto, and the stars of Galileo. Verily, it was the passage to another dimension and, at the same time, the discovery that, perhaps, life is nothing but a dream (Vanno chiaccherando di retorica e di studi umanistici, di logica medievale inglese e di fisica parigina, senza rendersi conto di quella trasfigurazione avveratasi in un breve giro di anni fra “il Giudizio finale” e “La Scuola d’Atene,” fra i sogni di Alberti e le cupole di Brunelleschi, fra le caverne di Leonardo, le

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY foreste di Ariosto e le stelle di Galileo. È davvero il passaggio a un’altra dimensione e, insieme, la scoperta che, forse, la vita non è che un sogno).

Then interviewer and interviewed spoke of the three great philosophers of the Italian twentieth century: Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Gentile was extremely important for the Italian School system with his reform and his presence at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. Gramsci was great on the level of political education and even more for the humane formation of the character. Croce was and still is unforgettable for his religion of liberty, his faith in freedom. The last confession of Garin is that he recognized himself of having favored always a social democracy throughout the political contingencies he encountered. He was never a communist or Marxist, and believed in Gorbaciov’s slow pacific transformation of the Soviet system. He affirmed that capitalism has not defeated the Socialist and democratic ideal of a free and just society. Cassigoli recorded this paragraph: The solicitations of socialism have not ended. Peoples are thinking that the defeat of the Soviet communism has caused the defeat of the social democracy…. The triumph and the defeat of Stalin have not being a triumph or the defeat of socialism…. Different forms for the renewal of the democratic state exist and they need patience…. No saving powers exist. No demiurges exist…. I have never been an optimist…. Presently, however, I sense the actual defeat of rationality. I never had this sensation, not even during the darkest periods of World War II (Le istanze del socialismo non sono finite. C’è chi pensa che la sconfitta del comunismo sovietico abbia segnato anche la sconfitta della socialdemocrazia. Ma il trionfo e la sconfitta di Stalin, non sono stati nè il trionfo, nè la sconfitta del socialismo…. Ci sono forme di rinnovamento dello stato democratico che vanno seguite con pazienza…. Non ci sono poteri salvifici. Non ci sono demiurghi…. Non sono mai stato un ottimista…. Ora, peró, ho il senso della sconfitta della ragione come non l’ho avuto neppure nei momenti più cupi della seconda guerra mondiale). 1. From 1943 to 1960. Storia della Filosofia Italiana and Cronache di Filosofia Italiana In Storia della filosofia italiana Garin declared that he wrote the greater part of the work from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century between 1940 and 1942, and published it in 1947. For the second edition of 1966, Garin added the Notice, the epilogue on the “Rebirth and Decline of Idealism” (Chapter 37), and more comments in the Bibliographical Notes. In 1978, Einaudi Publishers brought out the third edition of the Storia della filosofia italiana; Garin added recent comments in the Bibliographical

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Notes and a second Notice. The 1966 new chapter on “Rebirth and Decline of Idealism” considered the first four decades of the twentieth century, concluding with a reference to Antonio Gramsci, and with the affirmation that the year 1943 had established a definite boundary. Garin’s personal meditations on the first half of the twentieth century has the title Cronache di Filosofia Italiana, 1900/1943 and Laterza Publisher printed them in two volumes in 1955, 1959, and 1966. For the third time, in 1966, the two volumes appeared as the first edition in the “Universale Laterza” and contained an essay commenting on the Italian cultural scene of the period 1945–1960. This important essay with the title “Quindici Anni dopo, 1945–1960” had enjoyed two previous printings in 1962 and 1963 as part of Garin’s La cultura italiana fra ‘800 e ‘900 of 1961. The Cronache di Filosofia Italiana dealt with the first four decades of the twentieth century, and Garin described the cultural ambiance in the immediacy to the memorable 1943 that signaled the end of World War II for Italy and the beginning of liberation of central and southern Italy, leaving most of northern Italy in German hand. Garin narrated: In a brief turn of years, after the fatal 1943, the men, who gave tone and color to the Italian culture of the 1900s, disappeared. The first to vanish in a tragic end that seemed to seal an ancient crisis was Gentile. Almost consumed by the events, Omodeo and De Ruggiero followed Gentile. Last to go, after having spoken to another generation, with a serenity that appeared Goethesque was Croce…. In that corner of Naples, among the flames that were illumining the monuments in Santa Chiara, it appeared that the last great philosophy of history was burning also … but to clearly determine the terms of the victory and the defeat [of these great men] would be the primary duty of future Italian reflection, as Gramsci indicated in his profound meditations. This is, after all, a call that invites us to become aware of our historical reality, inquiring its components and roots, in order to be able to work with clarity to the advantage of our real liberation. An anti-Croce and anti-Gentile position does not mean a total refusal of them and an acceptance of other credos but an accurate and unprejudiced vision of the conditions and limits of our culture, in order to unmask equivocations and ambiguities and reverse their conclusions, if necessary. Garin had taken already Gramsci’s suggestions as personal. He understood the concrete research of philosophy to consist in the actualization of the fundamental convergence of human beings and things. This convergence, he said, should be obtained, without the seduction of immediate and apparent resolutions, through the difficult roads of educated action and conscious thought. When he reaffirmed the essence of philosophy in the newly acquired freedom after the war, he stated:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY This is to find the humanity of philosophizing … in the humanization of reality and the instruments, we possess. We must elaborate, and transform reality; in the defense of the meaning of human presence, not by exalting it illusorily outside of things, but with things and among things, as the consciousness of a center, which, once lost, the whole itself would fade away. “Without man, what would the reality of the universe mean?” We do not mean an extreme romantic defense or a rhetorical moralism, but the task of determining, and defending, the humanity of every instrument, technique, and production, within an exact and faithful history. We mean within a history, within a clear vision of the guises of human activities grasped in their articulated development, at the source of their mobile dispersion into their products. We wish for a history becoming always action. History, by re-uniting in a concrete knowledge the apparent dispersion within things, continuously recalls humankind back to its initiative, restoring it, against its dehumanization and servitude, to the path of liberty.

On this path, Garin focused in the Introduction and in chapter Thirty–Seven, which consists of a synopsis of the two entire volumes of the Cronache della Filosofia Italiana, with the exception of the added essay. Garin’s genius is all here in these unpretentious suggestions and comments with his methodology, history, and philosophy. To the above thoughts of the epilogue, he then added the following observations and encouragements, facing the events after World War II of which he was inescapably a witnessing participant: This, after so many superb pretensions, is doubtless a modest image of what philosophizing is, but it substitutes, to the virtuosity of sterile and abstract reasoning and to fantastic constructions without truth and beauty, an honest and useful work, especially as an effort of critical awareness within the multiplicity of human activities. It is useful to the various fields of research, by illustrating, in the discussion of logical proceedings and expressive forms, possibilities of convergence and encounters, difficulties and sources of errors, reciprocal limits, and fundamental unity. It is useful “morally,” by destroying not the hopes, but the myths, not the possibilities, but the transposition of desires to a fictitious reality, truly helping us and, in accordance with the Christian invocation, delivering us from evil. We would be certainly enveloped in evil by the archaic returns to baroque constructions a priori and to the impious total arrangements that lock out within their arbitrary schemes the unforeseeable riches of history. In the same Epilogue or chapter Thirty–Seven of History of Italian Philosophy, Garin confessed his pessimism on the post-war Italian situation, “The discourse of the last decades after the World War II could begin with the announcement that the specters have returned. Too many “philosophers” have

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also returned, not without advantages, to the enthralling castle to fight among the shadows, and to discuss the shadows of things.” In that paragraph, he looked at the first few decades of the twentieth century, the decades that brought Europe to the World War II: Here, summing up the philosophical situation of the first decades of the century, we must limit ourselves to registering the wave of turbid irrationalism that invaded Italy as well at the beginning of the twentieth century. We must recall the intense dialogue between Croce and Gentile, destined to involve the Italian culture, even the one that, for reasons that we must specify in each case, rejected both. To this dialogue, the meditation of Antonio Gramsci, which matured in those decades, but circulated only after the war, is connected. It is of the two decades after the war that Garin spoke in the appendix to the second volume: “Quindici anni dopo, 1945–1960.” If we could say that the chapter Thirty-Seven of the History with its references and indications arrives to 1943, with 1929 as the most important date, then we may consider the appendix to the Cronache a supplement to the History for the years from 1945 to 1960. The first note at the beginning of this essay of about one hundred pages declared specifically, “These pages are not and are not intended in any way to offer a complete panorama of the cultural debate and of the Italian philosophical orientations after 1945.” This essay is valuable for what it tells about Garin’s views on the period, his method, and philosophy in handling the historical analysis of individuals and their ways of resolving concrete problems in their specific actual space-time situations, where things and reality are. In the same note, Garin confessed that with “Quindici anni dopo, 1945– 1960” he had originally intended to write on some aspects of the “leftist” culture for an issue of Problemi del Socialismo, the journal directed by Lelio Basso. He soon realized that he could not sharply cut off one piece alone of the Italian culture of the time. How then did Garin value the post-war years from 1945 to 1960? What happened between September 1943 and April 1945? Arnoldo Momigliano, in 1960, was still repeating a famous saying of 1930, “Croce … dava il pane spirituale e Gentile … il pane materiale.” While Croce provided the spiritual bread, Gentile distributed the material bread. In Cronache (pp. 501–502), Garin observed: It is not strange that the fall of fascism symmetrically signed the fall of the Crocean hegemony…. The rejection began of a specific interpretation of the Italian history and, in it, of fascism … and people felt the gradual exigency for a re-evaluation and discussion of the whole idealism, the idealistic historicism, and all its rapports with fascism. It may appear an empirical distinction, and a base connection of the vicissitudes of cultures with the factual data. Nevertheless, the various tones

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY of the intellectual climate corresponded symmetrically to the painful stations of the Italian calvary between September 1943 and April 1945. It was still very Crocean from the south up to Rome; it was full with the restlessness of a “Leftism” in which was particularly strong the Action Party from Rome to Florence and up to the Gothic Line. It was decisively “socialist” at the North, with clear Marxist inflections. A harder and longer fight was weighing down Northern Italy. On the ideological level, Turin and Milan possessed a different history than Florence and Pisa (in the same way that these had from Naples and Palermo).

In short, Milan and Turin were outside the Crocean-Gentilean influence and were more in tune with the thinking of the nations at the borders of Italy. Antonio Banfi and his collaborators, Giovanni Maria Bertini, Remo Cantoni, Enzo Paci, and Giulio Preti began to judge without pity thoughts and thinkers in their journal, Studi Filosofici, of which Norberto Bobbio, in Rivista di Filosofia (37, 1946) gave this positive judgment, “We have accepted with a sense of relaxation and hope, in reaction to too much academic conformism and pervading preference for the tradition, which is at times, during turbulent periods, an evasion from the responsibilities that are not merely made with sonorous or pathetical words. We have accepted, I repeat, with confidence the re-appearance of a journal that is free, theoretically open, innovative, as Studi Filosofici is.” In Studi Filosofici, Banfi, from the beginning, had stated his program, “Philosophy would renounce to its task of an edifying wisdom. Philosophy is clarity that illumines reality and precisely the historical reality, in the radical concreteness that its problems have for us after Marx. Philosophy frees reality from the ideological fogs within which the souls escape from these problems, from the responsibilities that they imply, from the values that they have themselves constructed.” For Garin, what seemed to have placed Northern Italy on a different plain were the duress of its fight and victorious conclusion throughout 1940–1945, its culturally different formation, beyond the preoccupation of a historical revisionism, and the critical analysis of positions like those of Croce’s idealism and Gentile’s actualism already given as defeated. The intellectuals of the North were concerned with new horizons, with new constructions that could deal with the new reality of things and situations, without looking back. Learned and unlearned people were soon deeply attracted to the motions of the left, both under the influence and the fascination of Socialism and Marxism. On the contrary, the journal published in Florence, Società, from the first year of publication, in 1945, was manifesting the preoccupations for an analysis in depth at the cultural level of the times just past, but not yet dead. In Cronache (p. 505), Garin reflected:

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A heaven of metaphysical tranquility and metaphysical purity, beyond this crash [of worldly powers], is not open, and has never been opened (except for an illusory play of the mind and the heart) to any intellectual. Of this, perhaps, today everyone is persuaded … but truly persuaded? Full persuasion involves a decision to act in a certain sense, in the sense dictated by the objective analysis of the situation…. We do not accept that idyllic conception of the modern history of Italy that sees in fascism a passing and casual aberration, as if it were a strange body forcibly introduced within our social organism. Fascism has not come down from heaven, fascism is not the invidious gift of a hostile deity, and fascism is not the invasions of the Hyksos. Fascism is born from the womb of our society…. That matrix [of fascism], in Italy as anywhere else, has not at all been sterilized. It lives in the life of malignant tissues; it still lives. The need for the intellectuals to see clearly in order to reconstruct reality not in words, but in works started here; and so did the need of rethinking without illusions. The difficult task of the intellectuals did not consist in enthusiastic exaltations and programmatic formulations, but in thoughtful clarifications of terms, in becoming historically conscious instead of losing oneself in adventures of ideas, proclaimed with the energy and the intransigence equal only to their generality and abstractness. In time, the culture of 1945 so very certain of having liquidated the past, idealism or fascism, saw its horizons populated again by “metaphysical” structures of various tendencies or with masks. In December 1947, Felice Balbo, in what was the last number of the journal Il Politecnico, recognized that fascist culture was still dominating Italy through idealism and the allied Catholic spiritualism. In 1947 and 1948, the leading currents of thought were reaffirming themselves on pre-fascist and fascist bases, whose culture remained standing. Always according to Cronache (p.519), Balbo wrote: Today, cultural Italy is filled with Benedetto Croce (and, recently, of the worst Croce), and still filled, contrary to the appearances, with Gentile. The mentality of Papini, Giuliotti, and Prezzolini has remained as a general substratum diffused in the minds of too many. The categories of judgment, cultural or political, are still most often moving on grounds that go from those of the typical Mussolini to those of the theocracy of the Civiltà Cattolica, to the more tiresome “Catholic spiritualism” of French importation and of a bookish extrinsic existentialism, all mixed often together with slow and contradictory scientism. Balbo was saying that the Italian conscience had not yet been liberated from the medievalism, the idealism, and the Gentileanism that formed the mentality offering the logical justification of fascism. Between 1920 and 1925, Italy had

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substantially made a choice, a choice of a cultural nature. The winners in 1945–1950 were the intellectuals who ideally reconnected themselves to the “rebirth of idealism” of the first twentieth century. During those years, Gaetano Salvemini, Piero Gobetti, and Antonio Gramsci were cut off from the possibility of influencing the new generations, and the most advanced doctrines of the bourgeois culture, or the conscious Socialist criticism were not utilized. A choice for a new historical course, with different protagonists, required a new vision of the history of Italy, a descent to the roots of one whole period, a reconsideration of its problems. What was supposedly to have been the program of 1945, in 1948 was the epigraph of a lost battle. The thesis of Croce’s Storia d’Italia is again confirmed. The hegemony of culture has remained the same for half a century, overcoming wars, and revolutions! Mario Sansone, in volume four of La letteratura italiana (Bari, Laterza, 1960) wrote the essay “Dieci anni dopo” from which we obtained the following passage (Cronache, p. 536): It is characteristic of our particular history … that even in the years of greater fervor of hopes and revolutionary initiatives—those that go from 1945 to 1948 (precisely the 18 April 1948)—the cultural movement presented itself decisively not exactly as a restoration, but as a reconnection again with a past that in itself, in its proper field, had never suffered any profound earthquake or true and proper ruin. In our history, the problem of a restoration or of a revolution was never posited at the origin of the decade [1945–1955], for the simple reason that there was no motive for doing so, since the culture during the years of fascism had followed a proper and independent path. All that we could do was an expurgation of verbal consuetude…. The general interpretation given of fascism was that of a perversion or deviation from our political life and almost a malady or corruption of our civilization.... This interpretation favored the original position of our culture. The new problem consisted simply in the renovation, improvement, and accord within, however, the furrow traced by a tradition that demonstrated itself valid in the course of two decades (“il ventennio”). Reading these words, what would we imagine the “new culture” to be? The new culture would essentially be the same as that bringing Italy to its 1943. The unwillingness of historicizing the value and dialectic function of Croce through the age of fascism, together with its limits and characteristics, corresponded to the actual self-complacency of the majority of the so-called intellectuals. The opposition from the leftist movement itself, not comprehending the deep historical reasons of the Crocean hegemony, could not enter into a valid dialogue with it. The different vision of Italian history and future meditated by Gramsci and presented with courage remained, however, simply as a feeble voice heard by too few, too young, and too late. Garin, focusing on the

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literature of 1952–1955, puts the matter in these terms in Cronache (pp. 537– 538): The anti-Croce of Gramscian memory cannot consist in a book, or a formula. It signifies the return to a new history of Italy. This history should be an analysis of all its aspects, in all its fields, in all its problems, and in all the solutions. It should aim at an active fruitful decision capable of having an influence on the situation, on the institutes, the customs, the modes of thinking, on the ideas, the guises of education, sector by sector, connecting punctually a conscious need with a precise activity. Gramsci indicated the necessity of being aware of the historical context within which Marxism could operate in Italy within the horizon of Croce’s perennial hegemony. If this was true for the suggestions of Gramsci, it must have been also true for the existentialism of Nicola Abbagnano, the in-strumentalism of Guido De Ruggiero, the neo-positivism of Giulio Preti, and the Husserlianism of Enzo Paci. In Cronache (pp. 558–568), Garin narrates that, at the beginning of 1955, Abbagnano pointed out with precision the clear opposition of existentialism, at least for some relevant characters, to romanticism and idealism. He pointed to the instability and uncertainties of reality against the optimistic guaranties of pre-established absolute plans, the hesitation and problematic, risk and insecurity against rhetorical consoling perspectives. He contrasted limitation and finitude to an infinite creative liberty. He saw no fatal progress in history, but uncertainties and dangers of defeat, value of the mundane, the things, the finite, and the human incapacity of considering grief, pain, defeat, and death. Abbagnano indicated three lines of convergence of existentialism with other positions. Existentialism must embrace empiricism and the methodology of science; the rigorous consideration of natural and socio-historical conditions toward techniques of research and control against solution purely verbal of human problem. It should secure secular and mundane research of the sociohistorical human condition and of the means to do it, outside of spiritualism, intimism, and idealism. This was a new kind of enlightenment, “which abandoned the optimistic illusion of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the hard rationalism of the twentieth, and would see in reason what exactly reason is, a human power intending to make the world more humane.” In 1953, in Turin, Abbagnano, with a shoal of scholars, who wanted to orient their researches outside the prejudicial traditional orientations of a metaphysical necessity and with new cautions in respect to every form of dogmatism, formulated three quite clear theses. Philosophical research must remain open; it should never idle on the obtained results. Philosophy must acknowledge the place that science occupies in contemporary world; it should get involved in the social world, and defend even at the political level its own possibility. In

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the turn of ten years, however, the group that at first appeared to grow grounded in an equivocation of presumed eclecticism. The influence of Dewey on the Italian culture, in those years of researches for a valid philosophizing outside the Crocean frames, was felt very early by De Ruggiero. Already in 1931 in La Critica he had written, “Dewey has acquired an always clearer conscience of this idealistic need of liberation; but he has not yet accomplished a revision of its originary methodological premises.” De Ruggiero underlined that Dewey was capable of “awakening up the sense for concrete problems and of generating in people the healthy disgust for formulas and crystallized schemes.” Given the short distance between the Dewey strumentalism and the Crocean idealism, some major Italian philosophers drank at his fountain: Abbagnano, Ludovico Geymonat, Antonio Banfi, Giulio Preti, Guido Calogero, and Aldo Visalberghi. In a way, Dewey’s theories were accepted under the sign of a “concordance,” as something agreeably acceptable among philosophers. An accurate study concerning the success of Dewey in Italy appeared in Rivista di Filosofia (vol. 52, pp. 52–96) in 1961: “La fortuna di John Dewey in Italia.” Within the conception that thought is the instrument of will and life, and not “an idle contemplation of persons who have nothing to do,” Pragmatism was made to correspond to Marxism, “of which, under some aspects, it was the younger brother.” In 1946, Preti wrote about Pragmatism and Marxism, “The two philosophies come together on one point. The basis and the fundamental essence of the human being and its spiritual life is the practicalsensible activity, in virtue of which the human being, through its body and the organic functions, is influenced by the external environment. On the other hand, human beings influence the external environment by means of their work” (Cronache, p. 569). Of Dewey, Preti did not hesitate to affirm that “although not a Marxist, he is the thinker that most resembles Marx, of which he shares, in his concrete cultural analyses even though not fully in theory, the historical materialism.” Preti was attenuating the divergences in favor of a convergence. Between 1948 and 1950, Dewey is present in Abbagnano, Geymonat, and is classified in a defined tendency, with a clear goal: “To humanize reason, humanize science, making it something exclusively humane, constructed by us, and continuously subject to our elaboration.” The interest in Dewey brought out the awareness that Marxism had philosophical as much as historical importance. The critical task concerning idealism was not yet exhausted; the long journey to exit the kingdom of shadows taken for solid things was not yet concluded. To seize the ties between various positions even apparently similar was not an easy task unless approached in a historicist manner. Real syntheses were something different from ideal syntheses. Between 1951 and 1952, the bitter polemic among Marxist groups on how to handle the temptation of merging together Pragmatism and Marxism developed. The result risked completing the final reduction of Marxism to instrumentalism. In 1954, Roberto Guiducci renewed the motive of Dewey as the

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authentic continuator of Marx, with the intention of eliminating the “metaphysical Marxist residues, especially for what concerned the dogmatization operated by the dialectic materialism.” In 1956, in crisis, the intellectuals of the left concerned themselves with the operation of revision and reduction of Marxism in the “positivist” direction. The culprit was a pamphlet of Guiducci published in Turin on Socialismo e verità. In 1957, the focus turned back on the theses of the book of Preti, Praxis ed empirismo, generating a polemic that would continue until 1960. In 1943, Preti had wished already to introduce a new positivism in an idealistic language. The new positivism of Preti, Garin says, because it was a “general vision,” and did not end in analyses and particular researches, was negative; it was simultaneously a polemic against metaphysics and anti-metaphysics. It was a metaphysical discourse for the justification of particular researches and for giving them a foundation. Preti’s wish was again that of connecting Pragmatism with Marxism. Two were the components of his work: one offered particular researches (on common language, on ideal languages); another consisted in a concept of the world, which would give foundations to the researches. His historical bases for the concept of the world were Marx and Dewey. However, Garin observed, at a certain point Marx and Dewey vanished, and the remaining Pragmatism assumed the flavor of a neo-actualism. Preti hit on the point that the human activity cannot enter in a rapport with nature because “it is already in nature, or it is itself nature.” In Cronache (pp. 579–580), Garin wrote: On the other hand, (or, rather precisely, for this), “nature” is not something given to the activity once for all; nature presents itself progressively as the product of the accumulation of human activities throughout past centuries. Nature is simply the past of the activity. It is true that, from time to time, we find an activity that stands before us, as a given object, as something that stimulates the movement of the modifying activity. It is also true that such activity does not develop in the vacuity of nothing, but in concrete and established conditions. The error consists in conceiving those conditions as things that were and would be ab aeterno and in aeternum facing such an activity. What here and now is given to me has been produced elsewhere and in another epoch by others (or even by myself) In a conference of 1958 on science and technology, Preti underlined the complement both pragmatic and theoretical that technology finds in science and the consistency that science finds in technology. He explained, “Science contains the concept of the world of the technician. I mean to say that it expresses and exposes the frame of the world within which the technician operates, the frame that the technician is constructing in and through its activity.” This is the same rapport between philosophy and science; without this rapport science would be no longer science, “It would be nothing, or the worst philoso-

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phy; theology and phantasy.” This happened at the end of the ancient age, when science became theology and superstition. Today, the opposite danger exists that, in different ways, would bring us to the same results. Today, the danger consists in the change of science into pure technology, as many contemporaries would sustain and wish, “When science would become technology, science would cease from being the theoretical horizon, the spiritual vision of the world, a value of civilization. Science would be no longer thought; it would be reduced to a series more or less complicated and difficult pragmatic devices.” In contrast, technology reduced to a mere technique would risk becoming a new species of magic, a thaumaturgy capable of achieving admirable and impressive effects through processes of which we know little. Unfortunately, even this fecund discourse intended to raise our awareness on the connection of science-technology, nature and human nature, Dewey and Marx, empiricism and historicism was misunderstood and was not accepted as an invitation. Preti in Praxis ed empirismo gave voice to a “science” welded to the real world, corporeally sensible, outside of any metaphysical level and meta-historical, but within human horizon and rationality. In 1960, Mario dal Pra, reconnecting himself to the thought of Preti, underlined the irrationalistic insidiousness of Pragmatism and the task of the philosophy of the praxis. Conversely, the insistent inquiry on Hegel, on the genesis of Marx’s thought, and on the rapport between Hegelian and Marxist dialectic indicated the urgency of a problem that had to be searched in its historical roots. Between 1940 and 1960, the Hegel circulating in Italy was moving between Existentialism and Marx, between the solicitations of a tragic interpretation tied to the juvenile theological writings and the problem of relation with Marx. Hegel began to be taken as the manner for an understanding at the roots of the crisis of the European conscience. Be as it may, between 1950 and 1960, the discourse on Hegel and Marx, and perhaps, to a point, the discourse on Sartre and Heidegger, in Italy, was continuous and exciting. In some way, the discourse passed through an obligatory path. In the debate Hegel-Marx-Dewey the most repeated terms that surfaced were “science,” and “history” and the sense that the historical research can have when the world of nature integrated by human beings was explored with a method rigorously scientific, and comprehended by historians (or sociologists) in the complex of its development. This, Garin remarked, was perhaps the most characteristic point of the crisis of the Italian culture in the twentieth century: its incomprehension not only of the sciences in general (physical and mathematical), but of the most profound thematic of positivism, whose genesis and affirmations were inseparable from the progresses of the nineteenth century in the sciences of nature. The equivocal liquidation of the sciences of nature and of the studies of logics, which was operated by the Italian idealism, was the cause of a series of malfunctions that touched also the field of the humane disciplines, in which

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historicism, though representing philosophy as methodology of history easily got rid of everything that appeared to have a “naturalistic” flavor. Even more, historicism blocked the information on vast fields like the ones of sociological, anthropological, and psychological inquiries. In the field itself of the historical disciplines, ethical-political history suppressed every other kind of research. Consequently, even for the solicitations coming from Marxism, the Italian culture returned to look with some interest to the scientific inquiry and its methods. It became a search for a new genealogy of Italian wisdom, which, instead of passing through Cuoco, the Hegelians of Naples, and finally Croce, would restart with Gioia and continue with Romagnosi and Cattaneo. This entailed good ideas and justifiable needs as long as positivism would also be properly re-evaluated. Positivism was culpable, at least, under two points of view. First, it was culpable for its gross metaphysics, unconscious and unclear, capable of reaching contradictory compromises; second, for its being the cause of confusion in the mind of the “scientists” with ideas in which science was mixed with concepts and themes not at all scientific, but philosophical, and of a philosophy, naïve, and archaic. If idealism had limits and defects, they essentially consisted in not having seriously dealt with the problem of what is science and in not having deepened the problem of the methods of the historical sciences, which were the disciplines that it admitted as part of effective science, in the philosophy of the spirit. We may say that Italian idealism and actualism defeated themselves for not having been critical enough about their own methods and problematic, between the indifference of the intellectuals of the North and the divisions of those of the South. In 1961, Geymonat, Filosofia e filosofia della scienza, centered on the historicity of science. A the moment when the sciences of nature manifest themselves as active sciences, as the means through which, beyond every contrast, the human being works affecting every cognitive and practical process, the historical dimension imposes itself with evidence, inescapably. When the plurality of instruments and logical processes are manifest, once more the unifying center, the unitary point of reference, is transferred in the agent and its possibilities of coordination. The amplification, the pluralization accentuates the need of unification. When every unity disappears, when the ancient unifying terms fall into disuse, a turning toward the human pole becomes necessary. This turn must happen outside the mythologies of the Spirit, in solidarity with things, with nature from which human beings appear to emerge, but in which they plunge. We face the indivisibility of the consideration of the human being from the scientific vision of reality. We face also the impossibility of this consideration in one particular science, or in the sum of all the sciences, or in the comparative study of their methods, or of language, or of psychology, or of sociology, or of whatever partial view. A partial view would not propose the exigency of the coordination and unification and does not grow with the human significance of every process of the will to be able to

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give a meaning, a value, to human beings from whom and through whom every research and every activity is concretized. This return to the human being, to the significance of its presence and its consistency, becomes most dramatic at the point when the rapport with sciences and techniques, and the scientific development of the structures of society appear to crush the one agency that is their promoter, guide, and possibility. At a certain point, human beings become aware of being in a world that they have fabricated, and that it is destroying them. The extension and fractioning itself of knowledge is an aspect, or a moment, of this process for which things escape from human beings exactly through the instruments that appeared to be those of their dominion. In 1966, Garin had said that human beings sensed that the world was destroying human nature; that human beings had become the enemy of the world they wanted to control. The machines elaborated by human hands were reducing the human being to a machine. The human drama exploded not only between human beings, for the control of one group over another, or for the prepotency of some individuals who became tyrants. This drama was found in the injustice of society, in the internal unbalance, and in the contradictions of the human world. The human being inserted the tragedy, with its planning, its constructions, with the totality of the instruments with which it put itself in rapport with things, but also for the coordinations it built within the human society. It was a real drama, a condition of failure, which proposed the urgency of an involved awareness, of a new and positive connection between knowing and doing, at the point when human beings were conscious that the separation in act could become destructive of all humanity, because knowledge is an innocuous vision, but always a real operation. This separation could transform into a mad “instrument” what within the “moral” totality would have been a positive function for the “good” of humankind. This drama dealing with the real difficulties of history was then analyzed by Rodolfo Morandi, Dall’idealismo al Marxismo, in 1960, accentuating the phenomenon of the idealists of the twentieth century discarding every consideration of sciences, techniques, and economy. The redemption of these intellectuals during those years was through the awareness of the importance not only historical but also philosophical of Marxism. It constituted the invitation to come out of the kingdom of shadows and of abandoning the mythologies of abstract knowledge and consider the works of human beings essential for a transformation of the world. In the last two pages of the Cronache della filosofia italiana, Garin reconsider the post-war period and affirmed that one of the most salient motives of the cultural discussion was the debate around the history of Italy, the recovery of currents, positions, and personalities that expressed exigencies and needs suffocated or never satisfied. This work on the past registered a moment of fight but it was a factual critical clarification of general concepts and an introduction to new perspectives on essential problems. A discussion on the his-

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tory of the Italian culture was at the same time a construction of a new culture, and a new society. It was not a construction in the abstract, but in specific situations, and in rapport with real definite problems. Fifteen year later [1945–1960], on the ideological grounds, and in the institutes where the Italians were educated, idealism in forms more or less modernized continued to survive. The other Italy, which definitely applied itself to clarify its history and to define its own general conceptions and programs, did not always remained faithful to its task of a rigorous critique, and to the corresponding constructive work. On the cultural level, some combinations and impossible recoveries seduced this other Italy, which undervalued the capacity of survival of “philosophies” that accompanied a vicissitude still incumbent. This other Italy has not always comprehended the insidiousness of techniques, methods, and sciences that implied views and theologies very clear-cut; it forgot that its program was that of a reintegration of a science that had become “mistress of nature” in the history of the liberation of human beings. The difficulties on the theoretical level were certainly the translation of a difficult fight on the practical level. It is the duty of the intellectual activity to function critically and as the guiding intransigent element with a clear precision. Garin, in a defensive mood, ended his meditations in Cronache di Filosofia Italiana on the period 1945–1960 with the words of Gramsci: If philosophy is “history,” if philosophy develops because the general history of the world develops—the world in which human beings live within social rapports—and not because to a great philosopher succeeds a greater one and so on, it is evident that by working practically in making history, we are also doing philosophy (Se la filosofia è “storia,” se la filosofia si sviluppa perchè si sviluppa la storia generale del mondo—e cioè i rapporti sociali in cui gli uomini vivono—e non già perché a un grande filosofo succede un più grande filosofo e cosí via, è chiaro che lavorando praticamente a fare storia, si fa anche filosofia). 2. From 1960 to 1970. Antonio Gramsci’s Inheritance Antonio Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891, at Ales near Cagliari in Sardinia; Antonio was the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci, a clerk in the local registrar’s office. After the secondary school in Cagliari, in 1911, Gramsci won a scholarship for the University of Turin, where he studied linguistics. Turin at the time was under the process of industrialization and the factories of Fiat and Lancia were recruiting workers from the poorest regions of Italy, among which Sardinia was included. This factor created the first social industrial conflict, and to resolve it trade unions were formed, to which Gramsci became soon interested in favor of Sardinian connationals. In 1913, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the Socialist Party. In 1915, he abandoned the university studies for financial and health problems, but by then he had

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acquired an extensive knowledge of philosophy and history. At the university, he came to know the thought of Antonio Labriola, Rodolfo Mondolfo, Giovanni Gentile, and Benedetto Croce. From 1914 onward, he wrote for socialist newspapers, Il Grido del Popolo and Avanti!. By 1917, he was one of Turin’s leading socialist. In 1919, with Palmiro Togliatti, Angelo Tasca, and Umberto Terracini he founded the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo and with his writings and actions contributed to the organization and establishment, in 1920, of Workers’ Councils (Consigli di Fabbrica). On 21 January 1921, in the town of Livorno, Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga founded the Italian Communist Party, and Gramsci became the leader of the Party. In 1924, he won the election to the Parliament, becoming the leader of the Communist Group. The official newspaper of the party began this same year and its title was a call for unity, L’Unità, against the emerging Fascism. Quintin Hoare, Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926), has translated the last official report of Gramsci to the 2-3 August 1926 meeting of the Party’s Executive Committee, a part of which the public read only on 14 April 1967. The second part of this Gramscian report, “A Study of the Italian Situation,” dealt with the international consideration of the differentiation between capitalist states like the USA, England, Germany, and France, and peripheral states like Italy, Poland, Spain, or Portugal, in which the state forces were less efficient. Regarding the capitalistic and peripheral states, the report showed their social structural differences: In these countries, a broad stratum of intermediate classes stretches between the proletariat and capitalism: classes which seek to carry on, and to a certain sense succeed in carrying on, policies of their own, with ideologies that often influence broad strata of the proletariat, but which particularly affect the peasant masses. France too, although it occupies a prominent position in the first group of capitalist states, belongs by virtue of certain of its characteristics to the situation of the peripheral states…. I would say that today one of the most important problems we face, especially in the major capitalist countries, is the problem of factory councils and workers’ control, as the basis for a new regroupment of the proletarian class, which will permit a more effective struggle against the trade-union bureaucracy and will permit us to organize the immense masses of non-unionized workers, not just in France, but also in Germany and in England. We see in the above lines the major importance assigned to the “intermediate classes” by Gramsci. The ideology of the intermediate classes is capable of generating the progress of a society toward the achievement of liberty or its surrender to a hegemonic power. The challenge that Gramsci presented to Mussolini consisted in the Gramscian appeal to the learned, inviting them to come out of their privileged towers and descend among the unlearned. The

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thoughts of Gramsci were dangerous, and Mussolini suggested that it was the time to stop that brain from thinking. In 1926, Gramsci was arrested and condemned to prison for a period of twenty years. In prison, he wrote Lettere dal carcere, a literary document of the highest human value, but of capital importance are the thirty-three Quaderni di carcere, which represent the greater, though asystematic Italian attempt to a materialistic interpretation of history and culture. Garin had spoken on Gramsci before but only in 1997, his major writings on the subject appeared with the significative title Con Gramsci. The path of Garin through the politics, the philosophy, and the Italian culture of the twentieth century has been deeply marked by his indulgence on Gramscian thought. Garin, everybody knows, has never been a Marxist or a communist, but he declared that his reflection on the thought of Gramsci obliged him to perform positional changes and perspectives, without ever dismissing his obligation of intellectual honesty. In the essay “Gramsci e il problema degli intellettuali,” Garin reconstructed the question of the Italian intellectuals who in the hopes of Gramsci were supposed to join the “simple” people of the nation, the masses of workers for the purpose of diffusion and socialization of truth. In Gramsci’s view, “Telling the truth is always revolutionary,” and the intellectuals had to achieve the critical self-consciousness of their function and responsibility. Gramsci had said: Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of élite of intellectuals. A human mass does not distinguish itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself. No organization exists without intellectuals, without organizers and leaders…. The process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersal and regrouping, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried. The intellectuals, and this word always means philosophers, cannot abdicate to their responsibility as the transformers of thought into action. In their cumulative representation, the intellectuals should function as the hegemonic prince of times in the past. Garin, on the steps of Gramsci, wrote, “If the modern Prince as the collective intellectual is not functioning as the cement of the social body, there would be a return to a society of élites, of castes.” The truly democratic philosopher must be present with his culture as the yeast within the political realm; he must share the culture of the few with the many. The meaning of Gramsci is rooted on the equal dignity of every human being and on a society that is governed with the true participation of every human being. The humanization of institutions, methods, and techniques must be real, convinced, and continuous. In Con Gramsci (p. 113), Garin has written:

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY Gramsci wants for everybody the same culture which has been the possession of a few, not another culture; though it is clear that, breaking the class boundaries, this culture would become for this reason other thing: quantity will become quality (Gramsci vuole per tutti quella stessa cultura che è stata di pochi, non un’altra cultura; anche se è chiaro che, rompendo le barriere di classe, diventerá per ciò stesso altra cosa: la quantità si farà qualità).

Garin supported the image of the democratic philosopher for Gramsci. The actuality of Gramsci and the appeal to Gramsci meant an invitation to clarity and to the real problems of a society in transformation. Garin wanted us to read Gramsci as Gramsci and not according to actual contingencies that wanted him now liberal-democratic then reformist, and cut him off from the historical time of his reflection and fight. Garin assured us in Con Gramsci (p. 60): Gramsci is … for all those peoples that believe in the critical task of a culture interested in the freedom of human beings on earth, for the construction of a city of justice. Gramsci should be ours, because of his humane morality, his ironic lucidity, his courageous attitude toward fighting when the times demand it (Gramsci è … di quanti credono nel compito critico di una cultura volta a liberare gli uomini in terra, per costruire una città giusta; per la sua moralità impietosa; per la sua ironica lucidità; per il suo atteggiamento di lotta in un tempo di lotta). In the light of Gramsci, Garin argued that Renaissance Humanism consisted in the glorification of civic life and on the construction of an earthly city by human beings. We saw this theme developed through the Italian philosophers of the times after the Renaissance, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Italian philosophers of all periods implied in their thoughts the concept of time and memory and a sense of human creation, of human work in this world and of human responsibility. The humanists with their philology gave shape to the crisis of their world and occasioned the vision of a new reality as something earthly and by the attempt to explain history as the story of human beings. Garin repeated the path of Gramsci even in the presentation of the Italian culture between the nineteenth and twentieth century in La cultura italiana tra ’800 e ’900 (1961), and in Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo (1974), of which we read an outline in Storia della filosofia italiana (ch. 37). Garin defended the historical method and the conception of philosophy as historical knowledge, under the inspiration of Croce and Gramsci, criticizing the theoretical interpretations of Gentile, which are without philological rigor and historical sense, and see the past as an anticipation of the present. Gramsci in the Quaderni (from An Antonio Gramsci Reader), said: .

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Philosophy cannot be separated from the history of philosophy, nor can culture from the history of culture. In the most immediate and relevant sense, one cannot be a philosopher, by which I mean have a critical and coherent conception of the world, without having a consciousness of its historicity, of the phase of development which it represents and of the fact that it contradicts other conceptions or elements of other conceptions. One’s conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by reality, which are quite specific and original in their immediate relevance. How is it possible to consider the present, and a quite specific present, with a mode of thought elaborated for a past, which is often remote and superseded? When someone does this, it means that he is a walking anachronism, a fossil, and not living in the modern world. Francesco Flora, in the fifth volume of Storia della letteratura Italiana, first published in 1940, praised Gramsci as a heroic man of action in obedience to his communist faith. His writings were all for the defense of his cause, but he did not confuse the autonomy of art with the literature that is propaganda. As a writer, he spontaneously showed his strong qualities especially in the Lettere dal carcere. His writings in philosophy, history, and in those political and social, intended for the action of a renewal of society according to his own faith, are praiseworthy as literary documents. Gramsci is always clear and illumined by the depth of a conscience that sustained his faith so admirable in its resistance to tyranny. For his faith, he consigned himself over to the hands of the tyrant and to the prison, where he knew he would have died. Abbagnano in the third volume of Storia della Filosofia (Turin, 1966), which is a reprint of the second edition completely renewed, dedicated a single but extensive paragraph to Gramsci. As Garin also mentioned, Gramsci wrote his works between 1929 and 1935, and they were made known after the end of the war. His work, according to Abbagnano, constituted an appeal to a return to Hegel through the “mediation” of Croce. In Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (printed in 1948, p. 132), Gramsci defended the function and the significance of dialectic, “The function and the significance of dialectic can be conceived in their full fundamentality only if the philosophy of praxis is conceived as an original integral philosophy that gives way to a new phase in the history and in the worldly development of thought, in so far as it overcomes (and by overcoming them includes their vital elements in itself) idealism and materialism, which are the traditional manifestations of the old societies.” Gramsci retained the philosophy of praxis superior to all other philosophies that are “inorganic because contradictory.” The philosophy of praxis is not an attempt to “the pacific resolutions of the existing contradictions in history and in society; it is the theory itself of such contradictions.” Seen under this light, the philosophy of praxis is not the instrument of dominance by a certain group over subaltern classes, but “it is the expres-

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sion of these subaltern classes, which want to educate themselves in the art of government” (ibid., p. 237). History, in Gramsci’s view, would stop to be made in abstracto by a few politicians and blue blood families, with abuses of the masses; history would be made in concreto by the masses in the intricacy of their reciprocal and voluntary submission and cooperation within society. Gramsci doubted that Croce effectively succeeded in “making man stand on his two legs” (rimettere l’uomo sulle proprie gambe). He said, “Croce declares himself a dialectician—though he introduces in dialectic a dialectic of instinct, in addition to the dialectic of opposites, which he has not yet demonstrated is a dialectic or something else—but the point needing clarification is this: in the becoming, what does he see, the becoming itself or the concept of becoming?” (ibid., pp. 215–216). In a sense, Gramsci, as he did before, is accusing Croce of doing an abstract history of concepts, not a real history of events and facts. Though Garin put much hope on the suggestions of Gramsci for a formulation of a real and true history of Italian philosophy, Enzo Paci, in the second edition of 1959 of La filosofia contemporanea (p. 82), identified Gramsci’s value in bringing our attention to all the particular problems involved in the study of history. Paci’s comment is that all particular problems would risk remaining without significance if they are not seen in the organicism of the ensemble and in function of the historical and ethical end in rapport to which they are placed. Thus, the “profound meditations” of Gramsci in his jail have remained until now dead words. In the spirit of Gramsci or Garin, a history of Italian philosophy or thought for the period that goes from 1945 to 1960 and beyond, can be written only with the constant parallel consideration of the political and economical fluctuations of the condition of the Italian leaders and masses of that period. Norman Kogan, in A Political History of Postwar Italy, published in 1966, covered the political history from 1945 to 1966, and narrated that history showing that no thought should be formulated without the active counterpart of an action of an individual or class of individuals. What could be the meaning of the thought of a Palmiro Togliatti or an Alcide De Gasperi without the corresponding intervention of the masses that supported them in fabricating a new social and historical reality that supplanted that of the monarchy and of fascism? What value would Piero Calamandrei’s fight about constitutional rights of individuals and groups in Dieci anni dopo, published in Bari, in 1955, unless a new thought would be formulated that would oppose and abolish the fascist laws of oppression with the consideration of those individuals and groups that suffered such injustices? That is perhaps the meaning of Gramsci’s and Garin’s “thought in things, of things, with things,” in which “thought is operative of actions” that together with thought make history. In those years after the war, far from the abstractions and comprehensive syntheses of idealism and actualism, the Italian masses were moving in actions to defend every single person within the mass as possessing dignity and

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an inviolate power of action, especially understood as work. Work is the primary wealth of every human being and the function of the present is that of building the future. An effect of the active intervention of all citizens in production was the Italian industrial boom from 1959 to 1964. In other fields of the Italian life, in 1961, one hundred years after the completion of the unity of Italy with the Risorgimento, Italy was in need of a new Risorgimento from the fragmentation of its political movements that expressed a multi-diversity of cultural preferences. Italy was unable to have a permanent government as much as having a national identity. During the same year, Pope John XXIII wrote the encyclical Mater et Magistra on Christianity and social progress. Was Italy still the Cinderella of Europe? 3. From 1960 to 1980. Question on the Marginality of Italian Philosophy In 1988, Giovanna Borradori, with the publication of Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy, introduced a collection of essays of Italian philosophers who wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. She began by saying, “The rise of a ‘national’ segmentation of cultural discourse is almost always linked to a condition of weakness and marginality.” Then she admitted, “This can be the case either of a community in search of its national identity, or of a nation unable to retrieve its sense of identity in the continuity with tradition because its past is ‘untranslatable’ within the new terms imposed by integration in the post-colonial and post-industrial scene.” These words are significant in relation to what we previously wrote. Borradori recognized that for historical and de facto reasons this was not the type of marginal condition in which the Italian philosophical community was. Then she affirmed that it was an objective fact that within its most legitimate framework, that of continental philosophy, Italian philosophy was relegated to a subliminal position. Referring back in time to the 1940s and 1950s, Borradori agreed that the only exception to “weakness and marginality” of thought were Croce’s neo-idealism and the revision of Marxism carried out by Gramsci. In short, she concluded, from a critical point of view the Italian debate of the twentieth century remains, if not unnoticed, then at least disarticulated, episodic, and fragmentary. Borradori recognized the contemporary Italian marginality as being the effect of many factors, starting from the “autarchy” of two decades of Fascism (1923–1943), the Italian successive emigration exporting peoples that spoke a series of local dialects (1944-1964), and the predominance in Italian exportation of “visual” (movies, graphics) rather than “verbal” messages between 1965 and 1985. Borradori reiterates that one of the consequences of all this is “the emergence of the prejudice that Italian philosophic culture does not possess genuinely theoretical traits but is simply a historic-critical experience.” She, too, recognized that two positions are preeminent and in the greatest conflict. One position regroups all those who converge around the proposal of interpreting the Heideggerian conceptual fabric by means of philosophical

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hermeneutics. Though with different inflections and influences, as members in this group can be counted Gianni Vattimo, Mario Perniola, Aldo Gargani, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Giorgio Agamben, Gianni Carchia, and Carlo Sini, Alessandro dal Lago, Armando Rigobello, and Gianfranco Dalmasso. Borradori also assumed that these intellectuals would agree that metaphysics’s totalizing function of thought is no longer theoretically legitimate and that they would place themselves in a kind of negotiation with metaphysical language. They arrive to understand knowledge as a “system” of interpretive references. The second position rejects the radical critique of the metaphysical tradition and intends a reconstruction of a thought capable of reaching beyond the nihilistic technological destiny that characterized the conception of being in all western philosophy, posing an ontological question of time, which means a concern for the foundations of thought and not the ways of thinking. Emanuele Severino inaugurated the position, and Massimo Cacciari, in some aspects, continued it. Returning to the first position, it must be recognized that still in the 1980s for the Italian tradition the hermeneutic code did not represent a deliberate choice but rather a hereditary given, ingrained in its genetic patrimony, at least since Vico aligned himself against Descartes at the dawn of the Enlightenment and modernity. Whereas France elected itself the land of rationalism, England the cradle of empiricism, and Germany the guardian of metaphysics, Italy, with historicism, withdrew into an imaginary past, abandoning the role of cultural catalyzer that during the Renaissance had placed it at the center of the European community. The first symptoms of a “national” coagulation of Italian thought took place in response to the need for a textual confrontation with tradition, particularly with historical writings. It must be acknowledged that each of these writings is hermeneutic in its own right because representing a “historical stage” of a process of continuous interpretation of a monumental past, more imagined, and desired than philologically deduced. Borradori would argue: Even the construction of the cultural unity of the nation took place in Italy within a kaleidoscopic play of historic lenses. The Risorgimento, the mid-nineteenth-century movement to unite Italy, elected the Renaissance as its antecedent. The Renaissance in turn had recognized its element of formal and political cohesion in classical thought, in turn handed down through the words of the great Hellenistic historians and masters of rhetoric. A picture within a picture, a regressus ad infinitum at whose end lies a historical invention. In historical writings, the discourse about writings which have preceded is found. In them the sign always already possesses formal, conceptual, historical, and cultural connotations that guide its constant movement of reference to another sign in the dynamic of interpretation. Introducing Vico’s antirationalistic attitude and formulation that “reason is a stage of historical evo-

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lution which belongs to the cycle of ‘courses and recourses’ of human history and which is developed after perceptive intuition and imagination,” Borradori makes Vico responsible for the historicism that imprinted profound antirationalist bias on Italian philosophy from Croce to the present. Borradori claimed: Whereas in French philosophy Descartes inaugurated the research on the new subjectivity as research on the heart of darkness of perception, in Italian philosophy Vico inaugurated it under the aegis of the ineluctability of the relationship between human finitude and the universality of the time of history. We can trace that radical difference between the two figures that opened the doors to the philosophy of the twentieth century in France and Italy, Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce, to this seventeenth century divergence between the two orders of discussion, those of perception and history. In opposition to Descartes, Vico seems to say that our knowledge consists in the “science” of one’s own thinking. Thus, the modality in which thought manifests itself—form, style, and writing—become a textual event: the revelation of the role and temporal power of knowledge. If Vico condemns Descartes of impiety for a return to “zero degree” with the perception of the “consciousness of existing,” Descartes could very well condemn Vico of impiety for admitting the absolute centrality of history. Vico’s historic research is not an atheistic reflection but a process of secularization of Christian thought. The ghost of Vico and historicism haunted the rapport of Italian philosophy with the search for modernization within the context of European culture. Vico’s second historicist disinterment, after the first by way of Risorgimentoromanticism and postwar existentialism, has given way to a spiritualism that is becoming a specific and distinctive trait of Italian thought. Through Croce, Vico was the symbol of the closure of the Italian academy within the nation’s border and its isolation with respect to the broader themes of the international debate. Vico and Croce became the emblems of an endemic conservatism. Borradori, too, concedes that given the proximity of Fascism and neoidealistic philosophy, this double historicism of Vico-Croce’s hegemony within the Italian culture in the between of the two wars and the postwar continued until the 1950s, when it was challenged by a violent conflict with the contribution of Marxists, a handful of existentialists and some phenomenologists. Then, she explained: Even though of the two leaders of this school, Croce and Gentile, only the latter approved of the regime, accepting active appointments of considerable importance…. In some respects, the Fascist regime identified Croce as its “official” opponent, at times for both national and international demagogic ends. Yet not withstanding a thorough con-

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HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY frontation with Marxism, Croce had always been the promoter of a bourgeois liberalism that immediately found itself in open contradiction with the emancipatory emphasis and the pervasive “politicization” of Italian left-wing culture after the Second World War. At the root of the anti-Crocean polemic, however, lie also more strictly theoretical motivations, intrinsic to the rereading of Hegel’s idealism in a “historicist” key.

In some of his meditations in the Cronache di filosofia italiana, Garin had recognized the same validity in a reconsideration of Hegel’s renaissance as he became to be studied again in Italy after 1950. Croce was among the first in Europe of the 1910s to emphasize the centrality of Hegel’s thought with respect to the formation of contemporary consciousness and subjectivity. Again, in 1960s, the French with Jean Hyppolite acknowledged that practically from the Second World War on it was in the pages of Croce that the existentialist generation was initiated to Hegel. The attacks on the Crocean monolith came from various parts (the Marxists, the existentialists, and the group for “a return to reason”), but essentially concerned the concept of history. The anxiety of the Italian intellectuals to “internationalize” Italian culture led to simplifications: First of these was the idea that the Crocean system was a monolithic block endowed with a formidable compactness and transparency. In reality, it was the tormented fruit of half a century of second thoughts and rehabilitations stemming from Croce’s encounter with the most important currents of continental thought, ranging from fin-de-siècle neo-Kantism to Marxism, to the psychology of Johann Herbart, and to Dilthey, Simmel, and Bergson. Nor did Croce’s approach to Hegel represent an episode of national conservatism, given that it was connected to contemporaneous discovery of the German thinker by Wilhelm Dilthey; and Hegel, between the two wars and after, was retrieved and made sacred by the Hegel renaissance, or else his “existentialist renaissance.” In the case of Croce, many intellectuals in the postwar period railed against him, when the judgment of the guilt of fascism was superimposed on the judgment of his philosophy. In 1957, Enzo Paci in La filosofia contemporanea wrote of having discovered a new philosophy in Croce, offering a new rethinking of the path taken, a new interpretation of the relations of Croceanism with Vico and Hegel. Vico and Hegel were recognized as “philosophers of vitality” and “vitality” has its own “persistent negativity” so that “ambitious dimensions” in humankind become “the original sin of reality.” For the nascent Italian existentialism, Croce’s neo-Vichian historicism became the primary point of ref-

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erence with respect to the national tradition. The three “masters” of existentialism in Italy—Enzo Paci, Nicola Abbagnano, and Luigi Pareyson—have never denied this lineage. Paci at that time wrote, “The arc of the development of the Italian philosophical figure shows substantial continuity from Vico to nineteenth-century romantic spiritualism, to Croce, to the existentialist adventure, which, starting in the 1940s will remain upon the scene as background noise to the “return of Husserl” of the 1960s, to the beginning of the debate on hermenutics, and to the discussions concerning the crisis of Marxism.” Concerned with the dialectical clash between reason and reality, Paci inherited the contradictions and concreteness of history from Vico and Croce. He formalized the existential link between subjectivity and the world, working with the epistemological relationships between different disciplines. Husserl provided Paci with the phenomenology that Paci, in 1963, in Funzione delle science e significato dell’uomo, understood as “a transcendental science in a strictly methodological sense: the epistemological web of the great encyclopedia of sciences, the idea-limit of the interdisciplinary project.” The project was the concern of interpretations, of the historical backgrounds of the phenomenon, of the potential “literary-ness” proper to its surrounding world. Thus language becomes “the line of demarcation between Being and being, historic memory and subjective memory, historicism and existentialism.” Borradori introduced the extensions to Paci’s existentialism that “belonged to a markedly atheistic sphere of reflection (in tune with the historicism of Vico and Croce and subject to being comprised by and systematized within the methodological grid of phenomenology): With the concept of “intentionality” phenomenology establishes that psychic activity must be in relation to an object or to other subjects, that consciousness is always consciousness of something. In other words, both consciousness and its object exist only within a reciprocal intentional relation. “Weakness” or debolezza (Gianni Vattimo), “friction” or attrition (Aldo Gargani), and “distance” or distanza (Pieraldo Rovatti) are the rhetorical figures of this relation, which gradually extinguishes itself bur remains uninterrupted. Deriving also his inspirations from European currents of thought, Pareyson was concerned with “existential finitude,” an answer, ontological and religious, to the equally ontological and religious question of the possibility of a Christian existentialism. Borradori said, “Pareyson takes up the spiritualist tradition of Platonic and Augustinian origin, which, side by side with Vico’s historicism, represents the second soul of the fundamental anti-rationalism of Italian thought.” The understanding that Pareyson had of existentialism as a “philosophy of the person” had a positive character, in opposition to the French and German negative perspectives.

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For Pareyson, the personalistic perspective as such depended on the ontological and “creatural” relationship with God, whose recognition was source and stimulus of the search for truth, always and only to be found in interpretation. The correspondence between existentialism and ontological dimensions in Italy and re-opened the close dialogue with that part of the continental philosophy comprising later Heidegger, Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida. One particular person in the study of jurisprudence and in the science of interpretation was and remained more known abroad than in Italy. Emilio Betti, who extensively and ambitiously had already carried out in 1955 the first edition of the Teoria generale dell’interpretazione the fruits of that correspondence, became most famous among German jurists and hermeneuticians after 1967 when he renewed and translated his book into German with a more suitable title, Allghemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften. Gadamer, in 1960 with Wahrheit und Methode, had challenged already Betti as if Betti’s theory wanted simply to reproduce an original text as we can objectively reproduce an object. Betti denied. For Gadamer, in the reductionist words of Richard E. Palmer of MacMurray College in 1999, “every interpretation was a combination of the present horizon and the past, so that the dream of meaning coming objective and unchanged out of the past is impossible.” The works of Betti are not avalable in English, except for a few sections of the Teoria generale dell’interpretazione. In 1984, in Amherst, for an anthology on Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, .Susan Noakes wrote an introduction on “The Epistemological problem of Understanding as an Aspect of the General Problem of Knowing” and translated about thirtyfive pages of the first volume of the Teoria on the problem of objectivity. Josef Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique, is from 1990 and besides an introduction on Betti, he too showed a selection in English of about thirty pages (pp. 59-68, 157-158, 261-262, 304-305, 312-314) from the first volume. The dates of these works show the interest for the Betti-Gadamer conflict and its magnification within the Anglophone world. In fact, the debate continued throughout the twentieth century between realist, existentialist, and phenomenologist hermeneuticians. It re-emerged as in Alexander Kremer’s “Are All Interpretations Possible?” in 1990, but ending mostly and predominantly in an irrationalism that recognizing the historicality of the interpreter makes truth and the criteria of truth impossible realities. Betti offered the synopsis and the protective shield of his conceptions in an essay of 1957, “I principii di scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico e la teoria dell’interpretazione storica.” In the essay, Betti revealed what he called “the Vichian discovery.” It is the principle of inversion of the genetic iter into the hermeneutic one, and he found it in the primitive intuition of Vico’s New Science. Betti’s contributions to the science of law are remarkable and manifold. He was a member of the council that redacted in 1942 the Italian civil code. Of Betti’s many disciples, Giuliano Crifò, who teaches at the

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Sapienza University in Rome prepared and published in 1990 a second Italian edition of the Teoria generale dell’interpretazione. Crifò edited and published many other works of Betti and continues in his writings to honor the name of the teacher. Naturally, the Italian reflection on hermenutics differentiated itself rapidly from German and French formulations, for its historicist factor. Pareyson resolved the ontological problem in terms of an “ontology of freedom” or manifestation of Being to the person in history, in the milieu of interferences between the subject and its historical surroundings. In this, his followers were the “weak ontology” of Gianni Vattimo and the “friction of thought” of Aldo Gargani. Of them Borradori wrote, “They portray the fullness of a Being understood as recollection and monument, memory, that which is handed down.” In this way, weak ontology, like the friction of thought, registered an always-waning intensity of the conflict between the subject and its surrounding world: the progressive weakening of the clash between historic projectuality and historic reality. In 1968, we saw the political “historical crisis” of Marxism bringing to a political division with the left, with the “crisis of ideology” understood as an overturning of the categorical framework of modernity. Unfortunately, the crisis of ideology assumed also the form of crisis of the legitimacy of reason. It was a loss of confidence in the general “humanistic attitude” able to oppose the increasing extensive processes of technology, reification, and predominance. In an interview of Corrado Stajano for the Corriere della Sera of 5 August 1998, Garin stated that the Manifest of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels was deserving great admiration given its enormous ideological power, assimilating it to the Sermon on the Mountain, and encouraging an obliged reading of the document in the schools. The public of intellectuals reacted in a surprised manner, pointing out immediately that Garin in the History of Philosophy, written for the schools and published with Vallecchi Editors in 1945, contained passages that condemned Marxism, because of its cruel vision of life and the theoretical and practical denial of human dignity (vol. 2, pp. 206, 209). Garin replied that he wished to celebrate a document that for one and one half century had a great importance in the history of the world, and observed that the Manifest as a document underlined the fervor of ideas, which traversed the second half of the nineteenth century. 4. From 1980 to 2004. Philosophical Schools and Movements The 1970s and 1980s characterized a continuation of the lines of thought the most important philosophical personalities had originated. Teachers of philosophy or intellectuals emerged or reemerged, old or new as they were, in the immediate post-war period, and also by the birth and affirmation of modes of thought, perhaps non-original or autogenous, but nevertheless new within the Italian philosophical horizon. We may distinguish several nuclei in the Italian philosophy of the last decades of the twentieth century and these nuclei find

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their origin mainly in the majority of the thinkers that we met in the epilogue of the philosophical Italian history of Garin. This would allow us to convey in a few pages the idea of a fragmented culture, kept together by the same language and by the eclecticism manifested in that same language. The emerging figures include Umberto Eco, Gianni Vattimo, and in part, Emanuele Severino and Massimo Cacciari, and some historians of philosophy like Giovanni Reale and Cesare Vasoli. During these years, the valiant voices of personalities like those of Garin, Preti, Abbagnano, Pareyson, Geymonat, Giorgio Colli, Paci, and Bobbio became gradually unheard. When they spoke, like in the previous comments of Garin on the commemoration of the Marxist Manifest, they roar like the kings of thought they are, and the uniform forest reverberates with the wildest echoes. Among the many Italian tendencies, we may describe the few that have taken their origin in the last decades of the twentieth century, but it is evident that these subdivisions are not absolute. With the complete disappearance of the great teachers of the twentieth century, the basic and universal manifestation of contemporary Italian students of philosophy is eclectic. Contemporary known philosophers are listed in more than one school or movement. A. Turin: The School of Abbagnano It is from Turin that the only two figures of an international stature during the last few decades, Eco and Vattimo, have come. It is in Turin that Nicola Abbagnano worked and his school continued its line of a renewal of the philosophical studies in Italy, with a contribution of historiographic and historic nature. Abbagnano had studied with Antonio Abotta, one of the few Italian philosophers who did not suffered the attraction of Gentile and had been critical of the idealistic reaction against science. Abbagnano was one of the first to make the themes of existentialism known in Italy. In 1953, Abbagnano with a small group of neo-illuminist friends established these objectives: to defend the secularism of the Italian philosophical culture; to propose a new philosophical style, free from the old rhetoric and preaching tendencies. Like the illuminists of the eighteenth century, those of the twentieth renounced the pretence of reason to absoluteness. On this, Abbagnano had written an essay, “L’appello alla ragione e le tecniche della ragione,” in which he defended a pluralistic and artisan conception of reason. Many generations approached philosophy in the lucid pages of Abbagnano’s Storia della Filosofia and Dizionario di Filosofia. The works published by this group of scholars that Pietro Rossi, Carlo Augusto Viano, and Pietro Chiodi represented have not maintained the qualitative standard of their teacher. These works have not given place to new interpretive lines, nor had any echo within or without the national borders. The merit of the various members of this school and of their publications is found in their constant opposition to the “irrationalistic” tendencies that from the end of the 1960s and especially during the 1970s tended to manifest themselves among several scholars of Marxist or Catholic-laical

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positions. An expression of the philosophical views of this movement is found in the Rivista di Filosofia. Gianni Vattimo, a student of Luigi Pareyson, graduated from the University of Turin in 1959. In Heidelberg, he studied with Karl Löwith and Hans Georg Gadamer, whose thought he introduced to Italy. He taught aesthetics in Turin from 1964 to 1969, and from 1982 he teaches theoretical philosophy in the same university. He has visited the United States as a Visiting Professor in many universities. He directs the journal Rivista di Estetica. His most recent works include, Etica dell’interpretazione (Turin, 1989); Filosofia al presente, (Milan, 1990); Oltre l’interpretazione (Rome-Bari, 1994); Credere di credere (Milan, 1996); Tecnica ed Esistenza: Una mappa filosofica del ‘900 (1997 and 2002); Vocazione e responsibilità del filosofo (2000); Dialogo con Nietzsche (2001); Dopo la Cristianità: per un Cristianesimo non religioso (2002). We can read most of his works, like those of Eco in semiotics and of Betti in jurisprudence, in many different European and Asian languages. The line of thought generated in the mind of Vattimo is that of an aversion or aggression directed against modernity and the established univocal idols of modernity: faith, wellbeing, hope, order, and progress. Like in Gramsci and in Garin all thought must become action, in order to confirm that thought is flesh that we are ready to sacrifice on the pyre, as Giordano Bruno and Girolamo Savonarola did, for the redemption of humankind, for the pluralism overcoming the evil of individualism. His is a postmodern Christian philosophy, an Italian internal revolution that intends to transform thought and the social functions and effects of thought in our quotidian life. The solemn and great truths no longer exist; the babelic electronic furnace of information has melted the ferrous dogmas and systems of the two past millennia. Even history in Vattimo has lost its function as the unitary narrative track of events. Vattimo is not the prophet of the postmodern reality, but the witness and the victim. He sees in the postmodern human being the frailty of thought that shipwrecked within the oceanic multimediality of news and visions. All media are active reformatory forces that through words and pictures proclaim their truth. This kaleidoscopic information and vision required the ability of interpretation. Vattimo suggested that we must read three different politically oriented newspapers every morning, and look at three different news channels not owned by the same company every evening. Society has no secrets. We are all transparent to our neighbors. Each one among us can become, if it so wishes, knowledgeable about anyone among us. No religious secrets, no secrets of government, no secret individual information can be kept secret for long: we are vulnerable, weak, and naked. A transparent society does not simplify social relationships. The number of diversities, prejudices, tendencies, preferences, beliefs, cultural characteristics, economical conditions, and political orientations, racial and national connotations in the postmodern society is innumerable and creates the necessity of an education to tolerance and nonviolence. The contemporary existential restlessness that these contrastive fac-

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tors have caused is pushing humankind to the edge of an abysmal end on this earth, at the same time when abysmal universes are revealing themselves to us beyond the Kuipert Belt. The roots of Vattimo’s thought are Nietzsche and Heidegger. In them, he found the tools for the interpretation of postmodernity. The death of God means the end of the strong thought of metaphysics. B. Florence: The School of Garin? Maurizio Torrini is the foremost disciple of Garin, or the leader of the group, by the preferential choice of Garin. In a brief note of four pages on the teaching style of the teacher, “La lezione di Eugenio Garin,” Torrini stated that in Garin’s mind never existed the desire of becoming the head of anything. The words of Torrini are appalling and show the different human ambiance of the philosophical Italian tendencies: A school of Garin never existed. We may say that many individuals existed and exist who studied and graduated with Garin, or worked with Garin. We cannot say anything more on this subject. As incautious as we were, we, students of Garin, were jealous of the students of Dal Pra. He was inviting his students to Santa Margherita or to the Lake of Garda, centering their interests on the Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, or the series of publications of Milan’s center of history of the scientific and philosophic thought. We, students of Garin, envied the alumni of Paci, who were meeting to discuss Aut Aut and the editions of Saggiatore Publisher. We, students of Garin, remembered and knew the disciples of Banfi and those more famous of Geymonat, who were dedicated to impressive collective works. We had heard of the gatherings of many followers of this or that teacher, near or far away…. Garin had nothing. He never directed collective works, never organized conferences, or asked others to organize them for him. He never edited series of books…. He never wanted to be a father to his students or a teacher of life. I do not believe that he intended to be a model for them. He only wanted to offer a lesson in maturity. His was a call for a full and conscious lesson in the spirit of a democracy understood as a rigorous respect for our reciprocal roles (Di fatto non c’è mai stata una scuola di Garin, ci sono stati, e ci sono tanti che hanno studiato e si sono laureati con lui, che hanno lavorato con lui, ma niente di più. Incauti giovinetti, invidiavamo gli allievi di Dal Pra, che il maestro radunava a S. Margherita o sul lago di Garda, cui apriva la Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, la collana del centro Milanese di storia del pensiero scientifico e filosofico. O quelli di Paci, che si ritrovavano su aut aut, che si incontravano nelle edizioni del Saggiatore, ricordavamo e riconoscevamo quelli di Banfi o quelli emergenti di Geymonat, che

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attendevano a imponenti opere collettive, e tanti altri che andavano sorgendo vicino e lontano. Garin non aveva nulla: non ha mai diretto opere collettive, non ha mai organizzato convegni né li ha fatti organizzare, mai collane editoriali…. Non voleva essere né un padre, né un maestro di vita. Non credo neppure che volesse additarci un modello: era piuttosto una lezione di maturità, di piena e consapevole democrazia intesa come rigoroso rispetto dei ruoli, quella a cui ci chiamava). In what we may call the group of students around Garin, we find numerous scholars specialized in historiographic and critical-historical research. The group is doubtless the most prolific in historians of philosophy and the one that has produced the best studies of philosophical criticism during the last three decades. The Italian researches in history of philosophy, especially those concerning the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, within the philosophical Italian production, are the most studied, translated, and discussed both at home and abroad. At the end of the 1970s, Garin accepted the direction of the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, succeeding to Ugo Spirito, whose thought was born from the internal crisis of actualism. Spirito was known for the revival of the philosophy of Giordano Bruno and of all the antinomies of the whole and the parts, of the finite and the infinite. Other thinkers may also be included here: Paolo Rossi, Antonio Santucci, and the authors who collaborated with the journal Intersezioni. Paolo Rossi was born in Urbino in 1923, and graduated with Garin, whom he calls “il mio antico ed amato maestro.” In 1947, he was assistant with Garin to Antonio Banfi; then in 1954 began to teach history of philosophy at the University of Milan and remained there until 1961. From 1961 to 1966, he taught at the University of Cagliari and Bologna; after 1966, he moved to the University of Florence. Rossi was visiting professor at the Warburg Institute of London University, and Wolfson College of Cambridge University. From 1980 to 1983, he was the president of the Società Filosofica Italiana. In 1985, Rossi received the “Sarton Medal” from the American History of Science Society, for his writings on the modern scientific revolution and the idea of progress. In 1988, he became a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. He has been a member of the European Academy since 1989. His fundamental historical philosophical studies are on Bacon, Vico, and the scientific revolution of modernity. Among his many works, one includes Vico, I segni del tempo: storia della Terra e delle Nazioni da Hooke a Vico (Milan, 1979). In 1999, Rossi published a book that contained all his writings on Vico. The Sterminate antichità opens with this saying of Vico, “The mind is like a field that no matter how rich of ingenuity it may be, if it is not fertilized with different readings, in time it will dry up” (La mente è come un terreno, che per quanto sia di fecondo ingegno, se tuttavia non s’ingrassa con le varie letture, a capo di tempo si sterilisce). In this book, Rossi looks at

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Vico as Thomistic with Franco Amerio, Hegelian with Giovanni Gentile, preMarxist with Nicola Badaloni, modern, and anti-modern. These ideologies or “devozioni vichiane” as Rossi calls them are vanishing in our post-modern culture. The true intellectual finds new choices. The new need is that of reading in order not to forget (leggere per non dimenticare). We should read Vico as we read Shakespeare. C. Milan: The Neo-Illuminism The Milan’s group of scholars and students headed by Mario Dal Pra, whose positions are expressed in La rivista di storia della filosofia, could also be considered part of the philosofical tendencies of the entourage of Garin, but they held positions in sensu lato neo-illuministic. In their work of criticism or theoretical constructions they rooted themselves on a well defined concept of reason, argumentation, and philosophy. The genesis and the usage of the term “Neo-Illuminism” have been discussed by different authors in a work directed by Mirella Pasini and Daniele Rolando, Il neoilluminismo italiano. Cronache di Filosofia (Milan, 1991). Eugenio Scalfari reactivated the polemic on “Che cosa significa essere illuministi oggi?” (What does it mean to be a rationalist today?) writing on the daily La Repubblica of 3 December 2000. Demonstrating the vivacity and the interest of contemporary thinkers, the replies soon came in with Sergio Givone, “La ragione sul rasoio” in La Repubblica of 2 January 2001; Gianni Vattimo, “I Lumi” in La Repubblica of 4 January; Roberto Esposito, “La nera schiena della ragione” in La Repubblica of January 6; and Sergio Moravia, “Quanti lumi nella storia” in La Repubblica of 10 January; Pierangela Rossi, “La ricerca dei lumi perduti” in L’Avvenire of 9 January; Marcello Veneziani, “L’Illuminismo si è spento da solo” in Il Giornale of 12 January; Carlo Bernardini, “Che cosa vuol dire essere illuministi oggi” in Il Manifesto of 12 January. In all these articles the many various aspects of the rationalism and irrationalism of Italian thought can be found. The most important contemporary Italian reality manifested in this debate is that in Italy, today, philosophy is done through the daily newspapers with the widest distribution, the most known philosophers are interviewed or authored the articles, and the papers profit financially. It is the process of socialization of philosophy that is happening within the silent and transparent society that post-modern philosophers analyze, but that Gramsci foresaw, though it is happening with intellectuals still hidden in their protective towers, not of Garin’s shadows and ghosts of old metaphysics, but of political power, economic advantages, and self-promotion. D. Analytic and Post-Neoposivist Philosophy Contending the supremacy in the field of philosophical debate, were all the students, who, in some ways, inspired themselves to analytic philosophy, epistemology, and logic. Ludovico Geymonat’s teaching had more influence

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on a wider scale, even though in more recent years the school of Giulio Preti, for many years represented almost exclusively by Paolo Parrini and Alberto Peruzzi, has acquired new energies. Analytic philosophy found its way into Italy quite late. In the 1950s, its pioneers were Preti, Paolo Filiasi Carcano, Francesco Barone, Alberto Pasquinelli, Ferruccio Rossi Landi, Umberto Scarpelli, and few others. In the 1970s, there was a small but gradual interest in analytic philosophy especially in the universities of Florence, Milan, Rome, Turin, and Padua, with professors like Ettore Casari, Andrea Bonomi, Paolo Parrini, Carlo Cellucci, Eugenio Lecaldano, Diego Marconi, and Marco Santambrogio. Salvatore Veca, Sebastiano Maffettone, and Maurizio Mori deserved mentioning for having introduced in the Italian debate authors like John Rawls and Robert Nozick and some thematics relative to bioethics. Deserving mention is Barone together with Marcello Pera (“The justification of scientific progress”), Evandro Agazzi, and Dario Antiseri for the value of their works in the philosophy of science. Certainly, the most influential authors in the field of analytics and post-neopositivism until the 1980s were foreign to Italy: George Edward Moore (1873–1958), Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970), Ludwig Josef Johan Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Willard V. O. Quine, Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, R. M. Hare, Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, William Lowell Putnam, and Saul Aaron Kripke. Paolo Parrini in Fisica e geometria dall’Ottocento a Oggi (Florence, 1979), traced the reference lines of thought between foreign masters and Italian disciples in the field of epistemology. Thus, it made sense that in the 1990s the Italian epistemologists tried to come to an open confrontation at an international level and decided to organize conferences inviting to their own universities the most important philosophers of science. Nonetheless, still today, the weight of the Italian epistemology at the international level is marginal. Equally insignificant to foreign scholars seems to be the Italian moral philosophy of an analytical nature. It is true that also in this field, many congresses and conferences have been organized, but what remain of a certain value are only few proceedings of a few of these meetings. La Rivista di Filosofia of 1976, a special issue on “Logica e il dover essere,” lists the interventions of Uberto Scarpelli, Eugenio Lecaldano, and Carlo Calcaterra. In 1986, Etica e diritto was published, edited by Lecaldano and Letizia Gianformaggio, who took a position in rapport to an intervention of Hare. In 1987, Maurizio Mori published Questioni di bioetica, and C. A. Viano the Teorie etiche contemporanee. In 1997, Law and Language: The Italian Analytical School appeared. It is the first collection of translations into English of leading articles from this tradition. An extraordinary literary production in Italian in the field of bioethics during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century is bringing this field of studies to the forefront. However, all these manuals, courses, introductions to bioethics reveal a lot of information, but little philosophy. The fact remains that Italian students of epistemol-

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ogy and moral analytical philosophy are dominated by “foreign thought” and seem unable to find creative new orientations. E. The Post-Modern Philosophers Various groups and movements could be labeled “post-modern,” of which the most illustrious and known could be considered the school of hermeneutics of Turin, with its Rivista di Estetica. Luigi Pareyson’s essential teaching—on “the infinity of interpretations of a single work of art” and on “the identity and transcendence of the work of art in its rapport to every single interpretation”—was developed in different directions by his most successful disciples: Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo. In Lombardy, and precisely in Milan, Carlo Sini and Pier Aldo Rovatti, with rather different scientific interests, imposed their own personality, continuing in an eclectic manner in the line traced by Enzo Paci in his last scientific productions. Rovatti, born in Modena in 1942, studied theoretical philosophy at the State University of Milan with Paci and Geymonat as advisors, and researched on Alfred North Whitehead. Since 1976 he teaches history of contemporary philosophy at the University of Triest. During that same year, he accepted the direction of the philosophical journal Aut Aut that Paci founded in 1951. In 1983, Rovatti began to study the hypothesis of the “weak thought” and with Vattimo co-edited an anthology on Il pensiero debole (Milan, 1983); became involved in publicizing the theory by lecturing in Italy, France, and Spain. He became involved in psychoanalysis under the influence of Freud and Lacan, and then became interested in the “metaphysics of the subject,” ending with a research on “the paradoxes of subjectivity,” in the direction of Derrida and Lévinas, and with the publication of Le trasformazioni del soggetto, in 1993. He, too, disapproved of a philosophy merely speculative, of words and thoughts without actions. F. Marxism Some components of the heterodox Marxist current that includes Giuseppe Bedeschi, Aldo G. Gargani (Pisa), and Massimo Cacciari (Venice) may be counted with the previous currents because, under some aspects, they are concerned with the rapport theoresis/analysis of society, negative thought, and foreign thematics. With them goes Emanuele Severino, with the exception that Severino holds more precise and distinct positions than the other two. Severino, born in Brescia in 1929, completed his studies in 1950 with Gustavo Bontadini, with a thesis on “Heidegger and metaphysics.” He taught at the Catholic University of Milan and at the University of Venice, where he was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Theory of the Sciences. With Essenza del nichilismo in 1982, Severino animated Italian philosophical discussion with his attempt at accomplishing a radicalization overcoming Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics.

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It is important to notice what Borradoni also said about Gustavo Bontadini, Severino’s teacher, who in the 1940s, as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain did in France, reproposed in Italy the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the indispensable starting point for a new foundation of ethics, of the rapport between reason and faith. In order to reassert ethics as absolute value, he set about establishing a process of extreme “essentialization” of metaphysical discourse. Primarily in opposition to neo-positivism, he wanted to reaffirm the fullness of Being which modern thought, from Descartes to Kant, had dissolved into the dualism between certainty and truth, between appearance and reality. Bontadini asserted that the discourse of fullness of Being could begin once again by recuperating the thread of idealism on which, according to him, one ought to bestow the merit of having reopened the metaphysical possibility, in having reunited the antithesis between phenomenon and noumenon. The meaning of the fullness was reconstructed on the consideration that Being cannot refer only to its determinate contents but emerges in opposition to nonBeing. Thus, it is in this way that Being presents itself to humankind, in the form of becoming. Becoming is explained with the principle of cause and effect, a principle that does not work in the field of experience, in our sensation. Understanding the conflict beween experience and logic, Bontadini decided to legitimize metaphysical reason understood as the absolute discourse of Being. At this point, it was Severino who reacted to his teacher’s position and built his own construction on the ruins of that of Bontadini. Cacciari, the most active within the group, was born in Venice in 1944, graduated from the University of Padua, and is teaching aesthetics at the university of his city. Cacciari has been among the founders of the most vital philosophical and cultural journals of Italy: Angelus Novus (1964–1974); Contropiano (1968–1971); Laboratorio Politico (1980–1985); Centauro (1980–1985); and Paradosso, created in 1992 with Givone, Sini, and Vitiello. Involved in politics, he was elected to the Parliament from 1976 to 1983. Cacciari is affiliated with the many philosophical institutions of Europe, including the Collége de Philosophie de Paris. In 1995, he was elected Mayor of Venice. In this function, he tried to promote and animate some movements for the reestablishment of a center-leftist politics. His early writings still reflect his late actions, as Ristrutturazione e analisi di classe (Padua, 1973); Piano e composizione di classe (Milan, 1975); Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milan, 1976); Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione (Venice, 1977); Icone della legge (Milan, 1985); and Dell’inizio (Milan, 1990). Cacciari is a Wittgenstein scholar and translated Wittgenstein’s Memoires into Italian. During the 1970s, the theoretical instances that alimented the cultural debate in the previous two decades gave signs of exhaustion, but continued in the field of philosophy in so fas as it had by this time placed strong roots within the “academic towers.” In the 1950s, the center of the debate was rep-

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resented by the thought of the “mature” Georg Lukàcs, to which followed in the successive decade the study of the “young” Lukàcs. During the same period of the 1960s, heterodox Marxism triumphed with Max Horkeimer insisting on the social function of philosophy, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Korsch, reducing obviously the interest for the official Marxism of the oriental and sovietic kind that had been adopted by the Italian movement. In 1968, the debate centered on the so-called “French Marxism,” whose first wave invading Italy was the existentialist one of Paul Sartre, who with the publication in 1960 of Critique de la raison dialectique, accepted Marxism as the “philosophy of contemporaneity” and placed it in a predominant position in respect to existentialism or “philosophy of existence.” The opposite position was taken by Louis Althusser, and in 1968, younger thinkers who survived the May 1968 revolution in Tunis, like Michel Foucault, emerged. Naturally, the Italian component, under this aspect, was the predominant historicist materialism of Gramsci, followed by the dialectic materialism of Geymonat, the Husserlian Marxism of Paci, and the Pragmatist Marxism of Preti. Taking diverse positions in a way of opposing communism, there was the nihilism of Severino and the Catholicism of Augusto del Noce. It became clear that the Marxist problematic, having penetrated every level and every cultural debate, partially by its own saturation and partially because of the tremendous changes within the nation, was going to wane. Within this category, the heirs of Marxism, involved in overcoming Marxism itself, dedicated themselves almost completely to the area of historiographic criticism, influencing even other schools. Thus, Enrico Berti and Franco Volpi worked in Padua, (with interests for Karl Apel and Junger Habermas); in Pisa, Sergio Landucci and Remo Bodei centered on Hegel, Claudio Cesa on Feuerbach, and Alberto Zanardo on Marx. Within the historiographic movement, though not sharing the new tendencies, and not coming from Marxist originary positions, Valerio Verra and Vittorio Mathieu can be counted, together with some much younger students interested in historicism and hermeneutics. G. Irrationalism Among the changes that characterized the years between 1975 and 1980 there appeared a reborn attention for some thinkers of the irrationalism of the end of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth century: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and others. Massimo Cacciari offered a new interpretation of Wittgenstein, connecting the Austrian philosopher not to the Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, as it was done generally, but to the German philosophers opposed to Hegelianism and Positivism, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. This renewed irrationalism would carry with it all forms of irrationalism. From a Catholic tendency, Pareyson as well as some of his disciples could be classified under this label. Coming from an ex-Catholic vision, there is

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Severino. Rovatti, from the school of Paci, counted himself among the “irrationalists.” Some scholars originally oriented towards Husserl’s phenomenology in an existentialist key also could be counted to have held irrationalistic positions, as some interpreters of Pragmatism did. The studies of these Italian scholars are essentially centering on foreign authors, over all of German, like Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the more recent Gadamer. An exception is Ricoeur, from France. The “theoretical positions” of these “foreign” philosophers have been classified by Italian scholars as follows: pensiero debole (“weak thought,” especially referring to Gadamer); pensiero negativo (“negative thought,” as in Nietzsche); and pensiero della differenza (“thought of the difference,” as in Heidegger). 5. The New Problematic From 1970 to 2000, two polemical conflicts arose and developed within the context of the Italian Philosophy: (1) the polemic between moderns and postmoderns, and (2) the polemic between historians of philosophy (of the type of Garin’s school) and militant philosophers (of the type of analysis). These two debates continued in a parallel way for a decade during which period the first polemic remained most relevant until 1980, when, with the fading-out of the interest in it, the other became predominant. In the recent horizon, we may be able to distinguish three “philosophical parties,” though their theoretical boundaries or practical interests may not be so strongly delineated: (1) the philosophers of analys and epistemology; (2) the historians of philosophy doing also philosophy (historicism in the line of Garin); (3) and post-modern philosophers, who do not want to be called so, and whom their opposition defined as “irrationalists.” We will introduce the most public personalities. A. Massimo Cacciari In 1976, the book of Massimo Cacciari was published: Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Feltrinelli, 1976). It was an important text because, for the first time, the attention was focused on the Austrian Wittgenstein, as the connector with the Mittel-European and irrationalist culture of the beginning of the twentieth century, and as the divider of the Marxist thought from which Cacciari’s meditation originated. The book is also a complex of cultural ferments, of which Cacciari would be the protagonist, ferments that in various doses would mix, often in eclectic syntheses, Marxist and Post-Marxist analyses of society, negative thought, dialectic materialism, negative dialectic, existentialism, and hermeneutics. In the book, Cacciari moves away from orthodox Marxism, valuing the irrationalistic and anti-metaphysical instances of philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein for the purpose of philosophical-social analyses. He stated, “If this book has any value, it is that of showing the positive and effectual function that nega-

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tive thought has in the crisis of the classical system” (Ibid., p. 7). In fact, the research of Cacciari centered on the pensiero negativo, anti-dialectical, between Schopenauer and Nietzsche, of which he studied the connections with the literary, artistic, and scientific culture of the beginning twentieth century. In the process of time, Cacciari also focused on the Nietzsche of Heidegger, coming to a reconsideration of the entire history of western history of metaphysics and of the interpretive Heideggerian paradigm. The fundamental theoretical question of Cacciari can be formulated in the following way. What does it mean “to think” in a historical period in which philosophy seems definitively fragmented in specialized fields of inquiry, in the same way as it is happening in all forms of knowledge of technical character? Converging on some of the issues raised by Cacciari was A. G. Gargani who, in Crisi della ragione. Nuovi modelli del rapporto tra sapere e attività umane, assumed a position completely antithetical to classical metaphysics, the new analytic and theologizing reason, and the persisting historicist instances present in a large part of the Italian philosophical historiography. B. Gianni Vattimo The position of Vattimo, in its origin different from that of Cacciari and Gargani, in so far as Vattimo has no previous Marxist positions, at the end is convergent with them in the criticism of metaphysics, in assigning total value to technical knowledge, and in willing to reduce the existential dimension to logical-linguistic analysis. In Italy, Vattimo was the first to propose a particularly new perspective in hermeneutics, according to which hermeneutics has a positive connection with nihilism understood as the open denial of the validity of the logical and ontological categories inherited from metaphysics. Such reduction of credence in absolute verities must become the guiding notion for the understanding of the characteristics of the existence of human beings in the late-modern world, or post-modern, if we wish to use Jean-François Lyotard’s word. In fact, Vattimo adopted the vision expressed in the philosophy of the French thinker, for whom modernity is characterized by a complex of “meta-narrations” and “fables for adults,” like Enlightenment, Idealism, Marxism, and Christianity, which have determined and described the “western” mentality and all systems of metaphysics. The evolution or, rather, the transformations realized during the course of the twentieth century have corroded the absolute value of these “meta-narrations.” History, both Lyotard and Vattimo say, has shown the unreliability of such “fables for adults,” that is, of the absolute truths that they were meant to indicate. “Post-modern—said Lyotard—can be considered this disbelief concerning the meta-narrations.” If post-modernism is the experience of an end, it is therefore the experience of a breaking up of the modern conception of history as a unitary and progressive continuum of events. In La società trasparente (Milan, 1989), p. 8, Vattimo says, “In the hypothesis I am proposing, modernity ends when, for multiple reasons, it seems

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no longer possible to speak of history as of a something whole” (La modernità, nell’ipotesi che propongo, finisce quando, per molteplici ragioni, non appare piú possible parlare della storia come qualcosa di unitario). From this derives the consideration that the society within which we live—given that it no longer is moving toward a pre-established end, a unique end, or a whole collective completion—is a complex society that cannot be understood and represented in a unitary meta-narration (a metaphysics, in a classic sense), that is, in a “pensiero forte” (“strong thought”). The dichotomy into “pensiero forte” and “pensiero debole” (“weak thought”) is the sustaining core of one of the texts much discussed in the 1980s: Il pensiero debole (Milan, 1983), the book of Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti. Vattimo and Rovatti considered “post-modern” all metaphysical thought, which they named “pensiero forte.” On the other hand, for Vattimo, the “pensiero debole” consisted of a form of “nihilism,” which he described as “a key-word of our culture, a sort of destiny from which we cannot free ourselves without losing the fundamental characters of our spirituality” (una parola chiave della nostra cultura, una sorta di destino dal quale non possiamo liberarci senza privarci di aspetti fondamentali della nostra spiritualità). The concept of nihilism so defined is interpreted as the condition of “absence of foundations” (assenza dei fondamenti) of the post-modern humanity, which cannot believe, because of its clear critical spirit, the truth of the absolute certainties of metaphysics, religions, and political or social ideologies. This crisis of certainty in eternal truths should not bring humankind to a melancholic pessimism. Vattimo sustains that the human being can live without the illusions of the eternal and that his kind of nihilism is beneficial. The reason is that Vattimo’s nihilism is “un nichilismo debole” that having lived through the dissolution of being has no regrets for the ancient certainties or desires for new systemic totalities. With the decreasing interest in this thematic of the post-modernism, Vattimo has continued nevertheless to defend it and to point out its effects in today society of mass media, especially through the Internet. In opposition to the School of Frankfurt, Vattimo sustains that the new media help in the diffusion of diversity, in a species of liberation from differences, through an appreciation for the “dialects,” which are meant to signify all linguistic and cultural manifestations proper to a restricted minority. The affirmation of one’s own “being different” would come hand in hand with that of the recognition of diversity in others. This effective value of the mass media is realized when the level of a “total” aestheticism of the human experience is reached. Our aestheticized society uses hermeneutics as philosophical methodology, so that hermenutics becomes the profound and necessary cultural form of the postmodern individual. If the post-modern reality is a complete relativism of the values of theories, languages, differences, and if post-modern reality is the affirmation of a “nichilismo debole,” hermenutics is then the only instrument, the only method, the logic that alone possesses a historical and interpretive

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justification. Thus, suggests Vattimo, it is only in a society like ours that Nietzsche’s aphorism, according to which there are no facts but only interpretations, has value. Hermeneutics is the only “rational logic” that can be used after the fall of metaphysical reason. Several other scholars, for the most disciples of Pareyson and Paci, have embraced the thematics of the post-modern and of the crisis of reason. Among them, beside the mentioned Pier Aldo Rovatti, there are Eco, Maurizio Ferraris, Alessandro Dal Lago, Leonardo Amoroso, Franco Rella, Vincenzo Vitiello, Gianni Carchia, Giampiero Comolli, Filippo Costa, Franco Crespi, and Diego Marconi. If Vattimo may be considered the most important exponent of the postmodern current, in the younger generation of philosophers who were formed to his school Maurizio Ferraris seems the most promising. Ferraris, born in Turin in 1956, studied theory and history of hermeneutics, the aesthetics of the eighteenth century, and structured a general theory of aesthetics as a phenomenological ontology and psychology of perception. In the last few years, with the publication of L’ermeneutica in 1998, Ferraris began his polemic concerning some aspects of the theory of interpretation. C. Sergio Givone Another personality near to the post-modernists is Sergio Givone, professor of aesthetics at the University of Florence, for whom it is with aesthetics that today we may continue to do philosophy. The philosophical discourse found its subject matter in religion, myth, and art. Philosophy is the interpretation of the content of these expressions; it is interested in underlining their communicable universal value in spite of individuality and personal faith. Givone’s position is not hermeneutical; it is a “formative” interpretation of the works of art and religion at the moment when they call upon the intervention of philosophy, instead of an auto-reflection on the interpretive character of the philosophical discourse. In this way, Givone has inquired on the value of the “pensiero tragico” (“tragic thought”), acknowledging in the movement of Romanticism the historical origin of the problem of giving to the aesthetic experience a value of truth. Far from wishing to give, with the “pensiero tragico,” a heroic or pathetic vision of existence, which cannot be the reality of our late-industrial society, he intends to accentuate the need of a reflection that searches, probably utopian, to probe the irreducibly enigmatic character of being and existence. During the interview of Renzo Cassigoli for l’Unità of 15 November 1999, Givone outlined the contemporary situation: If we reflect on what happened during the twentieth century, we feel that we should speak with harsher words of risk and uncertainty in regard to the future. The risk comes from the awareness that we are in the situation of losing everything and the uncertainty comes also from the awareness that nothing is assured. If we look back, we fear that perhaps

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we will not have a future at all because the entire whole is at loss. This is the news that the philosophers have not yet fully comprehended. It is truly the first time that we must begin to think from the starting point of a possible total annihilation of the world, because of atomic or environmental risks and spiritual or cultural bankruptcy, and program a future for our children and grandchildren. We are coming to face the risk of annihilation. If philosophy would begin from here, it would be able perhaps to find diverse trails. Nihilism has traced one trail already, which we might follow. It consists in the testimony that all the great mythologies have disappeared and that human beings must accept the radical limitation of existence. Human beings should carve for themselves a minimal space for their actions and hopes, which would be rooted in a generic human providence or, whenever possible, in a god. A second trail may bring to a true and proper philosophy of freedom. If we are going to face annihilation, it means that our destiny is in our hands (Pensando al Novecento verrebbe la voglia di usare parole ancora più dure di rischio e incertezza rispetto al futuro su cui ci stiamo affacciando. Il rischio nasce dalla consapevolezza che davvero possiamo perdere tutto, e l’incertezza di nuovo nasce dalla consapevolezza che niente ci è garantito. Se volgiamo lo sguardo indietro temiamo di non poterlo neanche vedere il futuro, nel senso che, davvero è in gioco tutto. Una novità di cui i filosofi, forse, non hanno preso perfettamente coscienza. Per la prima volta bisogna pensare a partire dalla possibilità dell’annientamento del mondo, non solo per il rischio atomico e ambientale, ma anche sul piano spirituale, culturale, di progettare il futuro per i nostril figli e nipoti. Noi sappiamo che rischiamo il nulla Se la filosofia si pone davvero all’altezza di questa consapevolezza allora può percorrere strade diverse. Una è quella già imboccata dal nichilismo: prende atto che tutte le grandi mitologie sono sparite e non le resta che accettare la radicale finitezza dell’esistenza ritagliandosi uno spazio minimo di azioni e speranza, se non in dio in una generica “provvidenza” umana. L’altra via va verso una vera e propria filosofia della libertà. Se rischiamo il nulla allora vuol dire che l’essere è nelle nostre mani). In a way, we have no tradition on which to fall back as to a safe harbor. Velocity, immediateness, speed have accelerated the processes of transformation. In the past, the philosophers relied on few textbooks and dialogued in the epistolary format. On the contrary, “Today communication has transformed qualitatively the rapport with knowledge because, as we know, when quantity reaches a certain measurement it changes into quality” (Oggi la comunicazione ha trasformato qualitativamente il rapporto col sapere perchè, come sappiamo, quando la quantità supera una certa misura si trasforma in qualità). In the world of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing the simultaneous

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presence of the most opposite perspectives that oblige the philosophers to stop in front of this multiplicity of voices and attempt to reconcile them. It is a challenge, Givone said, that philosophy must accept. One of the effects of velocity is that technology is overpowering the human sciences, while in the past human being controlled technology. Politics controls ethics, while in the past ethics controlled politics. Given velocity and simultaneity, truth has become ambiguous and human beings should embrace the religion of nonviolence and tolerance. Some individuals may try to impose their truth to others; the majority may look at truth as a regulatory ideal. All these human beings would sense a profound inquietitude. D. Irrationalistic Thought The development of “irrationalistic” philosophies and over all of the “pensiero debole” has caused a series of reactions from many other philosophers. Positions, at times bitterly critical against the post-modernists, are those of Carlo Augusto Viano, who, in Va’ pensiero of 1985, with sarcasm and disdain assimilated the “pensiero debole” to “pensiero flebile,” that is, inconsistent. Paolo Rossi objected with solid argumentations to the post-moderns for having offered a unilateral conception of modernity and a distorted vision of science. Pietro Rossi, a colleague of Viano in a few philosophical and editorial projects, and strongly intransigent toward the post-moderns, during 1988, gathered in La Rivista di Filosofia many of the interventions against the irrationalists. These articles were then republished in one volume in 1991 as Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni (Il Mulino, Bologna). Both Viano and Rossi have not been able to continue on the path of their teacher Abbagnano. They are mentioned more for their polemic writings on postmodernism, rather than for the originality and relevance of their philosophical studies. The Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni shows the names of Stefano Zecchi, Giuseppe Cantillo, Antonio Santucci, Paolo Parrini, Gabriele Lolli, Eugenio Lecaldano, Alessandro Pagnini, Mario Miegge, Salvatore Veca, Paolo Rossi, and a few others, and it is a key for understanding some fundamental aspects of the Italian philosophy from the after war to the recent decade. To this list of critics of post-modernism and irrationalism, Lucio Colletti should be added, who left Marxism in the 1970s. From the Catholic side, Enrico Berti, in Le vie della ragione (Bologna, 1987), shows a more moderate attitude toward the post-modernists. Taking an intermediate position between moderns and post-moderns is Remo Bodei, who began with historical studies on Hegel and Marx. E. Emanuele Severino Emanuele Severino has taken a position worthy of consideration. In published works, between 1980 and 1995, he has moved favorably towards the irrationalists, proposing his own kind of “nihilism.” For Severino, the western world has made the mistake of abandoning the precept of Parmenides, according to

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which, only “being” is, can be thought, and defined. By introducing the concept of becoming within metaphysics and history, the western world is arrived at a dead end. In Dove va la filosofia italiana?, Severino explains: The “becoming” [is] understood as the visible dimension where things come from nothing and return to nothing, after their brief passage through being. For the first time, Greek thought pays attention to the infinite opposition between being and nothing and comprehends the becoming as a process in which being moves towards extinction, that is, as an oscillation of things between being and nothing (Il divenire, inteso come la dimensione visibile dove le cose provengono dal niente e ritornano nel niente, dopo essersi provvisoriamente trattenute nell’essere. Per la prima volta il pensiero Greco si rivolge all’opposizione infinita dell’essere e del niente ed intende il divenire come un processo in cui ne va dell’essere, ossia come oscillazione delle cose tra l’essere ed il niente, in Dove va la filosofia?, p. 165.) This has implied a continuous confrontation between humanity and “the nothing,” the expression of which has been felt in Christianity and the sciences: Knowledge is the original essence of philosophy: it is the will to know with stability and incontrovertibility the truth of the world. Knowledge is the stable dimension of knowing, within which all the immutable verities of the western world have been set on altars. The Christian faith has inherited all the characters of incontrovertibility and stability, and has addressed itself to the masses ([Epistéme è] l’essenza originaria della filosofia: la volontà di conoscere stabilmente ed incontrovertibilmente la verità del mondo. L’epistéme è la dimensione stabile del sapere all’interno della quale vengono innalzati tutti gli immutabili dell’occidente. La fede cristiana eredita tutti i caratteri di incontrovertibilità e stabilità dell’epistéme e si rivolge alle masse, in ibid., p. 165). Witnessing Nietzsche and Heidegger, human beings have become aware that not even religion can avert the nihilistic destiny toward which the western world moves. Human beings have searched for their ultimate refuge in science and technology, and this ended metaphysics, because “contemporary philosophy tends to set in the scientific knowledge precisely because science is negation and destruction of the immutable verities (immutabili).” The evolution of the thought of the last decades of the twentieth century in Italy has followed, at least in its general lines, the progressive tracks of the thought of Severino. Born as a criticism of the metaphysical and historicist knowledge, as the negation of the primacy of analytical epistemology, as nihilism, as “pensiero debole,” and “pensiero tragico,” has become thereafter a

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criticism of the technological society. In this sense post-modernism has found its most natural evolution and has given its most permanent fruits. In the 1990s, we may have had the best literary production on the reciprocal rapports between psychology, technology, sociology, and metaphysics, offering an eclectic vision of the problems and maintaining the dependence of the Italian academicians from foreign philosophers, but with some seemly originality. This criticism of psychology, technology, sociology, and metaphysics had its effect on the Italian debate, in the sense that as the post-modern positions changed, their supporters moved toward a work of analysis and “historical reconstructions” of the phenomena. Thus, the growing number of analytical philosophers arrived at the unilateral consideration and judgment of post-moderns and historians of philosophy, opposing both groups as being heirs to the so-called “continental” tradition. Consequently, while the attrition between moderns and post-moderns was attenuating, that between historians of philosophy and analytical philosophers was accentuating by re-proposing the counter-opposition between analytical and “continental” philosophers. This may be said an old debate, but it still is the only sign of life in a quite stagnant cultural panorama. F. Opposition and Analytical Philosophy The movement of Italian philosophy that is generally defined “analytical” in reality refers to those scholars of various tendencies and interests who can be assimilated under the aspect of their methodology instead of their theoretical positions. Interest for mathematical logic and epistemology, reference to neopositivists and epistemologists, devaluation of existentialist and postexistentialist positions, devaluation of historical work, and denial of the possibility of doing philosophy through the history of philosophy, are the attitudes of the analytical philosopher. Center and source of the opposition to the analytical philosophy has been the University of Florence for the reason that during the after-war period teachers taught there who could be considered the most important Italian philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century: Garin and Preti. The teaching of these two individuals has distinguished not only the history of the Florentine Academy, but also the development of the philosophical reflection throughout Italy. The conflict itself between “epistemologists” and “historians,” which has signaled out the Italian philosophy of the last three decades, finds in the different personalities and theoretical positions of these two individuals its origin. The schools of Garin and Preti, if we may be allowed to called them so, have trained the good majority of the protagonists of the contemporary philosophical Italian scene. The best studies in the history of philosophy have been written by Garin and his many disciples; Preti’s best students could be Paolo Parrini and Alberto Peruzzi, who made a fame for themselves with a specific number of followers and sympathizers of the analytical

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philosophy and logic. These groups have even challenged the positions of the school of Geymonat (and other epistemologists) with their attempt at giving to the Italian philosophy a different direction than the one traced by historicism. It is from this situation that the contrastive label of “analitici e continentali” has its origin, and the expression is equivalent to the others of “analitici e storici,” and, with a consideration of the subject matter, “storia della filosofia e filosofia teoretica.” 6. The “Società Filosofica Italiana” In 1999, in Florence, a mirroring image of the Italian philosophical situation was reflected by the convention on the theme “Verso il 2000. La filosofia italiana in discussione,” organized by the Società Filosofica Italiana. Present at this convention were all the most important professionals in the field; speakers were Paolo Rossi, Parrini, Berti, Givone, Sini, Moravia, Veca, Lecaldano, and Luigi Berlinguer, the Minister of Education. It was recognized that the Italian philosophy—the one of the Universities and of the Scholastic System—was in a state of disarray and disappointment that could not be imputed to any one of the different philosophical currents, but to atavic social and administrative problems of Italy. This judgment agrees with what, almost ten years before, Franco Restaino already wrote in “Il dibattito filosofico in Italia dal 1976 al 1990,” in Storia della Filosofia (Utet, 1994): It must be stated that traditionally, with the exception of Vico, almost nothing is translated abroad of the Italian philosophical production. Something of Croce is translated and nothing else. In the post-war period, especially during the 1970s, some historians of philosophy, like Garin and Paolo Rossi, saw some recognition abroad, as far as they dealt with periods, like the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, dear to foreign historians. In the 1990s, the works of Vattimo and Eco became the best deal for the English and American Publishers. A. The Recourse of Vichian Studies Restaino appears to acknowledge that around the 1970s there was an event that we may call “a recourse of Vichian studies” due to the dedicated research and passionate interest of Giorgio Tagliacozzo. He had planned to make the Neapolitan philosopher of the eighteenth century, already well known in Germany, known to, and studied by American Scholars in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Already in 1969, the whole of these studies, edited principally by Tagliacozzo, was published in Giambattista Vico. An International Symposium, by Johns Hopkins Press. Though Vico’s Autobiografia, the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, and the Scienza Nuova

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had already been respectively translated in 1948, 1965, and 1968, they had remained essentially on university library’s shelves. The “symposium,” instead, had a worldwide diffusion in addition to Vico’s own home, Naples. Soon the Centro di Studi Vichiani was born and the publication of the first volume of the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani under the direction of Pietro Piovani, in 1971, appeared. In it, Eugenio Garin and Paolo Rossi were the two major contributors. Reviewed more than thirty times by journals, magazines, and periodicals, the success of the “symposium” convinced Tagliacozzo to create the counterpart of the center of Naples, the Institute for Vico Studies of New York, in 1974. In 1983, Tagliacozzo founded the English Vichian journal, publishing the first issue of New Vico Studies, which would offer also the occasion to Italian Vichian specialists to become known, through translation, within the English-speaking philosophical circles and universities. Both Vichian Centers, of Naples and New York, with their organized conventions, libraries, and journals, revamped the interest and the study of Vico. As the last complement of the picture on the development, influence, and success of Tagliacozzo and Piovani in their efforts in favor of Vico in the 1970s, in Spain, in 1991, José M. Sevilla Fernández of the University of Sevilla founded the Centro de Investigaciones sobre Vico and the corresponding publication of the first of the Cuadernos sobre Vico, which have re-awakened the interest in Vichian studies within the countries of Latin culture. All this explains the three last decades of enthusiastic and passionate work in the preparation of the definite critical editions of all the original writings of Vico by Italian scholars and of the translations of all major Vichian works into English, Spanish, French, and other languages with the consequent stimulation and proliferation of an enormous production of researches, debates, and conferences worldwide. B. Historians of Philosophy and Analytical Philosophers It is an incontrovertible fact that the historians of philosophy have demonstrated no interest in fighting the analytic tendency in philosophy. For them it is just another philosophical position that anyone can take and that does not preclude the possibility of doing history of philosophy and philosophy through the history of philosophy, as Giuseppe Galasso confirmed in the speech “Storicismo, filosofia, e sapere storico” in the proceedings of the convention on Eugenio Garin. Il percorso storiografico di un maestro del Novecento (Le Lettere, Firenze, 2002). The historians of philosophy objected that analytic philosophy should not think of itself as the only viable philosophy that would decree the end of the history of philosophy. Strangely enough, one of the best studies on the different analytical positions is that of a disciple of Garin: Sergio Moravia, L’enigma della mente. In essence, from the position of the analytical philosophers, the historians of philosophy are an obstacle to those who want to do real, theoretical philosophy, by which they mean analytical and epistemological philosophy. The “analitici” do not wish to be con-

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textualized and historicized, to be an object of research. They do not accept to consider the analytic position as one of the many ways of doing philosophy; for them analytic philosophy is and must be the only way of doing philosophy. Considering, now, what the “analitici” call “storici della filosofia,” we must understand that if this expression is applied to the teacher and the members of what we called “school of Garin,” a fundamental consideration should be made. It is true that the school has produced especially historians of the Renaissance and Humanism, but at the same time these historians (Paolo Rossi, Cesare Vasoli, Michele Ciliberto, and others) embraced a certain method and certain goals that were rooted in some fundamental positions of their teacher. For Garin and his most reliable disciples the concept of “modernity” contains in a great part a prejudicial component. “Modernity” has not represented a “breaking” or a “capsizing” of the previous period. Modernity has none of the unity that the postmodern and analytical prejudice wants to attribute to it. Our society is not the product of a “unitary knowledge” formed between the sixteenth and seventeenth century; the technological mentality is not simply born from the scientific revolution of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Copernicus, and so on. On the contrary, our society is the result of many “rivers” of knowledge, of many forms of knowing, which from the Middle Ages transformed, in part evolved, in part fossilized, in part lost, in part turned upside down, from which some new forms were born. In order to comprehend this society, it is necessary to be free from the historiographic prejudice of modern science and become aware that the concept of “modernity” is simply a “pre-concept.” Without this awareness of their prejudicial position, it would be impossible to understand the analyses of society and of historical thought proposed by irrationalists and postmodernists. The analytical partisans, too, should recognize that their concepts of truth, knowledge, and epistemics, do not have the foundation that they say they have. It was not the banal opposition between science and Renaissance, magic or reason, and fantasy that gave the beginning to the physical mathematical sciences of the seventeenth century. The research in the epistemological field must be addressed to the reconstruction of a concept of rationality and science richer, more complex, and more various, than the one adopted by the philosophers of the analytical current. Beyond their general affirmation on the contrary, they continue in their analyses and constructions of philosophical theories with the logic and the forma mentis of scientists and positivists. It is in the contrast to these misconceptions of analytical and positivists scholars that the School of Garin has emerged and intended, through the study of Humanism and Renaissance, to demonstrate that there was no clear breaking between the seventeenth century and the previous times. By the success of their research, the true and acceptably founded concept of “modernity” would be known. Knowledge is not attained in a straight line, but in a web of interrelated lines, which only a historiographic research would be able to reconstruct and adequately describe. Historical inquiry must show the complexity of the history of philosophy and

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science, and describes culture as it is actually. Historiographic categories should be expanded to embrace the full complexity of historical reality, which should not be minimized to sustain or prove any specific philosophical theory. Garin, as historian of the Renaissance and philosopher, sees in the historical analysis and reconstruction the first needed instrument for doing philosophy. 7. What Will Italian Philosophy Tell? The disappointment that an analysis of the conditions of philosophy in Italy produces is based on the realization that during the 1990s the visible and militant philosophers were the same as in the previous two, three, or even four decades, with a few exceptions. The known schools of Garin, Preti, Abbagnano, Geymonat, Pareyson, and even Piovani, were suffering anemia. In 1999, L’Unità, through Cassigoli, asked this question, in reference to the Convention of the Società Filosofica Italiana: “The Florentine Convention has closed the period of the second after-war studying its rapport with the philosophy of Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci of the beginning of this century. What phase is starting now?” Sergio Givone answered, “The question asks what the Italian philosophy said and has to say concerning the European and worldly debate. The answer of someone has been, ‘Nothing. The Italian philosophy did only a pure work of importation’. I do not believe so. The Italian philosophy has said something of its own, independently from the rhetoric that is its proper manifestation.” The journalist insisted, by quoting Garin who said, “I’m experiencing the defeat of reason in a manner that I did not even experience it during the darkest moments of the war.” He was referring to the actual nihilism, eclecticism, and relativism that are pervasive in the contemporary philosophical debate. At the age of ninety-three, in one more interview of L’Unità of 4 May 2002, Garin spoke as the most important exponent of the movement of democracy and action, which from the end of the war remained allied with the communist, socialist, and democratic parties. The interviewer asked him to speak about the intimate impulses that animated Gramsci’s thought and which problems the Gramscian inheritance has left for us. For Garin, the position of Gramsci in the Notebooks was similar to that of Pasquale Villari and was about a moral and intellectual reformation to be achieved by re-reading the history of Italy and its unresolved conflicts. Italy has not resolved the problems of its national history. The civil integration has not been achieved and the southern question has remained unanswered. The concerns of Gramsci during the first decades of the twentieth century and his formation to Marxism through Labriola, Croce, and Gentile brought him to an analysis of the Italian society seen between the past and the present, beginning from the immediate historical period after World War I. On the same tracks of Croce and Gentile, Gramsci molded the historical concepts in the direction of a historical actualized recognition of the national reality. Garin said, “The mind’s itinerary of the author of the Notebooks resembled the one of the intellectuals of the six-

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teenth century and of the Counter-Reformation, who obtained a bundle of indications that appeared to me still valid. I could briefly synthesize in this way: the evils of today have profound and strong roots in the failure of the laic modernization of the country.” The interviewer remarked that the Catholic Church, in 1991, had renewed the crusade of the evangelization of the western world with the encyclical Centesimus Annus benefiting from the democratic and laic thought. Garin continued, “It is undeniable that the defense and the support for certain values of Christianity are important. But I am a laic, and though valuing these efforts, I still continue to regret that in the history of Italy the Council of Trent won, not Machiavelli and Guicciardini.” The breaking off from the idealistic systematization happened between 1960 and 1968, but in the view of Garin, it had begun in 1929 and 1930. Concerning the dialectic between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, Garin says, “The tendency toward the reunification of humanity must triumph…. The development of technology obliges us to accept the necessity of an interspatial government with the responsibility for worldly resources. Today, it is necessary to embrace the just balance between the citizenry of the world and that of a specific nation.” When asked about the validity of the idea of progress, he answered, “I will be cautious about this, because the concept of progress enjoys a certain ideological halo. It is linked with the faith in an intrinsic rationality present in the historical vicissitudes. History is made of regresses and progresses. Utopia instead can outline dynamically the betterment relative to the living conditions of human beings. A utopia, however, must be made wise by experience, so that we will not pay a too high price, in case of failure.”

NOTICE The observations and the reservations premised to the 1966 edition are still valid for the present edition. These Bibliographical Notes do not pretend in any way to give an account in an exhaustive manner of the production, for some chapters truly enormous, of this decade and even less, it presumes to offer, even indirectly, a judgment on its value. It wishes only to provide some useful preliminary indications. We have followed the rule of not referring to bibliographies or extensive works already mentioned in previous editions. We referred to new minor contributions only if there was a lack of monographs or bibliographical subsidies in previous editions. In general, we have wished to integrate what others previously observed. In all cases, we have followed a selective criterion and mentioned what had some worthwhile information, even if not always positive. We have referred to the voices in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, and only in some exceptional cases to those in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie (New York, 1970–1976, 14 vols.). The essays in the first are usually the fruit of original researches and always contemporary; meanwhile the others, at times optimal—but in relation to Italian authors, are sometime unsatisfying and archaic—are more than often modest compilations. This does not deny that there are essays in this latter volume of an exceptional value as, for instance, on G. B. Benedetti, by Stillman Drake (in vol. 1 (1970), pp. 604–609); on Boezio, by L. Minio-Paluello (in vol. 2 (1970), pp. 228–236); on G. A. Borelli, by Th. B. Settle (in vol 2, pp. 306–314); on Campano da Novara, by G. J. Tomer (in vol. 3 (1971), pp. 23–29); on Leonardo Fibonacci, by K. Vogel (in vol. 4 (1971), pp. 403–413); on Pacioli, by S. A. Jay a Wardene (in vol. 10 (1974), pp. 269–272); on Telesio, by N. W. Gilbert (in vol. 13 (1976), pp. 277–280); on Stensen, by G. Scherz (in vol. 13, pp. 30–35). There is in it even an essay on Buonamici, by W. Wallace (in vol. 2, pp. 390–391), which is strangely absent in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani. Finally, we are reminding the reader that the Index does not register (all of) the personal names mentioned in the Bibliographical Notes. Eugenio Garin Florence, January 1978.

ABBREVIATIONS AHDLMA

Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age

BGPTMA

Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters

BTAM

Bulletin de Théologie ancienne et médiévale

CSEL

Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vindebonae, Pragae, Lipsiae)

GCFI

Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana

GSLI

Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana

MAGL

Martin Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geistesleben, (München, vol. 1: 1926; vol. 2: 1936; vol. 3: 1956)

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

PG

J. P. MIGNE, Patrologia Graeca

PL

J. P. MIGNE, Patrologia Latina

RTAM

Revue de Théologie ancienne et médiévale

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES [These pages represent the combined edition of the comments and the notes that have partially appeared in the previous Italian editions of this work in 1948, 1966, and 1978]

PROLOGUE IS A NATIONAL PHILOSOPHY POSSIBLE? (pp. xxxix–lviii) In the last decades no treatise on Italian philosophy taken as a whole and on its characteristics that has caused a change in perspectives and positions has appeared, even though particular studies on the various periods and on single thinkers have been published. The brief outline of Emile Namer, La philosophie italienne (Paris, 1970), though it has been much praised (see the review of A. Corsano in Belfagor, 16 (1971), pp. 488–490) and is the work of a scholar who has given valuable contributions (on Bruno and especially on Vanini), nonetheless it was merely a sufficiently correct popularization. Anna M. Ammendola Seccareccia’s La filosofia italiana nel suo sviluppo storico (Naples, 1970) is a summary delineation that considers the more important figures and includes a classical period that begins with Pythagoras. Usefully innovative and well informed are often the contributions found in series of comprehensive works, normally in the sections dedicated to culture of the Storia d’Italia of Einaudi Publishers and in some volumes of the Letteratura italiana of Laterza Publishers. Given that these contributions are by different authors with a variety of positions, we will refer to them in specific sections of this commentary. 1. Evaluation of the Italian Philosophical Tradition between 18th and 19th century. The Renaissance Considered as the Beginning of a National Philosophy Concerning the important Disputatio of Genovesi, see M. T. Marcialis, “Note sulla Disputatio physico-historica di A. Genovesi” Annali della Facoltà di Lettere Filosofia e Magistero dell’Università di Cagliari, 32 (1970); E. Garin, “Antonio Genovesi e la sua introduzione storica agli Elementa Physicae di Pietro van Musschenbroek,” Physis, 11 (1969), pp. 211–212; idem, “A. Genovesi storico della scienza,” in the volume Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo (Pisa, 1970), pp. 222–240; P. Zambelli, La formazione di Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1972), p. 846. For the wide diffusion of the Disputatio, see F. Venturi, who considers it “a historical rhapsody on the doctrines of matter from antiquity to our days” but also as “a synoptic and general history of science,” in Settecento riformatore, Vol. 1: Da Muratori a Beccaria (Turin, 1969), p. 528. The Disputatio was included, with side numeration and elaborated in the text, in the beginning of the 2nd Neapolitan edition of Elementa methaphysicae (1751), and in the 4th edition (Naples, 1760–1763) at the beginning of Vol. 4, pp. 1–146. The dissertation is found again in N. Fergola, Elementa physicae (Naples, 1779), a textbook used in private courses and published posthumously; thereafter it was translated into vulgar by Marco Fassadoni (Venice, 1793), who also translated Condillac’s Treatise on sensations. Of Francesco Fiorentino we cited the Lettera filosofica of 1858, but of the same year there is another important text published in Messina, Volgarizzamento

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dell’Itinerario della mente a Dio di S. Bonaventura, di Libri del Maestro, dell’Immortalità dell’Anima e del Libero arbitrio di S. Aur. Agostino e del Proslogio di S. Anselmo. From the proem the connection philosophy, political activity, and national renewal is asserted energetically. Fiorentino underlined, “The century of Anselm is also the century of the Comuni, of Gregory VII, Bonaventure, Thomas, and prepares the century of Dante. However, the Scholastic philosophy degenerated because of a new foreign element imported by the Arabs, the philosophy of Aristotle. Thus, every bad tendency among us has always been the product of foreigners.” Fortunately the teachings of Pythagoras were anew embraced, and “in the way that Great Greece did before, again dared to break the encirclement within which the thinkers of that age had placed around the incommensurable vastness of science. Anyone can see that I am speaking of Telesio and Campanella, famous names within the history of human thought, if for no other reason of having attempted its freedom.” Singular was the genealogy that Fiorentino traced: “To understand the history of philosophy, the two mentioned manner of authority must be carefully distinguished. Thus, it would be seen that Campanella did not oppose the Pythagoras’s positions, but he instead should be considered his legitimate descendant. Pythagoras cared for the true, legitimate, and Semitic traditions that came from the East. Campanella applied himself to the destruction of the Aristotelian traditions, which through the chain of Protagoras and Empedocles connected with the traditions of the Jonic school that derived from the Hamitic ones, which was the most corrupt, and adulterated. With Pythagoras the speculative sciences truly began in the West.” Concerning Fiorentino’s polemic on the German thought, the first draft can be read in the small book of 1861 that he wrote on Bruno: “Before placing all our efforts in studying the Germans, why don’t we begin reading through the pages so much forgotten of our three supreme Italians, St. Anselm, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas? This last one, as the Hercules of the fable suffocated the serpents in their nest while they were clinging to him, had already blunted the blows that our terrible rival of the North one day would throw against our gigantic philosophy on its beginning.… And now … will we be going after the ultramontane customs that are rotten and wicked?” Concerning these positions of Fiorentino, see the first pages of the essay of R. Mondolfo of 1924, that has been reprinted in the volume Da Ardigò a Gramsci (Milan, 1962), pp. 46ff. It should be mentioned that Mondolfo, as well as Gentile, had no knowledge of the text above cited. 2. Vincenzo Gioberti In relation to the meaning of the positions taken by Bertrando Spaventa and to the lectures in the courses of history of philosophy given at Bologna and Naples (in May and November 1860), see the syllabus of Spaventa’s writings in Giuseppe Vacca, Unificazione nazionale ed egemonia culturale (Bari, 1969), pp. 193ff. Felice Tocco was a student of Fiorentino in Bologna and remained in good terms with him. He graduated on 7 June 1867 with the thesis, Delle varie interpretazioni dell’idea Platonica e della categoria aristotelica. This thesis was discussed with Bonatelli in addition to Fiorentino, and was criticized by Montanari with charges of presumed subjectivism. The thesis was published in the same year, in the second issue of the second volume of Rivista Bolognese. 3. Bertrando Spaventa The writings of G. Landucci, “La formazione di Roberto Ardigò,” Atti dell’Accademia

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Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria,” 37 (1972), pp. 43–87 and “Note sulla formazione del pensiero di Roberto Ardigò,” in GCFI, 53 (1974), pp. 16–60, would clarify the issue of Pezza-Rossa, Ardigò, and the most important question of “Italic” philosophy. 4. Roberto Ardigò and the Positivists A “reconstruction” of Gentile’s vision of the history of Italian philosophy has been attempted in the two volumes: G. Gentile, Storia della filosofia italiana, Edited by E. Garin (Florence, 1969). The editor, in the general introduction and in the individual introductions to the different parts and in the notes, tried to illustrate the point of view of Gentile and the results of the many researches done on the topic. 5. Giovanni Gentile and the Idealist Historiography See A. Guzzo, Storia della filosofia e della civiltà per saggi (Padua, 1973), Vol. 1, pp. 3–100, on some of the questions raised in this section. Also see L. Malusa, “La storiografia religiosa di Felice Tocco,” Studia Patavina, 19 (1972), pp. 580–609, and “Pietro Ragnisco storico della filosofia patavina,” Quaderni per la storia dell’Università di Padova, 5 (1972), pp. 107–144.

One FROM BOETHIUS TO THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY (pp. 3–32) 1. Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great Among the many works relating to the matter of this chapter and to the general aspects of the medieval culture, we must keep in mind: G. Manacorda, Storia della scuola in Italia (Milan, 1913), 2 vols.; P. Courcelle, Les lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore (Paris, 1943, 2nd ed. in 1948); idem, Histoire litteraire des grandes invasions germaniques (Paris, 1948); P. Riché, Education et culture dans l’Occident barbare, vi-viii siècles (Paris, 1962); and the volumes on the High Medieval Age published by the Center of Studies of Spoleto (Spoleto, 1954–1972), especially La cultura antica nell’Occidente Latino dal vii all’xi secolo (Spoleto, 1972). Regarding the medieval comment on the classics see C. Leonardi, “I commenti altomedievali ai classici pagani da Severino Boezio a Remigio di Auxerre,” ibid., pp. 459–508. Rich with important contributions is also the volume that contains the proceedings of the International Congress of Medieval Philosophy (Montréal, 27 August through 2 September 1967): Arts libéraux et philosophic au Moyen Age, (Montréal-Paris 1969). For a comprehensive view and for ulterior bibliographical indications see G. Miccoli, “La storia religiosa,” in Storia d’Italia (Turin, 1974) pp. 429–1079, and P. Renucci, “La cultura,” ibid., vol. 2, pp. 1081–1466. About the life and writings of Boethius, see first of all the article by M. Cappuyins, “Boèce,” Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique (Paris, 1939), vol. 9, pp. 348–380, which must be integrated with the researches of L. Minio-Paluello concerning the versions of the writings of Aristotle and the writings on logic, “Les traductions et les commentaires aristotéliciens de Boèce,” in Studia Patristica, 2 (1957), pp. 358–364. Concerning the preparation of the “Aristoteles Latinus,” see the many con-

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tributions of E. Franceschini, “Ricerche e studi su Aristotele nel medioevo latino,” in the volume Aristotele nella critica e negli studi contemporanei, a supplement to Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 48 (1956), pp. 144–166; “The genuine Text of Boethius’s Translation of Aristotle’s Categories,” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1943), pp. 151–177; “The text of the Categoriae: the Latin Tradition,” The Classical Quaterly, 29 (1945), pp. 63–74; “Note sull’Aristotele Latino Medievale,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 42 (1950), pp. 222–237; 43 (1951), pp. 97–114; 44 (1952), pp. 389–412 and 485–495; 46 (1954), pp. 211–231; 50 (1958), pp. 97–116 and 212–222; 52 (1960), pp. 29–45. Furthermore, see P. Hadot, “Un fragment du commentaire perdu de Boèce sur les Catégories d’Aristote dans le codex Bernensis 363,” AHDLMA, 26 (1959), pp. 11–27; J. Shiel, “Boethius’ commentaries on Aristotle,” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 4 (1958), pp. 217–244, about the dependence of Boethius on Porfiry and Ammonius; and L. M. De Rijk, “About the chronology of Boethius’ works on logic,” Vivarium, 2 (1964), pp. 1–49, 125–162, in which are discussed the researches and the criteria followed by previous scholars, and, at pp. 159–161, are briefly given the conclusions on the chronological succession. For textual questions, see G. F. Pagallo, “Per un’edizione critica del ‘de hypotheticis syllogismis’,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 1 (1958), pp. 69–101. In addition to the above see the voice “Boezio,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1969), vol. 11, pp. 142–165, and edited by L. Minio-Paluello and P. Courcelle the monograph of L. Obertello, Severino Boezio (Geneva, 1974), 2 vols. The second volume is completely dedicated to a very rich bibliography. Singular value has P. Courcelle, La Consolation de la Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire. Antécédents et Postérité de Boèce (Paris, 1967); it is an attractive research about one of the most important channels for the transmission of ancient culture: “Lo studio comparativo delle varie interpretazioni è particolarmente suggestivo; procura una specie di tavola sinottica delle tendenze filosofiche proprie di ogni epoca, e permette nello stesso tempo di discernere la persistenza di famiglie di spiriti attraverso i secoli successivi. Il resultato piú nitido della ricerca è di mostrare che, contrariamente alla opinione accreditata, la Consolazione fu sempre una pietra di paragone” (p. 337). This book brought us to comprehend the possibilities and also the limits of every conception that wishes to remain on a rational plane; it helped us to understand that a NeoPlatonic position imply difficulties and incompatibility in its comparison with Christianity. The work of Courcelle is a precious instrument for its exploration of the manuscript tradition of the commentaries and glosses up to the 15th century and for the attention given to iconography. Fundamental are the studies of E. Franceschini on the Latin Aristotle; they have been gathered in Scritti di filologia latina medievale (Padua, 1976), 2 vols. The Aristotelian researches of Franceschini are in vol. 2, while those of L. Minio-Paluello are placed in Opuscula. The Latin Aristotle (Amsterdam, 1972). The initial point on the question of the authenticity of the theological writings (with the exception of the de fide catholica) is the analysis that H. Usener did of the fragment of Cassiodorus found by A. Holder. Thus, see H. Usener, Anecdoton Holderi. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Roms in Ostgothisher Zeit, Festschrift ein Begrüssung der XXXII. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner zu Wiesbaden (Leipzig, 1877), where it is said that Boethius “Scripsit librum de sancta trinitate et capita quaedam dogmatica et librum contra Nestorium” (wrote a book on the holy trinity and some chapters on dogmatics and a book against Nestorius). However, for the literary story of the Opuscula sacra, see also M. Grabmann, “Die theologische

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Erkenntnis und Einleitungslehre des hl. Thomas von Aquin auf Grund seiner Schrift ‘In Boethium de Trinitate’.” Im Zusammenhang der Scholastik des 13. und beginnenden 14. Jahrhunderts dargestellt (Freiburg, 1948). The testimony of Cassiodorus in Variae, vol. 1, sect. 45 (ed. Mommsen, MGH, A. A., 12, 40) must always be kept in mind when considering the complex of Boethius’s studies: “sic … Atheniensium scholas longe positas introisti, sic palliatorum choris miscuisti togam, ut Graecorum dogmata doctrinam feceris esse Romanam. Didicisti enim qua profunditate cum suis partibus speculativa cogitetur, qua ratione activa cum sua divisione discatur, deducens ad Romuleus senatores quidquid Cecropidae mundo fecerant singulare. Translatationibus enim tuis Pythagoras musicus, Ptolomaeus astronomus leguntur Itali; Nicomachus arithmeticus, geometricus Euclides audiuntur Ausonii; Plato theologus, Aristoteles logicus Quirinali voce disceptant; mechanicum etiam Archimedem Latialem Siculis reddidisti. Et quascumque disciplinas vel artes facunda Graecia per singulos viros edidit, te uno auctore patrio sermone Roma suscepit.” Also see vol. 2, pt. 3, sect. 18, pp. 128–129 of Cassiodori senatoris Institutiones, Edited by Mynors (Oxford, 1962). All the works of Boethius, even those falsely attributed to him, are to be found in PL, 63–64; in a partial edition they exist in CSEL (Vindobonae, 1906): in vol. 48, S. Brandt edited the In Isagogem Porphyrii commentaria; vol. 67, Peiper and Schepss edited the De consolatione philosophiae, re-edited afterward by G. Weinberger. A new edition of the consolatio philosophiae edited by L. Bieber is in vol. 94 of the Latin Series Corpus Christianorum (Turnholti, 1957). The edition of the theological opuscules with an English translation of E. K. Rand and H. F. Stewart has been reprinted in the Loeb Classical Library. Given the vast literature on Boethius, readers should check general works and the data found in the works here cited. The writings we suggest here below have a special interest because they touch on the themes treated in the text: A. Van de Vijver, “Les étapes du dévelopement philosophique du haut moyen age,” Revue belge de philology et d’histoire, 8 (1929), pp. 425–452; idem, “L’évolution scientifique du haut moyen age,” in Archeion, 19 (1937), pp. 12–20. Worthy of a continuous reading are the pages of E. K. Rand, “Boethius: The First of the Scholastics,” Founders of the Middle Ages (New York, 1957), pp. 135–180. For an interpretation of the logic, independently from the Latin tradition, see K. Dürr, The propositional logic of Boethius (Amsterdam, 1951). For the presence of Boethius in the Middle Ages, see R. H. Patch, The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of His Importance in Mediaeval Culture (New York: Oxford, 1935); P. Courcelle, “Étude critique sur les commentaires de la Consolation de Boèce (IXe–XVIe siècles),” AHDLMA, 12 (1939), pp. 5–140. In relation with Dante, see R. Murari, Dante e Boezio. Contributo allo studio delle fonti dantesche (Bologna, 1905). W. Kranz, “Dante und Boethius,” Romanische Forschungen, 63 (1951), pp. 72–78, deals with Consolatio Philosophiae, chs. 1, v. 5 and 3, v. 9, considered as sources of the cantica 33 of Dante’s Paradiso, and in relation to E. Auerbach, “Dante’s Prayer to the Virgin,” Romance Philology, 3 (1949), pp. 1–26. A useful tool is L. Cooper, A Concordance of Boethius, the Five Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy (Mass.: Cambridge, 1928). The writings of Cassiodorus exist in PL, vols. 69–70, and partially in the series Corpus Christianorum, vols. 97–98. Fundamental work on the Institutiones is the edition of R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937, and again 1961); on the edition of 1937, see review by E. K. Rand in Speculum 13 (1938), pp. 433–447. For the De anima, see “Magni Aurelii Cassiodori Senatoris liber de anima, with Introduction and Critical

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Text” by James W. Halporn, in Traditio, 16 (1960), pp. 39–109. About Cassiodorus himself, see the article “Cassiodore” of M. Cappuyns in Dictionnaire d’histoire et géographie ecclésiastique, 2 (1949), pp. 1349–1408. Important are the researches of A. Van de Vijver, “Cassiodore et son oeuvre,” Speculum, 6 (1931), pp. 244–292; “Les Institutiones de Cassiodore et sa fondation à Vivarium,” Revue Bénédictine, 43 (1941, pp. 59–88. See also P. Lamma, “Cultura e vita in Cassiodoro,” Studium, 43 (1947), pp. 234–241; G. Bardy, “Cassiodore et la fin du monde antique,” L’année théologique, 6 (1945), pp. 383–425, and again in the volume L’Eglise et les derniers Romains (Paris, 1945). Concerning the influence of Cassiodorus, in addition to H. Thiele’s “Cassiodor, seine Klostergründung Vivarium und seine Nachwirken in Mittelalter,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benedektiner-Orden und zeine Zweige, 50 (1932), pp. 378–418, see L. W. Jones, “The Influence of Cassiodorus on Medieval Culture,” Speculum, 20 (1945) pp. 433–442; idem, “Further Notes concerning Cassiodorus’s Influence on Medieval Culture,” ibid., 22 (1947), pp. 254–256; see also Jones’s English translation and notes of the Institutiones (New York, 1946). Almost a biography is the work of J. J. Van den Besselaar, Cassiodorus Senator. Leven en werken van een staatsman en monnik vit de zesde eeuw (Haarlem, 1950); of the same author is the analysis of the Variae: Cassiodorus Senator en zijn Variae (Nijmegen, 1945). An important analysis of the culture of Cassiodorus is given by A. Momigliano, “Cassiodorus and Italian Culture of His Time” (Italian Lectures, British Academy, 1955), in Proceedings of the Bristish Academy, (1955), pp. 207–245. On Cassiodorus again see S. Viarre, “À propos de l’origine égyptienne des arts libéraux: Alexandre Neckam et Cassiodore,” Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Age, pp. 583–591. The book of G. Ludwig, Cassiodor. Uber den Ursprung der abendländischen Schule (Frankfurt a. M., 1967) is a liberal profile of the foundation and structure of Vivarium. The opuscule Cassiodor, Vom Adel des Menschen. “De anima.” Ubersetzt und eingeleitet von L. Helbling 0. S. B. (Einsiedeln, 1965) (originally it appeared in Sigillum, num. 26) is a translation of de anima. The essay of Momigliano appeared in Studies in Historiography (New York-Evanston, 1966), pp. 181– 210. Gregory the Great’s works can be read in PL, vols. 75–79. With the introduction of R. Gillet and translation of A. De Gaudemaris exists the Morales sur Job (Paris, 1952); on Gregory himself, see L. Weber, Hauptfragen der Moraltheologie Gregors des Grossen. Ein Bild altchristlicher Lebensführung (Freiburg, 1947); O. M. Porcel, La dottrina monástica de San Gregorio Magno y la “Regula Monachorum” (Madrid, Washington, 1950). To the influence of Moralia in Job is dedicated the thesis of R. Wasselynck, L’influence des “Moralia in Job” de S. Gregoire le Grand sur la théologie morale entre le VIIe et le XIIe siècle, 3 vols., Faculté de Théologie (Lille, 1956), and its review by O. Lottin, in BTAM, 8 (1958), pp. 33–34; for the influence in Italy, see G. Dufner, Die “Moralia” Gregors des Grossen in ihren italianischen Volgarizzamenti (Padua, 1958). To the editions of Gregory the Great add: the Registrum epistolarum, edited by P. Ewald and L. M. Hartmann, in MGH; the Epistolae 1–2, Berolini 1887–1899 (stereotyp. ed., 1957); the Dialogi libri IV, edited by U. Moricca, in Fonti per la storia d’Italia (Rome, 1924); Expositiones in Canticum Canticorum, in Librum Primum Regum, edited by P. Verbraken, in the series Corpus Christianorum, Latin Series, num. 144 (Turnhoiti, 1963). Concerning his positions see C. Dagens, “Grégoire le Grand et la culture: de la ‘sapientia huius mundi’ a la ‘docta ignorantia’” in Revue des études augustiniennes, 14 (1968), pp. 17–26. About The Rules of St. Benedict and on the debated question of its rapport to the Regula Magistri, see the edition with an

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extensive introduction, Italian translation, and comments of G. Penco (Florence, 1958), and its review by A. de Vogüe in Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, 36 (1960), pp. 214–326; also the rich edition of R. Hanslik with proems and minute discussions, vol. 75 of CSEL (Wien, 1960) and its review by F. Masai in Latomus, 22 (1963), pp. 303–307. Furthermore, see G. Aulinger, Das Humanum in der Regel Benedikts von Nursia. Eine moralgeschichtliche Studie (St. Ottilien, 1950); B. Steidle, ed., “Commentationes in regulam S. Benedicti,” Studia Anselmiana, 42 (Rome, 1957), a miscellany of studies by specialists; “Regula Magistri, Regula S. Benedicti. Studia monastica,” ibid., 44 (Rome, 1959); “Problemi e orientamenti di spiritualità monastica, biblica e liturgica,” ibid. (Rome, 1961), pp. 199–234. On his life see the voice “Benedetto” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1966), pp. 279–294; the article is of L. Salvatorelli and S. Simonetti; but consult also P. Courcelle, “La vision cosmique de saint Benoît,” Revue des études augustiniennes, 13 (1967), pp. 97–117. 2. The Italian Cultural Centers For this section, besides the general works cited, see F. Novati and A. Monteverdi, Le origini (Milan, 1900–1926); G. Giesebrecht, L’istruzione in Italia nei primi secoli del medioevo, trans. by C. Pascal (Florence, 1895); A. F. Ozanam, La scuola e l’istruzione in Italia nel Medio Evo (Florence, 1895); G. Salvioli, L’istruzione in Italia prima del Mille (Florence, 1912). About the School of Salerno, see the article of 1945, but completed with a bibliography, of P. O. Kristeller, “The School of Salerno: Its Development and its Contribution to the History of Learning,” in the volume Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), pp. 495–551. About the letters of Gerbert, whose works are in PL, vol. 139, see F. Weigle, “Studien zür Überlieferung der Briefsamlung Gerberts von Reims,” Deutches Archiv, 10 (1953), pp. 19–70; 11 (1955), pp. 393–421; 14 (1958), pp. 149–220. As to his personality, see F. Picavet, Gerbert ou le pape philosophe (Paris, 1897); J. Lefon, Gerbert. Humanisme et chrétienté au Xe siècle (Abbaye S. Waudrille, 1946); O. G. Darlington, “Gerbert, the Teacher,” American Historical Review,” 52 (1946–1947), pp. 456–476. In relation to Alfanus, in addition to the mentioned article of Kristeller, the article of A. Lentini must be checked in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 2 (1960), pp. 253–257, for the bibliography; and also N. Acocella, “La figura e l’opera di Alfano I di Salerno,” Rassegna Storica Salernitana, 19 (1958), pp. 1–74; 20 (1959), pp. 17– 90. Regarding the writings of Alfanus, see C. Beaumker, “Die Übersetzung des Alfanus von Nemesius perí fúseon anthropou,” Wochenschrift für klassiche Philologie, 13 (1896), pp. 1095–1102, re-edited by C. Burkhard. (Leipzig, 1917). The De quatuor humoribus corporis humani was edited by P. Capparoni, with Preface of A. Castiglioni (Rome, 1928); the Tractatus de pulsibus also edited by P. Capparoni (Rome, 1936). See also R. Creutz, “Erzbishof Alfanus I, ein frühsalernitanischer Arzt,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benedektiner-Ordens und seine Zweige, 16 (1929), pp. 413–432. With reference to Ursus of Calabria, his work has been defined by Kristeller, in the article above cited (pp. 517ff.), “the major contribution to philosophical literature by the school of Salerno in the 12th century, and perhaps of the school of Salerno in general.” In his principal writings—de effectibus qualitatum, de effectibus medicinarum, aphorisms, and commentary on aphorisms—is manifested a relevant knowledge of the physical theories of Aristotle.

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On the contrary, it does not appear that other members of the Salerno’s school have been dutifully studied and recognized: the first part of Pantheon of Goffredus of Viterbo is worthy an important place in the culture of its time. The epistle of Gunzo, in PL, vol. 136, pp. 1283–1302, where it reproduces the text of Martène and Durand, Veterum scriptorum amplissima collectio, vol. 1 (1724), pp. 294–314, has been critically edited and published by K. Manitius in MGH, “Quellen zur Geistergeschichte des Mittelalters.” Relating to Gunzo: Epistola ad Augienses and Anselm of Besate: Rhetorimachia (Weimar, 1958), the texts cited are at pp. 21–23, 37, 39–40, 46–47, and 49. About Gunzo, see the introduction of Manitius and G. Manacorda, “Postille gunzoniane,” Scritti vari di erudizione e di critica in onore di Rodolfo Renier (Turin, 1912), pp. 99–118; H. Silvestre, “Note sur l’épître de Gunzo de Novare,” Revue Bénédectine, 71 (1961), pp. 135–137, and “Gunzo et Marius Victorinus,” ibid., 74 (1964), pp. 322–323 (in which the thesis of Gunzo on the animation of the stars derives through Cicero from the commentary of Marius Victorinus on the de inventione. About the School of Salerno, besides the essays of Kristeller, “Nuove fonti per la medicina salernitana del sec. xii,” Rassegna storica salernitana, 18 (1957), pp. 61–76; “Beitrag der Schule von Salerno zur Entwicklung der scholastischen Wissensschaft im 12. Jahrhundert. Kurze Mitteilung über handschrifftliche Funde,” Artes Liberales. Von der antiken Bildung des Mittelalters (Leiden-Köln, 1959), pp. 84–90, see R. McKeon, “Medicine and Philosophy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Problem of Elements,” in the volume The Dignity of Sciences (Washington, 1961), pp. 75–120, and in the Thomist (1961), pp. 211–256. 3. Lanfranc of Pavia The Rhetorimachia was perhaps composed in Parma, between May 1046 and the Spring of 1048. It appears that Anselm was born in 1020 and studied dialectics in Parma with the philosopher Drocus, “flos et Italiae decus” (flower and honor of Italy), and rhetoric in Reggio with Sichelmus, a disciple of Drocus, “liberalium artium peritissimus” (most expert in the liberal arts). Anselm’s third teacher was “the most eloquent Aldobrandus,” of whom we have no information. About Alselm of Besate, in addition to the introduction of Manitius (pp. 61–93), see the research of E. Dümmler, Anselm der Peripatetiker nebst anderen Beiträgen zur Litteraturgeschichte Italiens im elten Jahrhundert (Halle, 1872), and the particular contributions of J. A. Endres, “Die Dialektiker und ihre Gegner in II. Jahrhundert,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 19 (1906), pp. 20–33; “Studien zur Geschichte der Frühscholastik,” ibid., 26 (1913), pp. 85–93; “Forschungen zur Geschichte der frühmittelalterlichen Philosophie,” BGPTMA, 17 (1916), pp. 2–3; and K. Manitius, “Magic und Rhetorik bei Anselm von Besate,” Deutsches Archiv, 12 (1956), pp. 52– 72. Speaking of himself, Anselm said that he studied Hermagoras, Cicero, Livy, Quintilian, Victorinus, Grillus, Boethius, and completed another work on rhetoric (de materia artis). About Anselm of Besate see the article of C. Violante in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1961), vol. 3, pp. 407–409. A selection of the texts of Lanfranc with introduction and notes is vol. 1: “Le origini” in the series La letteratura italiana. Storia e testi (Milan-Naples, 1956), pp. 420–433. For the polemic with Lanfranc see R. W. Southern, “Lanfranc of Bec and Berengar of Tours,” Studies in Medieval History presented to F. M. Powicke (Oxford, 1948), pp. 27–48; J. de Montclos, Lanfranc et Bérenger. La controverse eucharistique du xi siècle (Leuven, 1971) (see Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense, num. 37). About

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Alberico of Montecassino see in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 643–645 (with bibliography). About Bruno di Segni see R. Grégoire, Bruno de Segni, exégète médiéval et théologien (Spoleto, 1965). In PL, vol. 150, we have the works of Lanfranc. About him, see A. J. Macdonald, Lanfranc. A Study of his life, work and writing (Oxford, 1926; London, 1944 (2nd ed.); the article with bibliography of E. Amman and A. Gaudel, in Dictionnaire de théologie catolique, vol. 8, pt. 2 (1925), pp. 2558–2770; also P. Meyvaert, “Bérenger de Tours contre Albéric de Mont-Cassin,” Revue Bénédictine, 70 (1960), pp. 324–332. The writings of Brunone are in PL, Vol. 164–165. About the forgotten Gerard of Czanád, see E. von Ivánka, “Das Corpus Areopageticum bei Gerhard von Csanád (d. 1046),” Traditio, 15 (1959), pp. 205–222, in which the commentary on Canticum trium puerorum is examined. It was published in 1790 (Clm., 6211), but ignored by Migne, and the dependence of Gerard from Pseudo-Dyonisius is shown in it. 4. Peter Damian Damiani’s works exist in PL, vols. 164–165. A good selection, with introduction and bibliography, was made available by P. Brezzi and B. Nardi (Florence, 1943). About St. Peter Damiani, see V. Poletti, Il vero atteggiamento antidialettico di S. Pier Damiani (Faenza, 1953); Dressler, “Petrus Damiani Leben und Werke,” in Studia Alselmiana, 34 (Rome, 1954); J. Gonsette, Pierre Damien et la culture profane (Louvain, 1956); J. J. Ryan, Saint Peter Damiani and his Canonical Sources, Preliminary Study in the Antecedents of the Gregorian Reforms (Toronto, 1956); J. Leclercq, Saint Pierre Damien, l’ermite et l’homme d’Eglise (Rome, 1960); Studi su San Pier Damiani (Faenza, 1961); M. Della Santa, Ricerche sull’idea monastica di San Pier Damiano (Camaldoli, 1961). R. Bultot, in La doctrine du mépris du monde, tome 4: Le XIe siècle, vol. 1: Pierre Damien (Louvain, 1963), rejects the theses of Leclercq and Gonsette, but on the work of Bultot, see F. Lazzari, “S. Pierre Damien et le contemptus mundi. À propos d’un livre recent,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, 40 (1964), pp. 185–210. As to the controversial valuation of Pier Damiani see the answer of Bultot to his critics, in addition to Lazzari, B. D’Ippolito, “À propos de saint Pierre Damien et du contemptus mundi,” Collectanea S. Ordinis Cistercensium Reformatorum (1964), pp. 185–196; Une fausse querelle à propos de saint Pierre Damien (Louvain-Paris, 1965); “Méthode et conditionnement. Réponse à propos de S. Pierre Damien,” Revue d’ascetique et de mystique, 40 (1964), pp. 481–492. On the manuscript tradition see K. Reindell, “Studien zur Ueberlieferung des Werke des Petrus Damiani,” Deutsche Archiv (1959), pp. 23–102, and G. Lucchesi, “Clavis S. Petri Damiani,” Studi su san Pier Damiano (Faenza, 1961) (2nd ed. Faenza, 1970), pp. 253–407; on his poetical works consult M. Lokrantz, L’opera poetica di S. Pier Damiani (Stockholm, 1964). See at last V. Poletti, Pier Damiani e il secolo decimoprimo. Saggio filosofico (Faenza, 1972), with bibliography; and of Various Authors, San Pier Damiano (Cosenza, 1972); J. Leclercq, San Pier Damiano, eremita e uomo di chiesa (Brescia, 1972). 5. Anselm of Aosta A critical edition (ad fidem codicum) of the works of Anselm is by the hand of F. S. Schmitt, in 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1946–1961); the sixth contains the indices; in a seventh volume, the ratio editionis would be given; the printing started in 1938 in Seckau, but was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. Other contributions by Schmitt were published separately: “Zur Chronologia des Werke der hl. Anselm,” Revue Bénédictine, 44 (1932), pp. 322–350; “Geschichte und Beurteilung der früheren Anselmausgaben,” in

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Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benedektiner-Ordens und seine Zweige, 65 (1953–1954), pp. 90–115; “Die unter Anselm veranstaltete Ausgabe seiner Werke und Briefe. Die Codices Bodley 271 und Lambeth 59,” Scriptorium, 9 (1955), pp. 65– 75; “Die Chronologie der Briefe des hl. Anselm von Canterbury,” in Revue Bénédictine, 64 (1954), pp. 170–207; “Die echten und unechten Stücke der Korrespondenz des hl. Anselm von Canterbury,” Revue Bénédictine, 65 (1955), pp. 218–227. The literature on Anselm is rich; among the works that present a whole view, see Ch. De Rémusat, Anselme de Canterbury (Paris, 1854; 2nd ed. 1862); Ch. Filliatre, La philosophie de Saint Anselme (Paris, 1920); A. Levasti, S. Anselmo. Vita e pensiero (Bari, 1929); with a sufficient bibliography, S. Vanni-Rovighi, San Anselmo (Milan, 1949). Concerning the life of Anselm, see Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Edited with Introd. and Notes by R. W. Southern (Edinburgh, 1962); R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer. A Study of Monastic Life and Thought (Cambridge, 1963). In particular on the ontological argument, see K. Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum. Anselm Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms (München, 1931; Zollikon, 1958); translated into French in Neuchâtel, 1958. Also, A. Stolz, “Zur Theologie Anselms in Proslogion,” Catholica, 2 (1933), pp. 1–24; idem, “Vere esse in Proslogion des hl. Anselm,” Scholastik, 9 (1934), pp. 400–406; idem, “Das Proslogion des hl. Anselm,” Revue Bénédictine, 47 (1935), pp. 331–347; E. Gilson, “Sens et nature de l’argument de Saint Anselme,” AHDLMA, 9 (1934), pp. 5–51; M. Cappuyns, “L’argument de Saint Anselme,” RTAM, 6 (1934), pp. 313–330; M. Dal Pra, Il problema logico del linguaggio nella filosofia medievale (Rome-Milan, 1954). See also Spicilegium Beccense, I: Congrès International du IXe centenaire de l’arrivée d’Anselme au Bec (Paris, 1959), and the text, with transl., introd., and notes of R. Roques (Paris, 1963). Important for the Anselmian tradition, S. Vanni-Rovighi, “Notes sur l’influence de Saint Anselme au XIIe siècle,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 7 (1964), pp. 423–437; 8 (1965), pp. 43–58. For the citation of the catalogue of Bec, see PL, vol. 150, pp. 771ff. S. Vanni Rovighi (Bari, 1969) has accomplished the translation of the philosophical works of Anselm of Aosta with an exhaustive and learned introduction; we recommend the book also for the bibliography. To the above literature add the following: A. Koyre, L’idée de Dieu dans la philosophie de St. Anselme (Paris, 1923); P. Mazzarella, Il pensiero speculativo di S. Anselm d’Aosta (Padua, 1962) (with exposition and discussion of the interpretations of Anselm’s argument); R. Pouchet, La Rectitudo chez saint Anselme. Un itinéraire augustinien de 1’ame a Dieu (Paris, 1964); J. Moreau, Pour ou contre l’insensé? Essai sur la preuve anselmienne (Paris, 1967); D. P. Henry, The Logic of Saint Anselme (Oxford, 1967); F. Van Steenberghen, “Pour ou contre l’insensé?” Revue philosophique de Louvain, 66 (1968), pp. 267–281 (a forceful discussion on the work of Moreau); J. Vuillemin, Le Dieu d’Anselme et les apparences de la raison (Paris, 1971). See also the very important pages of P. Vignaux, De Saint Anselme à Luther (Paris, 1976), pp. 76–130. Of special interest is also the anthology of testimonies, reportationes, echoes and fragments in the Memorials of St. Anselm, Edited by R. W. Southern and F. S. Schmitt O. S. B., vol. 1 of the Series Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi (Oxford, 1969). Among the most recent miscellanies, we have: Sola ratione. Anselm-Studien für F. S. Schmitt (Stuttgart, 1969); Analecta Anselmiana. Untersuchungen über Person und Werk Anselms von Canterbury, Edited by F. S. Schmitt (Frankfurt a. M,. 1969) (a pp. 269–280 there is a bibliography on Anselm covering the period 1960–1969). In his

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inquiry on contemptus mundi, R. Bultot has included in vol. 2 of the fourth tome (Louvain, 1964) the already cited “La doctrine du mépris du monde” and consult F. Lazzari, Il “contemptus mundi” nella scuola di S. Vittore (Naples, 1965). 6. Peter Lombard The De orthodoxa fide of John Damascene was translated from Greek by Burgundio (1100–1193), probably a Pisan; see H. Dausend, “Zur Übersetzungsweise Burgundios von Pisa,” Wiener Studien, 35, pp. 353–369. In the 13th century, around 1235–1240, Robert Grosseteste made a new translation. However, already since 1145, in Hungary, a monk named Cerbanus had made a translation of which only one fragment survived that was found by de Ghellink in 1911. The fragment was published for the first time in 1940 by R. L. Szigeti, Translatio Latina Johannis Damasceni, De orthodoxa fide L. III, c. 1–8, saeculo XII in Hungaria confecta (Budapest, 1940). It was published again, more perfectly, by E. M. Buytaert, “The Earliest Latin Translation of Damascene’s De orthodoxa fide, III, 1–8,” Franciscan Studies, 2 (1951), pp. 49–67. According to Buytaert, the translation of Burgundio goes back to 1153–1154. See Saint John Damascene, De orthodoxa fide, Version of Burgundio and Cerbanus, E. M Buytaert editor (St. Bonaventure, 1955), the review of which is by V. Doucet, in Archivium franciscanum historicum, 49 (1956), pp. 483–487. Also see N. M. Haring, “The First Trace of the so-called Cerbanus Translation of St. John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa, III, 1– 8,” Mediaeval Studies, 12 (1950), pp. 214–216; E. M. Buyaert, “St. John Damascene, Peter Lombard and Gerhoh of Reichesberg,” Franciscan Studies, 10 (1950), pp. 323– 343; idem, “Damascenus Latinus on Item 417 of Stegmüller’s Repertorium Commentarium,” Franciscan Studies, 13 (1953), pp. 37–70; C. Vansteenkiste, “Le versioni latine del De fide orthodoxa di S. Giovanni Damasceno,” Angelicum, 35 (1958), pp. 91–98; P. Classen, “Der verkannte Johannes Damaszenus,” Byzantinische Zeischrift, 52 (1959), pp. 297–303. Concerning Gratian, see Studia Gratiana. Post octava Decreti saecularia auctore Consilio commemorationi Gratianae instruendae edita curantibus I. Forchielli et A. M. Stickler, 1–8 (Bologna, 1953–1962). Works of fundamental importance is the work of J. de Ghellink, Le mouvement théologique du XIIe siècle (Bruges, 1948). About the Liber sententiarum of Peter Lombard, see the edition of Quaracchi, vols. 2 (1916); on the chronology of the writings, see D. Van den Eynde, “Essai chronologique sur l’oeuvre littéraire de Pierre Lombard,” Miscellanea Lombardiana (Novara, 1957): (1) Commentarius in psalmos, pp. 1135–1137; (2) Summa Sententiarum, pp. 1137–1138; (3) Collectanea in epistolas Pauli, pp. 1139–1141; (4) Libri IV Sententiarum, pp. 1154–1157; (5) Sermones, pp. 1140–1160. About Lombard, see J. N. Espenberger, “Die Philosophie des Peter Lombard und ihre Stellung in zwölften Jahrhundert,” BGPTMA, 2, 5 (Münster, 1901); Miscellanea Lombardiana (Novara, 1957); Ph. Delhaye, Pierre Lombard. Sa vie, ses oeuvres, sa morale (Montréal, 1961). About the many “summaries” of Lombard’s sentences, see the systematic inquiry of R. M. Martin, “Filia Magistri. Un abrégé des Sentences de Pierre Lombard,” The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (Manchester: October-December, 1915), pp. 6– 60; A. M. Landgraf, Einführung in die Geschichte der Theologischen Litteratur der Frühscholastik (Barcelona, 1956), Spanish edition reviewed by the author, pp. 69–73. As to the “summaries” of Magister Bandinus, which are in PL, vol. 192, pp. 971– 1112, and on the codices that preserve them, see Landgraf, ibid., p. 167. About Gandulphus of Bologna, see again Landgraf, ibid., p. 175; “Drei Trabanten des Magisters

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Gandulphus von Bologna,” Collectanea franciscana, 7 (1937), pp. 357–373; but also the article of J. de Ghellink, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 6, pp. 1142– 1150, and his extensive treatment in the volume Le mouvement théologique, pp. 297– 373. Gandulphus’s work was produced between the years 1160 and 1170, and has been examined and published by J. De Walter, Magistri Gandulphi Bononiensis Sententiarum libri quatuor (Vindobonae-Vratislavae, 1924). Relating to the sentences of Roland—concluded, it appears, in 1150, according to D. Van den Eynde’s “Nouvelles précision chronologiques sur quelques oeuvres théologiques du XIIe siècle,” Franciscan Studies, 13 (1953), pp. 100–110—see A. M. Gietl, Die Sentenzen Rolands, nachmals Papste Alexander III (Frieburg im Breisgau, 1891) and Landgraf, Einführung in die Geschichte der Theologischen Litteratur der Frühscholastik, p. 109. About Burgundio see the rich voice in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1972), vol. 15, pp. 423–428, by F. Liotta with bibliography. On the date of the version of the De fide orthodoxa, the third part of pege gnoseos, there is no agreement, but verisimilar seems the proposal of J. de Ghellinck, of a date between 1148 and 1150. It is anyway certain that Peter Lombard in the Liber sententiarum (1150–1152) generously cited (twenty-seven times) Damascene in the version of Burgundio. The book is divided in four parts like the Sententiae of Lombard and had a vast manuscript diffusion, of which there were also extracts and synopsies under the title Sermones ex sententiis Damasceni. The version of Grosseteste, known as Translatio Lincolniensis, is in grand part a corrected version of that of Burgundio, though some paragraphs were translated ex novo. Burgundio, besides the texts of John Chrysostom, translated and dedicated to Barbarossa, the De natura hominis of Nemesius of Emesa (which in the Middle Ages was believed to be of Gregory of Nissa); the Aphorismi of Hippocrates and some writings of Galen (on which not all scholars are in agreement, though it seems that there is certainty about the attribution of the de sectis medicorum, de sanitate tuenda, and de differentiis pulsuum). We know that Taddeo Alderotti was still making use of the versions of medical works by Burgundio: “La sua traduzione del Damasceno esercitò influenze determinanti nel pensiero filosofico-teologico medioevale.” It is characteristic of Burgundio’s versions to maintain an exact correspondence that even respected the disposition of the words that take at times a Latin form and are interpreted successively with a paraphrase introduced with an “id est.” On the translation of Cerbanus, see E. M. Buytaert, “Another Copy of Cerbanus’ Version of John Damascene,” in Antonianum, 40 (1965), pp. 303–310. The journal Studi Gratiana continued to publish interesting researches in the history of jurisprudence or matters connected with it. About Peter Lombard see first of all the new critical edition of Sententiae in IV Libris distinctae (Grottaferrata, 1971), of which the first volume contains the Prolegomena and the text of the first two parts with precious indexes. See also the many contribution in the journal Pier Lombardo, which began in Novara in 1953 at the occasion of the celebrations for the eighth centenary of the Sententiae. See the article of E. Bertola, “Pietro Lombardo nella storiografia filosofica medioevale,” Pier Lombardo, 4 (1960), pp. 95–115, which offer a panorama of the various interpretations up to Grabmann, De Wulf, Bréhier, Gilson, beginning from the scholars of Magdeburg. 7. Arnold of Brescia Landgraf, Einführung in die Geschichte der Theologischen Litteratur der Frühscholastik, at pp. 152–153, speaks of Cardinal Laborante (who died ca. 1191) and of the

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ms. that preserves his writing. Landgraf has also published Laborante’s theological works, of which he gives mention in “Laborantis Cardinalis opuscula,” Florilegium Patristicum, 32 (Bonn, 1932). Already in 1886, G. B. Siragusa had published the De iustitia et iusto in Palermo. Siragusa had also written Il regno di Guglielmo I in Sicilia, illustrato con nuovi documenti (Palermo, 1885–1886). Concerning this, see Ph. Delhaye, “La place de l’étique parmi les disciplines scientifiques au XIIe siècle,” in Miscellanea Janssen (Louvain, 1948), vol. 1, pp. 29–44. About Arnold of Brescia, see A. Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nelle fonti del secolo XII, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Studi Storici, 8–9 (Rome, 1955); idem, “La fortuna di Arnaldo da Brescia,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, series II, vol. 24 (1955), pp. 145–160. 8. Heretical Unrest and Movements About heresies and the anti-heretical repressions you must see the article of Miccoli in Storia d’Italia by Einaudi, 2 vols., vol. 1, pp. 609–734, also for what concern the most recent bibliography. See again of R. Manselli, L’eresia del male (Naples, 1964); R. Nelli, La philosophie du catharisme. Le dualisme radical au xiii siècle (Paris, 1975) (with an extensive analysis of Liber de duobus principiis, of which are given some samples on the basis of the critical edition of the Livre des deux principes. Introduction, texte critique, traduction, notes et index de Christine Thouzellier (Paris, 1973). The edition of Thouzellier, done on the unique codex of Florence, is better than the one of Dondaine but does not eliminate all the obscurities, as Nelli declared in Sur quelques points obscurs du Livre des deux principes, Edited by Folklore (1973). Of Thouzellier see also Catharisme et Valdéisme en Languedoc à la fin du xii et au debut du xiii siècle (Paris, 1966). Of the work of Arno Bost, in which there is a minute analysis of the de duobus principiis, there is a French version: Les Cathares. Traduction et postface de Ch. Roy (Paris, 1974). The volume that gathers the proceedings of the Convention of Royaumont of 27– 30 May 1962, though published six years later, offers some interesting studies: Hérésies et sociétés dans l'Europe pre-industrielle, xi-xviii siècles. Communications et débats du Colloque de Royaumont présentés par J. Le Goff (Paris-La Haye, 1968), where at pp. 408–467 is found a “Bibliographie des études récents après 1900 sur les hérésies médiévales” prepared by Grundmann was already published in Bibliographie zur Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters, 1900–1966 (Rome, 1967). With reference to heresies, see the review of L. Sommariva, “Studi recenti sulle eresie medievali, 1932–1952,” Rivista storica italiana, 64 (1952), pp. 237–268. Concerning the heresies, in general, consult again F. Tocco, L’eresia nel Medioevo (Florence, 1884) and G. Volpe, Movimenti religiosi e sette ereticali nella società medievale italiana, secoli XI–XIV (Florence, 1922). Concerning particular cases, see R. Morghen, Medioevo cristiano (Bari, 1951), pp. 212–286; R. Manselli, Studi sulle eresie del secolo XII (Rome, 1953). Concerning Manicheism, see S. Runciman, The Medieval Manichee. A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge, 1947); D. Obolensky, The Bogomils, A Study in Balkan Neo Manicheism (Cambridge, 1948); H. Söderberg, La religion des Cathares. Etude sur le gnosticisme de la basse antiquité et du moyen âge (Uppsala, 1949); R. Nelli and various other authors, Spiritualité de l’hérésie: le Catharisme (Paris, 1953); G. Gonnet, “Waldensia,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse, 33 (1953), pp. 202–254. Concerning this subject of heresies, of particular importance is the liber de duobus principiis, which A. Dondaine has published from a ms. of the National Li-

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brary of Florence (“Conv. Soppr. I. Ii. 44,” da S. Marco): A. Dondaine, Un traité néomanichéen du XIIIe siècle. Le “Liber de duobus principiis,” (Rome, 1939); idem, “Nouvelles sources de l’histoire doctrinaire du néomanichéisme au M. A.,” in Revue de sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1939), pp. 465–488. Referring to the work of Dondaine is A. Borst, Die Katharer, Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vol. 12, (Stuttgart, 1953); also F. Steigmüller, “Der Liber contra Manicheos,” in Mélanges offerts à Etienne Gilson (Paris, 1959), pp. 563–611; Une somme anticathare, le ‘Liber contra Manicheos’ de Durand de Huesca, Texte inédit publié et annoté par Chr. Thouzeller (Louvain, 1964). About the Patarins, see C. Violante, La Pataria Milanese e la Riforma ecclesiastica, vol. 1: Le premesse, 1045–1057 (Rome, 1955), and its review by F. J. Schmale in Historische Zeischrift, 187 (1959), pp. 367– 385; E. Werner, Pauperes Christi. Studien zu social-religiösen Bewegungen im Zeitalter des Reformpapsttums (Leipzig, 1956); G. Miccoli, “Per la storia della Pataria Milanese,” in Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 70 (1958), pp. 43– 123. 9. Joachim of Fiore Given that the bibliography on Joachim is massive, for the works anterior to 1953, see F. Russo, Bibliografia gioachimita (Florence, 1954), which should be corrected and integrated with B. Hirsch-Reich, “Eine Bibliographie über Joachim von Fiore und dessen Nachwirkung. Berichtigung und Ergänzung,” RTAM, 24 (1957), pp. 27–44; H. Grundmann, Neue Forschungen über Joachim von Fiore (Marburg, 1950); J. BignamiOdier, “Travaux récents sur Joachim de Flore, in Moyen Age, 58 (1952), pp. 45–61; Marjorie Reeves, “The Penetration of Joachism into Northern Europe,” Speculum, 29 (1954), pp. 773–793; E. Wellens, “Recente Studien over Joachim von Fiore,” in Cîteaux in de Nederlanden, 6 (1955), pp. 206–209; E. Mikkers, “Neuere Litteratur über Joachim von Fiore,” in Cîteaux in de Nederlanden, 9 (1958), pp. 286–293; M. W. Bloomfield, “Joachim of Fiore. A Critical Survey of His Canon, Teaching, Sources, Biography and Influence,” Traditio, 13 (1957), pp. 249–311, with a counterreaction by B. Hirsch-Reich, “Eine neue ‘oeuvre de synthèse’ über Joachim von Fiore,” RTAM, 26 (1959), pp. 128–137. The exposition in the text particularly kept present the works of E. Buonaiuti, Gioacchino da Fiore. I tempi, la vita, il messaggio (Rome, 1931); E. Anitchkof, Joachim de Flore et les milieux courtois (Rome, 1931); F. Foberti, Gioacchino da Fiore. Nuovi studi critici sulla mistica e la religiosità in Calabria (Florence, 1934); J. Ch. Huck, Joachim von Fiore und die joachitische Litteratur (Freiburg, 1938). For the Tractatus super IV Evangelia, the edition of E. Buonaiuti (Rome, 1931) was followed and for the Scritti minori that of the same Buonaiuti (Rome, 1936); for the Liber contra Lombardum, the Ottaviano’s edition was used (Rome, 1934), and for the Libro delle figure, the first edition by Tondelli (1940). G. Bondatti, Gioachimismo e Francescanesimo nel ’200 (Assisi, 1924), dealt with rapports with Franciscanism. Adversus Judaeos was edited by Arsenio Frugoni (Rome, 1957), with an important introduction. Most relevant is L. Tondelli, Il libro delle figure dell’Abate Gioacchino da Fiore, with introd. and comment (Turin, 1953), 2 vols. : vol. 1: Il libro delle figure dell’Abate Gioacchino da Fiore, with Tondini, Reeves, and Hirsch-Reich; vol. 2: Tavole. This book relied on the Oxonian ms. “Corpus Christi, Col. 255 A.” Lastly, see A. Crocco, Gioacchino da Fiore (Naples, 1960). For some specific questions, keep in mind: R. Manselli, La ‘Lectura super Apocalipsim’ di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi. Ricerche sull’escatologismo medioevale

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(Rome, 1955); H. Helbling, Saeculum humanum. Ansätze zu einem Versuch über spätmittelalterliches Geschichtsdenken (Naples 1958). For all this part see again the work of Miccoli, Storia d’Italia, pp. 734–793. In particular about Joachim see F. Russo, “Rassegna bibliografica gioachimita (1958– 1967),” Cîteaux, 19 (1968), pp. 206–214, which integrates the bibliographical information. In 1964 the anastatic edition of Grundmann of 1927 Studien uber Joachim von Fiore. Mit einem Vorwort zum Neudruck (Darmstadt, 1966). Of Grundmann we already have in Italian Movimenti religiosi nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1973). It is useful to mention also: E. Benz, “Creator Spiritus. Die Geistlehre des Joachim von Fiore,” Eranos Jahrbuch, 25 {1956), pp. 285–355; M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages. A study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969); B. McGinn, “The Abbot and the Doctors. Scholastic Reactions to the Radical Eschatology of Joachim of Flore,” Church History, 40 (1971), pp. 30–47. In this book three periods are distinguished in the reaction of the 13th century, in 1240, when Joachim is considered the prophet of the Anti-Christ condemned by the Lateran Council. After 1240, when especially with Gerardo of the imminence of the third age is underlined, at the time when the polemic of St. Thomas on Trinity and the three ages are commonly read. Then there is the third interpretation of Bonaventure. See G. Wcndelborn, “Die Hermeneutik des kalabresischen Abtes Joachim von Fiore,” Communio Sanctorum, 17 (1974), pp. 63–91.Of Jacopone there is the new critical edition of Laude, Edited by Franco Mancini (Bari, 1974); for some questions see the miscellaneous volume Il movimento dei Disciplinati nel VII centenario del suo inizio (Perugia, 1260), in Deputazione di Storia Patria per l ’Umbria. Appendici al Bollettino, num. 9 (Perugia, 1962); also E. Menestó, “Il Tractatus utilissimus attribuito a Jacopone da Todi,” Studi Medievali, 18 (1977), pp. 261–314. 10. Francis of Assisi For Lothaire’s De miseria humanae conditionis, see the edition of M. Maccarrone (Lucani, 1955); also the texts in vulgar collected by A. Levasti, I mistici del Duecento e Trecento (Milan, 1935). See Bono Giamboni, Della miseria dell’uomo. Giardino di Consolazione. Introduzione alle virtú, Edited by F. Tassi (Florence, 1836). As to Franciscanism, no need to give here bibliographical indications. What was here kept in mind is the essay of Gilson, “La philosophie Franciscaine,” in the volume of H. Lemaitre and A. Masseron, Saint François d’Assise, son oeuvre, son influence (Paris, 1927), pp. 148–175; L. F. Benedetto, Il Cantico di Frate Sole (Florence, 1941); V. Branca, Il Cantico di Frate Sole. Studio delle fonti e testo critico (Florence, 1950). In addition, see the Opuscula in the edition of Quaracchi (1943) and tome X of the Analecta Franciscana. Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis XIII et XIV conscriptae (Ad Claras Aquas, 1926–1941). About St. Francis and his work see “S. Francesco nella ricerca storica degli ultimi ottanta anni,” in Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale (Todi, 1971), vol. 9. 11. The Eternal Gospel. Ubertino of Casale Regarding this whole section, see the material and the studies of H. Denifle and F. Ehrle in the volumes of the Archiv für Litteratur und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1885 and Freiburg im Breisgau, 1900), in which the texts of Angelus Clarenus and Ubertino of Casale can be found. About Ubertino of Casale, see J. Huck Ubertino von Casale und sein Ideenkreis (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1903); F. Callaey, Etudes sur Ubertino de Casale (Louvain, 1911); P. Godefroy, “Ubertino da

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Casale,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 15 (1947), pp. 2021–2034. In regard to the thesis of E. Blondel about the influence of Ubertino on Saint Bernardino of Siena in Collectanea Francescana (1935–1936), see M. Bertagna, “Christologia S. Bernardini Senensis,” Collectanea Franciscana, num. 16–17 (1946–1947), pp. 5–37; 18 (1948), pp. 5–117. For other theological problems, see the contributions of M. Mückshoff and K. Balic in Franziskanische Studien, 39 (1957), pp. 218–287, and 288– 502. See other documents on Ubertino in F. M. Delorme, “Notice et extraits d’un manuscript franciscain,” Collectanea franciscana, 15 (1945), pp. 5–91, in reference to ms. “Rome Arch. Coll. S. Isid., I/146.” As to Jacopone of Todi, consult the contributions gathered in the miscellaneous volume titled Jacopone e il suo tempo (Todi, 1959).

Two TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GREEK AND THE ARABIC (pp. 33–40) 1. Italy and the Byzantine Culture. The Swabians. Michael Scot. The general and essential works on the subject matter of this chapter are A. Jourdain, Recherches critiques sur l’âge et l’origine des traductions latines d’Aristote et sur des commentaires, grecs ou arabes employés par les docteurs scolastiques (Paris, 1819), reprinted by the son Ch. Jourdain in 1843; M. Steinschneider, “Die arabischen Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekwesen, 8 (1888), 9 (1893); idem, Die hebräischen Ubersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893); idem, “Die europäischen Ubersetzungen aus dem Arabischen bis mitte des 17, Jahrhunderts,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse (Wien, 1905–1906), pp. 149–151; M. Grabmann, “Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotel-Ubersetzungen des XIII. Jharhunderts,” BGPTMA, 17 (Münster, 1916), pp. 5–6. A list of the most important material is found in the bibliography contained in Aristoteles latinus, Pars prior (Rome, 1939), pp. 20–30; Pars posterior (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 773–782. For some specific aspects, see H. Bedoret, “Les première traductions tolédanes de philosophie,” Revue néoscholastique de philosophie, 41 (1938), pp. 519–533; J. L. Teicher, “The Latin-hebrew school of translations in Spain in the twelfth century,” in Homenaje a Millás-Vallicrosa (Barcelona, 1965) vol. 2, pp. 403–441; E. Bertola, “La traduzione delle opere filosofiche arabo-giudaiche nei secoli XII e XIII,” in Scritti in onore del Prof. Mons. F. Olgiati (Milan, 1961). In regard to the Arab philosophers, see M. T. d’Alverny, “Les traductions des philosophes arabes,” in La pubblicazione delle fonti del Medioevo europeo negli ultimi 70 anni (1883–1953). Istituto Storico per il Medio Evo (Rome, 1954), pp. 313–321. A precious instrument for research is F. J. Carmody, Arabic Astronomical and Astrological Sciences in Latin Translation. A Critical Bibliography (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1956); also T. Gregory, “Il Duecento,” in Storia della filosofia, Edited by Mario Dal Pra (Milan, 1976), pp. 1–232. Great importance has G. Sermoneta, Un glossario filosofico ebraico-italiano del XIII secolo (Rome, 1969). Concerning the Byzantine philosophical culture in general, see B. Tatakis, La philosophie Byzantine (Paris, 1942) (“Deuxième fascicule supplémentaire” of Histoire de la philosophie of E. Bréhier). For some particular aspects, see S. Impellizzeri,

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“L’umanesimo bizantino dell’XI secolo e la genesi della Biblioteca di Fozio,” Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici, 16–17 (1969–1970), pp. 6–69. About Giovanni Italo in particular, see P. E. Stephanou, Jean Italos Philosophe et Humaniste (Rome, 1949); but for his presentation of the Lucian Timarione, see the edition by R. Roman (Naples, 1974), pp. 23–26, 144; I. Dujcev, Medioevo bizantino-slavo (Rome, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 321–326; P. Joannou, Christliche Metaphysik in Byzanz: vol. 1, Die Illuminationslehre des Michael Psellos und Joannes Italos (Ettal, 1956). About the translations and the translators, consult M.-Th. D’Alverny, “Les traductions d’Aristote et de ses Commentateurs” Revue de Synthèse, 89 (1968), pp. 125– 144; Scritti di filologia latina medioevale, E. Franceschini ed. (1976); Opuscula, L. Minio-Paluello ed. (1972); Aleksander Birkenmajer, Études d’histoire des sciences et de la philosophie du Moyen âge (Wroclaw-Warszawa-Krakow, 1970); idem, Études d’histoire des sciences en Pologne (Wroclaw-Warszawa-Krakow, 1972). The book contains biographies and bibliography of various authors (including Aleksandra Maria Birkenmaier and J. B. Koroloc), particularly of Henricus Aristippus, Gerard of Cremona, and Michael Scot. About Gerard of Cremona, see B. Boncompagni, “Della vita e delle opere di Gherardo Cremonese, traduttore del secolo duodecimo ecc.” Atti della Pontificia Accademia dei Lincei, 4 (1951), pp. 387–493; F. Wünstenfeld, “Die Ubersetzungen arabischer Werke in der lateinische seit dem ii Jahrhundert,” Abhanlungen der Kaiserlischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Historisch-philosophische Klasse, 22 (1877), pp. 57–81. About Michael Scot, see Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 266ff.; idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford, 1929), pp. 124–169; L. Thorndike, An History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1929), pp. 2, 307-337; idem, Michael Scot (Edinburgh, 1965). Consult also, Averrois Cordub. Compendia Librorum Aristotelis qui Parva Naturalia vocantur, E. L. Shields and H. Blumberg, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., 1949); Averrois Cordub. Comm. Medium in Aristotelis de generatione et corruptione libros, F. H. Fobes ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). About Henricus Aristippus, William of Moerbeke and two Medieval translations of Pneumatica of Heron, see E. Grant in Speculum (1971), pp. 656ff. Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 155–193; the Preface to the edition of the translation of Meno, V. Kordeuter and C. Labowsky (London, 1940) and Phaedo, L. Minio-Paluello, ed. (London,1950). Concerning the sayings of philosophers, Bocados de oro, see W. Mettmann, “Spruchweisheit und Spruchdichtung in der spanischen und katalanischen Literatur des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift roman Philologie, 76 (1960), pp. 94–117. About the works and the schools, see the proceedings of the Congress of Montréal of 1967, Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen âge. For an introductory overview of the period, see F. van Steenberghen, La philosophie au XIIIe siècle (Paris-Louvain, 1966) and Tullio Gregory, “Il Duecento,” in Storia della filosofia, Mario Dal Pra ed. (Milan, 1976), vol. 6, pp. 1–232; G. Sermoneta, Un glossario ebraico-italiano del XIII secolo (Rome, 1969). About Alfanus of Salerno and the school of Salerno, see these essays by Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The School of Salerno: Its Development and its Contribution to the History of Learning,” Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), pp. 495–551; “Nuove fonti per la medicina salernitana del secolo XII,” Rassegna Storica Salernitana, 18 (1950), pp. 61–76 and “Beitrag der Schule von Salerno zur Entwicklung der scholastischen Wissensschaft im 12. Jahrhundert. Kurze Mitteilung über

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handschrifftliche Funde,” in Artes liberales: Von der antiken Bildung des Mittelalters (Leiden-Köln, 1959), pp. 84–90. About the works of Alfanus, see N. Acocella, “La figura e l’opera di Alfano I di Salerno,” Rassegna Storica Salernitana, 19 (1958), pp. 1–74; 20 (1959), pp. 17–90; C. Beaumker, “Die Übersetzung des Alfanus von Nemesius perí fúseon anthropou,” Wochenschrift für klassische Philologie, 13 (1896), pp. 1095–1102 (C. Burkhard, ed. Leipzig 1917); De quatuor humoribus corporis humani, P. Capparoni ed. (Rome, 1928); Tractatus de pulsibus, P. Capparoni ed. (Rome, 1936); R. Creutz, “Erzbischof Alfanus I, ein frühsalernitanischer Arzt,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benedektiner-Ordens und seine Zweige, 16 (1929), pp. 413–432. Also, see R. McKeon, “Medicine and Philosophy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Problem of Elements,” in The Dignity of Science (Washington, 1961), pp. 75–120; idem, Thomist, 1961, pp. 211–256. About Burgundio the Pisan, see H. Dausend, “Zur Übersetzungsweise Burgundios von Pisa,” Wiener Studien, 35, pp. 353–369; R. Mols, “Burgundio,” the term in Dictionnaire d’Histoire et Géographie Ecclésiastique, 10 (1938), pp. 1363–1369. About Jacobus Venetus, the fundamental study is that of L. Minio-Paluello, “Jacobus Veneticus Graecus Canonist and Translator of Aristotle,” Traditio, 8 (1952), pp. 265–304. About Moses of Bergamo, see Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 144–150, 197–206; idem, The Renaissance of the 12th Century (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 64, 273, 294, 298; also C. Cremaschi, Mosè del Brolo e la cultura a Bergamo nei secoli XI–XII (Bergamo, 1945). A. Dondaine, “Hugues Ethérien et Léon Toscan,” AHDLMA, 19 (1953), pp. 67– 134, has amply illustrated the vicissitudes of the two fellow countrymen. S. CollinRoset, “Le Liber Thesauri occulti de Pascalis Romanus. (Un traité d’interprétation des Songes)” AHDLMA, 30 (1963), pp. 111–198, in addition to publishing the text of 1173 of Paschal the Roman, the author narrates also Paschal’s activities. About Eugene the Emir, see E. Jamison, Admiral Eugenios of Sicily, his Life and Work (London, 1957) and L’Optique de C. Ptolomée, A. Lejeune ed. (Louvain, 1956). The Liber de pomo sive de morte Aristotelis was published by M. Plezia, Aristotelis qui ferebatur “Liber de pomo.” Versio latina Manfredi (Varsaviae, 1960) and then again by P. Mazzantini in the Appendix to B. Nardi, Il canto di Manfredi (Turin, 1964). For the Liber de dictis philosophorum antiquorum, see E. Franceschini in Memorie della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, series VI, 3 (1930), pp. 354–399 and in Atti del R. Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 91, pt. 2 (1931–1932), pp. 393– 597. G. Billanovich, “La Tradizione del Liber de dictis philosophorum antiquorum e la cultura di Dante, del Petrarca e del Boccaccio,” Studi petrarcheschi, vol. 1 (1948), pp. 111–123, denies that the Paris ms. “Nat. lat. 6069 V” is the copy of a codex by Petrarch and raises strong doubts about the attribution of its translation to John of Procida. On the subject of the “detti dei filosofi” (Bocados de oro), see W. Mettmann, “Spruchweisheit und Spruchdichtung in der spanischen und katalanischen Literatur des Miltelalters,” Zeitschrift roman Philologie, 76 (1960), pp. 94–117. About the activity of William of Moerbeke, see M. Grabmann, “Guglielmo di Moerbeke O. P. il traduttore delle opere di Aristotele,” Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae (Rome, 1946), vol. 2. Grabmann, on the basis of the dedicatory letter premised by Witelo to Perspectiva, insists on the Platonism of William.

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2. Astrologists, Epicureans, and Averroists. The “Sicilian Questions” For a study of culture at the court of Frederick II, see A. De Stefano, La cultura alla corte di Federigo II imperatore (Bologna, 1950), and the essays in Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi federiciani, VII Centenario della morte di Federigo II imperatore e re di Sicilia (Palermo, 1952). See also, A. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Düsseldorf, 1963). The questions of Ibn Sabin edited by Michele Amari can be seen in Gentile, La filosofia, pp. 7ff. About Guido Bonatti, see Thorndike, An History of Magic and Experimental Science, pp. 824–835; C. Vasoli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1969), vol. 11, pp. 603–608; A. Vasina, Cento anni di studi sulla Romagna, Bibliografia Storica (1861–1961) (Faenza, 1963), pp. 179–180. About Bartholomew of Parma, see Vasina, Cento anni di studi sulla Romagna, pp. 835–838. For a reliable edition of Brunetto’s book, see Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou trésor, Edition critique par F. J. Carmody (Berkeley, 1948) and its review by R. Bossuat in Moyen Age, 54 (1948), pp. 372–376. For Brunetto’s rhetoric, see the edition Brunetto Latini, La Rettorica, F. Maggini ed. (Florence, 1915), reprinted by C. Segre (Florence, 1968). For the Tesoretto and the Favolello exist the excellent edition of Contini in Poeti del Duecento (Milan-Naples, 1960) vol. 2, pp. 175–284, with commentary and introduction. See also, H Wieruszowski, “Brunetto Latini als Lehrer Dantes und der Florentiner,” Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà, 2 (1957), pp. 171–198; C. T. Davis, “Brunetto Latini and Dante,” Studi Medievali, third series, 8 (1967), pp. 421– 450. About Thomas Gallus, see PL, vol. 206, pp. 9–835; G. Théry, “Thomas Gallo, Aperçu biographique,” AHDLMA, 12 (1939), pp. 141–208. About Bartholomew of Messina, see R. Seligsohan, Die Ubersetzung der pseudoaristotelischen Problemata durch B. von Messina (Berlin, 1934); G. Marenghi, “Un capitolo dell’Aristotele medievale: Bartolomeo da Messina traduttore dei Problemata physica,” Aevum, 36 (1962), pp. 268–283. We used the textual edition of the works of Salimbene edited by F. Bernini (Bari, 1942), now again re-edited by G. Scalia (Bari, 1966); for history, see N. Scivoletto, Fra Salimbene da Parma e la storia politica e religiosa del secolo decimoterzo (Bari, 1950). Most recent is Dal pulpito alla cattedra which touches on Salimbene and is reviewed in “Dal pulpito alla cattedra. I vescovi degli ordini mendicanti nel ’200 e nel primo ’300,” Catholic Historical Review, 4 (2002), vol. 88, num. 2, p. 343. In regard to the Abbot of Vercelli and the discussed attribution of the Deiformis animae gemitus, see Abbas Vercellensis (Pseudo-Thomas Gallus), Le commentaire du Cantique des cantiques ‘Deiformis animae gemitus’. Étude d’authenticité et édition critique, par J. Barbet, Publications de la Sorbonne, Document 21 (Louvain, 1972). The author denies the authenticity and sustains that the attribution was due to a copyist of the fifteenth century.

Three

ST. BONAVENTURE AND FRANCISCAN THOUGHT (pp. 41–56) 1–5. Characteristics of St. Bonaventure’s Thought. Illumination The complete works of St. Bonaventure were published in 10 vols. in the edition of Quaracchi (1882–1902). In an editio minor (Opera theologica selecta) published in 4 vols. always by Quaracchi (1939–1949), the Libri sententiarum were included. The

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Tria opuscula ad theologiam spectantes, that were published several times, contains the Breviloquium, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, and the Reductio artium in sacram theologiam. In English version, see Breviloquium, Erwin Esser Nemmers trans. (B. Herder Book Co., 1947); The Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint, trans. from the Latin by José de Vinck (Paterson, N.J.: St Anthony Guild Press, 1960), 2 vols.; St Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam: A Commentary with an Introduction and Translation, Sister Emma T. Healy, trans. and ed. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Saint Bonaventure College, 1939); Itinerarium mentis in Deum, with an introduction, translation, and commentary, Philotheus Boehner, trans. and ed. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1956). Truly important is the Thesaurus Bonaventurianus, Christian Wenin, director: vol. 1: S. Bonaventurae: Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, De reductione artium ad theologiam, Concordance-Indices, ed. by J. Hamesse (Louvain, 1972); vol. 2: Breviloquium, ed. by J. Hamesse (Louvain, 1975). Some works in translation, are Saint Bonaventure, Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, with Introduction and Translation, Zachary Hayes, ed. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, 1979); Mystic of God’s Word, Timothy J. Johnson, ed. (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1999); Selected Works, Ewert Cousins, trans. and ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). From a codex whose proprietor was St. Bernardino of Siena (“U. v. 6.”), F. Delorme has published a different but authentic report of the Collationes in Hexaëmeron (together with a Bonaventuriana quaedam selecta) (Quaracchi, 1934). After the centennial celebration (1274–1974), a collection of essays was published, San Bonaventura 1274–1974: Miscellanea Commemorativa del VII Centenario della Morte, Jacques Guy Bougerol, ed. (Roma: Grottaferrata, Collegio San Bonaventura, 1973–1974), 5 vols., of which the last is a Bibliographia Bonaventuriana that lists all the writings on Bonaventure published from 1850 to 1973. See also Proceedings of the Seventh Centenary Celebration of the Death of Saint Bonaventure, Edited by Pascal F. Foley (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: St. Bonaventure University Press, 1975). The bibliography on Bonaventure can be checked particularly in Etienne Gilson, La philosophie de St. Bonaventure (Paris, 1924, 1953 rip.); Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, Illtyd Trethowan and Frank J. Sheed, trans. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938); L. Veuthey, S. Bonaventurae Philosophia Christiana (Romae, 1943); very good is the article of Manselli in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1969), vol. 11, pp. 612–630. For the chronology see J. F. Quinn, “Chronology of s. B. (1217–1257),” in Franciscan Studies, 32 (1972), pp. 168–186; idem, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy (Toronto, 1973); extremely important the Thesaurus Bonaventurianus, Edited by Christian Wenin: vol. 1: S. Bonaventurae Itinerarium mentis in Deum. De reductione artium ad theologiam. Concordance-Indices, Edited by J. Hamesse (Louvain, 1972); vol. 2: Breviloquium, Edited by J. Hamesse (Louvain, 1975). Concerning Bonaventure’s thought besides the translated work of Veuthey (Rome, 1971) see J. G. Bougerol, S. Bonaventure et la sagesse chrétienne (Paris, 1963) (and “S. Bonaventure et la philosophie chrétienne,” Culture, 27 (1966), pp. 290–312); S. Vanni Rovighi, San Bonaventura (Milan, 1974); Mauro, Bonaventura da Bagnoregio. Dalla Philosophia alla Contemplatio (Geneva, 1976) in the Series of Monographs of Accademia Ligure di Scienze e Lettere. Among the miscellaneous works see Contributi per una nuova interpretazione (Brescia, 1974); “San Bonaventura Maestro di vita francescana e di sapienza cristiana,” Atti del Congresso Internazionale per il VII Centenario di S. Bonaventura da Bagnoregio (Rome, 1976) already

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existing in Miscellanea francescana, 75 (1975), pp. 20–996. For the rapports with St. Thomas see E. H. Wéber, Dialogue et dissensions entre saint Bonaventure et saint Thomas d’Aquin a Paris (1252–1273) (Paris, 1974). The work of Gilson of 1924, which reacted to the positions expressed by the editors of the Quaracchi editions that moved within the Thomistic frame of the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, had a decisive importance for the studies on Bonaventure and generated a long and vast debate. Gilson accentuated in St. Bonaventure a philosophical program tied to the Platonic-Augustinian tradition, indifferent to the Thomistic distinctions between philosophy and theology, in opposition to Aristotelianism and Thomism for their concept of philosophy. After Gilson, the studies on Bonaventure centered for the most on the polemic created by Gilson. A certain convergence of positions was nevertheless determined, in the sense that the conception of Christian philosophy that Bonaventure presented was in opposition to that of the Thomistic school. “Christian philosophy considers reality in its totality, natural and supernatural, with the collaboration of reason and faith, in view of finding an answer to the existential problems that the Christian philosophy raises.” See Christian Wenin, “La connaissance philosophique d’après S. Bonaventure,” in L’homme et son destin d’après les penseurs du Moyen Age, Actes du premier Congrès internationale de philosophie médievale (LouvainParis, 1960), pp. 485–494; E. Longpré, “S. Bonaventure” in Dictionnaire d’histoire et géographie ecclésiastique (Louvain-Paris, 1937), vol. 9, pp. 741–788; I. Squadrani, “S. Bonaventura christianus philosophus” Antonianum, 16 (1941), pp. 103–130, 253– 304. Immediate reactions to the interpretations of Gilson were those of Mandonnet, “L’augustinisme bonaventurien,” Bulletin thomiste, 3 (1926), pp. 52–54; F. Van Steenberghen, who discussed Gilson’s theses repeatedly, in Siger de Brabant d’après ses oeuvres inédites (Louvain, 1942), vol. 2, pp. 464–466, in Aristote en Occident: Les origins de l’aristotélisme parisien (Louvain, 1946), pp. 131–147, in “Le XIIIe siècle,” Histoire de l’Eglise, ed. by A. Fliche and E. Jarry (Paris, 1951), pp. 218–236. In these writings, Steenberghen sustains that Bonaventure, in his relation with pagan philosophers, had no radical precluding; had no different opinions than Thomas in regard to the frailty of reason; believed in the supremacy of faith in the order of knowledge, but did not admit the incapacity of natural reason; understood philosophy as a discipline autonomous and independent from theology. Always against the theses of Gilson, see also P. Robert, “Le problème de la philosophie bonaventurienne,” Laval théologique et philosophique, 6 (1950), pp. 145–163; 7 (1951), pp. 9–58. Robert tries to define the significance that Bonaventure assigned to philosophy (formally distinct from theology) and to natural reason and faith. F. Van Steenberghen has summarized the controversy and the terms of the polemic against Gilson and all those who have followed him or have been inspired by him, in La filosofia nel XIII secolo (Milan, 1972), pp. 180–240. At the end, he observed: “Non bisognerebbe concludere da tutto ciò—osserva alla fine—che il Dottore Serafico non è un filosofo e che la sua opera non interessa la storia della filosofia. Le sue idee filosofiche sono numerose e talvolta personalissime; esse hanno contribuito in parte non trascurabile allo sviluppo del pensiero del secolo XIII e, in particolare, dell’aristotelismo. In reazione contro le formule provocanti del Gilson, il Mandonnet ha minimizzato la portata filosofica dell’opera di san Bonaventura. Sviati dalla presentazione brillante, ma sconcertante, della filosofia di San Bonaventura fatta dal Gilson, la maggior parte degli storici recenti hanno esposto il pensiero del Dottore Serafico senza tener conto delle distinzioni che egli stesso aveva fatto.... Bonaventura non ha

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affatto cercato un’originalità di cattiva lega rivoluzionando le idee trasmesse circa la natura e i metodi della filosofia; di piú, egli non è un creatore in materia filosofica e non è all’avanguardia del progresso in questo campo. La sua vera grandezza è altrove: nella sua mirabile visione cristiana dell’universo trasfigurato dal Verbo incarnato e nella chiaroveggenza con la quale è riuscito a discernere e definire le tappe del sapere cristiano, partendo dall’esperienza sensibile fino alle soglie della visione beatifica” (We should not conclude from all this that the Seraphic Doctor is not a philosopher and that his work has no interest for the history of philosophy. His philosophical ideas are numerous and most personal; they have contributed in an important way to the development of the thought of the thirteenth century and, in particular, of Aristotelianism. As a reaction to the provoking formulations of Gilson, Mandonnet minimized the philosophical importance of the work of Bonaventure. The greater part of the recent historians, diverted by the brilliant but baffling exposition of the thought of Bonaventure made by Gilson, have presented the thought of Bonaventure without pointing out the distinctions that he made.… Bonaventure’s originality has not tried to revolutionize the ideas of the tradition concerning the nature and the methods of philosophy; he is not a creator in matters concerning philosophy and is not at the avant-garde of the progress in this field. His true greatness is elsewhere: in his admirable Christian vision of the universe transformed by the Word incarnate and in the clairvoyance with which he succeeded to discern and define the stages of Christian wisdom, beginning from the experience of the sensible up to the border of the beatific vision). In the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1966), vol. 11, p. 83, Gregory synthesized Bonaventure’s significance and influence: “Bonaventura godrà di una larghissima fama e di duratura influenza sulle generazioni seguenti; il suo nome, come quello del suo maestro Alessandro di Hales e piú ancora con quello di Agostino, costituirà un punto di riferimento sicuro per la difesa contro 1’aristotelismo trionfante, sia averroistico che tomista; alcune dottrine bonaventuriane costituiranno il fondamento comune della filosofia dei francescani: concezione della natura come specchio e immagine di Dio, creazione nel tempo, ilemorfismo universale, pluralità delle forme, individuazione della convergenza di materia e forma, gnoseologia fondata sull’illuminazione e sulle rationes aeternae, primato della volontà; ma soprattutto resterà centrale del pensiero francescano, la prospettiva di una sapienza cristocentrica in cui tutte le scienze si subordinano e coordinano alla teologia (reductio artium ad theologiam) concepita come espansione dell’intellectus fidei corroborato dalla luce divina e purificato dalla grazia, tendente alla visione beatifica che si realizza nella gioia e nella pace dell’estatica visione di Dio” (Bonaventure will enjoy a wide fame and a long-living influence on the successive generations. His name together with that of his teacher, Alexander of Hales, and that of Augustine, will constitute a sure bastion against the triumphing Aristotelianism, both Averroistic and Thomistic. Some of the doctrines of Bonaventure will remain the common basis of the philosophy of the Franciscans. These doctrines are the conception of nature as the mirror and the image of God, the creation in time, the universal hylemorphism, the plurality of forms, the individuation of the convergence of matter and form, a gnoseology founded on illumination and rationes aeternae, and the primacy of the will. Central position within the Franciscan thought will be taken by the perspective of a wisdom centered in Christ, in which all the sciences will be subordinated to and coordinated with theology (reductio artium ad theologiam). Theology will be conceived as an expansion of the intellectus fidei strengthened by divine light and purified by grace, aiming to the beatific vision, which is attained in the joy and peace of the ecstatic vision of God).

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J. Roch, “The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure: A Controversy,” Franciscan Studies, 19 (1959), pp. 209–226, referring to the positions of Steenberghen, sustained that Bonaventure is a theologian who in the early comments to the Sentences professes a Neo-Platonic Aristotelianism, not an Augustinianism. Only when later he decided to oppose the Aristotelianism of the teachers of the faculty of the arts, Bonaventure abandoned Peripatetism and returned to Augustine, perhaps under the influence of Gauthier de Bruges, who in 1268 attacked Thomas and the Aristotelians. In this chapter, the exposition on Bonaventure follows the theses presented by Gilson, and for some aspects also J. M. Bissen, L’exemplarisme divin selon S. Bonaventure (Paris, 1923). Efrem Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, Angelus Gambatese, trans. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1964; Greenwood Press, 1981); R. Lazzarini, San Bonaventura filosofo e mistico del cristianesimo (Milano, 1946); George H. Tavard, Transience and Permanence: The Nature of Theology according to St. Bonaventure (New York-LouvainPaderborn, 1954); Joseph Ratzinger, Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura (München, 1959). More studies include those of J. G. Bougerol, S. Bonaventure et la sagesse chrétienne (Paris, 1963) and “S. Bonaventure et la philosophie chrétienne,” Culture, 27 (196)), pp. 290–312; Sofia Vanni Rovighi, San Bonaventura (Milano, 1974); L. Mauro, Bonaventura da Bagnoregio: Dalla “Philosophia” alla “Contemplatio” (Genoa, 1976); San Bonaventura Maestro di vita francescana e di sapienza cristiana, Atti del Congresso Internazionale per il VII Centenario (Rome, 1976); many authors contributed to Teologia e Filosofia nel pensiero di S. Bonaventura: Contributi per una nuova interpretazione (Brescia, 1974). For the relationship BonaventureThomas, see E. H. Wéber, Dialogue et dissensions entre S. Bonaventure et saint Thomas d’Aquin à Paris (1252-1273) (Paris, 1974); David Tracy, ed., Celebrating the Medieval Heritage: A Colloquy on the Thought of Aquinas and Bonaventure (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Robert W. Shahan, and Kovach, Francis J., Bonaventure and Aquinas: Enduring Philosophers (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976). 6. Mathew of Acquasparta About the Franciscan School, see the texts collected in the volume De humanae cognitionis ratione anecdota quaedam (Quaracchi, 1883). In particular for Mathew of Acquasparta, see the two volumes of the Quaestiones Disputatae (Quaracchi: Collegio San Bonaventura, 1957), 2nd ed.; Quaestiones disputatae de gratia, V. Doucet ed. (Quaracchi, 1935), with an important and rich introduction; Quaestiones disputatae de anima separata, de anima beata, de ieiunio et de legibus, G. Gàl, A. Emmen, I. Arady, C. Piana, eds. (Quaracchi, 1959). See also A. J. Gondras, “Les ‘Quaestiones de anima VI’ (manuscript de la Bibliothèque communale d’Assise n. 159) attribuées à Mathieu d’Acquasparta,” AHDLMA, 24 (1957); Sermones de Beata Virgine, C. Piana ed. (Quaracchi, 1962); Sermones de S. Francisco, S. Antonio, et de S. Clara. App. De potestate papae, G. Gàl ed. (Quaracchi, 1962). About the life and works of Acquasparta, see the above introduction of Doucet and his “L’enseignement parisien de Mathieu d’Acquasparta (1278–1279),” Archivium franciscanum historicum, 28 (1935), pp. 568–570; on his thought, see M. Grabmann, Die philosophische und theologische Erkenntnislehre des Kard. Mattheus von Acquasparta (Wien, 1906); Efrem Bettoni, “Matteo d’Acquasparta e il suo posto nella scolastica post-tomistica,” in Filosofia e cultura in Umbria tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Atti del IV Convegno di studi umbri (Perugia, 1967), pp. 231–248; G. Buon-

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afede, “La gnoseologia di Matteo d’Acquasparta” (ibidem), pp. 249–269; P. Mazzarella, La dottrina dell’anima e della conoscenza in Matteo d’Acquasparta (Padova, 1969); on the knowledge of the individual being, see C. Bérubé, La connaissance de l’individuel au moyen âge (Montréal-Paris, 1964), pp. 94–100. For general studies on Acquasparta, but also for the texts presented, see Sofia Vanni Rovighi, L’immortalità dell’anima nei maestri francescani del secolo XIII (Milano, 1936); A. Zavalloni, Richard de Mediavilla et la controverse sur la pluralité des formes (Louvain, 1951). About some general points, see L. Veuthey, “Les divers courants de la philosophies augustino-franciscaine au moyen âge,” Scholastica ratione historico-critica instauranda, Acta Congressus Scholastici Internationalis (Rome, 1951), pp. 627–652. About Gregory of Rimini, who was Father General of the Hermits of St. Augustine, died in 1358, and was influenced by Ockham, see Super Primum et Secundum Sententiarum, reprint of 1522 (New York: Franciscan Institute Publisher, 1955), Text Series 7. About Gregory, see J. Würsdörfer, “Erkennen und Wissen nach Gregor von Rimini. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Erkenntnistheorie des Nominalismus,” BGPTMA, 20 (1917), pp. 1–138; D. Trapp, “Gregory of Rimini, Manuscripts, editions and additions,” Augustiniana, 8 (1958), pp. 425–443; G. Leff, Gregory of Rimini: Tradition and Innovation in Fourteenth Century Thought (Manchester, 1961); E. Grarcía Lescun, “El conocimiento natural de Dios en el siglo XIV. En torno a Gregorio de Rimini” in Augustiniana, 21 (1972), pp. 467–504. Of Alexander of Alexandria (1268–1314), a colleague of Duns Scotus in Paris, a Father General of the Order, who among other writings wrote the comments on the Sentences and the Quodlibeta, we have the Tractatus de usuris, for which see Un traité de morale économique au XIV siècle. Le Tractatus de usuris de Maître Alexandre d’Alexandrie, Text with translation and commentary by A-M. Hamelin, O.F.M. (Louvain, 1962). The book was reviewed by R. De Roover in Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 59 (1964), pp. 854–866.

Four

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS AND THOMISM (pp. 57–88) 1–12. The indications provided are intended as an indispensable introduction to more complete works. A good orientation, with a systematic bibliography, is the essay of C. Fabro, in Enciclopedia cattolica, vol. 12 (1953) and the articles “Thomisme” and “Thomas d’Aquin,” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 15, pp. 618–761, and 823–1023. The Bibliographie Thomiste of P. Mandonnet and J. Destrez (Le Saulchoir, 1921) was reprinted in 1960, with additions and new indications by M. D. Chenu. This French work is integrated by Thomistic Bibliography, 1920–1940 (St. Louis, 1945) of Vernon J. Burke that was published as a supplement to The Modern Schoolman, vol. 21 (1945); and, since 1923, it is yearly adjourned by the Bulletin Thomiste. Furthermore, see P. Wyser, Thomas von Aquin and Der Thomismus, two issues (Bern, 1950 and 1951). For the lexemes, see L. Schütz, Thomas-Lexicon. Sammlung, Ubersetzung und Erklärung der Sämtlichen Werken des hl. Thomas von Aquin vorkommenden Kunstausdrücke und wissenschaftliche Aussprüche (Stuttgart, 1958), a facsimile reproduction of the 2nd edition of Paderton of 1895; the 1st was of 1891. About this see I. Co-

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losio, “Il Thomas Lexicon di Ludwig Schütz (d. 1901),” in Divus Thomas, 62 (1959), pp. 208–212; also M. Hubert, “Vers une lexicographie thomiste,” Revue des Etudes Latines, 34 (1956), pp. 254–267; R. J. Deferrari, M. I. Barry, A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas Based on the Summa Theologica and Selected Passages of His Other Works (Washington, 1948–1953). Always to be kept present is the Tome XVI of the Editio Leonina of the works of Thomas (Rome, 1948), which contains Indices auctoritatum et rerum occurrentium in Summa theologiae et Summa contra Gentiles. About the biography, see Fontes vitae sancti Thomae Aquinatis, 1–6 (St. Maximin de Var, 1924–1937), and especially A. Walz, Thomas von Aquin. Lebensgang und Lebenswerk des Fürsten der Scholastik (Basel, 1935) and its French version, Saint Thomas d’Aquin. Adaptation française par P. Noverina (Louvain, 1962), with a bibliography of the works of Walz. The contribution of M. Grabmann on the works of Thomas is fundamental: “Die Werke des hl. Thomas von Aquin. Eine literar-historische Untersuchung und Einführung. Dritte, stark erweiterte Auflage,” BGPTMA, 22, 1–2 (Münster, 1949). This 3rd edition was posthumously edited by M. L. Ott, and was adjourned to the works that appeared after 1931. See G. Verbeke, “Authenticité et chronologie des écrits de Saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue philosophique de Louvain, 48 (1950), pp. 260–268. The list of the complete editions of Thomas’s works includes the Editio Piana ordered by Pius V (Rome, 1570–1571); the Editio Parmensis, in 25 vols., Fiaccadori ed. (Parma, 1852–1873); the Editio Leonina wanted by Leo XIII, which arrived to the already cited Tome XVI. G. Bruni, “Bibliografia tomistica,” Bibliografia filosofica italiana (Rome, 1953), vol. 3, pp. 331–364, offers a list of partial editions, Italian and foreign translations, from 1900 to 1950. Concerning the translations and Aristotelian commentaries used by Thomas, see the examination of the most recent works in D.A. Callus, “Les sources de Saint Thomas. Etat de la question,” in the volume Aristote et Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain, 1957), pp. 93–174. For the “Platonici” in Thomas, see R. J. Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism. A study of the “Plato” and “Platonici” Texts in the Writings of Saint Thomas (The Hague, 1956). An indispensable instrument, rich in well articulated bibliographical indications, is the work of M. D. Chenu, Introduction à l’étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Montréal-Paris, 1950). The works concerning the thought of Thomas are not many; the following ones are listed because the author used them or have important information on what has been said: C. Fabro, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Turin, 1950); idem, Partecipazione e causalità secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Turin, 1961); A. Forest, La structure métaphysique du concret selon Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 1931); R. Garrigou-Lagrance, La synthèse thomiste (Paris, 1947); E. Gilson, “Pourquoi St. Thomas a critiqué St. Augustin,” AHDLMA, 1 (1926–1927), pp. 5–127; idem, Le thomisme (Paris, 1948); J. Legrand, L’univers et l’homme dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas (Bruxelles-Paris, 1946), 2 vols.; O. Lottyin, Psychologie et morale au XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Louvain-Gembloux, 1942–1960), 8 vols.; A. Masnovo, Da Guglielmo d’Auvergne a S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Milan, 1930–1944), 3 vols.; H. Meyer, Thomas von Aquin. Sein System und seine geistgeschichtliche Stellung (Paderborn, 1961); F. Olgiati, L’anima di S. Tommaso (Milan, 1922); A. D. Sertillange, La philosophie de St. Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 1940), 2 vols., of which an Italian translation exists since 1959; S. Vanni-Rovighi, L’antropologia filosofica di San Tommaso d’Aquino (Milan, 1965). It is not easy to choose among the enormous litereray production about Thomas Aquinas of the period 1964–1974 what is essential, production increased by the activities of the 1974 commemorative celebrations. What was excel-

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lent and still very useful is Sofia Vanni Rovighi’s Introduzione a Tommaso d’Aquino (Bari, 1973), pp. 161–207. For the years 1968–1969 A Rassegna di letteratura tomistica in 3 vols., appeared in Naples between 1969 and 1971, but also see C. D. Boulogne, S. Thomas d’Aquin, essai bibliographique (Paris, 1968). For the lexicon, besides the monumental Index Thomisticus of R. Busa, see Thomas Aquinas’ Dictionary, Edited by M. Stockammer (New York, 1965) For the biographical sources see Thomae Aquinatis vitae fontes praecipuae, Edited by A. Ferrua (Alba, 1968). The book contains the Historia of Guglielmo of Tocco, the Legenda of Bernardo Gui, the Processus canonizationis, and extracts from the Historia and from the Annales of Tolomeo of Lucca, from the Vitae fratrum of friar Gérald Frachet, from Bonum universale de apibus of Tommaso of Cantimpré. About Thomas’s works, the Commissione Leonina has published the catalogue: Codices manuscripti Operum Thomae de Aquino; vol. 1: Autographa et Bibliothecae A-F. Recensuerunt H. F. Dondaine et H. V. Shooner (Romae, 1967). Of Dondaine, see also Sécretaires de S. Thomas (Rome, 1956). Of the Leonina edition already appeared the following volumes: 22 (1970–1971), 26 (1965), 28 (1974), 40 (with In opuscula introductio generalis, 1967–1969), 41 (1970), 47 (1968–1869), 48 (1971). On the planning and actual situation of the Leonina edition see M. De Cotenson, “L’édition critique des oeuvres de S. T. d’A.,” Bulletin de Philosophie Medievale, 10–12 (1968–1970), pp. 175–186; 13 (1971), pp. 128–130; but see ibidem, 1 (1959), p. 53 and F. Van Steenberghen, “L’édition léonine des oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue philosophique de Louvain, 72 (1974), pp. 5–10; C. Vansteenkiste, “L’edizione leonina delle Opere di S. Tommaso,” Divus Thomas, 76 (1973), pp. 365–384. Separate editions of the works of Thomas are printed by Editrice Marietti of Turin. See also Saint Thomas and Saint Bonaventure in the Vatican Library. Exhibit on their seventh centenary. 1274–1974 Catalogue (Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, 1974). Of all the miscellaneous works and special issues of journal dedicated to Thomas in 1974, see Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1274–1974. Commemorative Studies, Foreword E. Gilson (Toronto, 1974), 2 vols.; “In commemoration of the death of S. T. A., 1274– 1974,” Thomist, 38 (1974), num. 1; “Thomas Aquinas, 1274–1974,” The Monist, 58 (1974), num. 1; “S. Tommaso d’Aquino nella ricorrenza del centenario, 13 dicembre 1974,” Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome, 1975); and the issues and contributions in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 27 (1974), num. 3; in Revue philosophique de Louvain, 72 (1974); in Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 66 (1974), num. 2–4, and in Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 58 (1974), num. 3. A selection of minor contribution is listed in the bibliography given by Gregory in Storia della filosofia, Edited by Dal Pra, vol. 6, pp. 449–461. 13. Italian Thomists On the first Thomistic school see F. J. Roensch, Early Thomistic School (Dubuque, 1964); A. Birkenmayer, Études d’histoire des sciences et de la philosophie du moyen age, pp. 277–311, 513–528. It was during the second phase of his teaching in Paris that the opposition against Thomas became violent—not without Bonaventure’s influence, on which see J. D’Albi, S. Bonaventure et les luttes doctrinaires de 1267–1277 (Paris, 1923)—and culminated in the disputation of 1270, at the presence of Bishop Etienne Tempier, on the uniqueness of the substantial form, among various other questions. The Condemnation of 7 March 1277 (Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, I, n. 473, pp. 543– 555) included some Thomist theses (numbered 27, 34, 69, 77, 82, 96, 191, 218, and

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219). According to the ms. Conv. E. 5. 532 of the National Library of Florence, among the condemned theses were those numbered 124, 129, 156, 163, 173, 187, and 212, which were Thomist. Albert the Great, at the announcement of the judgment, went to Paris to defend the disciple. Adenulfo of Anagni, dead by 1290, a canon of Notre Dame of Paris, magister artium and thereafter of theology, author of works on canonic law, of comments on Posterior analytics and Topics, in Quaestiones de quolibet seems to be the first to use the Secunda Secundae of Thomas, and had to retract in Paris the thesis of the unity of the substantial form. On this see L. Ott, “Die Wissenchaftslehre im Topikkommentar des A. v. A.,” in Mélanges Gilson (Toronto-Paris, 1959), pp. 465–490). About Nicola Brunacci, lector sacrae paginae in Florence in S. Maria Novella in 1299 (and not in 1294, as Mandonnet assumed), a collaborator with Remigio Girolami and Tolomeo of Lucca, see the voice of J. Kirshner in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1972), vol. 14, pp. 523–524. About Tolomeo of Lucca see A. Dondaine, “Les Opuscula fratris Thomae chez Ptolomé de Lucca,” Archivium fratrum praedicatorum, 31 (1961), pp. 142–203; about Giovanni of Naples see R. Schneider, Die Trinitätslehrer den Quodlibeta und Quaestiones disputatae des Johannes von Naples, O.P. (died in 1336), (München-Paderborn-Wien, 1972), pp. 369–370. The Dominican Order remained firm in the defense of Aquinas’s doctrines. The quaestio of John of Naples addressing propositions numbered 79, 81, 124, 129, 156, 173, 187, 212, and 218, was published by C. J. Jellouschek in Xenia Thomistica, 3 (Rome, 1925), pp. 75–101; they were published the first time in Naples in 1618 on the initiative of Domenico Gravina as part of Quaestiones variae XLII Parisiis disputatae. Jellouschek wrote on John of Naples, Johannes von Neapel und seine Lehre von Verhältnisse zwishen Gott und Welt (Wien, 1918), and in Jahrb. Philos. Theol., 26 (1912), pp. 155–187. See also M. Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geisteleben (München, 1926), 2 vols., vol. 1, pp. 274–384; J. Koch, “Durandus de Porciano,” BGPTMA, 26 (1927), pp. 285–314; P. Stella, “Zwei inedierte Artikel des Johannes von Neapel über das Individuationsprincip,” Divus Thomas, 29 (Freiburg, 1951), pp. 129–166; P. Michaud-Quentin, “Le droit naturel chez Jean de Naples,” RTAM, 29 (1962), pp. 268– 287, from ms. “VII B.28” of the National Library of Naples. About the Italian Thomist in general, see M. Grabmann, “La scuola tomistica italiana nel secolo XIII e principio del XIV,” Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica, 15 (1923), pp. 97–155; G. Taurisano, “Discepoli e biografi di S. Tommaso,” in the volume S. Tommaso, Miscellanee storico-artistiche (Rome, 1926), pp. 111–186. About the library of friar Proino, see J. Pelster, “Die Bibliotek von S. Caterina zu Pisa, eine Buchersammlung aus den Zeiten des hl. Thomas von Aquino,” Xenia Thomistica, 3 (1925), pp. 249–280. The Summa adversus Catharos et Valdenses of Moneta was published in Rome, in 1743. About Roland of Cremona, see F. Ehrle, “S. Domenico. Le origini del primo studio generale del suo Ordine a Parigi e la Somma teologica del primo Maestro Rolando da Cremona,” Miscellanea Domenicana (Rome, 1922), pp. 85–184; E. Filthaut, Roland von Cremona O. P. und die Anfänge der Scholastik in Predigerorden (Vechta, 1936). Concerning Magister Martinus, see Grabmann, in MAGL, 250. For Prepositinus, see G. Lacombe, La vie et les oeuvres de Prevostin (Le Saulchoir, 1927), in which it is said that besides the Summa, the Quaestiones and the Summa contra hereticos are preserved in a manuscript form. See F. Stegmüller, “Die Summa des Prepositinus in der Universitätsbibliotek zu Uppsala,” RTAM, 15 (1948), pp. 171–181, in which one chapter of the Summa is published; O. Lottin, “Psychologie et morale,” BTAM, 6 (1960), pp. 19–26. About Romanus, see M. Grabmann, “Romanus de Roma (d. 1273) und der Prolog seines Sentenzkommentars,”

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MAGL, 3, pp. 280–305. The position of Bambolognus of Bologna is unclear; he knew the commentary of Thomas on the sentences, but he depended also from Bonaventure, whom he copied without saying so; his sources are Thomas, Bonaventure, and Peter of Tarantasia. See C. Piana, “Questione inedita de sanctificatione B. V. Mariae di Bambologno da Bologna, O. P.,” Studi Francescani, 38 (1941), pp. 185–196; idem, “L’influsso di S. Bonaventura su la cristologia di Bambologno da Bologna, frate domenicano contemporaneo di S. Tommaso,” Antonianum, 23 (1948), pp. 475–500; I. Backes, “Die Lehre des Bambolognus von Bologna über die Verehrung Christi,” in Theologie in Geschichte und Gegenwart, M. Schmaus zum sechzigsten Geburstag dargebracht von seinen Freunden und Schüler, herausgegeben von J. Auer und H. Volk (München, 1957), pp. 551–570. About Annibaldo Annibaldi and his Commentarium in IV libros sententiarum, see the voice “L. Redigonda” in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1961), vol. 3, pp. 342–344, which notices how Bambolognus de Musoliis of Bologna imitated in his own Commentarium that of Annibaldo in the second part of bk. 3 and in the whole bk. 4. The Correctorium fratris Thomae (Correction of Brother Thomas) of William De la Mare was composed between 1277 and 1279; it listed and discussed the theses contrasting with the traditional doctrines of the Franciscans. The Dominicans called this book Corruptorium (Corruption) and began to work on a series of correctoria corruptorii (corrections of the corruptions): these corrections were named with the first word of the sentence. F. Ehrle, “Der Kampf um die Lehre des hl. Thomas von Aquin,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie, 37 (1913), pp. 266–318. The Apologeticum veritatis contra Corruptorium (in 16 questions) of the Dominican Rambert of Primadizzi of Bologna discussed the Correctorium of De la Mare, but also Mathew of Acquasparta, Richard of Middleton, Henry of Ghent, and Giles of Rome (Egidius Romanus). See Rambert of Primadizzi of Bologna, Apologeticum veritatis contra Corruptorium. Edition critique par dom Jean Pierre Muller (Città del Vaticano, 1943), No. 8 in the series “Studi e Testi.” Concerning Giles of Rome as a censor of Thomas, see G. Bruni, “E. Romano e la sua polemica antitomista,” Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica, 26 (1934), pp. 239–241; the polemic caused a reaction from an unknown Dominican author of a document titled Impugnationes contra fratrem Egidium contradicentem Thome super primum Sententiarum, which Bruni edited from the ms. “Vat. Lat. 772” and published in Bibliotheca Augusti Medii Aevi (Città del Vaticano, 1942). About Remigio de’ Girolami, see Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geisteleben (München, 1926), 2 vols., vol. 1, pp. 361–369, and the note 64 of p. 361, where an indication is given of the previous contributions of Grabmann, especially in relation to Dante. A quaestio of Remigius was published by Grabmann in Miscellanea Thomista of the Catalan Society of Philosophy (Barcelona, 1924). See also L. Minio-Paluello, “Remigio Girolami’s De bono communi,” in Italian Studies, 11 (1956), pp. 56–71; O. Capitani, “La venditio ad terminum nella valutazione morale di San Tommaso d’Aquino e di Remigio de’ Girolami,” Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 70 (1958), pp. 299–363; C. T. Davis, “An early Florentine Political Theorist: Fra Remigio de’ Girolami,” in Proceedings of American Philosophical Society, 104 (1960), pp. 662–676, which offers a fine profile of Remigio and a bibliography. Again of C. T. Davis, “Remigio de’Girolami and Dante. A Comparison of their Conceptions of Peace,” Studi Danteschi, 36 (1959), pp. 105–136; O. Capitani, “De peccato usure di Remigio de’ Girolami,” Studi medievali, 6 (1965), pp. 2, 537–662 (with the text). About Giovanni Balbi of Genoa and his dialogues de quaestionibus animae ad spiritum, see Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geisteleben, vol. 1, pp. 370–373; also Dizi-

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onario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1963), vol. 5, pp. 369–370. For Giovanni Graziadio Ascoli, see C. Prantl, “Geschichte der Lögik,” in Abendlande, 3 (Leipzig, 1867), pp. 313–318. Some informations used in the text of History of Italian Philosophy were obtained from F. Bonaini, “Chronica antiqua conventus Sanctae Caterinae de Pisis,” Archivio Storico Italiano, 6, 2 (1840), pp. 399–593. Writers on morality or preachers of Trecento, from the successor in Florence of Girolami Giordano of Rivalto to Bartolomeus of San Concordio, merited indeed a treatment by themselves.

Five ARISTOTELIANISM AND AVERROISM (pp. 89–94) 1. The Presumed “Averroism” of Pietro d’Abano. Guido Bonatti In general, the old work of Joseph Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroisme (Paris, 1852, with a 2nd edition in 1861) is still recommended for consultation, especially in order to focus on the many questions, but see the article of M. M. Gorce, in Dictionnaire d’histoire et géographie ecclésiastique, (Paris, 1931), vol. 5, pp. 1031–1092. In this case, the need is non existent for even a summary bibliography of what has been said concerning the Latin Averroism; see, however, P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’averroisme latin au XIIIe siècle (Louvain, 1908, with 2nd edition in 1911), 2 vols.; F. van Steenberghen, Siger de Brabant d’après ses oeuvres inédites (Louvain, 1931– 1941), 2 vols. In relation, in particular, to the Italian centers, besides the already mentioned individual studies of Grabmann and Vanni-Rovighi, the contributions must be seen of Bruno Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del Rinascimento italiano (Rome, 1945), and Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence, 1958). Regarding some comments made in the text, see Alphendéry, “Y a-t-il un averroïsme populaire au XIIIe et XIVe siècle?” Revue d’histoire des religions (1910), and idem, Les idées morales chez les hétérodoxes latins au début du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1903). About Pietro d’Abano, see S. Ferrari, I tempi, la vita, le dottrine di Pietro d’Abano. Saggio storico-filosofico (Genoa, 1900); idem, “Per la biografia e per gli scritti di Pietro d’Abano. Note e aggiunte,” Memorie della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1918), 5th series, vol. 15, pt. 7; and the studies of B. Nardi, reprinted in Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI, pp. 1–74., where the true definition of Pietro is found: “l’idea centrale della scienza di lui è un’idea astrologica” (the central idea he had of science was an astrological idea). Valuable also for the bibliographical apparatus is L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 4th edition (New York, 1947), 2 vols., vol. 2, pp. 875–947. For the various versions of Ibn Ezra, see again Thorndike, “The Latin Translations of the Astrological Tracts of Abraham Avenezra,” in Isis, 35 (1944), pp. 293–302; R. Levy, “A Note on the Latin Translation of Ibn Ezra,” in Isis, 37 (1947), pp. 153–155. In addition to these, see also L. Norpoth, “Zur Bio-bibliographie und Wissenschaftslehre des Pietro d’Abano, Mediziners, Philosophen und Astronomen in Padua,” Kyklos, Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Philosophie der Medizin, vol. 3 (1930), pp. 292–353 and as inaugural dissertation (Leipzig, 1930). A better utilization of the ms. “Lucidator, Parigi, Naz. Lat. 2598, 99r123v,” besides the importance given to astrology, will document the knowledge possessed by Pietro. Concerning the importance of astrology, see R. Lemay, Abu Ma’shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century. The Recovery of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy through Arabic Astrology (Beirut, 1962). For a precise and learned conclu-

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sion about Pietro d’Abano see F. Alessio, “Filosofia e scienza: Pietro d’Abano,” in Storia della cultura veneta. Il Trecento (Venice, 1977), pp. 171–206; N. G. Siraisi, “The Expositio problematum Aristolelis of Peter of Abano,” Isis (1970), pp. 321– 339.A new light on Restoro comes from the critical edition published by the Accademia della Crusca: Restoro d’Arezzo, La composizione del mondo colle sue cascioni, Critical edition by A. Morino (Florence, 1976). About the cultural ambiance see H. Wieruszowski, “Arezzo as a Center of Learning and Letters in the Thirteenth Century,” in Traditio, 9 (1953), pp. 321–391. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that the study of the manuscript tradition and the intervention of Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, the biographer of Brunelleschi and friend of Ficino witnessed in the 15th century a dense thread of refined scientific culture of “humanistic” flavor. 2. Cecco d’Ascoli About Guido Bonatti, see L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 4th edition (New York, 1947), 2 vols., vol. 2, pp. 825–836, 839–840. About Bartholomew of Parma, see ibid., pp. 836–838. About Cecco d’Ascoli, see ibid., pp. 948–968; also, “More Light on Cecco d’Ascoli,” Romenic Review, 37 (1946), pp. 293– 306, which focuses on the reasons of Cecco’s condemnation. 3. John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua Very important for the Averroism in Italy in the 14th century and its growth centered in Bologna are the editions of texts and studies of Zdzislaw Kuksewicz: Averroïsme bolonais au xiv siècle. Editions des Textes (Wroclaw-Varsovie-Cracovie, 1965) (they are texts of Anselmus de Cumis, Cambiolus Bononiensis, Jacobus de Placentia, Jordanus de Tridentia, Matheus de Eugubio, Petrus de Bonifaciis); idem, Siger de Brabant à Jacques de Plaisance. La théorie de l’intellect chez. les averroïstes latins des xiii–xiv siècle (Wroclaw-Varsovie-Cracovie, 1968) (with extensive treatments of Antonio of Parma, Angelo d’Arezzo, Taddeo of Parma, Anselmo of Como, Matteo of Gubbio, Giacomo Piacenza, while outlining four phases of the Latin Averroism: (1) 1260–1277, with Siger; (2) 1280/1290–1300; (3) 1300–1328, with Giovanni of Gottinga, Antonio of Parma, Tommaso Wilton, Marsilius of Padua, John of Jandun, Walter Burley; (4) teaching in Bologna during the first half of the 14th. See also Jacobi Placentia, Lectura cum quaestionibus super tertium de anima, Edited by Kuksewicz (Wroclaw-Varsovie-Cracovie, 1967). Of Taddeo of Parma many quaestiones exist in manuscript format and even a commentary super theoricam planetarum, for which see M. Grabmann, “Studien über den Averroisten Taddeo von Parma (ca.1320),” an article in Mittelalterliches Geistesleben (München, 1936), pp. 239–260; of S. Vanni-Rovighi, “La psicologia averroistica di Taddeo da Parma,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 23 (1931), pp. 504–517, and the edition of Le quaestiones de anima (Milan, 1951). About Angelo d’Arezzo, see Grabmann, “Ein Bologneser Averroist: Angelo d’Arezzo (ca. 1325),” MAGL, vol. 2, pp. 260–271; Ch. Ermantinger, “Averroism in Early Fourteenth Century Bologna,” Mediaeval Studies, 16 (1954), pp. 35–56; A. Maier, “Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des italienischen Averroismus im 14. Jahrhundert,” in Quellen und Forschungen aus italianischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 33 (1944), vol. 2, pp. 136–157. Also, see Grabmann, “Das Aristoteles Studium in Italien zur zeit Dantes,” MAGL, 3 (München, 1956), which speaks of Antonio of Parma, Jacobus de Pistorio, Zacharias de Parma, and Zilfredus de Piacenza; and R. A. Gauthier, “Trois Commentaires ‘averroïstes’ sur l’Etique à Nicomaque,” AHDLMA,

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16 (1947–1948), pp. 187–336. Two critical editions of the Defensor pacis exist: C. W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928) and R. Scholz (Hannover, 1932–1933) in MGH, Fontes juris germanici antiqui. For the Defensor minor, see the edition of C. H. Brampton (Birmingham, 1922). In the ms. “Laur. Fesul. 161, 1r-41v” are found the Quaestiones in Metaphysicam, which have been attributed to Marsilius of Padua, because of their evident dependence from the commentary on Metaphysics of John of Jandun, on which see H. Riedlinger, “Notes sur des ‘Questions sur la Métaphysique’ attribuées à Marsile de Padoue,” in Bulletin de la Société International pour l’Etude de la Philosophie Médiévale, 4 (1962), pp. 136–137. The Defensor pacis was translated probably from French (ms. “Laur. 44, 26”) into Florentine vulgar in 14th century. The translation of C. Vasoli (Turin, 1960) with introduction and commentary, offers also an extensive bibliography (pp. 83–89). The most relevant works on the topic are F. Battaglia, Marsilio da Padova e la filosofia politica del medioevo (Florence, 1928), which ought to be integrated with the successive contribution of the author; G. De Lagarde, La naissance de l’esprit laïque au déclin du moyen âge, vol. 2: Marsile de Padoue ou le premier théoricien de l’état laïque (Paris, 1948), 2nd edition.; on which the review on the 1st edition is by Battaglia in Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, 8 (1935), pp. 151–168; Marsilio da Padova. Studi raccolti nel VI centenario della morte (Padua, 1942); A. A. Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy (New York, 1951); of Gewirth see the version of the Defensor pacis with introduction and notes (New York, 1956). About Marsilius of Padua, see of C. Vasoli the chapter in Storia della cultura veneta. Il Trecento, pp. 207–237. The ancient version from French of ms. “Laur. 44, 26” has been published by C. Pincin, Il difenditore della Pace, nella traduzione in volgare fiorentina del 1363 (Turin, 1966); in 1975 came out a second edition of the version of Vasoli, while of 1968 is another French version of J. Quillet, Le Defenseur de la paix, Traduction, introduction, et commentaire (Paris, 1968), on which see the reservations of E. Jeauncau, “Note critique sur une traduction francaise du Defensor pacis de Marsile de Padoue,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 66 (1971), pp. 930–947. In 1975 appeared the Italian version of the Defensor minor: Il difensore minore, Edited by C. Vasoli (Naples, 1975). On Marsilius also consult C. Pincin, Marsilio (Turin, 1967); J. Quillet, La philosophie politique de Marsile de Padoue (Paris, 1970); Di Vona, I principi del Defensor pacis (Naples, 1974). Rich with information and important material is the volume of G. Piaia, Marsilio da Padova nella riforma e nella controriforma. Fortuna e interpretazione (Padua, 1977). For some general questions see W. Ullmann, The individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, Maryland, 1966), of which an Italian translation exists (Bari, 1974).

Six THE THOUGHT OF DANTE (pp. 95–116) 1–3. The Problem of Dante’s Philosophy It is difficult to try to find one’s own way through the wealth of Dantesque bibliography. Here, we are simply offering indications about some among the works of greater importance or of usefulness for their bibliographical information. A systematic anthology, organically structured, which can serve as a good introduction is that of B. Nardi,

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“La filosofia di Dante,” in Grande Antologia Filosofica, vol. 4 (1954), pp. 1149–1253. Of Nardi, who is the major student of Dantesque thought, see also Sigieri di Brabante nella Divina Commedia e le fonti della filosofia dantesca (Spianate, 1912), which is derived from the articles that appeared in Rivista di Filosofia neoscolastica, 3 (1911), pp. 187–195, 526–545; 4 (1912), pp. 73–90, 225–239; Saggi di filosofia dantesca (Milan, 1930); Dante e la cultura medievale (Bari, 1942 and a 2nd edition in 1949); Nel mondo di Dante (Rome, 1944); Dal Convivio alla Commedia. Sei saggi danteschi (Rome, 1960); and the important panorama in “Filosofia e teologia ai tempi di Dante in rapporto al pensiero del poeta,” Atti del Congresso internazionale di Studi danteschi, 20–27 aprile 1965 (Florence, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 78–165. In the same volume, the important articles on dantesque thought are G. G. Meerseman, “Dante come teologo,” pp. 177–195; E. Gilson, “Poésie et théologie dans la Divine Comédie,” pp. 197–223; A. Buck, “Gli studi sulla poetica e sulla retorica di Dante e del suo tempo,” pp. 249–278; of Buck, see also Italienische Dichtungslehren vom Mittelalter bis zum Ausgang des Renaissance, a supplement to Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 94 (Tübingen, 1952); and C. Dionisotti, “Dante nel Quattrocento,” pp. 333–378. For an understanding of many of the discussions on the thought of Dante, the following works are necessary: P. Mandonnet, Dante, le théologien; Introduction à l’intelligence de la vie, des oeuvres et de l’art de Dante Alighieri (Paris, 1935); E. Gilson, Dante et la philosophie (Paris, 1939), which is a critical analysis of the arbitrary interpretations of Mandonnet; but then on Gilson see Nardi, “Dante e la filosofia,” in Studi Danteschi, 25 (1940), pp. 5–42; A. Pézard, Dante sous la pluie de few. Enfer, chant XV (Paris, 1950), which is relevant for the richness of the background; A. Renaudet, Dante humaniste (Paris, 1952). In regard to political thought, see F. Ercole, Il pensiero politico di Dante (Milan, 1927–1928), 2 vols.; A. Passerin d’Entrève, Dante politico e altri saggi (Turin, 1955). For the editions of Dantesque works, see Le Opere di Dante. Testo critico della Società dantesca italiana (Florence, 1960), 2nd edition.; for individual works (commented) see the edition of Michele Barbi, Vita Nuova (Florence, 1932); BusnelliVandelli, Convivio (Florence, 1937), 2 vols.; A. Marigo, De vulgari eloquentia (Florence, 1938); G. Vinay, Monarchia (Florence, 1950) with introduction and commentary; another edition is of P. G. Ricci, Monarchia (Milan, 1965). An edition of Il Fiore and Detto d’Amore is by E. G. Parodi (Florence, 1922). 4–5. The Sciences. Guido Vernani. The Averroism of Dante. The De Monarchia In the history of the “philosophical” success of Dante, the Italian version of the De Monarchia completed by Marsilio Ficino in 1467 on the demand of Antonio di Tuccio Manetti and Bernardo di Filippo del Nero should be consulted. An indication of the interest for this work is the existence of another version of the Quattrocento (15th century) preserved in the ms. form. One of the codices, the ms. “II, iii, 210” of Fondo Nazionale of the National Library of Florence is by the hand of Bernardo di Filippo del Nero, and was completed on 27 October 1465. A printed first edition of the Monarchia was supposedly to be edited by Erasmus in 1527, but the editio princeps was printed in Basel in 1559 by Johannes Oporinus, who confessed that his “edition was not older than the one of the illustrious Florentine poet and philosopher, a man of the greatest ingenuity and learning, and friend of Politian.” In fact, see in Andreae Alciati jureconsulti clarissimi De formula Romani Imperij Libellus. Accesserunt non dissimilis argumenti Dantis Florentini De Monarchia

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libri tres, in which Alciati (1492–1550) gives the complete book of Monarchy at pp. 53–179. The De reprobatione Monarchie composite a Dante Aligheris florentino, written by the Dominican Guido Vernani of Rimini, and dedicated to the commentator of the Divine Comedy, Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, was composed between 1327 and 1335. See T. Käppeli, “Der Dantegegner Guido Vernani O. P. von Rimini,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italianischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 28 (1937–1938); N. Matteini, Il piú antico oppositore politico di Dante: Guido Vernani da Rimini (Padua, 1958); and B. Nardi, “Di un’aspra critica di fra Guido Vernani a Dante,” L’Alighieri, 6 (1965), pp. 42–47. The writing of the Franciscan Guglielmo of Sarzana, which Fedele said to be a confutation of the work of Dante is inedited; see Fedele, “Per la storia della Monarchia,” GSLI, 56 (1910), p. 271; F. Delorme, “Fratris Guillelmi de Sarzana Tractatus de excellentia principatus regalis,” Antonianum, 15 (1940), pp. 221–244. Various manuscripts of Vernani exist, among which are various commentaries on Aristotle. About Guinizelli, see M. Casella, “Al cor gentil repara sempre amore,” Studi romanzi, 30 (1930), pp. 36–53. About the canzone of Cavalcanti, see again M. Casella, “La canzone d’amore di G. Cavalcanti,” Studi di filologia italiana, 8 (1944), pp. 97– 140, which gives the text with an elaborated interpretation that P. O. Kristeller justly retains “unconvincing,” but that is not without some worthy comments. Always on Cavalcanti, see O. Bird, “The Canzone d’Amore of Cavalcanti according to the Commentary of Dino del Garbo,” Mediaeval Studies, 2 (1940), pp. 150–203; 3 (1941), pp. 117–160; J. E. Shaw, Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love (Toronto, 1949); E. Favati, “La glossa latina di Dino del Garbo a ‘Donna me prega’ del Cavalcanti,” in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2nd series, 21 (1952), pp. 70–103; B. Nardi, “Noterella polemica sull’averroismo di Guido Cavalcanti,” Rassegna di Filosofia, 3 (1954), pp. 47–71. Kristeller contributed to Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi (Florence, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 425–463, by presenting “A philosophical treatise from Bologna dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti: Magister Jacobus de Pistorio and his quaestio de felicitate,” in which he published the text of Iacobus de Pistorio with an introduction where he touched on many problems. Regarding the ancient commentaries to the famous Canzone, besides those of Dino del Garbo (Venice, 1498), we must mention the ones attributed to Giles of Rome, Verino the second, Paolo del Rosso (Florence, 1568), and of G. Frachetta, La Sposizione (Venice, 1585). The translation of Dante’s verses in the text is from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, A Verse Translation with an Introduction by Allen Mandelbaum (Quality Paperback Book Club, 1984). Regarding the situation of Dante studies as they came to be delineated at the Congress of 1965 and for the contributions given in that occasion two volumes were printed of Atti del Congresso Internazionale (Florence, 1965–1966) and the Council for the Dantesque Celebrations published 12 more in 1968. The twelfth volume titled L’Italia e il mondo per Dante (Florence, 1968) contains a useful bibliographic panorama. In another work, Rinascite e rivoluzioni. Movimenti culturali dal xiv al xviii secolo (Bari, I976), pp. 51–70, I tried to indicate the terms within which the problem of the Dantesque philosophical thought could be placed in light of the modern inquiries and conclusions that Gianfranco Contini has formulated about Fiore and its authenticity. Contini considered this a “knot” of great significance of medieval culture and commented on it in the article “Roman de la Rose, Fiore, Divina commedia” in the volume edited by Vittore Branca, Concetto, storia, miti e immagini del medio evo

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(Florence, 1973), pp. 509–542. On the basis of these results and of the researches I am doing on some aspects of the philosopher-poets of the 13th, I am conceptualizing in different way also the question of the rapports of Dante with the medieval thought on one hand and with Renaissance on the other. For this see L’eta nuova (Naples, 1969), pp. 179–214. Consult again, among the most interesting contributions on the philosophical thought of the ambiance of Dante: S. Vanni Rovighi, “Le disputazioni de li filosofanti,” in the vol. Dante e Bologna nei tempi di Dante (Bologna, 1967), pp. 179–192; M.-Th. D’Alverny, “Pietro d’Abano e les ‘naturalistes’ a l’epoque de Dante,” in Dante e la cultura veneta of Atti del Convegno di Studi (30 March through 5 April 1966), Edited by V. Branca and G. Padoan (Florence, 1976), pp. 207–219; G. Ineichen, “La cultura scientifica araba a Venezia al tempo di Dante,” ibid., pp. 221–227; A. Pertusi, “Cultura greco-bizantina nel tardo medioevo nelle Venezie e suoi echi in Dante,” ibid., pp. 157–198; F. Gabrieli, “Cultura araba nelle Venezie al tempo di Dante,” ibid., pp. 199–200. Concerning the Averroism of Cavalcanti and the criticism of Nardi toward Favati, Favati answered with “Guido Cavalcanti, Dino del Garbo e l’averroismo di Bruno Nardi,” Filologia romanza, 2 (1955), pp. 67–83. On the question of the “disdegno” of Guido consult again: A. Pagliaro, “Il disdegno di Guido,” in Saggi di critica semantica (Messina-Firenze, 1961), 2nd edition, pp. 357–380; M. Lucidi, “Ancora sul disdegno di Guido,” Cultura neolatina, 14 (1964), pp. 203–216.

Seven THE DECLINE OF SCHOLASTICISM (pp. 117–126) 1. Giles of Rome. The Polemic with Henry of Ghent With reference to the thought of this entire period and in particular to the crisis of Scholasticism, the researches begun by K. Michalski are still very important: “Les sources du criticisme et du scepticisme dans la philosophie du XIVe siècle,” in La Pologne au Ve Congrès International des Sciences Historiques (Bruxelle, 1923); “Les courants philosophiques à Oxford et à Paris pendant le XIVe siècle,” in Bulletin International de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences et Lettres, Classe d’Histoire et de Philosophie (1920), pp. 59–88; “Le criticisme et le scepticisme dans la philosophie du XIVe siècle,” ibid. (1925), pp. 41–122; “Les courants critiques et sceptiques dans la philosophie du XIVe siècle,” ibid., pp. 192–242; and “La physique nouvelle et le différents courants philosophiques au XIVe siècle,” ibid. (1927), pp. 93–164. Principal studies, rich in unpublished documents on the philosophy of nature, are those of Anneliese Maier, Studien zur Naturphilosophie des Spätscholastik (Rome, 1949–1958), vol. 5; and Ausgehendes Mittelaltert gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Rome, 1964). Some of the most significant writings of Michalski have been collected and reproduced in La philosophie au xiv siècle. Six études. Hrsg. u. eingel. von K. Flasch (Frankfurt a. M., 1969). About the writings of Giles of Rome (Egidio Romano, Aegidius Romanus), see the works of G. Bruni, “Catalogo critico delle opere di Egidio Romano,” La Bibliofilia, 36 (1934), pp. 78–110; 37 (1935), pp. 247–306, 357–375, and 418–440; “Di alcune opere inedited e dubbie di Egidio Romano,” RTAM, 7 (1935), pp. 174–196; Le opere di Egidio Romano (Florence, 1936). For the authorship and manuscript tradition of the de

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erroribus philosophorum, see J. Koch, “Studiem zur handschriftlichen Überliefrung des Tractatus de erroribus philosophorum,” in Aus der Geisteswelt des Mittelalters (Miscellany in honor of M. Grabmann), in BGPTMA, 3rd supplement (Münster, 1935), pp. 862–877, and the edition Errores Philosophorum. Critical Text with Notes and Introduction by Joseph Koch, English Translation by John O. Riedl (Milwaukee, 1944). A chief work for biographical information is the edition of Theoremata de esse et essentia, Edg. Hocedez, ed. (Louvain, 1930); Hocedez is an acute student of Aegidius Romanus: “Gilles de Rome et Henri de Gand sur la distinction réelle, 1276– 1287,” Gregorianum, 8 (1927), pp. 358–384; “Gilles de Rome et Saint Thomas,” in Mélanges Mandonnet, vol. 1 (Paris, 1930), pp. 385–409; “La condamnation de Giles de Rome,” RTAM, 4 (1932), pp. 34–58. See J. Paulus, Henri de Gand. Essai sur les tendences de sa métaphysique (Paris, 1938), in particular for the polemic between Aegidius and Henri. About Aegidius Romanus’s political thought, besides the De regimine principum, written for Phillip the Beautiful, which was very early divulged also in the vulgar, in the edition and introduction of F. Corazzini (Florence, 1858), see also De potestate ecclesiastica, in the edition of R. Scholz (Weimar, 1929), of which S. Bross wrote in Gilles de Rome et son traité “de ecclesiatsica potestate” (Paris, 1930). Members in the first school of Aegidius, among others, were Gilles of Viterbo (or James of Viterbo), Agostino d’Ancona, Bartolomeo of Urbino, Bonsembiante Badoario, and Bonaventure of Padua. In particular about Giles of Rome see the more recent P. Glorieux, “Les premiers écrits de Gilles de Rome,” Recherches de Théologie ancien et médieval, 41 (1974), pp. 204–208; M. A. Hewson, Giles of Rome and the medieval theory of conception. A study of the “De formatione corporis humani in utero” (London, 1975). 2. Giles of Viterbo and Agostino of Ancona James (Giles, Egidio) of Viterbo was born around 1255, studied in Viterbo and then in Paris, where in 1293 succeeded to Aegidius Romanus. In 1300, he was in Naples; in 1302, Boniface VIII named him Bishop of Benevento, and thereafter Archbishop of Naples. He died before March 1308. About him, see H. X. Arquillière, Le plus ancien traité de l’Eglise. Jacques de Viterbe: De regimine christiano (1301–1302). Etudes des sources et édition critique (Paris, 1926); P. Glorieux, Répertoire des maîtres en theologie de Paris au XIIIe siècle, vol. 2 (Paris, 1934), pp. 309–312; M. Grabmann, “Die Lehre des Jakob von Viterbo (d. 1308) von der Wircklichkeit des göttlichen Seins,” MAGL, vol. 2, pp. 490–511; F. Casado, “El pensamiento filosófico del beato Santiago de Viterbo,” in La Ciudad de Dios, 163 (1951), pp. 437–454; 164 (1952), pp. 301–331; 165 (1953), pp. 103–144, 283–302, 491–500; O. Lottin, “Psichologie et morale,” BTAM, num. 4, pp. 559–569. Of Giles of Viterbo besides the De regimine christiano various Quaestiones exist. Giles died in 1308 as Archbishop of Naples and left four Parisian disputed quodlibets (1293–1296) published by P. E. Ypma: “Jacobi de Viterbio O.E.S.A. Disputatio prima de quolibet,” Cassiciacum, Supplement num. 1 (Würzburg, 1968); “Disputatio secunda tertia quarta,” Cassiciacum, Supplement num. 2–5 (1969, 1973). See E. P. Mahoney, “Themistius and the Agent Intellect in James of Viterbo and other Thirteenth Century Philosophers (Saint Thomas, Siger of Brabant, and Henry Bate),” Augustiniana, 23 (1973), pp. 422–467; E. Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire et la bibliothèque de Jacques de Viterbe,” ibid., 24 (1974), pp. 247–282 (see also of Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité litteraire de J. de V. jusqu’à 1300,” ibid., 25 (1975), pp. 223–282); F. Ruello, “Les fondements de la liberté humaine selon Jacques de

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Viterbe O.E.S.A. Disputatio num. 1 de Quodlibet q. 7,” ibid., pp. 283–347; John F. Wippel, “The dating of James of Viterbo Quodlibet I and Godfrey of Fontaines Quodlibet VIII,” ibid., pp. 348–386. About Agostino Trionfo d’Ancona, see M. Grabmann, “Der Metaphysikcommentar des Augustinus Triumphus von Ancona,” Scholastik, 16 (1941), pp 11–23. For his political writings, see R. Scholz, Unberkannte kirchenpolitische Stretschriften aus der Zeit Ludwig des Bayern (Rome, 1911–1914), 2 vols. About him and other scholars mentioned see A. Zimmermann, Ontologie oder Metaphisik? Die Diskussion über Gegenstand der Metaphysik im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Leiden-Köln, 1965) and again of Zimmermann keep in mind the useful Verzeichniss ungedruckter Kommentare zur Metaphysik und Physik des Aristoteles aus der Zeit von etwa 1250–1350 (Leiden, 1971). 3. Gerard of Bologna. Hugolin of Orvieto Concerning the Carmelite Gerard of Bologna, see B. M. Xiberta, De scriptoribus scholasticis saeculi XIV ex ordine Carmelitarum (Louvain, 1931), pp. 74–110; P. De Vooght, Les sources de la doctrine chrétienne d’après les théologiens du XIVe siècle et du debut du XVe. Avec le texte intégral des XII première questions de la “Summa” inédite de Gérard de Bologne (died 1317) (Bruges, 1954); for which, see pp. 265–492 of the mss. “Oxford, Merton Collection 149,” and “Vatican Borgh. Lat. 27”; B. Smalley, “Gerard of Bologna and Henry of Ghent,” RTAM, 22 (1955), pp. 125–129; P. De Vooght, “La méthode théologique d’après Henri de Gand et Gérard of Bologna,” RTAM, 23 (1956), pp. 61–87. Regarding Gerard of Bologna’s bibliography see also B. M. Xiberta, “Magistri Gerardi Bononiensis 0. Carm., Quaestio de Dei cognoscibilitate (Summa theologica, q. 13),” in Miscellanea Nardi Medioevo e Rinascimento (Florence, 1955), vol. 2, pp. 829–870. Regarding Hugolin of Orvieto, besides the mentioned studies of Michalski, see J. Rousset, “Hugolin d’Orvieto. Une controverse à la faculté de théologie de Bologne au XIVe siècle,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’Ecole française de Rome, 47 (1930), pp. 63–91, which contains also a small part of the treatise De Deo uno et trino against two late followers of Joachim of Fiore; A. Zumkeller, Hugolin von Orvieto und seine theologische Erkenntnislehre (Würzburg, 1941), a valuable work for the bibliography and for the edition of the Proem to the commentary on the Sentences; F. Corvino, “Il de perfectione specierum di Ugolino d’Orvieto,” Acme, 7 (1945), pp. 73– 105; of Corvino, see the edition of De perfectione specierum, Acme, 8 (1955), pp. 119–265. About Hugolin of Orvieto see Der Physikkommentar Hugolins von Orvieto OESA. Ein Beitr. z. Erkenntnislehre d. spätmittelalterl. Augustinismus. Hrsg. Willigis Eckermann (Berlin-New York, 1972) (but consult F. Corvino, “La polemica antiaristotelica di Ugolino da Orvieto nella cultura filosofica del sec. xiv,” in the volume Filosofia e cultura in Umbria tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Atti del IV Convegno di studi umbri (Perugia, 1967), pp. 407–458). About the later Nominalism, see A. Birkenmejer, “Marco da Benevento und die angbl. Nominalistenakademie zu Bologna (1494–1498),” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 38 (1925), pp. 336–344. Marco da Benevento was previously studied by F. Ehrle, “Der Sentenzenkommentar Peters von Candia,” Franziskanische Studien, supplement 9 (Münster, 1925), in rapport to the discussions on via antiqua and via moderna in 14th and 15th centuries. Birkenmejer instead researched the disciple of Domenico Maria Novara, friend and teacher of Copernicus: Marco Beneventano, Kopernik, Wapowski, a najstarsza geograficzna Polski (Krakóu, 1901). Marco’s astronomical studies brought him to theological disputes; with Paolo Barbo of Soncino, in 1494, he pub-

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lished the commentary on the Sentences of Saint Thomas, and, perhaps, on the same period, published an edition of Paulus Venetus. Relating to political writings, see in particular, besides the mentioned works of Scholz, U. Mariani, Scrittori politici agostiniani nel sec. XIV (Florence, 1927), where he considers Giles of Rome, Agostino d’Ancona, and Giles of Viterbo.

Eight THE ORIGINS OF HUMANISM (pp. 129–138) 1. Middle Ages and Humanism. Consciousness of Renovation It is certainly not necessary in this case to explore the enormous production of literature on Humanism and Renaissance, since major bibliographical informations and general problems can be seen in Hans Baron, “Renaissance in Italien,” in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 17 (1927), pp. 226ff; 21 (1931), pp. 95ff.; P. O. Kristeller and J. H. Randall, jr., “The Study of the Philosophies of the Renaissance,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), pp. 449–496; C. Carbonara, Il secolo XV (Milan, 1943), pp. 449–517; “Survey of Recent Scholarship in the Period of Renaissance Studies,” The American Council of Learned Societies, Series I (1945). For the history of the historiography of the Renaissance, see in particular W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1948); H. Schulte Nordholt, Het Beeld der renaissance. Een historiographische Studie (Amsterdam, 1948); F. Chabod, L’età del Rinascimento, in the miscellany offered to B. Croce (Naples, 1950), vol. 1, pp. 125– 207; H. Bayens, Begrip en problem van de Renaissance (Leuven, 1952); Il Rinascimento. Significato e limiti, Atti del III Congresso Internazionale sul Rinascimento (Firenze, 1953); D. Cantimori and E. F. Jacob, La periodizzazione dell’età del Rinascimento nella storia d’Italia e in quella d’Europa, X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze storiche (Florence, 1955), pp. 307–363; A. Sapori, “Medioevo e Rinascimento. Spunti per una diversa periodizzazione,” Archivio Storico Italiano, 115 (1957), pp. 135–164; also see “Moyen Âge et Renaissance en Italie. Pour un remaniement des périodes historiques,” Annales, 2 (1956), pp. 433–457; D. Cantimori, “Il problema rinascimentale proposto da A. Sapori” in Studi in onore di A. Sapori (Milan, 1957), pp. 937–947 (also in Studi di storia, pp. 366–378). In an appendix to F. Chabot, Machiavelli and the Renaissance (London, 1960), pp. 201–247, an excellent reasoned bibliography exists. Systematic reviews of the most recent studies are to be found in Studies in Philology, published annually with a rich and accurate systematic bibliography; in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 16 (1954), pp. 375–385 with A. Chastel’s “L’Humanism italien. Travaux récents”; Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 37 (1955), pp. 105–122 with A. Buck’s “italienischer Humanismus”; and in general in specialized magazines as Renaissance News, Studies in Renaissance, and Rinascimento. In regard to the history of thought, see T. Gregory, “Gli studi italiani sul pensiero del rinascimento,” Rassegna di Filosofia, 1 (1952), pp. 201–213; 2 (1953), pp. 51–62; considering the whole Renaissance panorama is C. Vasoli, “La civiltà dell’Umanesimo e il problema del Rinascimento,” in the vol. Prospettive storiografiche in Italia (Genoa, 1956), that had appeared in the journal Itinerari, issues 22–24 that were dedicated to G. Salvemini. The volume of C. Angeleri, Il problema religioso del Rinascimento (Florence, 1952) is well informed and G. De Blasi, “Problemi critici del Rinascimento,” in the vol. Letteratura Italiana (Milan, 1956), pp. 203–416 is precious.

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Let’s here mention the classic works of Burckhard, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch, D. Valbusa, trans., with introd. of E. Garin; Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, Zwei Abhandlungen über die Grundlage moderner Bildung und Sprachkunst, D. Cantimori, trans. (Florence, 1935); Dilthey, Werltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen sei Renaissance und Reformation, G. Sanna trans. (Venice, 1927), 2 vols.; Huizinga, Herfsttij der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden, B. Jasink, trans., with introduction of E. Garin (Florence, 1953); Voigt, Die Viederbelebung der klassichen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus, D. Valbusa, trans., with additions and corrections of G. Zippel (Florence, 1890–1897), 3 vols.; and Walser, Gesammelte Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance, partial translation of M. Corssen, with introduction of E. Garin (Florence, 1942). In addition to the above, see De Ruggiero, Rinascimento Riforma e Controriforma (Bari, 1961); G. Saitta, Il pensiero italiano nell’Umanesimo e Rinascimento (Bologna, 1949–1951), 3 vols.; E. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig-Berlin, 1927); G. Gentile, Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento (Florence, 1940); P. O. Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); idem, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956); idem, Renaissance Thought (New York, 1961–1965); W. Moench, Die italienische Platonrenaissance und ihre Bedeutung für Frankreichs Literatur und Geistesgeschichte (Berlin, 1936); E. Panofsky-F. Saxl, Dürers “Melencolia I” (Leipzig-Berlin, 1923) and the new edition of R. Klibansky: E. Panofsky-F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the history of natural philosophy, religion and art (New York, 1964). For the contribution of the Warburg Institute, see the introd. of E. Garin to F. Saxl, Lectures (Bari, 1965); G. Toffanin, Storia dell’Umanesimo (Naples, 1933), 3 vols., and again in Bologna, 1951; W. Rüegg, Cicero und der Humanismus (Zurich, 1946); again E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1960); idem, The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York, 1962); J. Macek, Italská renesance (Praha, 1965). Concerning particular aspects, see H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300– 1800 (New York, 1957); A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo. The History of Science, A.D. 400–1650 (London, 1957); L. Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur (Heidelberg-Halle a.d. Saale, 1918–1927); V. Rossi, Il Quattrocento (Milan, 1938); R. Sabbadini, Il metodo degli umanisti (Florence, 1922); L. Thorndike, A History of magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1923–1958), 8 vols.; M. Boas, The Scientific renaissance, 1450–1630 (London, 1962). About the “consciousness” or awareness that the humanists possessed of a radical renovation, see especially F. Simone, La coscienza della rinascita negli umanisti francesi (Rome, 1949). Among the works that with originality of research and materials have dealt with the themes and problems touched in the text, see H. Baron, Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); idem, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955), 2 vols., but reviewed, enlarged and republished in one volume by Princeton in 1966. Valuable for the documentation is L. Matines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists (Princeton, 1963). Many reactions stimulated the book of H. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950), on which see the reviews: B. W. Whitlock, “The Counter-Renaissance,” in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 20 (1958), pp. 434–439; D. Cantimori, “L’Antirinascimento,” in Studi di Storia, pp. 455–460. About the historical background, see M. Gilmore, The World of Humanism (New York, 1952); D. Hay, The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background (Cambridge, 1962). Fundamental for

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some specific problems and very suggestive is J. Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (London, 1940), with English editions in 1953 and 1961 in New York. Lastly, concerning the Italian philosophy in 15th and 16th century, see the two systematic presentations: E. Garin, “The fifteenth century in Italy” and L. Firpo, “La philosophie des seizième et dix-septième siècles” in Philosophy in the Mid-Century. A Survey (Florence, 1959), pp. 95–119. There is no point here in mentioning the different phases of the discussion on the historiographic categories of Humanism and Renaissance. On the general problem see Chaim Perelman, Les categories en histoire (Bruxelles, 1969), in which it is possible to read the important intervention of F. Masai, “La notion de Renaissance,” pp. 57–86, purposely with an equivocal and misunderstood subtitle. A critical and well-informed exposition of the entire debate can be found with a wealth of bibliographical information in the volume of C. Vasoli, Umanesimo e Rinascimento (Palermo, 1976). A rapid but equally essential presentation with rich information is found in M. Giliberto, Il Rinascimento. Storia di un dibattito (Florence, 1975). It should be noticed that since 1966 there is a most valuable publication, Bibliographie Internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance from Geneva. From the publication of 1965, we have the information on all that is published around the world; until 1973, ten voluminous books have appeared that covered all that has been published until 1973. The following works are among those that have contributed to the discussion or that should be kept handy by the scholars in their different value and in the specific fields of research: Ch. Bec, Les marchands écrivains à Florence 1375–1434 (Paris-La Haye, 1967); J. E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom. Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, 1978) (this book challenges the theses of Baron more with emphasis than arguments and information); R. Romano, Tra due crisi: l’Italia del Rinascimento (Turin, 1971) (it is mostly an anthology of previous writings); C. Trinkaus, “In our Image and Likeness.” Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (London, 1970), 2 vols.; D. Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence. Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970) (Italian version was printed in Bologna 1976); Various Authors, Les écrivains et le pouvoir en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance, Edited by A. Rochon (Paris, 1973– 1974), 2 vols.; J. Macek, Il Rinascimento italiano (Rome, 1972) (the original work was published in 1965); W. Ullmann, Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism (London, 1977). In line with the traditional interpretations are instead these works: B. Suchodolski, Anthropologie philosophique de la Renaissance (Wroctaw-Warszawa, 1976; A. Heller, L’uomo del Rinascimento (Florence, 1977) (the original edition was in Hungarian and dated 1967). A reconsideration of the question in light of cultural programs and myths elaborated at an intellectual level between Middle Ages and Modern Age can be found in E. Garin, Rinascimento e rivoluzioni (Bari, 1976). Many important contributions of a general character but also on particular questions and individuals exist in the two miscellaneous volumes in honor of P. O. Kristeller: Itinerarium Italicum. The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations, Edited by Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas A. Brady (Leiden, 1975); Philosophy and Humanism. Renaissance Essays, Edited by E. P. Mahoney (New York, 1976) (with essays of R. Lemay on the polemic of Fiandino against Pomponazzi, of M. Pine about Pomponazzi; of F. E. Cranz on the editions of Aristotle with the commentary of Averroès, of J. Soudek on the version of Bruni of the Economici, of Mahoney about Vernia, of W. F. Edwards about Leoniceno, etc.). Concerning Cola see P. G. Ricci, “Il commento di Cola di Rienzo alla Monarchia di Dante,” in Studi Medievali, 6 (1965), pp. 665–708.

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2–3. The Interpretation of Burdach. Renovatio and Rebirth. Cola di Rienzo To value the thesis of Burdach it is necessary to keep in mind, together with his complex of documented contributions, also the great work Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation. Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutchen Bildung (Berlin, 1912–1933), in the second volume Briefwechsel des Cola di Rienzo, Konrad Burdach and Paul Piur, eds., of which there are five parts: (1) K. Burdach, Rienzo und die geistige Wandlung seiner Zeit (1913–1928); (2) Kritische Darstellung der Quellen zur Geschichte Rienzos (1928); (3) Critical text of Lesarten und Anmerkungen (1912); (4) Urkundliche Quellen zur Geschichte des Cola di Rienzo (1912); (5) Nachlese zu den Texten, Kommentar (1929). See also P. Piur, Cola di Rienzo, J. Chabod Rohr, trans. (Milan, 1934). 4–6. The Religion of the Humanists In reference to the crisis of Scolasticism, in addition to the works already mentioned of K. Michalski and A. Maier, see especially on scientific thought P. Duhen, Le système du monde (Paris, 1913–1960), 10 vols. As to the problem of the religious interpretations of the age of Humanism and its origins, rather than to the “religion of the humanists,” besides the thesis of Pastor in his Storia dei Papi (Rome, 1925), 3 vols, see H. Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien (Berlin, 1885, 1904); V. Zabughin, Storia del Rinascimento cristiano in Italia (Milan, 1924); and, for the philosophy, F. Olgiati, L’anima dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento (Milan, 1925).

Nine FROM PETRARCH TO SALUTATI (pp. 139–166) 1. Albertino Mussato. The Love of Petrarch for the Ancients About Mussato, seen as a whole, there is the essay of M. Dazzi, Il Mussato preumanista, 1261–1329. L’ambiente e l’opera (Venice, 1964), with bibliographical informations also on the Paduan ambiance; in the particulars, concerning the de lite inter Naturam et Fortunam, see Guido Billanovich and G. Travaglia, “Per l’edizione del De lite inter Naturam et Fortunam e del Contra casus fortuitos di A. Mussato,” Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova, 31–42 (1942–1954). As for the pre-humanistic ambiance, see R. Weiss, Il primo secolo dell’Umanesimo. Studi e Testi (Rome, 1949), which in particular studies Geremia of Montagnone and his Compendium moralium notabilium (pp. 15–50) and Geri of Arezzo (pp. 51–56). For the rapports of Petrarch with the prehumanistic ambiances, G. Billanovich has written Petrarca letterato, vol. 1: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome 1947). For the fundamental question on the valuation of Mussato and his place within the polemic on “poetry” and the “ancients,” which developed through Boccaccio and Petrarch, and arrived to the contrast between Salutati and Dominici, the books to be consulted are E. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinishes Mittelalter (Bern, 1948), pp. 219–232; G. Vinay, “Studi sul Mussato, part 1: Il Mussato e l’estetica medievale,” GSLI, 126 (1949), pp. 113–159; G. Billanovich, “Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte tra il Petrarca e il Boccaccio,” in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di B. Nardi, vol. 1, pp. 3–76. As far as Petrarch goes, in general and for his importance on the awakening of humanistic studies, consult P. De Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme (Paris, 1907), 2 vols.; G. Gentile, Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence, 1936), pp. 4–97; R. De Mattei, Il sentimento politico del Petrarca (Florence, 1944); J. H. Whitfield, Petrarca e il Rinas-

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cimento (Bari, 1949); U. Bosco, Francesco Petrarca (Bari, 1961). Dealing with the polemic with the Aristotelian “physicists” is P. O Kristeller, “Petrarch’s Averroists: a note on the history of Aristotelism in Venice, Padua and Bologna,” Bibliothéque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 14 (1952), which also appeared in Mélanges de Augustin Renaudet, pp. 59–65; idem, “Il Petrarca, l’Umanesimo e la Scolastica a Venezia,” in La Civiltà veneziana del Trecento (Florence, 1956), pp. 149–178; in general also his “Umanesimo e Scolastica nel Rinascimento italiano,” an essay of 1950, many times published, and which, at last, appeared in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), pp. 553–583. In regard to Petrarch’s rapports with the Augustinian tradition, see P. P. Gerosa, L’umanesimo agostiniano del Petrarca (Turin, 1927). Relevant for some aspects of Petrarch’s thought is K. Heitmann, Fortuna und Virtus. Eine Studie zu Petrarcas Lebensweisheit (Köln, 1958); idem, “Petrarca und Humanismus des 12, Jahrhundert,” Romanische Forschungen, 68 (1950–1957), pp. 149-151. The two volumes of Prose (Milan-Naples, 1955) and Rime, Trionfi, Poesie Latine (Milan-Naples, 1951) constitute a good selection of works, of which we recommend the notes for indications about the ancient editions and the volumes published by national publishers; for this, see also Invenctivae contra medicum, P. G. Ricci, ed. (Rome, 1950); De otio religioso, G. Rotondi and G. Martellotti, eds. (Città del Vaticano, 1958); P. Piur, Petrarcas “Buch ohne Namen” und die päpstliche Kurie (Halle a. d. Saale, 1925). Useful are still the translations of Fracassetti’s 5 vols. of Familiares (Florence, 1863–1867) and the 2 vols. of Senili (Florence, 1869–1870). Lastly, see W. Handschin, F. Petrarca als Gestalt der Historiographie. Seine Beurteilung in der Geschichtsschreibung von Frühhumanismus bis zu Jacob Buckhardt (Basel, 1964). Concerning the Venetian Culture see the essay of G. Billanovich, “Il preumanesimo padovano,” in the second volume of the cited Storia della cultura veneta; G. Ronconi, Le origini delle dispute umanistiche sulla poesia (Mussato e Petrarca) (Rome, 1976) (with extented citations from texts of Mussato). But see also the volumes Dante e la cultura veneta (Florence, 1966); Petrarca, Venezia e il Veneto, Edited by G. Padoan (Florence, 1976). About Petrarch whose celebrations in 1974 have increased considerably the literature see his profile by A. E. Quaglio, Scienza e mito nel Boccaccio (Padua, 1967) with a rich and well organized bibliography, pp. 197–237. In particular concerning his thought see the new edition of the book of P. P. Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano del Petrarca. Influenza agostiniana. Attinenze medievali (Turin, 1966). Consult also the first volume of the important work of Rico, Vida u obra de Petrarca, vol. 1: Lectura del “Secretum” (Venice, 1974); the proceedings of “Convegno internazionale linceo (24– 27 April 1974)” in Rome 1976 (Atti dei Convegni Lincei, num. 10, of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei); vol. 17 of Italia Medievale e Umanistica, the first of the two issues dedicated to Petrarch (the second of 1975 contains an index of the mss.); the already mentioned volume Petrarca, Venezia e il Veneto. In 1975 an edition of selected works of Petrarch was published in Florence: it contains the Canzoniere, the Trionfi, and the Familiari in the text Rossi-Bosco with an Italian translation of E. Bianchi. In 1974, U. Dotti edited a new edition of the Sine nomine with Latin text and translation. Always in 1975 in Turin two volumes of Opere latine appeared with translation of A. Bufano, Edited by B. Aracri and C. Kraus Reggiani (with an introduction of M. Pastore Stocchi). Concerning the polemic on “poetry” and Boccaccio see Branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence, 1975) (in particular the notes at pp. 298–299; but on the culture of Boccaccio important A. E. Quaglio,

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Scienza e mito nel Boccaccio (Padua, 1967); and see also S. P. Marrone, “Domenico Silvestri’s Defense of Poetry,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 13 (1973), pp. 115–132; Ermolao Barbaro il Vecchio, Orationes contra poetas. Epistolae, Edited by G. Ronconi (Florence, 1972). 2. Cicero and Augustine. Petrarch and Luigi Marsili About Marsili, see C. Casari, Notizie intorno a Luigi Marsili (Lovere, 1900); C. Vasoli, “La ‘Regola per ben confessarsi’ di Luigi Marsili,” Rinascimento, 4 (1953), pp. 39–44. 3. Science and Philosophy. Plato and Petrarch. Barlaam and Leonzio Pilato In regard to Barlaam, in addition to the old works of G. Mandalari, Fra Barlaamo calabrese maestro di Petrarca (Rome, 1888) and of F. Lo Parco, Petrarca e Barlaam (Reggio Calabria, 1905), see G. Gentile, Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento, where, at pp. 48–51, are analyzed the Ethica secundum stoicos, many times printed, and, according to Gentile, much like the Secretum. More recent works are Barlaam Calabro, Epistole greche, G. Schirò ed. (Palermo, 1954), with an introductive essay by Schirò who refers to previous works from 1931 onward; J. Meyendorff, “Un mauvais théologien de l’unité du XIVe siècle: Barlaam le Calabrais,” in 1054–1954. L’Eglise et les Eglises, Etudes et travaux sur l’Unité chrétienne offerts à dom Lambert Baudoin (Chevetogne, 1954), pp. 47–64; C. Giannelli, “Un progetto di Barlaam calabro per l’unione delle Chiese,” in Miscellanea Mercati, vol. 3, pp. 154–208; idem, “È Francesco Petrarca o un altro Francesco, e quale il destinatario del De primatu papae di Barlaam Calabro?” in Studi in onore di G. Funaioli (Rome, 1950), pp. 83–97. The one mentioning the attacks of Barlaam to Plato was Filelfo, and the saying was divulged at the time of the polemic between Aristotelians and Platonists. The writings of Barlaam are in PG, vol. 151 (the Ethica secundum stoicos is at columns 1341–1364). About Leonzio Pilato, but with rich indications on the whole Greek culture, see A. Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio. Le sue versioni omeriche negli autografi di Venezia e la cultura greca del primo umanesimo (Venice-Rome, 1964). 4. Petrarch and Aristotle About some of the polemic motives among the humanists, see E. Garin, “La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del ‘300 e i ‘barbari britanni’,” La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, 64 (1961). 5–7. Coluccio Salutati and Petrarch. Francesco Landini. The Thought of Salutati Concerning the Florentine groups, see A. Wesselofsky, Il Paradiso degli Alberti (Bologna, 1867), 4 vols. with an abundant documentation; L. Mehus, Vita Ambrosii Traversarii (Florence, 1759), which constitutes the first volume of the epistles of Traversari and is still today a precious panorama on the Florentine cultural life between the 14th and 15th century; A. Manetti, “Roberto de’ Rossi,” Rinascimento, 2 (1951), pp. 33ff.; C. Vasoli, “Polemiche occamiste,” Rinascimento, 3 (1952), pp. 119– 141, with the brief poem of F. Landini from “ms. Ricc. 688, in laudem loyce Ocham,” pp. 137–140, previously edited by Wesselofsky and Böhner in Franziskanische Studien, 26 (1939), pp. 78ff. Of Salutati, see the Epistolario, ed. by F. Novati in 4 vols. (Rome, 1891–1905); the De Tyranno, ed. by A. von Martin (Berlin-Leipzig, 1914), Italian version (Bologna, 1942), and English version by E. Emertlon, Humanism and Tyranny. Studies in

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Italian Trecento (Cambridge, Mass., 1925); the De laboribus Herculis, ed. by B. L. Ullman (Zurich, 1951); the De Fato is in ms. “Vat. Lat. 2928”; the De saeculo et religione, ed. B. L. Ullman (Florence, 1957); also E. Garin, I trattati morali di Coluccio Salutati (Florence, 1944); the De Verecundia and De nobilitate legum et medicinae can be found in the edition of Garin, with Italian translation (Florence, 1947). About Salutati, there is the monograph of B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua, 1963), with valuable bibliography; Walser, Gesalmmelte Studien (Basel, 1932), pp. 23–37; A. von Martin, Mittelalterliche Welt und Lebensanschauungen in Spiegel d. Schriftenh Coluccio Salutati’s (Berlin, 1916); idem, Coluccio Salutati und das humanistische Lebensideal (Berlin, 1916); L. Borghi, in Annali della Scuola Superiore di Pisa (1934), pp. 75–102, 469–472; J. Cinquino, “Coluccio Salutati Defender of Poetry,” Italica, num. 26, pp. 131–135; G. M. Sciacca, La visione della vita nell’umanesimo (Palermo, 1954); idem, Il concetto di tiranno dai Greci a Coluccio Salutati (Palermo, 1953); W. Rüegg, “Quellen und Ziel von Salutati’s De Fato et Fortuna,” Rinascimento, 5 (1954), pp. 154–190; E. Gilson, “Notes sur une frontière contestée,” AHDLMA, 25 (1958), pp. 65–81; J. Reginald O’Donnel, “Coluccio Salutati on the Poet-Teacher,” Mediaeval Studies, 22 (1960), pp. 240–256; M. Jannizzotto, Saggio sulla filosofia di Coluccio Salutati (Padua, 1959), in regard to which (and to the discussion between Ullman and Gilson) see E. Garin, “A proposito di Coluccio Salutati,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 15 (1960), pp. 73–82. 8. Martha and Mary Of Giovanni Dominici is available the Regola del governo di cura familiare, D. Salvi ed. (Florence, 1860) and then in 1925; the Libro d’amore di carità, A. Ceruti, ed. (Bologna, 1889); the Lucula noctis, R. Coulon, ed. (Paris, 1908) and then E. Hunt, ed. (Notre Dame, 1940). About Dominici there are the 2 vols. of A. Roesler (Freiburg im Bresgau, 1893–1894). Concerning the polemic on poetry, see M. L. Plaisant, “Un opuscolo inedito di Francesco da Fiano in difesa della poesia,” Rinascimento, 12 (1962), pp. 119–162; I. Taú, “Il Contra oblocutores et detractores poetarum di Francesco Fiano,” in Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 4 (1965), pp. 253–350. About Francesco Barbaro, see P. Gothein, F. Barbaro, Früh-Humanismus und Staatkunst in Venedig (Berlin, 1932), with good bibliography at pp. 393–401. 9–10. Law and Medicine For the problems dealt in the text, see L. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century. Studies in the History of Medicine and Surgery, Natural and Mathematical Science, Philosophy and Politics (New York, 1929); but for the chapter on “Medicine versus Law,” see idem, in Romanic Review, 17 (1926), pp. 8–31; E. Garin, “Umanesimo e vita civile,” Atti dell’Accademia fiorentina di scienze morali “La Colombaria,” 15 (1947), pp. 469–492; idem, “La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento,” in Testi editi e inediti (Florence, 1947); G. F. Pagallo, “Nuovi testi per la disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento: la quaestio di Bernardo da Firenze e la disputatio di Domenico Bianchelli,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 2 (1959), pp. 467–481, important article for the texts and the information on the manuscripts. On the humanistic polemic between the 14th and the 15th century (Trecento and Quattrocento) see A. Lanza, Polemiche e berle letterarie nella Firenze del primo Quattrocento (Rome, 1971), in which, among other things, are reprinted the “Versus facti in laudem loyce Ocham” of Francesco Landini, pp. 233–238, and the “Invettiva” of Cino Rinuccini, pp. 261–267; very important essay of G. Tanturli, “Cino Rinuccini

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e la scuola di Santa Maria in Campo,” Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 17 (1976), pp. 625– 674, where the correct reading of ms. “II, iv, 311” of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence is restored, a text of great importance for the reconstruction of the culture and the teaching in the city of Florence toward the end of the 14th century (Trecento). Concerning the “dispute umanistiche” see also N. W. Gilbert, “The Early Italian Humanists and Disputation,” in the volume Renaissance, Studies in Honour of Hans Baron, Edited by A. Molho and J. A. Tedeschi (Florence, 1971), pp. 201–226. About Salutati consult R. Witt, “The Rebirth of the Concept of Republican Liberty in Italy,” in above cited Renaissance, pp. 173–199; R. A. Bonnell, “Key concepts to an understanding of Salutati’s thought on politics and government,” Annuale medievale, 7 (1966), pp. 51–56; R. A. Bonnell, “An early humanistic view of the active and contemplative life,” Italica, 43 (1966), pp. 225–239; R. B. Donovan, “Salutati’s Opinion of Non-Italian Latin Writers of the Middle Ages,” Studies in the Renaissance, 14 (1967), pp. 185–201. Many contributions are found in: E. Kessler, Das Problem des frühen Humanismus. Seine philosophische Bedeutung bei Coluccio Salutati (München, 1968) (but see J. Lindhardt, En renaissancetaenkrs syn. En kritisk undersogelse af Coluccio Salutatis skrift “De nobilitate legum et medicinae” (Kobenhavn, 1965); A. Petrucci, Coluccio Salutati (Rome, 1972) (with bibliography, pp. 118–132); R. Witt, Coluccio Salutati and his public letters (Geneva, 1976). Of Dominici (Giovanni di Domenico Banchini) G. Cracco has traced a biographical profile in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1963), vol. 5, pp. 657–664; see also P. Da Prati, Linguaggio e pensiero di Giovanni Dominici nel “de conceptione Virginis” (Naples, 1965); idem, Giovanni Dominici e l’Umanesimo (Naples, 1965); Various Authors, Giovanni Dominici, Saggi e inediti, in the new series of Memorie domenicane, 1 (1970). Of Francesco Barbaro see the biography in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1964), vol. 6, pp. 101–103, by G. Gualdo.

Ten THE WORLD OF HUMANITY (pp. 167–218) For the religious aspects of many of the authors here treated see the enormous work of R. L. Guidi, Aspetti religiosi nella letteratura del Quattrocento (Rome-Vicenza, 1973– 1976) (in which loci and texts of Salutati, Bracciolini, Valla, Guarino, Alberti, and even Palmieri, Vegio, Pizolpasso, Barbaro, Savonarola and many others are included). There are general discussions and analises of texts in Ch. Bec, L’Umanesimo civile (Turin, 1974); V. De Caprio, L’Umanesimo (Florence, 1976); F. Tateo, La letteratura umanistica, oggi (Messina, 1976). On the Greeks see D. J. Geanakoplos, Bisanzio e il Rinascimento (Rome, 1967) (Italian translation of the volume Greek Scholars in Venice of 1962); but see also Byzantine East and Latin West. Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance (New York-Evanston, 1966). About the pedagogues and the educational ideals see the additions to the edition of 1976 of E. Garin, L’educazione in Europa, pp. 283–296; of the volumes of Sabbadini see the reprint (Florence, 1967) (with additions and introduction of Garin); but consult A. Franceschini, Giovanni Aurispa e la sua biblioteca, Notizie e documenti (Padua, 1976). A collection of old essays, but still important is that of D. Cantimori, Umanesimo e religione nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1975); of a particular value for the humanis-

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tic dialectics is the book of Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo. “Invenzione” e “Metodo” nella cultura del xv e xvi secolo (Milan, 1968). For particular aspects of the Florentine culture and on rhetoric, see G. Holmes, The Florentine Enlightenment. 1400–1450 (London, 1969), and consult H. H. Gray, “Renaissance humanism: the pursuit of eloquence,” in Renaissance Essays, Edited by P. O. Kristeller and Ph. P. Wiener (New York, 1968), pp. 199–216; G. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (New York, 1969). About L. Bruni, besides the article of Vasoli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1972), vol. 14, pp. 618–633, see H. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago, 1968); D. J. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiographies in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); E. Garin, Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, Studi e ricerche (Pisa, 1970), pp. 21–42; N. S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance. Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970). 1. Luigi Marsili. The Meetings of Santo Spirito Alongside the work of Wesselofsky, Il Paradiso degli Alberti di Giovanni da Prato (Bologna, 1867), see A. Levasti, ed., Mistici del Duecento e del Trecento (MilanRome, 1935); F. Del Secolo, Un teologo dell’ultimo Trecento: Luigi Marsili (Trani, 1897); J. Hijmans-Tromp, Vita e opere di Agnolo Torini (Leiden, 1957). Concerning the colloquia at Santo Spirito, see A. Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia Platonica in Firenze (Florence, 1902), pp. 174–189. About Niccoli, see G. Zippel, N. Niccoli (Florence, 1890). In the codex “Magliab. VI, 201” cited by Smith, the editor of the Epistolario of Vergerio (Rome, 1934), and by Cammelli as of an unknown author, Bruni, Vergerio, and Palla Strozzi are introduced in a dialogue; Chrysoloras is mentioned at pp. 60–61. The codex is the work of canon Francesco Zeffi, deceased in Florence in 1546, the biographer of the Strozzis. About Chrysoloras, see G. Cammelli, Manuele Crisolora (Florence, 1941); on Jacopo Angeli, see E. Weis, “Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia (ca. 1360–1410/1411),” in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di B. Nardi, vol. 2, pp. 801–827. In regard to the translations of Plato, see E. Garin, “Ricerche sulle traduzioni di Platone nella prima metà del sec. XV,” in ibid., pp. 339–374; and the bibliography cited in that work, to be integrated with A. Belli, “Le versioni umanistiche dell’Assioco pseudoplatonico,” in La Parola del Passato, 39 (1954), pp. 442–467; V. Zaccaria, “Piercandido Decembrio traduttore della Repubblica di Platone,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 2 (1959), pp. 179–206; G. Resta, “Antonio Cassarino e le sue traduzioni da Plutarco e Platone,” in ibid., pp. 207–283. 2. The Aristotelianism of Bruni. The Ancients and the Moderns In relation to the pedagogues, see W. H. Woodward, La pedagogia del Rinascimento (Florence, 1923); G. Saitta, L’educazione dell’umanesimo in Italia (Florence, 1928); G. Vidari, L’educazione in Italia dall’Umanesimo al Risorgimento (Rome, 1930); E. Garin. L’educazione in Europa, 1400–1600 (Bari, 1957); idem, Il pensiero pedagogico dell’umanesimo (Florence, 1958), with a rich collection of texts, documents, and bibliography. For the discovery of codices, the two volumes of R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci nei secoli XIV e XV (Florence, 1905) and Nuove ricerche (Florence, 1914) are still valid and precious; also see the Carteggio of the Aurispa (Rome, 1931) that Sabbadini edited.

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About Bruni, see first H. Baron, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Humanistischphilosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe (LeipzigBerlin, 1928), important for the editions, the mss., and the chronology. Integrating Baron, is the work of L. Bertalot, “Forschungen über Leonardo Bruni Aretino,” Archivium Romanicum, 15 (1931), (1932), pp. 284–323; idem, “Zur Bibliographie der Übersetzungen des Leonardo Bruni,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 27 (1937), pp. 178–195; 28 (1938), pp. 268–285. Of Bertalot are the reviews of H. Baron, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe in Historische Vierteljahrschrift, 29 (1934), pp. 385–400, and also H. Baron, “Forschungen über Leonardo Bruni Aretino. Eine Erwiderung,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 22 (1932), pp. 352– 371. The eulogy of Giannozzo Manetti is found in the edition of Bruni’s letters edited by Mehus in 2 vols. (Florence, 1741). About Bruni’s Greek researches, in addition to Della Torre, see G. Cammelli, Manuele Crisolora (Florence, 1941). Bruni’s Dialogi were printed in modern fashion by Kirner (Leghorn, 1889), by Klette in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Litteratur der Italiänischen Gelehrten-renaissance (Greifswald, 1889), by Wotke (Wien, 1889), and E. Garin, Prosatori latini del Quattrocento (MilanNaples, 1952), pp. 44–99. The Isagogicon was reprinted by Baron. Concerning Bruni’s thought, there are F. Tocco, “L’Isagogicon moralis disciplinae di Leonardo Bruni,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 6 (1892), pp. 157–159; L. Zannoni, “Il liber vitae Aristotelis di Leonardo Bruni,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 3 (1911); J. Freudenthal, “Leonardo Bruni als Philosoph,” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, 25 (1911). In particular on the translation of the Nichomachean Ethics, on the polemics it gave way, and on Battista de’ Giudici, see M. Grabmann, “Eine ungedruckte Verteidigungsschrift von Wilhelms von Moerbeke Übersetzung der Nichomachischen Ethik gegen über dem Humanisten Leonardo Bruni” of 1913, in the series of MAGL, I, pp. 440–448; A. Birkenmajer, “Der Streit des Alonso von Cartagena mit Leonardo Bruni Aretino,” BGPTMA, 20 (1922), pp. 129–210. Relevant corrections to the chronology of the works of Bruni are now in H. Baron, The Crisis, published in 1966. 3. St. Bernardino of Siena Of St. Bernardino are Prediche volgari per la prima volta messe in luce, G. Milanesi, ed. (Siena, 1853); Le prediche volgari (1427), L. Banchi, ed. (Siena, 1880–1889), in 3 vols,, edition reproduced by P. Bargellini (Milan, 1936); Le prediche volgari (1424– 1425), C. Cannarozzi, ed. (Pistoia-Florence, 1934–1940), in 5 vols.; Operette volgari, D. Pacetti, ed. (Florence, 1938). For Bernardino’s Latin works, see D. Pacetti, Ratio criticae editionis (Quaracchi, 1947); Opera omnia, vols. 1–2: Quadragesimale de Christiana religione (Quaracchi, 1956); vols. 6–7: Tractatus de vita Christiana etc., Sermones (Quaracchi, 1957); vol. 8: Sermones imperfecti, etc. (1963). About Bernardino’s thought: M. Sticco, Il pensiero di S. Bernardino da Siena (Milan, 1924); D. Scaramuzzi, La dottrina del b. Duns Scoto nella predicazione di S. Bernardino da Siena (Florence, 1930): San Bernardino da Siena. Saggi e ricerche pubblicati nel quinto centenario della morte (1444–1944) (Milan, 1945); “S. Bernardino da Siena,” in Studi Francescani, 42 (1945), a special issue for the fifth centennial anniversary of his death. About Bernardino of Siena see the excellent biographical note of Manselli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1967), vol. 9, pp. 21–26, and the volumes of the critical edition of his Latin works.

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4. Poggio Bracciolini. Carlo Marsuppini A precious instrument of work for the study of Poggio Bracciolini are the four volumes of texts in anastatic edition and original transcription of unedited works edited by Riccardo Fubini (Turin, 1964–1969); of Fubini see also the Introduzione alla lettura dei “Contra Hypocriticas” di Poggio Bracciolini (Turin, 1970 ca.). Check also A. Petrucci’s and E. Bigi’s biographical data of Poggio in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1971), vol. 13, pp. 640–646. The edition of the works of Poggio is that of Basel of 1538, now reproduced by R. Fubini (Turin, 1964), as the first volume of a collection of Opera omnia, which intended to gather the various writings, concerning which, see the preface of Fubini himself. For the letters, see the edition of Tonelli in three vols. (Florence 1832–1861), and A. Willmans, “Aus humanistischen Handschriften, 1: Über die Briefsammlungen des Poggio Bracciolini,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekwesen, 30 (1913), pp. 289–463. The Historia de varietate fortunae was entirely published in Paris in 1723. As for his life, writings, and culture the fundamental work is that of E. Walser, Poggius Florentinus. Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1914), with an important appendix; but still valuable are G. Shepherd, Vita di Poggio Bracciolini, T. Tonelli, trans. (Florence, 1825), 2 vols.; F. Tateo, “Poggio Bracciolini e la dialogistica del Quattrocento,” Annali della facoltà di Lettere e Fiolosofia di Bari, 7 (1961); also G. Pontano, I trattati delle virtú sociali, F. Tateo ed. (Rome, 1965). 5. Epicureanism. Cosma Raimondi About the topic in general, see M. Lehnerdt, Lucretius in der Renaissance (Königsberg, 1904,) with an important appendix; on Cosma Raimondi, R. Sabbadini, “I codici delle opere retoriche di Cicerone,” Rivista di filologia classica, 16 (1888), pp. 107– 113; F. Novati-G.Lafaye, “Le manuscript de Lyon no. C,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, 11 (1891, pp. 391–405; G. Mercati, “Miscellanea di note storico-critiche, Cosma Raimondi cremonese,” Studi e documenti di storia e diritto, vol. 15 (1894). The text here discussed was first published by E. Santini, “Cosma Raimondi umanista e epicureo,” Studi storici, 8 (1899), pp. 153–159; E. Garin gave an Italian translation in Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento (Florence, 1942), pp. 87–92; for a second ms. “Laur. Ashb. 267” see idem, “La Defensio Epicuri di Cosma Raimondi,” Rinascimento, 1 (1950), pp. 100–101; the new text can be seen in idem, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961), pp. 87–92. Concerning the whole Epicureanism of the period, including all the previous bibliography on the topic, see G. Radetti, “L’epicureismo nel pensiero umanistico del Quattrocento,” in Grande Antologia Filosofica (Milan, 1964), vol. 6: pp. 839–961. 6. Filelfo. Alipía. Conciliation between Plato and Aristotle Regarding the biography of Filelfo, we have C. De Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo (Milan, 1808), 3 vols.; for the bibliography, G. Benadduci, Contributo alla bibliografia di F. Filelfo (Tolentino, 1902) and in Atti e Memorie della R. Deputazione di Storia Patria per le province delle Marche (1901), with the additions of Zippel, in GSLI, 42 (1903), p. 403, and the indications of A. Calderini, “I codici milanesi delle opere di F. Filelfo,” Archivio Storico Lombardo (1915), pp. 335–411; for posterior publications, V. Rossi, Il Quattrocento 69, n. 44. For Filelfo’s relations with the Greeks, see T. Klette, Die griechischen Briefe des Fr. Philelphus (Greifswald, 1890), and E. Legrand, Cent-dix letters greques de F. Filelfo (Paris, 1892), with Italian translation of L. Agostinelli and G. Benadduci (Tolentino, 1902); G. Cammelli, Manuele

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Crisolora (Florence, 1941). About the Greek culture of Filelfo, see A. Calderini, “Ricerche intorno alla biblioteca e alla cultura greca di Francesco Filelfo,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, 20 (1913), pp. 204–424. About Filelfo in Florence, see G. Zippel, Il Filelfo a Firenze (Rome, 1899). For the translation of the Rhetorica, see A. Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia Platonica in Firenze, pp. 288ff.; also for Fr. Philelphi, Oratio habita Florentie in principio Ethicorum, iii Kal. Ian. 1431, see Zippel, ibid., pp. iii–v of the appendix. About the Commentationes in ms. “Magliab. VI, 209 (II, 70),” see C. Errera, “Le Commentationes Florentinae de exilio di Fr. Filelfo,” in Archivio Storico Italiano, 5 (1890). The third book of the Commentationes translated by E. Garin is available in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, pp. 493–517. The Convivia Mediolanensia is found in the Parisian edition of the Quattrocento cited by Rossi, Il Quattrocento, p. 166, and editions and codices are indicated by Benadduci, Contributo alla bibliografia di F. Filelfo, p. 42. The De morali disciplina, published in Venice in 1552 and 1578, is now preserved in “Laur. LXIX, 289.” For the letters, the editions and the codices that preserve them, see G. Benadduci, ibid., pp. 6ff. Concerning Filelfo as philosopher, see Aug. Messer, “Franz Philelphus, De morali disciplina,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 9 (1896), pp. 337–341; F. Tocco, “Ancora del De morali disciplina di Francesco Filelfo,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 9 (1896), pp. 486–491; G. Radetti, L’epicureismo, pp. 849–853; N. Badaloni, “Discussioni umanistiche su fato e libertà,” Critica Storica, 1 (1962), pp. 277–293. About Filelfo see again L. Firpo, Francesco Filelfo educatore e il “Codice Sforza” della Biblioteca Reale di Torino (Turin, 1967). 7. Lorenzo Valla The Basel edition of 1540 (and 1543) was translated into Italian, edited and published by G. Radetti as Lorenzo Valla, Scritti filosofici e religiosi (Florence, 1953). An anastatic reproduction of the edition of Basel and of all the dispersed writings was made available in two volumes by E. Garin in 1962 through the print of Bottega d’Erasmo of Turin. About the versions/editions of the de vero bono and de voluptate, see M. De Paniozza, “Le tre redazioni del De voluptate del Valla,” in GSLI, 121 (1943), pp. 1– 22; idem, “Le tre versioni del de vero bono del Valla,” Rinascimento, 6 (1955), pp. 349–364. Useful is G. Radetti, “Nota bibliografica sulla filosofia del Valla,” Archivio di Filosofia (an issue on Umanesimo e Machiavellismo) (Padua, 1949), pp. 127–135. About Valla in general, see L. Barozzi-R. Sabbadini, Studi sul Panormita e sul Valla (Florence, 1891); G. Mancini, Vita di Lorenzo Valla (Florence, 1891); M. von Wolff, Lorenzo Valla (Leipzig, 1893); W. Schwahn, Lorenzo Valla (Berlin, 1896). About some aspects of his thought: E. Maier, Die Willensfreiheit bei Lorenzo Valla und P. Pomponazzi (Bonn, 1914), a dissertation; A. Corsano, “Note sul De voluptate del Valla,” in GCFI (1940) (Studi sul Rinascimento), pp. 7–35; F. Adorno, “Di alcune orazioni e prefazioni di Lorenzo Valla,” Rinascimento, 5 (1954), pp. 201–226; G. Radetti, “La politica secondo Valla,” in GCFI, 29 (1950), pp. 326–334; idem, “La religione di Lorenzo Valla,” in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi (Florence, 1955), pp. 595–620; C. Vasoli, “Le Dialecticae disputationes del Valla e la critica umanistica della logica aristotelica,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 12 (1957), pp. 412–434; 13 (1958), pp. 27–46. From a whole point of view, see F. Gaeta, Lorenzo Valla. Filologia e storia nell’umanesimo italiano (Naples, 1955); with a wealth of indications and suggestions is G. Zippel, “Lorenzo Valla e le origini della storiografia umanistica a Venezia,” Rinascimento, 7 (1956), pp. 93–133; idem, “La Defensio quaestionum in philosophia di Lorenzo Valla, e un noto processo

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dell’Inquisizione napoletana,” Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, 69 (1957), pp. 319–347. To be also seen is P. Mesnard, “Une application curieuse de l’humanisme critique à la théologie: l’Eloge de Saint Thomas par L. Valla,” Revue Thomiste, 55 (1955), pp. 159–176. About Francesco Zabarella and his de felicitate libri tres (Padua, 1655), see U. Caregaro Negrin, “Il de felicitate di F. Zabarella e due trattati sul bene e la felicità del sec. XV,” Classici neolatini, 2 (1906), pp. 288ff. In the last few years the studies on Valla, under all of his aspects, have flourished and editions of unpublished works have been critically prepared while other editions already existent have been revised and republished according to modern criticism. Of De vero falsoque bono the edition of Maristella De Panizza Lorch (Bari, 1970) has appeared; A. Perosa has redacted the unedited Collatio Novi Testamenti (Florence, 1970); as an appendix of his essay S. I. Camporeale in 1972 has printed the Apologus; in 1973, 0. Besomi edited the Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum. Of the most relevant works about Valla we are listing the most important: M. Fois, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla nel quadro storico culturale del suo ambiente (Rome, 1969), with a most accurate bibliography, pp. 640–667; G. Di Napoli, Lorenzo Valla. Filosofia e religione nell’umanesimo italiano (Rome, 1971); S. I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972). On the last three vols. see F. Gaeta, “Recenti studi su Lorenzo Valla,” in Rivista della Chiesa in Italia, 29 (1975), pp. 559–577; C. Vasoli, “Nuove prospettive su L. Valla,” in Nuova Rivista Storica, 57 (1973), pp. 448–458); S. I. Camporeale, “Da Lorenzo Valla a Tommaso Moro,” in Memorie Domenicane, 90 (1973), pp. 9–102; Hanna-Barbara Geri, Rhetorik als Philosophie. Laurentius Valla (München, 1973); W. Setz, Lorenzo Vallas Schrift gegen die Konstantinische Schenkung: De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione. Zur Interpretation und Wirkungs-geschichte (Tübingen, 1975) (the editio minor is in the appendix, the maior will be published in volume 10 of MGH with title Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters); S. I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla tra medioevo e rinascimento, Encomion s. Thomae, 1457 (Pistoia, 1977) (extracted from Memorie Domenicane, 7 (1977). Furthermore, for some critical observations on the most recent literature about Valla see R. Fubini, “Note su Lorenzo Valla e la composizione del De voluptate,” in the miscellany I classici nel Medioevo e nell’Umanesimo (Geneva, 1975), pp. 11–57. 8. About Pleasure Concerning the de libero arbitrio, see the edition of M. Anfossi (Florence, 1934). 9. Epicureanism of the Academy. Callimaco Esperiente. Platina About Leto see Zabughin, Giulio Pomponio Leto. The book is in two parts, one published in Rome in 1909, the other in Grottaferrata, 1910–1912. On the identification of Pietro Calabro, see B. Kieskowski, Studi sul platonismo del Rinascimento in Italia (Florence, 1936), who believed it possible, but on Kieskowski read the review of Kristeller in Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2nd series, 7 (1938), pp. 341–349. The above cited letter of Agostino de’ Rossi can be found in Pastor, Storia dei Papi (Rome, 1925), vol. 2, pp. 741–745. About Callimaco, see B. Kieskowski, “Filippo Buonaccorsi detto Callimaco e le correnti filosofiche del Rinascimento,” GCFI, 15 (1934), pp. 281–294. The philosophical epistles of Callimaco to Ficino and Pico have been partially published by H. R. Zeissberg, “Kleinere Geschichtsquellen Polens in Mittelalter,” Archiv für österreichische Geshichte, 55 (Wien, 1877), pp. 41–94; the epistle de daemonibus was

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reprinted correctly by P. O. Kristeller in Supplementum ficinianum (Florence, 1937), vol. 2, pp. 225–228, together with other three letters. The quaestio de peccato addressed to Pico, of which Zeissberg gave only the beginning and the end, has been analyzed and re-edited by E. Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961), pp. 280–286, from ms. “Monac. Lat. 464”; and see on this G. Radetti, “Demoni e sogni nella critica di Callimaco Esperiente al Ficino,” Archivio di Filosofia (on the topic Umanesimo e esoterismo), (Padua, 1960), pp. 111–121; idem, “Il problema del peccato in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e in Filippo Buonaccorsi detto Callimaco Esperiente,” in L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’umanesimo (Florence, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 103–117. Concerning the relationship of Callimaco with Pico, see G. Zathey, “Le milieu de Callimaque Experiens et de Pico,” ibid., pp. 119–147, with the text of Trialogus in rebus futuris annorum XX proximorum; idem, “Quelques recherches sur l’humaniste Kallimach,” Archivio di filosofia (1960), pp. 123–139. On the important praefatio in somniarum Leonis Tusci philosophi, unjustly neglected by historians, is A. Kempfi, “Une polémique méconnue de Callimaque à propos de Marsilio Ficino,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 17 (1964), pp. 263–272. The Rhetorica of Callimaco was published in 1950 in Warsaw by C. F. Kumaniecki. However, for an understanding of Callimaco’s position, some of the most important texts are found in the biography that he wrote of Gregory of Sanok, Archbishop of Leopolis, who was one of his first protectors in Poland: Vita et mores Gregorii Sanocei. Edidit, commentaries illustravit, in linguam Polonam vertit Irmina Lichónska (Varsaviae, 1963); and see A. Nowicki, Grzegorz z Sanoka, 1406–1477 (Warszawa, 1958); G. Radetti, “L’epicureismo di Callimaco Esperiente nella biografia di Gregorio di Sanok,” in Atti del Convegno italo-ungherese di studi rinascimentali (1954) and in Ungheria d’oggi, 5 (1965), pp. 46–53. Of Grzegorz z Sanoka Callimaco wrote: “In the sciences and in what pertains to goals, he preferred Epicurus. As for what has been written to confute the opinions of that man, he valued them little, and rather considered vain all those who were to enjoy such activity or were occupied in doing it.” (In physicis rationibus et his, quae finem spectant, Epicurum praeferebat. Ex illis vero, quae ad confutandum eius viri opiniones conscripta sunt, admodum pauca comprobabat, quin immo vanos censebat omnes, qui in ea re aut fruissent aut essent occupati, in ibid., p. 66). About Callimaco’s political activity, see G. Dalla Santa, “Di Callimaco Esperiente (Filippo Bonaccorsi) in Polonia e di una sua proposta alla Repubblica di Venezia nel 1495,” Nuovo Archivio Veneto, 26 (1913); G. Agosti, Un politico italiano alla corte polacca nel secolo XV. Il Consilium Callimachi. Memorie dell’Istituto Giuridico dell’Università (Turin, 1930), with the Latin text and the translation of the Polish text. About Platina exist A. Zeno, Dissertazioni Vossiane (Venice, 1752), vol. 1, pp. 242–256, and especially the introduction of G. Gaida to his edition of the Vite dei Pontefici, in the new edition of Rerum Italicarum Scripta, 3, 1 (1913–1932); S. Bissolati, Le vite di due illustri cremonesi (Milan, 1856); Luzio-Renier, “Il Platina e il Gonzaga,” GSLI, 13, pp. 430–440; V. Zabughin, G. Pomponio Leto (Rome, 1909); G. Cammelli, Giovanni Argiropulo (Florence, 1941), pp. 97–98. For Platina’s relationship with Ficino and Florence, see A. Della Torre, Storia dell’accademia platonica, pp. 352ff. The fact that Platina taught Greek to Ficino is given in his biography by Corsi, whom Della Torre repeated. On the rapports between Ficino and Platina, and thus the Roman Academy, the one to insist is Kieszkowski, Studi sul platonismo del

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Rinascimento in Italia, pp. 43–44, who mentioned also that Ficino listed Platina among those familiar to him and as having correspondence with Callimaco. About the dates of Platina’s political writings, Della Torre, at p. 534, referred to a letter of 1474 (from “codex Magliab. VIII, 1390”) of Donato Acciaiuoli, in which thanks are given to Platina for having sent the De optimo cive to Lorenzo De’ Medici who received it with great pleasure. It would seem therefore that the De optimo was composed sometimes in 1474, while the De principe in 1470. Holding an opposite opinion is Zabughin who inverted the order. Interesting of Platina is also the In Bessarionis laudem, written as he first arrived at Rome. T. A. Vairani, Cremonensium Monumenta Romae extantia, pars I (Romae, 1778), published an epistolary exchange of Platina with Rodriguez Sanchez, a Vita di Vittorino da Feltre, the teacher of his own teacher Ognibene of Lonigo. See the editions of Platina’s works: Venice, 1511; Köln, 1519; and Paris, 1530. A new edition of the political writings of Platina exists with translation and introduction in F. Battaglia in his appendix to the edition of Palmieri (Bologna, 1944). In addition to his philosophical writings (de falso et vero bono dialogi III, dialogus contra amores ad Lodovicum Stellam Mantuanum, dialogus de vera nobilitate ad amplissimum Ursinum archiepiscopum Tranensem) and the oratio de pace Italiae componenda et bello Thurcis indicendo, we should mention the de honesta voluptate et valetudine ad amplissimum ac doctissimum D. B. Roverellam, S. Clementis presbyterum Cardinalem, in ten books, which is a dietetic treatise rather than a manual of food recipes, rich with information on the Roman Academy and general reflection. See A. Della Torre, Paolo Marsi da Pescina (Rocca San Casciano, 1903). 10. Bartolomeo Fazio and Giannozzo Manetti Of Fazio’s de vitae felicitate seu summi boni fruitione liber one edition exists (Antverpiae, 1556). This was reprinted together with de excellentia et praestantia hominis in 1611 (Hanoviae) in a volume containing the writings of Felino Sandeo (Epitome de regibus Siciliae et Apuliae), Panormita, Aeneas Sylvius, and Manetti. See C. Braggio, “Giacomo Bracelli e l’umanesimo dei Liguri,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 23 (1890), especially pp. 207–230; F. Gabotto, “Un nuovo contributo alla storia dell’umanesimo ligure,” Ibid., 25 (1892), pp. 129ff. For the biography of Manetti, the collected texts in vol. 2 of Collezione di opere inedited o rare dai primi tre secoli della lingua (Turin, 1862) must be consulted: “Commentario della vita di Messer Giannozzo Manetti scritto da Vespasiano da Bisticci aggiuntevi altre vite inedited del medesimo e certe cose volgari di esso Giannozzo, ossia lettere e ‘protesti’.” In regard to his writings, see A. Zeno, Dissertazioni vossiane, vol. 1, pp. 170–186; F. Pagnotti, “La vita di Niccolò V scritta da Giannozzo Manetti,” Archivio della Società romana di storia patria, 14 (1891), pp. 429–436. The oratio funebris in solemni Leonardi Historici is preferable to the edition of Mehus of the epistles of the Aretino; for the Aristotelian translations and the mss. that contain them, see E. Garin, “Le traduzioni umanistiche di Aristotele nel secolo XV,” Atti dell’Accademia fiorentina di scienze morali “La Colombaria,” 8 (1950) (Florence, 1951). The dialogus consolatorius de morte filii (see also in Ricc. 1200) was translated by Manetti himself (ms. “Magliab. VI, 181”). The Adversus judaeos et gentes exists in ms. “Urb. Lat. 154.” The de dignitate et excellentia hominis was printed in Basel in 1532 (its preface and the fourth book from the ms. “Urb. Lat. 5,” can be read also in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, pp. 423–487.

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As for some aspects of Manetti’s political activities, see L. Rossi, Guerra in Toscana, 1447–1448 (Florence, 1903), with some documents of Manetti; N. Lerz, “Il diario di Griso di Giovanni,” Archivio Storico Italiano, 117 (1959), pp. 247–278; on his library, U. Cassuto, I manoscritti palatini ebraici della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Città del Vaticano, 1935); G. M. Cagni, “I codici vaticani palatino-latini appartenenti alla biblioteca di Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459),” La Bibliofilia, 62 (1960), pp. 1–43; on Manetti, biblical translations, S. Garofalo, “Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia,” Biblica, 27 (1946), pp. 338–375, with an appendix of texts; on the thought of Manetti, besides the general works already cited, see N. Badaloni, “Filosofia della mente e filosofia delle arti in Giannozzo Manetti,” Critica storica, 2 (1963), pp. 395–450. It must be noticed that in recent times the attention of scholars has converged on Giannozzo Manetti and his works. Heinz Willi Wittschier studied and published his orations: Giannozzo Manetti, Das Corpus des Orationes (Köln, 1968), which includes a good bibliography, pp. 207–217. M. Montuori published in full the life of Socrates and C. Moreschini that of Seneca: Vita Socratis, first edition with an introduction and the variants of the codices (Florence, 1974); C. Moreschini, La Vita Senecae of Giannozzo Manetti, a volume in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 3rd series, vol. 6 (1976), pp. 847–875. A. De Petris analyzed “L’Adversus Judeos et Gentes,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 16 (1976), pp. 193–205. E. Battisti published the singular Adumbratio that Giannozzo sent to Angelo Acciaiuoli for the completion of the cupola of Brunelleschi (in appendix to “Il mondo visuale delle fiabe,” a volume in Atti del V congresso internazionale di studi umanistici (Padua, 1960), pp. 310–320. And it is possible to read in a critical edition the De dignitate et excellentia hominis, Edited by E. R. Leonard (Padua, 1975). 11. Matteo Palmieri About Palmieri, see A. Zeno, Dissertazioni vossiane, vol. 1, pp. 100–124; E. Bottari, Matteo Palmieri (Lucca, 1885), taken from Atti della R. Accademia Lucchese di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 24 (1885); G. B. Benvenuti, Quadri Storici (Florence, 1889), 2nd ed., pp. 1–69; A. Messeri, M. Palmieri cittadino di Firenze nel secolo XV, a copy of what is in Archivio storico italiano, 5, 13 (1894). His funerary eulogy, drafted by Rinuccini, can be found in Fossi, Monumenta ad Alamanni Rinuccini vitam contexendam (Florence, 1791). The autograph ms. of Vita civile is in Florence, “Cod. Bibl. Naz. Centr. II, iv, 91” and has been already mentioned in the first ed. of this Storia della Filosofia Italiana; but see now L. Rainaldi, “Notizia dell’autografo della Vita Civile,” in Rinascimento, 5 (1954), pp. 133–136. The first edition of the Vita civile is the “giuntina” of 1529. On the Vita civile, see D. Bassi, “Il primo libro della Vita civile di Matteo Palmieri e l’Institutio oratoria di Quintiliano,” GSLI, 23 (1892), pp. 182–207; and consult H. Baron’s studies on governmental ethics in the 15th century. According to the narration of Vespasiano of Bisticci, the ms. of the Vita civile was given to the proconsul of the notary art, and remained in the house of the proconsul until 1557, when it was damaged by the flood of the Arno. As damaged as it was, it was brought to the Laurenziana (“Laur. XL, 53,” with the comment of Dati); of this, Bandini published the first canto and the commentary of Dati (Cat. Codd. Lat. 5, 74–96). From “Laur. XL, 53” and “Magliab. Strozz. II, ii, 41,” Margaret Rooke published in 1927 the whole first book and canti 1–15 of the second book for which see Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 8 (Northampton, Mass.-Paris, 1927), pp. 1–2; in 1928, Rooke published the remaining parts ibid., 9 (1927–1928), pp. 1–4. One ms. of the

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Vita civile exists in the Ambrosiana Library, a partial one is placed in the Riccardiana Library. On La città di vita and its vicissitudes, see E. Frizzi, “La città di vita, poema inedito di Matteo Palmieri,” Propugnatore, 11 (1878), pp. 140ff.; G. Boffito, “L’eresia di Matteo Palmieri,” GSLI, 37 (1901), pp. 1–69. Of the Vita civile there is now the cited edition by Battaglia. A “protesto” (a protest) was published by Guasti from the Riccardiana Library (ms. “Ricc. 2322”): Una prosa inedita di Matteo Palmieri fiorentino (Prato, 1850). F. Sarti, “La religione di Matteo Palmieri,” in La Città di vita, 1 (1946), pp. 301–323, makes use of the Libro di ricordi, ecc., preserved in Archivio di Stato of Florence. On Palmieri and especially on others, like Bonaccorso Pitti, Giovanni Morelli, Goro Dati, Pandolfo Collenuccio, C. Varese, Storia e politica nella prosa del Quattrocento (Turin, 1961) should also be pointed out. 12. Alamanno Rinuccini The Dialogus de libertate of Rinuccini, edited by F. Adorno appeared in Atti dell’Accademia Toscana di scienze e lettere La Colombaria, 22 (1957), pp. 265–303; for the Lettere e Orazioni, V. R. Giustiniani, ed. (Florence, 1953). The Ricordi edited by G. Aiazzi exists in the volume Cino Rinuccini, Ricordi storici dal 1282 al 1460 (Florence, 1840). About Rinuccini, see F. Adorno, “La crisi dell’umanesimo civile fiorentino da Alamanno Rinuccini al Machiavelli,” in Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 7 (1952), pp. 19–40, and especially V. R. Giustiniani, Alamanno Rinuccini, 1426–1499. Materialen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des florentinischen Humanismus (Köln-Graz, 1965), with an extensive bibliography. See the review of this book by R. Fubini in Studi medievali, 3rd series, 8 (1967), pp. 938–948. 13. Leon Battista Alberti As for the life of Alberti, see Vita Leonis Baptiste de Albertis in “RR II SS, 25 (1751, 297 b” edited by L. Mehus; L. B. Alberti, Opere volgari, Bonucci ed. (Florence, 1843), I, pp. XCVI and ff.; Ph. Villani, Liber de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus, Galletti ed. (Florence, 1847), pp. 139–148. Many, with good foundations, believed the vita to be of the author himself. Works in general still important are those of G. Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti (Florence, 1911), 2nd ed.; P. H. Michel, Un ideal humain au XVe siècle. La pensée de Léon-Baptiste Alberti (Paris, 1930), with a bibliography at pp. 11–46; C. Grayson, “Leon Battista Alberti,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1 (Rome, 1960), pp. 702–719, which we recommend also for the reference to other writings on Alberti of Grayson; G. Santinello, Leon Battista Alberti. Una visione estetica del mondo e della vita (Florence, 1962). For the editions of the works, see De re aedificatoria (Florence, 1485); Opere, Girolamo Massaini, ed. (Florence, ca. 1499), for which consult IGI, p. 149; Opuscoli morali tradotti e in parte corretti da M. Cosimo Bartoli (Venice, 1568); Opere volgari, A. Bonucci, ed. (Florence, 1843–1849), 5 vols.; H. Janitschek, Kleinere kunsttheorische Schriften (Wien, 1877); Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressa, G. Mancini, ed. (Florence, 1908); Momus, G. Martini, ed. (Bologna, 1943); Della pittura, L. Mallé, ed. (Florence, 1950); Opuscoli inediti … Musca, Vita S. Potiti, C. Grayson, ed. (Florence, 1954); Opere volgari, Edited by C. Grayson (Bari, 1960–1973), in 3 vols., of which the first contains “I libri della famiglia, Cena familiare, Villa”; Intercenali inedite, Edited by E. Garin (Florence, 1965). Grayson has also brought out the De pictura with both Latin and Italian texts (Bari, 1975). Of the De re aedificatoria there is the edition of the Latin text edited by G. Orlandi with a side by side translation;

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notes and introduction are of P. Portoghesi (Milan, 1966), 2 vols. In vol. 12 of Rinascimento (1972), which is totally dedicated to the work of Alberti and to the critical edition of his writings is included also his Vita (for which see R. Fubini and A. Nenci Gallorini, “L’autobiografia di L. B. Alberti, Studio e edizione,” ibid., pp. 21–78). Of the De commodis litterarum atque incommodis there exists the edition of L. Goggi Carotti (Florence, 1976) who wrote the essay “Dalle Intercenali ai libri della Famiglia: la prima formazione di Leon Battista Alberti,” in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 3rd series, 1 (1971), pp. 375–414; of the comedy Philodoxeos L. Martinelli edited the critical edition in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 17 (1977). Grayson’s edition of Famiglia has been reproduced by Romano and Tenenti (Turin, 1969), with an introduction. About Alberti’s philosophical themes see N. Badaloni, “La interpretazione delle arti nel pensiero di L. B. Alberti,” in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 3 (1963), pp. 59–113; J. Gadol, L. B. Alberti, Universal Man of Renaissance (Chicago, 1969); E. Garin, L’età nuova. Ricerche di storia della cultura dal xii al xvi secolo (Palermo, 1969), pp. 215– 234; Rinascite e rivoluzioni, pp. 131–196 (with bibliographical information). Valuable are also the volume of Proceedings of the Convegno Internazionale Linceo, 25–29 April 1972 (Rome, 1974) and the Miscellanea di studi albertiani (Genoa, 1975). For some observations see M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition (Oxford, 1971).

Eleven THE GREEKS IN ITALY (pp. 219–228) 1. The Greek Influence. Byzantine Culture. Gennadius On the more general problem of the influence of the Byzantines or of the rapport with the Byzantines, see G. Pasquali, “Medioevo bizantino,” Civiltà moderna, 13 (1941), pp. 289–320; also in Stravaganze quarte e supreme (Venice, I95I), pp. 93–109. Pasquali absolutely denies a determining contribution of the Byzantine culture to the Renaissance and concluded his bibliographical notes by saying that on the insufficiency and marginality of the Greek studies in the Italian Renaissance the acutely pondered considerations of Augusto Mancini, Italia e Grecia (Florence, 1938, pp. 422ff.) have unfortunately been little known. On the question of the origin of the Renaissance, a question often fruitfully discussed in recent years, there is no motive to accumulate bibliography. It is important, however, to refer to the work of Augusto Heinsenberg, “Das Problem der Renaissance in Byzance,” Historische Zeitschrift (I33, 1925), pp. 393ff. Heinsenberg rightfully denied that in Byzantium there were any periods of Renaissance awakening. The first edition of this book moved from similar positions, but they should be partially modified in this third edition. For a different point of view, see J. Irmscher, “Theodoros Gazes als griechischer Patriot,” in La Parola del Passato (78, 1961), pp. 161–173. An important contribution for the reconsideration of this topic and particularly in regard to Pletho and his rapports with the Italian culture has come from F. Masai, Pléthon et le platonisme de Mistra (Paris, 1956), with a general bibliography at pp. 16–23, in relation to which see E. Garin, Studi sul platonismo medievale (Florence, I958), pp. I53–2I9. In general, for the Byzantine philosophy consult B. Tatakis, La philosophie byzantine (Paris, I949), a supplementary volume for the Histoire de la philosophie of E. Bréhier. About Psello and Byzantine Neoplatonism: Chr. Zervos, Un

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philosophe neoplatonicien du XIe siècle, Michel Psellos (Paris, I920), with bibliography at pp. 24–42. The commentaries of Eustratius of Nicea and MichaeI of Ephesus, often used by the humanists, were published in vols. 20 and 21 of the Commentaria in Aristotelem graeca of the Academy of Berlin. For the writings of Barlaam, see PG, vol. 5, columns 1249–1364” (Ethica secundum Stoicos, 1341–1364). The Opera Omnia of Georgeos Skolarios, the Gennadius, have been critically edited and published by L. Petit, X.-A. Sidéridés, M. Jugie (Paris, 1928–1936). It will be useful to remember that the Aristotelian Skolarios was an active promoter of the Latin Scholasticism in the Greek world. Of Saint Thomas he translated the commentaries on the Analitici secondi, de anima, and Physica. He translated also the de ente et essentia between I445 and 1450 (vol. 6, pp. 154–321), parts of the Summa theologica and of the Summa contra gentiles, after 1464 (vol. 5, pp. 1–510; vol. 6, pp. 1–153), and de fallaciis (vol. 8, pp. 255–282). As it is well known, Skolarios also translated the Summulae logicales of Peter Hispanus (vol. 8, pp. 282–337) and the de sex principiis attributed to Gilberto Porretano (vol. 8, pp. 338–350), the same text Ermolao Barbaro will translate from barbarous Latin to humanistic Latin. George of Trebizond manifestly presents the political background of this Aristotelianism and of this appreciation of the Latin Scholasticism. In the famous Comparationes Trebizond sustained the concordance between Plato on one side and Epicurus and Mohammed on another, but also the revolutionary character of the writings of Plato (Platonis scripta, praecepta, instituta, Graecia perdiderunt), and the necessity of preserving the “western” world from the contagious influence of the PlatonicEpicurean-Islamic materialism (nisi provideatur, similiter ruent occidentalia). In “Adversus Theodorum Gazam in Perversionem Problematum Aristotelis,” Mohler, ed., in Aus Bessarions Gelehrtenrkreis (Paderborn, 1942), pp. 274–342, Trebizond opposed Latin Scholasticism and in particular Albert and Thomas to the Latin and Greek humanists. About the Greeks in general besides the cited volumes of Geanakoplos, see the volume of contributions Venezia e l’Oriente fra tardo Medioevo e Rinascimento, Edited by Agostino Pertusi (Florence, 1966). In particular, about the Council of Florence, besides the fundamental work of J. Gill, Il concilio di Firenze (Florence, 1967) (Italian translation of The Council of Florence (1959), see J. Decarreaux, Les Grecs au Concile de l’Union. Ferrare-Florence 1438–1439 (Paris, 1970). The two volumes of Pertusi, La caduta di Costantinopoli (Fondazione Valla, 1976) offers texts of great significance. 2. Gemistos Pletho. Comparison between Plato and Aristotle About Pletho, the work already cited of Masai, with an exhaustive bibliography, is the most important. Of Pletho’s theological and philosophical works the codex “PG, 160, perí on Aristotélen prós Plátona diaféretai” in Greek in Paris has been published in 1541 and in Latin in Basel in 1574. For the laws, see the edition of C. Alexander, Traité des Lois, ou recueil des fragments, en partie inédits, de cet ouvrage. Texte revu sur les manuscrits, precedé d’une notice historique et critique, et augmenté d’un choix de pieces justificatives, la plupart inédites (Paris, 1858). See also B. Kieszkowski, Studi, (with some texts) at pp. 13–36; R. and F. Masai, “L’oeuvre de G. G. Pléthon,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique (C1. Lettres, 1954), pp. 536–555. For an historical understanding of Hellenism in Pletho, see D.-A. Zakythinos, Le despotat grec de Morée, 2 vols., (Paris, 1932, and Athens, 1953); of great interest is M.-V. Anastos, “Pletho’s calendar and liturgy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers (4, I948), pp. I83–305. Pletho’s De differentiis has been published from an autograph edited by B. Lagarde,

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“Le De differentiis de Pléthon d’aprés l’autographe de la Marcienne,” in 1974, in the journal of Bruxelles, Byzantion, 43 (1973), pp. 312–343. 3. George of Trebizond. Bessarion. Johannes Argyropoulos For the Platonic polemic among the Byzantine immigrants, see especially the 3 volumes of L. Mohler, Kardinal Bessarion als Theologe, Humanist und Staatsmann. Vol. 1: Darstellung (Paderborn, 1923); vol. 2: In calumniatorem Platonis libri IV, with Greek and Latin texts (Paderborn, 1927); vol. 3: Aus Bessarions Gelehrtenkreis (Paderborn, 1942), with the texts of Bessarion, Gaza, Andronicus Callixtus, and Trebizond. The works of Bessarion are from codex “PG, 161” and contains Platina’s eulogy, texts of Trebizond, Costantine Lascaris, Gaza and Andronicus Callixtus). About Argyropulos, see G. Cammelli, Giovanni Argiropulo (Florence, 1941) that is the second volume in a work by Byzantine scholars on the origins of humanism, of which were published vol. 1, Manuele Crisolora (Florence, 1941) and vol. 3, Demetrio Calcondila (Florence, 1954); and see in idem “Andronico Callisto,” in Rinascita (1942, I04), pp. 215, 174– 214. Texts of Argyropulos exist in Sp. Lambros, Argyropouleia (Athens, 1910); K. Müllner, Reden und Briefen italienischer Humanisten (Wien 1899), pp. 3–56. For an indication on his courses, on mss., on his influence, see Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari, 1961), pp. 210–287. The dialectics that the Fathers Inguanez and Muller published in 1943 as a work of Argyropoulos, in Miscellanea Cassinese 25 (Montecassino, 1943), is instead of Trapezond. On this, consult C. Vasoli, “Su una dialettica attribuita all’Argiropulo,” Rinascimento 10 (1959), pp. 157–164; a Compendium de regulis et formis ratiocinandi, of the Argyropoulos has been published from ms. by Vasoli in Rinascimento 15 (1964), pp. 285–339. Extensive parts of de institutione eorum qui in dignitate constituti sunt are found in E. Garin, “Un trattatello inedito di Giovanni Argiropulo,” in Studi in onore di Ernesto Codignola (Florence, 1960), pp. 28–35. We should not forget that some of his courses have been published by Donato Acciaiuoli Expositio in Ethicam Aristotelis published in Florence (San Jacopo a Ripoli, 1478). For the translations, see the already cited Le traduzioni umanistiche d’Aristotele nel secolo xv. About Gaza and de fato see J. W. Taylor, T. Gaza’s de Fato (University of Toronto, 1925) and “More Light on Theodore Gaza’s de Fato“ in Classical Philology, 21, pp. 733–740; also in Mohler, vol. 3, pp. 236–246, “Theodori Gazae de Fato.” For the polemic Gaza-Apostolis-Callixtus, see J. Enoch Powell, “Mickael Apostolios gegen Theodoros Gaza,” in Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 38 (1938), pp. 71–86, with text, but, especially the editions in Mohler: “Theodori Gazae Adversus Plethonem pro Aristotele de substantia” (vol. 3, pp. 151–158); “Michaelis Apostolii ad Theodori Gazae pro Aristotele de substantia adversus Plethonem obiectiones” (vol. 3, pp. 159–169); “Andronici Callisti defensio Theodori Gazae adversus Michaelem Apostolium” (vol. 3, pp. I70–203). On Trebizond there is the monograph of J. Monfasani, George of Trebizond. A Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976) (consult E. Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni, pp. 113–129, about Trapezunzius and Argyropoulos); see also F. Gaeta, “Giorgio di Trebisonda, Le Leggi di Platone e la costituzione di Venezia,” Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, 82 (1970), pp. 479–501; G. Ravegnani, “Nota sul pensiero politico di Giorgio di Trebisonda,” Aevum, 49 (1975), pp. 310–329; Th. Khoury, Georges de Trébizonde et l’union islamo-chrétienne (Louvain, 1971). About Bessarion consult L. Labowski in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1967), vol. 9, pp. 686–696; the issues num. 3–4 of Miscellanea Francescana, 73 (1973), pp. 265–386, dedicated to Bessarion, and Miscellanea marciana di studi bessiaronei (Padua, 1976).

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About Gaza see L. Labowski, “An unknown treatise by Theodorus Gaza,” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (1968), pp. 173–205.About Argyropoulos see J. E. Seigel, “The Teaching of Argyropoulos and the Rhetoric of the First Humanists,” in the volume Action and Convinction in Early Modern Europe. Essays in Memory of E. H. Arbison (Princeton, 1969), pp. 237–360.

Twelve THE SCHOOL OF MARSILIO FICINO (pp. 229–280) 1-3. P. Collenuccio. The Life of Ficino. N. Tignosi. St. Antonino. Epicureanism As to Pandolfo Collenuccio see the essay of C. Varese, “Pandolfo Collenuccio Umanista,” in Storia e politica nella prosa del Quattrocento (Turin, 1961), pp. 148–286 and the bibliographical information given in the notes. See also: Operette morali, poesie latine e volgari, A. Saviotti, ed. (Bari, 1929). Also of Saviotti is Paradolfo Collenuccio (Pisa, 1888). Concerning the Plinian polemic is M. Santoro, “La polemica pliniana fra il Leoniceno e il Collenuccio,” Filologia romanza, 3 (1956), pp. 162–206. For the treatise on education, see P. Collenuccio, Dell’educazione usata dagli antichi in allevare i loro figlioli (Pesaro, I838). Of Leoniceno there is the translation with the Latin text in the appendix of De Plinii in medicina erroribus edited by Loris Premuda (Milan-Rome, 1958). Relating Nicolò Tignosi, Ficino’s teacher, and his writings, besides L. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 1929), pp. 161–173, 308–365 (de ideis), see the comprehensive study of A. Rotondo, “Nicolò Tignosi da Foligno,” Rinascimento, 3 (I958), pp. 2I7–255. On Tignosi two valuable contributions: E. Berti, “La dottrina platonica delle idee nel pensiero di Niccolò Tignosi da Foligno,” in the cited volume Filosofia e cultura in Umbria, pp. 533–565; M. Sensi, “Niccolò Tignosi da Foligno. L’opera e il pensiero (with an appendix of texts, among which the important In eos qui mea in Aristotelis comentaria criminantur opusculum),” Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Perugia, 9 (1971–1972), pp. 361–395. The literature on Ficino is most abundant and it would be sufficient to mention those works that contain a comprehensive bibliography, among which P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York, 1943), translated into Italian with an enriched bibliography (Florence, 1953). This work should be integrated with other studies of Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance’s Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), pp. 33–237 (“Marsilio Ficino and his circle”), and with A. Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’art (Geneva, 1954); M. Schiavone, Problemi filosofici in Marsilio Ficino (Milan, 1957); R. Marcel, Marsile Ficin (Paris, 1958), with bibliography, pp. 746–757; sources for the bibliography: Vita M. Ficini per Joannem Cursium, pp. 479–489; Vita secunda, pp. 630–730; “Sommario della vita di Marsilio Ficino raccolta da M. Piero Caponsacchi,” pp. 73I–734. See D. F. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), pp. 7–59; E. Gilson, “M. Ficin et le Contra Gentiles,” in AHDLMA, 24 (1957), in Paris in 1958. The editions of Ficino’s works appeared in two volumes in Basel in 1561 and 1576. This edition was photo-reproduced by M. Sancipriano and published with a preface of P. O. Kristeller; it must be integrated with the fundamental work of Kristeller, Supplementum ficinianum, 2 vols. (Florence, 1977) that contains information

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also on the Ficinian Circle. In addition, consult also Commentaire au Banquet de Platon, Texte du manuscrit autographe présenté et traduit par R. Marcel (Paris, 1956); Teologia platonica, edited by M. Schiavone, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1965), with text, translation, introduction, and notes. The volumes of the complete works of Ficino have also appeared with text and French translation by R. Marcel (Paris, 1965–1970). Of significant interest is the volume of Sears Jayne, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino (Oxford, 1963). Some unedited contributions can be found in G. B. Alberti, “Marsilio Ficino e il codice riccardiano 581,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 10 (1970), pp. 187–193; R. Pintaudi, Lessico greco-latino. Law. Ashb. 1439 (Rome, 1977); the well-known monograph of Kristeller, Die Philosophie des Marsilio Ficino (Frankfurt a. M., 1972). Of Kristeller is available in Italian a more elementary exposition in Otto pensatori del Rinascimento, R. Federici, trans. (Milan-Naples, 1970), pp. 43–59 (consult also the translation of the original text of the essays of Cassirer, edited by Kristeller, in the volume titled Dall’umanesimo all’illuminismo (Florence, 1967). Concerning the translation of the Neo-Platonic texts see E. Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni, pp. 89ff. On some specific themes see A. B. Collins, “Love and Natural Desire in Ficino’s Platonic Theology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 9 (1971), pp. 435–442; P. Zambelli, “Platone, Ficino e la magia,” in Studia Humanitatis. E. Grassi zum 70. Geburtstag (München, 1973), pp. 121–143. See the English translation The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (London, 1975) presented by Kristeller; the translation is based on a text revised by Kristeller himself, who also has traced “L’état présent des études sur Marsile Ficin” in the volume Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance (Paris, 1976), pp. 59–77. Very useful is the critical edition with introduction and commentary on the Filebo of M. J. B. Alien (University of California Press, 1975). 4-8. Theology. Avicennian and Franciscan Influences Concerning Ficinian Avicennianism, even if in a strict dependency from the discutible point of view of Gilson about the so-called Avicennian Augustinianism, see M. Heitzman, “L’agostinismo avicennizzante e il punto di partenza della filosofia di Marsilio Ficino,” GCFI, 16 (1935), pp. 295–322, 460–480; I7 (1936), I-II (also of Heitzman), in addition to the works cited by Kristeller, in Studja nad akademia platonska we Florencij (Krakow, 1933). For a case of Avicennianism in Florence, see Andreae Catanii Imolensis opus de intellectu et de causis mirabilium affectuum, published in Florence around 1504, a work dedicated to Pier Soderini by a physician of Santa Maria Nuova, a lecturer in philosophy for the years 1502 and 1503. About Pier Soderini, see the introduction of H. Busson to his translation of the de incantationibus of Pomponazzi (Paris, 1930), p. 23; E. Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento, pp. 42–45; and La Cultura Filosofica nel Rinascimento Italiano, pp. 114–115, I24–126. About Avicenna in Italy and its Renaissance success, see M-T. d’Alverny, “Avicenne et les médecins de Venise,” in the cited Miscellanea Nardi, vol. 1, pp. 175–215; on Andrea Alpago, see “Andrea Alpago interprète et commentateur d’Avicenne,” in Atti del XII Congresso internazionale di filosofia (Florence, I960), vol. 9, pp. 1–6, the comprehensive volume of F. Lucchetta, II medico e il filosofo bellunese Andrea Alpago (died in 1522), traduttore di Avicenna. Profilo biografico (Padua, 1964), with bibliography at pp. x–xix. 9. Astrology and Magic. Lorenzo Bonincontri Of Bonincontri and his writings in print and manuscript, see B. Soldati, La poesia astrologica del Quattrocento (Florence, 1906), pp. 118ff. One of his treatises on the soul exists in the ms. “Estense latino 408 ( . F. 6. 18, cc. 81 a–86 a).” About Bonin-

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contri see Grayson’s article in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1970), vol 12, pp. 209–211; P. Landucci Ruffo, “Lorenzo Bonincontri ed alcuni suoi scritti ignorati,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 5 (1965), pp. 171–194. About Pellegrino Prisciani there is a reliable essay of A. Rotondo, “Pellegrino Prisciani (1435ca.–I5I8),” Rinascimento, 11 (1960), pp. 69–110. For some of the aspects here considered on the position of Ficino, and for the de vita coelitus comparanda, fundamental is the work of R. Klibansky, F. Saxl, E. Panofsky, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (New York, 1964). This is the 2nd edition, revised and renewed of the volume of E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Dürers Melencolia, published in Leipzig in 1923, in Studien der Bibliothek Warburg. In regard to Giovanni Rucellai, see Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone: vol. 1: Il Zibaldone Quaresimale. Selected pages edited by Alessandro Perosa (London, 1960), with bibliography at pp. 213–219. Concerning the medicine of the time and the scientifically rigorous work of a humanist, see A. Costa, G, Weber, “L’inizio dell’anatomia patologica nel Quattrocento fiorentino, sui testi di Antonio Benivieni, Bernardo Torni, Leonardo da Vinci,” Archivio De Vecchi per l’anatomia patologica, 39 (1963), pp. 431–878 (a work also important for the edition, translation, and commentary on de abditis nonnullis morborum et sanationum causis of Benivieni). For his rapports with Poliziano and Pico, see Nicolò Leoniceno, De Plinii in medicina erroribus, Edited by L. Premuda (Milan-Rome, I958). 10. The Academy. G. Nesi and B. Colucci. Giles of Viterbo With reference to the Ficinian Circle, see A. Della Torre, Storia dell’accademia platonica di Firenze (Florence, 1902), and P. O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, pp. 35–260. A. Frugoni published the writings of Colucci da Pistoia (Florence, 1939); (and on Colucci Frugoni wrote, “L’umanista Benedetto Colucci da Pistoia,” in Momenti della Rinascita e della Riforma Cattolica (Pisa, 1943), pp. 37–48; L. Borghi published the intellectus voluntatisque excellentia of Alamanno Donati, in La Bibliofilia, 42 (1940), pp. 108–115. In this regard see also E. Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento (Florence, 1942), pp. 526–528. About Nesi see Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia Platonica in Firenze, pp. 422– 425, 692–701; C. Marchesi, Bartolomeo della Fonte (Bartholomaeus Fontius) contributo alla storia degli studi classici in Firenze nella seconda metà del Quattrocento (Catania, 1900), pp. 181–182 (but on Fonzio see Charles Trinkaus, “A Humanist’s Image of Humanism: the Inaugural Orations of Bartolommeo della Fonte,” Studies in the Renaissance 7, pp. 90–I47); E. Garin, Filosofi italiani, pp. 528–531 (the dialogus de moribus exists in ms. “Laur. lat. plut. 77, 24” and in “Bern. 194,” originally in Biblioteca di Santo Spirito of Florence; the poem exists in “Ricc. 2722”). See C. Vasoli, “Giovanni Nesi tra Donato Acciaiuoli e Girolamo Savonarola,” in the volume I miti e gli astri (Naples, 1977), pp. 51–128, with an abundant reproduction of texts, pp. 73– 128; R. Nesi Bonfanti, “Su un dialogo filosofico del tardo Quattrocento. Il de moribus del fiorentino Giovanni Nesi,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 11 (1971), pp. 203–22I. Of Nesi Bonfanti exists in dactylo-script form the critique of the De moribus. About Fonzio (Bartolomeo Fonzi) and the cultural ambient, see, besides Ch. Trinkaus, “The Unknown Poetics of Bartolomeo de Fonzi,” Studies in the Renaissance, 13 (1966), pp. 40–122; Lo scrittoio di Bartolomeo Fonzi umanista fiorentino, Edited by Stefano Caroti and Stefano Zamponi, with a note of E. Casamassima (Milan, 1974). A remarkable personality is that of Giles of Viterbo, whose works unfortunately are mainly unpublished; some pages of the Sententiae ad mentem Platonis (from mss.

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“Vat. lat. 6325”; “Ang. 636”; “Neap. VIII. F. 8”; “Neap. XVI. H. 71”) have been published by E. Massa, I fondamenti metafisici della dignitas hominis e testi inediti di Egidio da Viterbo (Turin, 1954), pp. 54–110. The Scechina and the Libellus de litteris hebraicis have been edited and published by F. Secret, in 2 vols. (Rome, I959). About Giles, see L. Signorelli, II Cardinale Egidio da Viterbo agostiniano umanista e riformatore, 1469–1532 (Florence, 1929), and the contributions of Massa, among which are “Egidio da Viterbo e la metodologia del sapere nel Cinquecento,” in the vol. Pensée humaniste et tradition chrétienne au XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1950), pp. 185– 239; J. W. O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform. A Study in Renaissance Thought (Leiden, 1968) (with a comprehensive bibliography), pp. 192–206; also V. Cilento, “Glosse di Egidio da Viterbo alla traduzione ficiniana delle Enneadi in un incunabulo del 1492,” in the volume of Studi di Bibliografia e di storia in onore di Tammaro De Marinis (Verona, 1964), pp. 281–296. 11. Ludovico Lazzarelli About Lazzarelli see P. O. Kristeller, “Marsilio Ficino e Lodovico Lazzarelli: Contributo alla diffusione delle idee ermetiche nel Rinascimento,” in Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, sect. 2, 7 (1938), pp. 237–262 (reviewed in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, pp. 221–248, and 249–257), to be completed with “Ancora per Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio,” in La Bibliofilia, 43 (1941), pp. 23–28. In particolare about the ms. of the Biblioteca Comunale of Viterbo “II. D. I. 4”; P. O. Kristeller, “Lodovico Lazzarelli e Giovanni da Correggio, due ermetici del Quattrocento e il manoscritto ‘II. D. 1. 4’ della Biblioteca Comunale degli Ardenti di Viterbo,” in the volume Biblioteca degli Ardenti di Viterbo. Studi e ricerche nel 150mo della fondazione (Viterbo, n.d.); “Testi scelti,” Edited by M. Brini, in the issue of Testi umanistici sull’ermetismo (Rome-Milan, 1955), pp. 21–77; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, pp. 64–72. Existent editions are: Crater Hermetis (Parisiis, 1505); Bombyx (Aesii, 1765); for manuscript works see the essays of Kristeller and Brini. In particular, on orphism and the prisca theologia, see D. P. Walker, “Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists,” Journal of the Watburg and Courtauld Institute, 16 (1953), pp. 100–119; “The prisca theologia in France,” in ibid., 17 (1954), pp. 204–259. See also P. Tognetti, “Note sul profetismo del Rinascimento e la letteratura relativa,” Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano e Archivio Muratoriano, 82 (1970), pp. 129–157. 12. Cristoforo Landino and Lorenzo de’ Medici About Landino, A. M. Bandini wrote Specimen literaturae florentinae saec. XV, 2 vols. (Florence, 1748–1751), reviewed by A. Perosa, “Una fonte secentesca dello Specimen del Bandini,” La Bibliofilia, 41 (1941). Of Perosa see also the edition of the poetry of Landino (Florence, 1938). Of the Disputationes there is an unpublished Italian version of Father Jacopo Carpi in the mss. of the “Conv. Soppr., Angeli, F. 5. 639” in the Nazionale Library of Florence, but on this see Kristeller, Supplementum ficinianum, 2, p. 237. The De anima was published by A. Paoli and G. Gentile, in Annali delle Università toscane, 34 (1915), pp. 1–50; new series: 1 (1916), issue 2; (1917), issue 3. In relation to this, see G. Gentile, Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence, 1936), 2nd edition, pp. 108–117. A prolusion to Petrarch is found in F. Corazzini, Miscellanea di cose inedite e rare (Florence, 1853) pp. 125–134; a prolusion In Tusculanas Ciceronis exists in K. Müllner, Reden und Briefe, pp. 118–129; see also E. Garin, Testi inediti e rari di Cristoforo Landino e Francesco Filelfo (Florence, 1949).

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The first quaestio of the Disputationes, text and translation, is found in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento (Milan-Naples, 1952), pp. 716–791. See Cardini, La critica del Landino (Florence, 1973) (with a rich selection of texts); C. Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, Edited by R. Cardini (Rome, 1974), 2 vols. Concerning the cultural ambiance of Florence, see the fundamental volumes of A. Verde, Lo Studio fiorentino. 1473– 1503 (Firenze-Pistoia, 1973–1977). About Lorenzo de’ Medici and his Platonism, see first N. Scarano, “Il platonismo nelle poesie di Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Nuova Antologia, 130 (1893), pp. 605–623; 131 (1893), pp. 49–66; and then A. Buck, Der Platonismus in den Dichtungen Lorenzo de’ Medici’s (Berlin, 1936), on which the observations of Kristeller in GCFI, 19 (1938), pp. 149–153, and in Studies, pp. 213–219. See also J. B. Wadsworth, “Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses, Ficino’s de felicitate, and L’Altercazione of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” in Modern Philology, 50 (1952), pp. 23–31. For a derivation from Boethius, see E. H. Wilkins, “Lorenzo de’ Medici and Boethius,” in Modern Philology, 15 (1917–1918), pp. 255–256. Of particular importance are A. Rochon, La jeunesse de Laurent de Médicis (1449–1478) (Paris, 1963), with a valuable bibliography, pp. 665–692; M. Martelli, Studi laurenziani (Florence, 1965).

Thirteen THE ARISTOTELIANS (pp. 281–294) 1. The Averroists. Urbano of Bologna. Zaccaria of Parma For the majority of the questions and the individuals here discussed, consult the general works already cited. In particular for the logic, see C. Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, vol. 4, pp. 118–298; I. M. Bochénski, A history of formal logic (Notre Dame, 1961); for physics, the volumes of Annaliese Maier, Studien zur Naturphilosophie des Spätscholastik (Rome, 1949–1958); Pierre Duhem, Etudes sur Léonard de Vinci (Paris, 1906–1913), 10 vols.; idem, Le système du monde (Paris, 1913–1958), 10 vols.; and Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in Middle Ages (LondonOxford, 1959); idem, “Aristotelismo padovano e filosofia aristotelica,” in Atti del XII Congresso internazionale di Filosofia, 1958 (Florence, 1960); and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1934). About Urban the Averroist, see Urbanus Averroista philosophus summus ex almifico Servorum Divae Mariae, commentorum omnium Averroys super librum Aristotelis de physico auditu expositor clarissimus. Per probum virum Bernardinum Tridinensem de Monferrato (Venetiis, 1492). Vernia’s quaestio introduces the work of Urban, of whom nothing is known, but see B. Nardi, “Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano,” pp. 103–104, and 318. For the Averroistic tradition in Bologna and in Italy in general during the 14th century, consult M. Grabmann, MAGL, 2 (1963), pp. 261–271; A. Maier, “Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des italienischen Averroismus im 14. Jahrhundert,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 33 (1944), pp. 136– 157; R. A. Gauthier, “Trois Commentaires ‘averroïstes’ sur l’Etique à Nicomaque,” AHDLMA, 16 (1947–1948), pp. 187–336; C. Piana, “Nuovo contributo allo studio delle correnti dottrinali nell’università di Bologna nel sec. XIV,” Antonianum, 23 (1948), pp. 221–254; A. Maier, Die Vorlaüfer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert (Rome, 1949), pp. 251–278; S. Vanni-Rovighi, Le ‘questiones de anima’ di Taddeo da Parma

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(Milan, 1951); Ch. J. Ermatinger, “Averroism in Early Fourteenth Century Bologna,” Medieval Studies, 16 (1954), pp. 35–56. About Paolo Veneto read B. Nardi, “Paolo Veneto e I'averroismo padovano,” in Saggi sull'averroismo padovano (and the notes of G. F. Pagallo, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 14 (1959), pp. 221–27); for the logic, besides C. Pranti, Geschichte der Logik, vol. 4, pp. 118–140, see M. Bochenski, A History of Formal Logic, pp. 161ff., who draws from the Logica magna that he considers a true and proper summa of the more mature medieval logic. On this also see Pauli Veneti summulae cum commentariis (Blanchelli) Menghi Faventini... ac quaestionibus eiusdem... per Franciscum de Macerata revisa (Venetiis, 1498); Benedictus Vecturius Faventinus (Bononiensis) … opusculum in Tisberum de sensu composite ac diviso cum ... collectaneis in suppositiones Pauli Veneti (Bononiae, 1504); Bartholomaeus Manzolus, Dubia super logicam Pauli Veneti iuxta viam realium philosophorum praesertim S. Thomae extricata et resoluta (Venetiis, 1523). As to the biography and his works, still useful are G. Rossi, Alcune ricerche su Paolo Veneto (Torino, 1904) and G. Gentile in La critica, 3 (1905), pp. 417–420; F. Momigliano, Paolo Veneto e le correnti del pensiero religioso e filosofico nel suo tempo (Torino, 1907); G. Gentile, “Intorno alla biografia di Paolo Veneto,” Studi sul Rinascimento, pp. 98–108. For Ugo Benzi da Siena, his life, writings, and thought, see D. P. Lockwood, Ugo Benzi: Mediaeval Philosopher and Physician, 1376–1439 (Chicago, 1951), with bibliography. 2. Paolo Veneto, Ugo Benzi, and Niccolò Fava Concerning the De anima, see the Venice edition of 1504, “ex proprio originali diligenter emendata per clarissimum atrium et medicine doctorem D. Magistrum Hieronymum Surianum, filium prestantissimi quondam artium ac medicine doctoris Domini Magistri Jacobi de Surianis de Arimino.” Regarding the calculatores see for Suiseth, the Calculationum liber, edited by Joannes de Cipro (Padua, 1477), and the edition of Joannes Tollentinas, Calculationes (Papie, 1498). The Sophismata of Entisber and the Consequentie Strodi came to be published in Pavia in 1481, and again in Venice in 1491. Of Entisber the Probationes conclusionum in regulis positarum were published also in Pavia in 1483. Very important are the two following collections: (1) Tractatus Gulielmi Hentisberi de sensu composito et diviso. Regulae eiusdem cum sophismatibus. Declaratio Gaetani supra easdem. Expositio (Gaetani) super tractatus de tribus (praedicamentis). Quaestio Messini de motu localium cum expl.tione Gaetani. Scriptum super eodem Angeli de fosambruno. Bernardi Torni annotata supra eodem. Simon de lendenaria supra sex sophismata (Hentisberi). Tractatus Hentisberi de veritate et falsitate propositionis. Conclusiones eiusdem (Venetiis, 1494); (2) Guillelmi Hentisberi Consequentiae subtiles; Blasii Pellecani de propositione de secundo et tertio adiacente; Offredi Apollinaris quaestio de suppositione predicati istius propositionis … nullus homo est cuilibet homo” (Bononiae, 1495). 3. Biagio Pelacani and Gaetano of Thiene Of Pelacani and his various works, in particular concerning “perspectives,” there are recent contributions and some initiatives for the editing of the abundant manuscript material. See L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 4, pp. 65–79; E. Garin, “La cultura milanese nella prima metà del secolo xv,” in Storia di Milano, 6 (1955), pp. 570–573; A. Maier, An der Grenze von Scholastik und Naturwissenschaft, pp. 375–384 (an analysis of the quaestiones relating to de latitudinibus

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formarum, but the book includes information on Giovanni da Casale and the Magister Messinus; on Antonio of Scarperi, a professor at Bologna and Perugia toward the end of the 14th century and on Torni); G. Vescovini Federici, “Problemi di fisica aristotelica in un maestro del sec. xiv: Biagio Pelacani da Parma,” in Rivista di Filosofia, 51 (1960), pp. 179–220; G. Vescovini Federici, “Le questioni di perspectiva di Biagio Pelacani da Parma,” Rinascimento, 12 (1961), pp. 163–243. For another collection of quaestiones, see F. Alessio, “Questioni di ottica di Biagio Pelacani da Parma,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 16 (1961), pp. 79–110. G. Federici Vescovini offers interesting contributions in Le “Quaestiones de anima” di Biagio Pelacani da Parma (Florence, 1974) in whose introduction are recalled all the previous contributions. Relating to Gaetano da Thiene, see Father Silvestro da Valsanzibio, Vita e dottrina di Gaetano da Thiene (Padua, 1949) and B. Nardi, Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano, pp. 116ff.As to Pietro degli Alboini da Mantova see C. Dionisotti, “Ermolao Barbaro e la fortuna di Suiseth,” in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di B. Nardi, vol. 1, pp. 217–253, and C. Vasoli, “Pietro Alboini da Mantova ‘scolastico’ della fine del Trecento e un’epistola di Coluccio Salutati,” Rinascimento, 14 (1963), pp. 3–22; also idem, Studi sulla cultura del Rinascimento (Manduria, 1968), pp. 11–39. About Marliano see M. Clagett, Giovanni Marliani and Late Mediaeval Physics (New York, 1941). Clagett and Moody together edited the de ponderibus of Pelacani in The Mediaeval Science of Weights (Madison, 1952).Of Bianchelli, under many aspects a relevant figure, see the commentary on Paolo Veneto and the Tractatus magnus de primo et ultimo instanti (in the Venetian edition of 1542 of the Summulae, ff. 161r–182r), where are found many of the discussions concerning the principle of individuation, the immortality of the soul, the Logica per viam resolutionis facta that he drafted late in his life: “nec negabo recollectas super logicam Pauli a me editas esse in adolescentia ... nec modo quiesco octogenarium ducens annum,” and many other minor logical works as De primis et secundis intentionibus (203–4 v) and De vero et falso. 4. Scotists and Thomists. Giorgio Valla and Niccoletto Vernia. The Southern Culture: Pontano and Galateo As to Trompetta or Tubeta, professor of metaphysics in Padua in via Scoti notice his In Metaphysicam Aristotelis (Venetiis, 1504). Many of his works have been published: Opus doctrine Scotice in Thomistas discussum (Venetiis, 1493); In tractatum formalitatum Scoti sententia etc. (Venetiis, 1505); De efficientia primi principi ad mentem Aristotelis (Venetiis, 1513). About Trombetta, B. Nardi wrote Saggi, p. 178; A. Poppi, “L’antiaverroismo della scolastica padovana alla fine del secolo xv,” Studia patavina, 11 (1964), pp. 102–124. Of Giorgio Valla, I. L. Heiberg has written many times, but consult in particular Beitrage zur Geschichte G. Valla’s und seine Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1896). P. Landucci Ruffo researched Giorgio Valla and his encyclopedia, “Note sulla Physiologia di Giorgio Valla,” Physis, 13 (1971), pp. 13–20; “Le fonti dei libri dell’Astronomia nell’Enciclopedia di Giorgio Valla,” in the volume Il Rinascimento nelle Corti padane. Società e cultura (Bari, 1977), pp. 363–378. B. Nardi in Saggi, pp. 95–126, has written also about Vernia, the list of his works, editions, and manuscripts (ibid., pp. 102–104). Furthermore, see F. Pagallo, “Sull’autore (Niccoletto Vernia?) di un’anonima e inedita quaestio sull’anima, del secolo xv,” in the volume La filosofia della natura nel Medioevo in the Atti del terzo congresso filosofico medievale (Milan, 1966), pp. 670–683; C. Vasoli, “La scienza

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della natura in Niccoletto Vernia,” ibid., pp. 717–729, in the cited Studi sulla cultura, pp. 241–256. For Barozzi see F. Gaeta, II Vescovo di Padova P. Barozzi e il trattato de factionibus extinguendis (Venice, 1958). About Domenico Grimani and his philosophical writings, see M. Dal Pra, “Metafisica e scienza in una quaestio inedita di Domenico Grimani,” in Atti del XII Congresso internazionale di filosofia, vol. 9, pp. 61–69, and P. Kibre, “Cardinal Domenico Grimani, Questio de Intensione et Remissione Qualitatis: a commentary on the tractate of that title by Richard Suiseth (Calculator),” in the volume Didascaliae. Studies in Honor of A. M. Albareda (New York, 1961), pp. 147–203. Again, see A. Ferriguto, Almorò Barbaro, l’alta cultura del Settentrione d’Italia nel ‘400; the important correspondence of Barbaro, published by Branca Publishers, in 2 vols. (Florence, 1943); the works of Galateo in Scrittori di Terra d’Otranto, vol. 2 (Lecce, 1867), vol. 3 (1868), vol. 18 (1871); the Epistole (Lecce, 1959) edited by A. Altamura with a bibliography. Of Pontano, in addition to the old editions of the works (Venetiis, 1518–1519), in 3 vols. (Florendae, 1520) and (Basileae, 1538–1540 and 1556); see the edition by C. Previtera of the Dialoghi and F. Tateo, Astrologia e moralità in Giovanni Pontano (Bari, 1960); V. Prestipino, Motivi del pensiero umanistico e Giovanni Pontano (Milan, 1963). Of great usefulness is the review of Charles B. Schmitt, A critical survey and bibliography of studies on Renaissance Aristotelianism,. 1958–1969 (Padua, 1971), but do not forget the works of Schmitt on the Aristotelianism of the Renaissance, on whether it was truly a neo-Aristotelianism or a survival of the medieval teaching: “To-wards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism,” in History of Science, 11 (1973), pp. 159–193 (with rich bibliographical references, pp. 180–193); “Philosophy and Science in Sixteenth-Century Universities: Some Preliminary Comments,” in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, Edited by. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla (Dordrecht, 1975), pp. 485–537. An excellent introduction to Renaissance Aristotelianism is found in the anthological profile of T. Gregory, “Aristotelismo,” in Grande Antologia Filosofica (Milan, 1964), vol. 6, pp. 607–683; also Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance. Le 16e Colloque International de Tours (Paris, 1976). About Galateo see Studi su Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo (Galatone, 1970), which is a miscellany presented by M. Dal Pra and P. A. De Lisio, Studi sull’umanesimo meridionale (Naples, 1973), pp. 21–59. Valuable is P. O. Kristeller, Le thómisme et la pensée italienne de la Renaissance (Montreal-Paris, 1967), with unedited texts of Battista Spagnoli and Vincenzo Bandello.

Fourteen GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA (pp. 295–326) 1–6. About Pico exists by now a vast literature of which we are mentioning only some comprehensive works in which it is possible to find rich contemporary bibliographies: E. Garin, G. Pico della Mirandola (Florence, 1937); E. Monner-jahn, G. Pico della Mirandola, (Wiesbaden, 1960); E. Garin, G. Pico della Mirandola (Florence, 1963); G. Di Napoli, G. Pico della Mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo, (Rome, 1965) with bibliography, pp. 521–535. Documents, texts, illustrations of the “fortune” of Pico and contemporary personalities are presented in the two volumes of L'opera e il pensiero di G. Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’Umanesimo (Flor-

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ence, 1965). Very relevant P. O. Kristeller, G. Pico della Mirandola and his sources, vol. 1, pp. 35–142, with unpublished texts, complete indication of existing manuscripts, and bibliography. A history of the criticism is in E. Garin, Le interpretazioni del pensiero di G. Pico, ch. 1, pp. 3–33; and see F. A. Yates, G. Pico della Mirandola and Magic, vol. 1, pp. 159–203; E. Colomer, Individuo e cosmo in Nicola Cusano e G. Pico, vol. 2, pp. 53-102; G. Radetti, II Problema del peccato in G. Pico della Mirandola e in Filippo Buonaccorsi, vol. 2, pp. 103–117. See also the contributions of G. Zathey on Pico and Callimachus, of F. Secret on Flavius Mithridates and Pico, of P. Zambelli on Giovanni Mainardi, of C. Vasoli on the followers of Savonarola, of Ch. B. Schmitt on the rapport with Gianfrancesco Pico, of P. Mesnard on Pico and Bodin, of L. Firpo and N. Badaloni on Pico and Campanella. Then see: Studi pichiani, in the series Deputazione di Storia patria per le antiche provincie parmensi (Modena, 1965); P. Rocca, G. Pico della Mirandola nei suoi rapporti di amicizia con G. Savonarola (Ferrara, 1964); H. Crouzel, “Pic de la Mirandole et Origene,” Bulletin de Litterature Ecclesiastique (Toulouse,1965), pp. 81–106, 174–194, 272–288. For the texts of Pico see the edition of Bologna, 2 vols. of 1496, and that of Basel of 1572. A new edition with translation and comments was made by E. Garin, in 3 vols., in Florence, 1942–1952. Garin published also some unedited writings, some letters and verses, in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961), pp. 229–289; P. O. Kristeller; G. Pico della Mirandola and his sources, pp. 84–107. The Carmina have been published by W. Speyer, in Leiden, 1964. The life of Giovanni by Gianfrancesco Pico was printed again with comment and translation of T. Sorbelli (Modena, 1963); the documents of the process are in L. Dorez and L. Thuasne, Pic de la Mirandole en France (Paris, 1897); the letter of Elia del Medigo to Pico in the ms. “lat. 6508” of the Nationale of Paris is in Bodan Kieszkowski, “Les rapports entre Elie del Medigo et Pic de la Mirandole,” Rinascimento, 15 (1964), pp. 41–91. Notice that Flavius Mithridates, Sermo de passione Domini, has been edited by C. Wirszubski, and published in Jerusalem in 1963. About Pico’s library: P. Kibre, The Library of G. Pico della Mirandola (New York, 1936) (on which we have the review of P. O. Kristeller, in GCFI, 19 (1938), pp. 378–381); G. Mercati, Codici latini Pico Grimani Pico (Città del Vaticano, 1938). In regard to Pico’s contemporaries now and then mentioned besides the works of Della Torre and Kristeller, for Hebrew scholars see U. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento (Florence, 1918); F. Secret, Les Kabbalistes chretiens de la Renaissance (Paris, 1964); for Donà, see Degli Agostini, Scrittori veneziani, vol. 2, pp. 201–237; E. Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 439–441; for Barbaro, see T. Stikney, De Hermolai Barbari vita atque ingenio (Paris, 1903); E. Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 396ff.; for Savonarola and followers, see the fundamental work, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola of Roberto Ridolfi (Rome, 1952), 2 vols., and the Bibliografia Savonaroliana of Mario Ferrara (Florence, 1958), but also see E. Garin, La cultura filosofica, pp. 182–212; for Politian, ibid., pp. 335–358 (and id., Filosofi italiani, pp. 409–425); for Girolamo Benivieni see C. Re, Girolamo Benivieni Fiorentino (Città di Castello, 1906); E. Garin, “Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Benivieni e G. Pico,” in GCFI, 23 (1942), pp. 93–99. For some remarkable references to Pico, see J. B. Sermoneta, “La dottrina dell’intelletto e la ‘fede filosofica’ di Jehudah e Immanuel Romano,” in Studi medievali, 6 (1965), p. 76. About Antonio Cittadini of Faenza, his published and unpublished writings, and his teachings, see my notes in Rinascimento, 1 (1950), pp. 103–104; GCFI, 35 (1956), pp. 360–363; ibid., 36 (1957), pp. 265–267. About Pico, more recently, the volume of Henri de Lubac appeared, Pic de la

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Mirandole (Paris, 1974) and in Italian in Milan, 1977. Kieszkowski has attempted a critical edition of the Conclusiones (Geneva, 1973), completed with comments, introduction, documents, and an extensive and useful bibliography. Unfortunately Kieszkowski made numerous errors that were carefully identified by Jose De Pina Martins, Jean Pic de la Mirandole (Paris, 1976), pp. 45–82. The effort I made of gathering the material already in print, though dispersed, produced a volume of the anastatic edition that was published in Turin, in 1971. Chaim Wirszubski has excellently contributed with the essay “Giovanni Pico’s Book of Job,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 22 (1969), pp. 171–199. Consult also Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven-Days of Creation, translation with introduction and glossary by Jessie Brewer McGaw (New York, 1976). As for Ermolao Barbaro, Victor Branca in 1969 combined his precious collection of orations and letters with the two tractates de coelibatu and de officio legati in Tractatus “De coelibatu” et “De officio legati” (Florence, 1969); the rich appendix offers very useful documents. Concerning the Savonarola ambiance, besides the already quoted book of Weinstein, see Vasoli, Profezia e ragione (Naples, 1974), pp. 15–127.About Veronese Pietro Mainardi see the important remarks of P. Zambelli, “Il de auditu kabbalistico e la tradizione lulliana nel Rinascimento,” in Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria,” 30 (1965), pp. 115–248.

Fifteen ARISTOTELIANISM FROM POMPONAZZI TO CREMONINI (pp. 329–378) 1. The Inheritance of the Fifteenth Century In relation to the fundamental importance of the Platonic currents on art, see A. Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’art (Geneva, 1954); id., Arte e umanesimo a Firenze al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Studi sul Rinascimento e sull’umanesimo platonico, R. Federici, trans. (Turin, 1964); C. De Tolnay, Michelangelo (Princeton, 1947–1954), 4 vols. There is interesting information on the printing of Aristotelian works in L. Minio-Paluello, “Attività filosofico-editoriale aristotelica dell’umanesimo,” in V. Branca, Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano (Florence, 1963), pp. 245–262; a general introduction to the Paduan Aristotelianism and a review of the research between 1958 and 1969 can be read in A. Poppi, Introduzione all’aristotelismo padovano (Padua, 1970). 2. Alessandro Achillini and Pietro Trapolino All the writings of Achillini were collected and published for the first time in 1508: Alexandri Achillini Bononiensis philosophorum nostre etatis decoris opera lima eiusce auctoris repollita et extersa ac denuo maxima cura ac diligentia impressa. De intelligentiis. De orbibus. De universalibus. De elementis. De principiis chyromantie et physionomie. De potestate syllogismi. De subiecto medicine (Venetiis, 1508) and again in 1545. The de intelligentiis appeared in 1494; the de orbibus in 1498 (GW, pp. 191– 192; IGI, pp. 45–46). The quodlibets de intelligentiis were debated during the General Chapter of the Minor Friars in Bologna (and Nardi assumes that Nifo and Pico were present during the public part of the discussions of the Council): “Vi si ritrovano— dice il Nardi—inserite negli schemi del metodo calcolatorio, divenuto di moda anche a

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Bologna come a Padova, tutte le tesi fondamentali dell’averroismo, concernenti Dio, le altre intelligenze separate, e in particolare 1’intelletto possibile e la copulatio di questo con 1’intelletto agente.” Concerning the language of the calculators (that was also used by Ficino) and of the thesis that the possible intellect is a form dans esse homini (a thesis that later was harshly criticized by Pendasio and Zabarella) see Quodl. de intell. 3: “de intellectu possibili, qui est tertia et ultima pars latitudinis intellectuum ... utrum intellectum possibilem habeat omnis homo. Opinio Philosophi est quod sic. Illa opinio non est vera. Est forma dans esse homini.”; Quodl. 4: “intellectus agens est extremum intensissimum latitudinis intellectuum. Probatur: Deus est extremum intensissimum latitudinis intellectuum. Et Deus est intellectus agens.” In 1501, Achillini published the Opus septisegmentatum, which included a group of Pseudo-Aristotelian opuscules (de secretis secretorum; de regum regimine; de sanitatis conservatione; de physionomia; de signis tempestatum, ventorum et aquarum; de mineralibus), but also a fragment of de intellectu of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the de animae beatitudine of Averroès, followed by the de universalibus of the same Achillini, and, finally the de mirabilibus Indiae. The Quaestio de subiecto physionomiae et chyromantiae is of 1503 and was dedicated to Bartolomeo Codes, of whom in 1504 the Chyromantiae ac physionomiae anastasis cum approbatione magistri Alex. Achillini was published. Always in 1504 the two quaestiones de potestate syllogismi and de subiecto medicinae were printed. In 1505 the three books of the de elementis appeared. In 1506 the second edition of the quodlibets de intelligentiis with the addition of eighteen new dubia (doubts) was published. Between 1506 and 1508, Achillini, having escaped from Bologna to Padua, began to teach in Padua and competed with Pomponazzi. In the last period of his life, after returning to Bologna, Achillini published the de distinctionibus (1511), the partial comments on the Physics (1512), the de proportione motuum (posthumously, in 1515). Posthumous are also in 1520 the Anatomicae annotationes, published by his brother, Giovanni Filoteo. Some autograph manuscripts and fragments of lessons and notes remain still unpublished. Nardi has examined and described the documents exstant at the University of Bologna and at the Ambrosiana Library of Milan, giving of them a negative assessment: “neppur essi recano alcuna luce per una migliore conoscenza del pensiero del bolognese.” About Achillini see F. Fiorentino, Pomponazzi, pp. 252ff., and in addition L. Thorndike, History, vol. 5, pp. 37–49, and B. Nardi, Saggi, pp. 178–279 must be checked. Recent are the works of H. S. Matsen (who in 1969 presented a dissertation on Achillini at Columbia University, “Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512) and His Doctrine of Universals and Transcendentals”), “Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512) as Professor of Philosophy in the Studio of Padua (1506–1508),” Quaderni per la storia dell’Università di Padova, 1 (1968), pp. 91–109; A. Achillini (1463–1512) and his Doctrine of Universals and Trascendentals: A study in Renaissance 0ckamism (Lewisburg, 1974); “A. Achillini (1463–1512) and Ockamism at Bologna (1490–1500), Journal of the History of Philosophy, 13 (1975), pp. 437–451. Read Nardi’s voice “Achillini” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 144–145. More recent is the contribution of G. Baroncini, “Forma e ruolo dell’esperienza nel sapere di un medico e filosofo naturale dello studio bolognese: A. Achillini (1463– 1512),” which can be seen in the already cited work of various authors, Il Rinascimento delle Corti padane, pp. 439–468. Trapolino, or rather Pietro Trapolin, a Paduan physician and philosopher, of a noble family originary from Vigodarzere, born toward the end of June 1506, was first teacher and then colleague and friend of Pomponazzi (“dicis quoque ulterius te quon-

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dam responsiones alias a Petro Trapolino Patavo communi nostro praeceptore audivisse,” Peretto wrote to Ludovico Panizza in the dedication of the De incantationibus, dated Bologna, 24 July 1520; from the edition published by Gratarol). Of him, after Fiorentino, B. Nardi has widely written in Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence, 1965), pp. 104–121; Saggi, pp. 107–178, giving abundant information on his life, teaching, and extant writings: a course of lesson on de anima, collected by the Mantuan Benedetto del Tiriaca, and preserved in a codex of the Marciana of Venice; a comment on de anima of 1491–1492, preserved in a ms. of the Biblioteca Comunale of Perugia; a fragment on medicine in a ms. of the Nationale of Paris; a ms. at the Ambrosiana Library, completed by Tommaso Campeggi of Bologna on 26 August 1504, about which see P. O. Kristeller, Iter Italicum, vol. 1, pp. 335–336. Given that Nardi has scholarly collected a large amount of information on Trapolin, it is convenient to direct the reader to his works. Regarding the Averroism of Trapolin, which has been exaggerated by Fiorentino (and, on his footsteps, by myself), it is probable that the accentuation was tied to a cultural climate that gave way to an opposite accentuation, perhaps also tied to another cultural climate. See G. Di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1963), pp. 197–198. If Nardi spoke of a “moderate Averroism,” as it had been attributed to Trapolin by M. Antonio Genoa, Di Napoli underlined instead an approach to Thomism in the manner of Gaspare Contarini. To tell the truth, this kind of discourse needs a wider consideration that should focus on: (1) the value as sources of thought to be assigned to the collections of lessons (if they are unique sources and if they can be compare with works for publication and published, as it happened in the case of Pomponazzi); (2) the value to assign to certain cautions in the exposition, to certain moderations in tone, to some literary devices (the so-called “double truth”) used in moments of incomplete freedom or even when condemned for certain doctrines; 3) the rules and obligations connected with certain types of teaching. 3. The Influence of Siger of Brabant. Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Commentary. Pomponazzi. Philosophy and Religion About Pomponazzi see especially F. Fiorentino, P. Pomponazzi. Studi storici su la scuola bolognese e padovana del secolo xvi con molti documenti inediti (Florence, 1868), which is still a book of great value even with its limitations; L. Ferri, “La psicologia di P. Pomponazzi secondo un manoscritto inedito dell’Angelico di Roma,” Atti della R. Accademia dei Lincei, (1875–1876), 2nd series, part 3: “Memorie della Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche,” pp. 333–548; F. Fiorentino, Studi e ritratti della Rinascenza (Bari, 1911), pp. 1–79 (the articles of 1877–1887); S. Davari, Lettere inedite di P. Pomponazzi filosofo mantovano (Mantua, 1877) (Nozze TedaldiPanini); E. Costa, “Nuovi documenti intorno a P. Pomponazzi,” Atti e Memorie della Deputazione di Storia patria per le Provincie di Romagna, 3rd series, 21 (1903), pp. 277–318; A. H. Douglas, The Philosophy and Psychology of P. Pomponazzi (Cambridge, 1910); E. Breit, Die Engel und Dämonenlehre des Pomponatius und Cäsapinus, Dissertation (Bonn, 1912); W. Betzendorfer, Die Lehre von den zweifachen Wahreit bei P. Pomponazzi, Diss. (Tubingen, 1919); G. Sante Felici, “Pomponazzi e la dottrina della predestinazione,” GCFI, 7 (1926), pp. 24-33; C. Oliva, “Note sull’insegnamento di P. Pomponazzi,” GCFI, 7 (1926), pp. 83–103, 179–190, 254–275 (important work for the indication of the manuscript sources); E. Weil, “Die Philosophie des P. Pomponazzi,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 41 (1932), pp. 127– 177, which is based on his dissertation of 1928; A. Corsano, II pensiero religioso itali-

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ano dall'umanesimo al giurisdizionalismo (Bari, 1937), pp. 65–97; L. Thorndike, History, vol. 5, (1941), pp. 95–110; P. O. Kristeller, “Ficino and Pomponazzi on the Place of Man in the Universe,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), pp. 220–226 (Studies, pp. 279–286); idem, “A new Manuscript Source for Pomponazzi’s Theory of the Soul from his Paduan Period,” Revue Internationale de philosophie, 16 (1951), pp. 144–157; C. Wilson, “Pomponazzi’s Criticism of Calculator,” Isis (1953), pp. 355– 362; P. O. Kristeller, “Two unpublished Questions on the Soul of P. Pomponazzi,” Medievalia et Humanistica, 9 (1955), pp. 76–101; l0 (1956), p. 151; E. Gilson, Autour de Pomponazzi. “Problematique de l’immortalité de l’âme en Italie au debut du xvi siècle”, in AHDLMA, 28 (1961) (Paris, 1962), pp. 163–279; idem, “L’affaire de l’immortalité de l’âme a Venise au debut du xvi siècle,” in the volume Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano, a cura di V. Branca (Florence, 1963), pp. 31–61; D. A. Jorio, “The Problem of the Soul and the Unity of Man in P. Pomponazzi,” The New Scholasticism, 37 (1963), pp. 293–311; P. O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Standford, 1964), pp. 72–90. There is a good comprehensive bibliography in the edition of the Tractatus de immortalitate animae, a cura di F. Morra (Bologna, 1954), pp. 17–31. A special consideration deserves Bruno Nardi for the Studi su P. Pomponazzi (Firenze 1965) (to be integrated with the cited Saggi). Nardi was the first who with a work of many years researched, examined, and ordered the many manuscripts that preserve the courses taught by Pomponazzi. It is indubitable that without first analyzing, chronologically listing, and comparing these documents among themselves and the published work, an exposition and adequate evaluation of the thought of Pomponazzi would be possible. Furthermore, there still remain most urgently the necessity of clarifying, from a methodical point of view, the previously listed points of consideration in regard to Trapolin. In this book we depended on the Venetian edition of 1515 of the works; on the edition of Basel of 1567, edited by Gratarol, of the de incantationibus (already previously edited by Gratarol, in 1556); on the Venetian edition of 1563 of the course of 1523 on Meteore (Dubitationes in quartum Meteor. Aristotelis librum). Of the de fato alone there is a critical edition by R. Lemay (Lugano, 1957). For the De immortalitate animae see also the edition of Gentile (Messina, 1925), and the cited edition with translation by Morra in addition to the photographic edition of W. H. Hay (Haverford, 1938), with an English translation. See also P. Pomponazzi, Trattato sull’immortalità dell’anima. Il libro degli incantesimi, preface of R. Ardigò, introduction, translation and notes of I. Toscani (Rome, 1914) in the series “I classici del libero pensiero” on which G. Gentile wrote in La critica, 15 (1917), pp. 42–52. A work important for its introduction (pp. 1–105) is the anthological translation of the de incantationibus by di H. Busson (Paris, 1930). We owe to the research of Busson the knowledge of a Pomponazzi “libertino” or of the vast influence of Pomponazzi on the French libertine currents, which would explain also the polemic against Pomponazzi raised during the 17th century in France from Mersenne to Sirmond, to Yves de Paris, on which topic consult P. Julien-Eymard, “Le P. Yves et Pomponazzi,” Études Franciscaines, 49 (1937), pp. 144–177. All this shows how a certain representation of Pomponazzi was not generated in the 19th century, but derived at least from the 16th century and in part from his contemporaries. How this understanding of Pomponazzi was generated, however, would be the task of new interpreters. Pomponazzi’s thought has been extensively analyzed and discussed, though the perspective of the inquiry has been changing very slowly, remaining in prevalence centered on the problem of the soul. Many are the new documents produced and A.

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Poppi has been in this sense the most active. He edited the Paduan courses of Pomponazzi (1499–1500, 1503–1504) and that of 1507 (quaestiones physicae et animasticae decem; super libello de substantia orbis). Poppi has also tried to resolve the problem of the rapport between the first Paduan courses and the Trattato of 1516; more generally, the rapport between scholastic teaching and books in print. In the volume that collects his Saggi sul pensiero inedito di Pietro Pomponazzi (Padua, 1970), Poppi, on the subject of an eventual development, is as precise as he is resolute (pp. 90–91): “Ci sembra di dover rispondere senza esitazione che nel pensiero del Pomponazzi non si può parlare né di una evoluzione in senso stretto, ... né di una evoluzione in senso piú mitigato.... Nel commento al De anima del 1503–1504 il Pomponazzi appare già decisamente attestato sulle posizioni teoretiche del 1516: la ripulsa dell’assurdo dualismo averroista, la denuncia della teologicità del tomismo, la proclamazione della superiore razionalità dell’alessandrismo. In tale omogeneità di fondo, la differenza della posizione alessandrista solo accarezzata nel 1504 come 1’ipotesi piú razionale ed esplicitamente dimostrata e difesa nel 1516, diventa a nostro avviso una differenza assai marginale e probabilmente dettata da considerazioni esclusivamente prammatiche. Cosí pure altrettanto inessenziale pensiamo la variazione interpretativa riguardante i testi aristotelici: con Aristotele o senza Aristotele il Pomponazzi aveva già scelto a Padova la sua strada di un materialismo antropologico con il quale doveva coerentemente accordarsi un sensismo gnoseologico.” Still on the subject of the Paduan courses and often in polemic with Poppi, see M. R. Pagnoni Sturlese, “I corsi universitari di Pietro Pomponazzi e il ms. Neap. VIII D 81,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe Lettere e Filosofia, 3rd series, 7 (1977), pp. 801–831, with accurate descriptions and precise information about Antonio Surian, the student of Pomponazzi who collected the texts. Pagnoni Sturlese efficaciously insists on the wide circulation of the manuscripts of Pomponazzi’s courses, resting on the witness of Castelvetro: “Quantunque non stampate ... non c’è niun lettore pubblico di filosofia che non le abbia, e non se ne abbellisca leggendo.” On De Fato see G. Di Napoli, “Libertà e fato in Pietro Pomponazzi,” in Studi in onore di A. Corsano (Manduria, 1970), pp. 175–220; on De incantationibus and its first editor Gratarol, see M. Doni, “Il De incantationibus di Pietro Pomponazzi e I’edizione di Guglielmo Grataroli,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 15 (1975), pp. 183–230 (with an essay of critical editing of ch. 13); on the themes of fate and astral bodies, with an extensive use of manuscript sources is F. Graiff, “I prodigi e l’astro-logia nei commenti di Pietro Pomponazzi al De caelo, alla Meteora e al De generatione,” in Medioevo, 2 (1976), pp. 331–361. Always on the theme of fate see M. Pine, “Pietro Pomponazzi and the Scholastic Doctrine of Free Will,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 28 (1973), pp. 3–27, who concludes in favor of an unresolved conflict: “Questo conflitto fra un naturalismo che sopprime la libertà e una libertà indipendente da tutte le determinazioni materiali resta senza soluzione.” Pine, in a previous essay, “Pomponazzi and Double Truth,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), pp. 163– 176, sustained the rationalism of Pomponazzi or rather identified Pomponazzi as the one who caused the turning point or the one who not only had sustained the freedom of philosophizing but helped to destroy any pretense of faith. 4. Disputation Concerning the Soul The letter of Crisostomo Javelli can be read in Pomponazzi (Venetiis, 1525), p. 108, and now also in an appendix of Gilson, L’affaire de l’immortalité de l’âme, pp. 60–61. Of C. Javelli, the Solutiones of 1519 (Solutiones rationum quae continentur in tractatu

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De immortalitate animae; Solutiones rationum quae formantur in Defensorio) were incorporated within the text of Pomponazzi. About Javelli, called Canapicius because from the Canavese, see Quetif-Echard, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, vol. 2, p. 104. Javelli discussed Pomponazzi not only in the Tractatus de animae humanae indeficientia, in quadruplici via sc. Peripatetica, Academica, Naturali et Christiana, revisus per auctorem et nunc primum editus (Venetiis, 1536), but also elsewhere in the Quaestiones subtilissimae, in quibus clarissime resolvuntur dubia Aristotelis et Commentatoris, eaque ut plurimum decisa habentur iuxta Thomisticum dogmata (which were completed and reviewed in Piacenza on 5 August 1532), then printed (Venetiis, 1552), p. 131. More than Pomponazzi, Javelli discussed De Vio, to whom he attributed the same position: “et quoniam Petrus Pomponatius nihil novi dicit quod non fuerit tactum a Thoma Gaeta. ideo simul improbabitur.” All the comments of Javelli deserved particular attention because of their continuous references and discussions of the theses of Pomponazzi. This is true in the commentary on the Physics, a work of 1522, published in Venice in 1552. In the first quaestio on the first book (si ens mobile est subiectum in philos. naturali), we read: “et quoniam aliqui moderni assumentes nomen Thomistarum ... inter quos est Petrus Pomponatius Mantuanus in lectura sua super libros physicorum.…” Again, he continues (c. 2 r): “et adverte quod Petrus Pomponatius non invenit.…” And at c. 4v: “ad hoc dicunt aliqui et praecipue Petrus Pomponatius quod haec tria sunt idem, ens mobile, corpus mobile, substantia mobilis.…” At c. 10v (q. V): “tu ergo ut defendas b. Thomam adverte quod aliqui faventes Coment., et praecipue Petrus Pomponatius.…” Of Javelli consult the editions of the complete works in the three volumes published in Lyons in 1567, 1574, and 1580. However the most important work of Javelli remains the Christiana philosophia that he completed in Piacenza on 15 July 1534, when he was sixty-seven years old. As to De Vio (Tommaso De Vio, called Gaetano or Cajetan, born in Gaeta in 1468 and died in Rome in 1534, was a most famous commentator of St. Thomas) see M.-H. Laurent, “Le commentaire de Cajetan sur le de anima” in the new edition of the Scripta philosophica (Rome, 1938). But see also Il cardinale Tommaso De Vio Gaetano nel quarto centenario della sua nascita (Milan, 1935); C. Giacon, La Seconda Scolastica, vol. 1: I grandi commentatori di s. Tommaso (Milan, 1944), pp. 37– 162. On De Vio see also Étienne Gilson, “Cajetan et l’humanisme théologique,” in AHDLMA, 22 (1955), pp. 113–136, who for the de anima relies on the cited work of Laurent premised to the first book of the Commentaria in de Anima Aristotelis Edited by P. I. Coquelle. The charge against Pomponazzi of being an apostate and a thinker of everchanging positions was formulated not only by Contarini but also by another one of his disciples, Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola in Evers. sing. certam. libri XL (Basileae, 1562), pp. 618–645, where it is possible to read a detailed confutation of the De immortalitate: “Reprehendendus mihi videtur esse Pomponatius, tamquam non germanus et ex Peripateticorum familia philosophus, sed nothus et transfuga; modo enim ad Platonicos, modo ad Poetas, nunc ad istum nunc ad illum, nulla vel pauca consideratione adhibita, confugere videtur, et ita miscere quadrata rotundis, ut pene turpe existimem cum eo disputationem inire; neminem enim legisse memini, ex iis qui Peripateticorum doctrinam profitentur, Alberto Magno excepto, qui plura miracula, plures fabulas et narret et credat ipso Pomponatio.” For the critical discussion of the de incantationibus, see ibid., pp. 494–520. About Bernardi see P. Zambelli’s essay in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1967), vol. 9, pp. 148–151. Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531) professor in Padua, “Aristotelicos libros

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graeco sermone Patavii primus omnium docuit.” “Piú che filosofo candido e probo e bene intenzionato letterato”—see A. Corsano, Storia della mente di Bruno (Florence, 1940), pag. 8—wanted to bring together Aristotelianism and Platonism in his Dialogi (Venetiis, 1524), dedicated to Reginald Pole, and addressed to Bembo, sive de immortalitate animorum, to Sanudo, Sadoleto, etc.: “Nihil enim me prohibet—he wrote in Bembus, c. XIX r—hodie ... Academicum ex Peripatetico fieri.” In the Opuscula (Venetiis, 1525), many paraphrases and versions from Aristotle and Plato are encountered. Of a particular importance, indeed, are his translations and comments, antiquorum more, of the Parva Naturalia of Aristotele, published in Venice in 1523. The curator of this edition was Giovanni Montesdoch, also professor in Padua, where he was greatly esteemed until 1525, and where he had commented the De anima, the Physics, and the De coelo becoming the object of many suspicions and provoking anger for his open-mindedness: “Cum isti fraters—he said in the comment on De anima—vident philosophum, dicunt: haereticus est.” Tomeo was certainly a subtle and refined philologist, valued even by Erasmus. His de varia historia libri tres dedicated on 1 February 1531 to Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, show his great erudition. Of his conciliatory tendency, Platonic rather than Aristotelian, the Dialogi are the best demonstration. In Trophonius, he sustained: “Divinum... hoc animal sive mundus, seu universum, sive alio quovis nomine appellari gaudet, omnia in se animalium complectens genera, ceu sui partes et membra, vitali cuncta spiritu permeans animat, pariaque comparibus copulans, et contraria disterminans a diversis, mirabili quodam harmoniae temperamento componit et temperat summaque concilians imis et mediis ex materia coniungens et vinciens, indissolubili rerum nexu cuncta constringit. Ex quo omnes omnium rationes et causas ceu a perenni quodam fontis exordio partum ad se invicem concordia et discordia ... emanare emuereque certissimum est.…” (c. XII r). And here he claimed the innatism (c. XII v) and the preexistence of the soul (c. XVIII v): “animum humanum Academicorum haerentes vestigiis in terrenum hoc domicilium descendere affirmamus, omnimodasque rerum in se continere species dicimus.…” Again in Bembus, c. XIX r: “an ignoratis Peripateticos ipsos et Academicos ex eadem quasi fontis cuiusdam origine defluxisse, nominibusque solum differre illos, cum rebus sententiisque inter sese optime congruant et vere concordent.…” Of interest, in regard to Pole, is the letter he sent to Sadoleto exhorting him to alienate Lazzaro Bonamico of Bassano from Pomponazzi and direct him instead toward the divine philosophy of Plato. Of the friendship with Bembo the Lettere (Venice, 1552), vol. 1, pp. 36, 91–92, etc., continues to be the best testimony. Bembo, in Lettere, vol. 2, p. 41, mentioned also the long time spent by Ercole Gonzaga in studying with Peretto. A striking and interesting document of the school of Pomponazzi are the many dialogues of Speroni. 5. Immortality and Morality A valuable document of the transmission of Pomponazzi’s school-lessons by Giovanni Grillenzoni of Modena is preserved in the “memories” of Castelvetro that were partially published by Antonio Muratori in the life of Castelvetro inserted in the edition of his unedited Opere vane critiche (Berna, 1737), p. 10: “Udí (il Grillenzoni) in Bologna Lodovico Boccadiferro, che leggeva pubblicamente la Loica. Udí molti anni Peretto Pomponaccio, che leggeva pubblicamente la Filosofia, e udillo finché morí, e lui morto si diede alla Medicina.… Ora aveva la mano tanto veloce, che scriveva ciascuna parola, la quale il Pomponaccio diceva leggendo, non lasciando da parte ancora i

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motti, de’ quali il Pomponaccio abbondava piú che non conveniva a Filosofo. E perch’egli non iscriveva nulla delle sue letture, per la mano del Grilenzone si sono conservate; il quale avendone fatta copia a molti, sono al presente tanto divulgate, quantunque non sieno stampate, che non è niun Lettore pubblico di Filosofia, che non le abbia e non se n’abbellisca in leggendo.” The pages of Castelvetro about Grillenzoni were published by Tiraboschi (Bologna, 1866) and again in an opuscule for a wedding, with unpublished verses of Grillenzoni, by Zambrini. Other scholars who used the lessons of Pomponazzi have been Benedetto del Tiriaca, Antonio Surian, Lazzaro Bonamico of Bassano, Pietro Manna of Cremona, Gian Pietro Bresciano, Girolamo del Bene of Bologna, and Gregorio Frediani of Lucca. With reference to his first printed works, it is interesting to notice that in the De intensione et remissione Pomponazzi cited Ficino when dealing with latitudo entis, and it seems probable that Ficino, too, used a language in fashion at the time, contrary to the opinion of P. O. Kristeller, II pensiero filosofico di M. Ficino, p. 27, note 4. In De reactione, ch. 4, f. 2, Pomponazzi recalled the past: “Tempore adolescentiae meae, dum Patavii philosophiam audirem, vir non minus moribus quam doctrina venerandus Franciscus de Neritone ord. praed. et mihi praeceptor hanc Calculatoris insecutus est viam.” Antonio Fraganzan (Fracanziano, Fracanzano, Tracanciano), a lector in logic commented the Consequentiae Strodi and his quaestiones together with a de sensu composito et diviso were printed in 1517 in a miscellaneous volume edited by Benedetto Vittori of Faenza. Of Fraganzan, a disciple of Vernia and a concurrent of Pomponazzi, in a manuscript form exist some questiones de casu fortuna et casu (“Ashb. 1048”; “Ambros. T 77 sup.”) and a Tractatus proportionalitatum (“Ambros. T 77 sup.”; “Vat. lat. 10728”). Contarini, when still a student, narrated the famous Paduan disputation between Fraganzan and Pomponazzi on whether the intelligences are more or less the formae dantes esse to the bodies. See Di Napoli, L’immortalità, p. 197; Nardi, Saggi, pp. 164–165). 6. The Polemic with Contarini and Nifo The Opuscula of Spina that he dedicated to Grimani (Venetiis, 1519), “die x mensis septembris” are three: (1) Propugnaculum Aristotelis de immortalitate animae contra Thomam Caietanum; (2) Tutela veritatis de immortalitate animae contra Pomponatium Mantuanum cognominatum Perettum cum eiusdem libro de immortalitate fideliter toto inserto; (3) Flagellum in tres libros Apologiae Peretti de eadem materia, finished in 1518 (aetatis vero meae quadragesimo primo). According to Spina, Gaetano was the one to open the way to Pomponazzi (“insulsa et periculosa et inaudita doctrina, quae a Caietano sumpsit exordium”). As to Pomponazzi and his insults against friars, his theses, Spina has no doubts: Peretto is a heretic who attacked the Church and rejects the immortality (“tu autem non disputative, sed adeo assertive, contra ea quae fidei fundamenta sunt pugnare contendis”). Ambrogio Fiandino (or Flandino)—of Naples, of the Order of the Hermits (Eremites), the author of many anti-Lutheran works (contra Lutheranos de vera et Catholica fide conflictationes, some dialogues dedicated to G. M. Giberti in ms. “A VII 6” of the University of Genoa) and of comments and Platonic writings (Annotationes in librum de causis and Annotamenta in utrumque Alcibiadem, dedicated to Ercole Gonzaga, which we already mentioned in the first edition of this book, in the mss. “G III 10 and 11” of the Biblioteca Comunale of Mantua; various commentaries to different Platonic dialogues, dedicated to Francis I and preserved in the National Library of

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Paris in ms. “lat. 12948” that was made known by Gilson, in AHDLMA (1961), p. 278)—polemized for a long time with Pomponazzi. Besides the dialogues on immortality, which we will mention later, of Fiandino remain a de fato contra Petrum Pomponatium pro Alexandro Aphrodisio apologia, in dialogues between Sophist and Philalethes dedicated to Clement VII and presented with a Sermo ad Pomponatii Petri auditores, in the “ms. A VII 5” of the University of Genoa. The dialogues de animarum immortalitate a Reverendo sacre theologie doctore Magistro Ambrosio Neapolitano editi ... contra assertorem etc. appeared in print in Mantua on 30 March 1519. Their author confessed that he was a follower of Plato and Hermes, imitator of Mariano of Genazzano and Giles of Viterbo and that in his own sermons, since his earlier age, he used Hermetic and Platonic authorities. He admires Ficino and Nifo, flatters Equicola, gossips about the Mantuan circles, compares (malignly) Pomponazzi with Galeotto Marzio (but at the advantage of the latter): “qui verbo tantum violavit nostram religionem.” These dialogues are disparagingly and speculatively poor, rich only in insults and citations (even of Siger), with references to Platonic-Hermetic texts that are used only in a rhetorical-apologetic-edifying function. His pressures on Nifo are narrated by Nifo: “Suessae me comperit. Rogavit ... ut ... legerem relegeremque, et quae de ipso sentirem scriberem ac etiam publicarem.” With “Polemiche pomponazziane,” in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 27 (1972), pp. 223–228, I have tried to examine some points in the unedited polemical writings of Ambrogio Fiandino, starting from De fato contra Petrum Pomponatium, of the ms. “A VIII 5” of the University Library of Genoa. G. Zanier has produced an inquiry of great interest: Ricerche sulla diffusione e fortuna del “De incantationibus” di Pomponazzi (Florence, 1975), on which see the observations of. M. Doni in Critica Storica, 13 (1976), pp. 170–176). The de elementis of Contarini, in five books, is dedicated to Matteo Dandolo. The discussion on ens and unum is found in the second book of Primae philosophiae compendium. In the cited edition of Contarini’s works, the de immortalitate animae adversus Petrum Pomponatium is found at pp. 179–231. To the above mentioned interventions in the polemic on the soul, those of (1) Girolamo Fornari, de animae humanae immortalitate, examen perspicacissimum totius disceptationis inter Aug. Suess. et Petrum Pomponatium Mant., (Bononiae, 1519) should be added; (2) Luca Prassicio, Quaestio de immortalitate animae intellectivae secundum mentem Aristotelis a nemine verius quam ab Averroi interpretati a seculo latitans nuperrime vero ... in clarissimam lucem educta (Neapoli, 1521); (3) Battista Fiera. A collection of philosophical opuscles of Fiera was published in Venice at the end of 1524: Opusculum de animae immortalitate contra Pomponatium Mantuanum... Quaestio de attractione medicinarum solutivarum…. Solutio argumentorum ad quattuor conclusiones Marliani. The third of the three documents relates to the time when Fiera was studying in Pavia the logic of the calculatores and is a proof of his rapports with Alselmo Meia and Mariani, on which you may see C. Dionisotti, “Battista Fiera,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 1 (1958), pp. 401–418). 7. The Two Treatises: De incantationibus and De fato The problem of the soul is at the center of a great number of the philosophical writings of the 16th century, within which almost always the name or the influence of Pomponazzi is found. Of these, those which are relevant or possess some although light originality will be singularly cited. Let’s here list of all these texts those that sometime are mentioned in the book, though for some of them we could not even see an exemplar: G. F. Brancaleone, Breve discorso de la immortalità dell’anima (Naples, 1542); Vito

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Piza da Chiaramonte, De divino et humano intellectu et de hominis sensu ex Peripateticis (Padua, 1553) (in Renan, Averroes, p. 357); Nic. Ab. Pacca, Endixes logicae (Naples, 1556) (in the dedication to Brancaleone and in a species of history of the question in Naples); Marcello Capra da Nicosia, De immortalitate animae rationalis juxta principia Aristotelis adversus Epicurum, Lucretium et Pythagoricos (Palermo, 1589), where there are traces of the teaching of Pomponazzi fused and confused with Averroistic motives; R. S. Chiavelli, Dilucidationes in tertium Arist. lib. de an. et intellectu (Palermo, 1591). According to the opinion of De Vio there is information on the existence of unedited comments on de anima made by Vincenzo Montecalvo—in Tomasini, Elogia (Patavii, 1644), pp. 104–108—a colleague of Pendasio, author of unpublished comments on logic (1573–1637); Borsetti in Hist. almi Ferrariae gymnasii (Ferrariae, 1735), vol. 2, pp. 133–134, cites unpublished comments on the soul by Tommaso Badia of Modena, of the physician Antonio Musa Brasavola who wrote also on logic and was a friend of Calcagnino. Later we will speak of the most famous commentators, from Boccadiferro to Pendasio, to Maggi. 8. Agostino Nifo and His Averroism The sonnets written by Casio in the event of the death of Pomponazzi constitute certainly a worthy document: Libro Intitulato Cronica: Ove si tratta di Epitaphii: di Amore: e di Virtute. Composto per il Magnifico Casio Felsineo Cavaliero: e Laureato, dedicated to Ercole Gonzaga in 1525. Pomponazzi or “L’almo Peretto che da gli Indi. a Persi, / dai liti Gangi, al Mintio, Rheno, e Xante, / havea sua Fama per virtute spanto,” is exalted in hundred of verses, some of which placed on the mouth of Ercole Gonzaga. At the end is Peretto himself who speaks from heaven addressing Gonzaga in order to assure him: “In el Felsineo dotto aimo Ginnasio / Letto ho fin qui, hor ne la eccelsa corte / Lego, dove ho gli Dei tutti al conspetto.” But concerning the de incantationibus and the empiety of Pomponazzi, Antonio Bernardi, in the mentioned work, at p. 496, will write: “Haec igitur cum ita sint, elaborandum nobis esse videtur, qui philosophiam naturalem ex sensibus ortam nunc sectamur, ut ostendamus, ipsum Pomponatium a Peripateticorum doctrina longe aberrasse, atque in illo suo libro neque philosophum, neque, quod multo foedius est et gravius, Christianum extitisse, atque etiam contra omnem rationem in Ioannem Picum (virum celeberrimum et omni laude dignum) verbis tam contumeliosis invectum esse, cum quo neque doctrina, neque ingenio ipsum esse comparandum ... neminem latere arbitror.” See also the epigram of Janus Vitali against Pomponazzi; Borsetti (vol. 2, pp. 126–127) pointed it out together with the encomiastic verses of Scaliger. Among the foremost known disciples of Pomponazzi, the contemporaries counted Gian Francesco Forni who, in 1520 in Modena before the General Chapter of the Dominicans and Pomponazzi, participated in a famous debate. From Tiraboschi we came to know that Forni taught logic in Bologna and, between 1521 and 1524, in Pisa. About Nifo, besides Renan, Fiorentino and K. Werner, Der Averroismus in der christlich-peripatetischen Psychologie des späteren Mittelalters (Wien, 1881), pp. 117–147, are to be seen B. Nardi, Saggi, pp. 160–166, 370ff.; Di Napoli, G. Pico della Mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo, pp. 203–214. About Nifo’s life and works, see P. Tuozzi, “Agostino Nifo e le sue opere,” in Atti e Memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze e Lettere di Padova, 20 (1903–1904), pp. 63–86. As for the work of Florimonte, it came out initially with the name of Nifo, I ragionamenti sopra la filosofia morale d’Aristotele raccolti dal rever. G. Plorimontio, Edited by G. Ruscelli (Venezia 1554), and then in Parma in 1562 as Ragionamenti di M. Agostino da

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Sessa, con l’Illustriss. S. Principe di Salerno, sopra l’Etica d’Aristotele raccolti dal Rever. Monsignor Galazzo (sic) Florimontio Vescovo d’Aquino. Finally, it is again printed in 1567 in Venice, but enlarged with two more books, which should not be counted as the third edition but a true first edition of the work: Ragionamenti di Mons. Galeazzo Florimonte, vescovo di Sessa, sopra l’Ethica d’Aristotele. Important is the letter of Sadoleto, Epistulae (Lugduni, 1550), pp. 241ff., to Florimonte on the value of philosophy. E. P. Mahoney began some important researches about Agostino Nifo since 1966 when he prepared a dissertation at Columbia University on The Early Psychology of Agostino Nifo (Dissertation Abstracts, 27 (1967), 2559A). Of Mahomey production exists “Niccoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo on Alexander of Aphrodisias: an Unnoticed Dispute,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 23 (1968), pp. 268–296; “Agostino Nifo’s Early Views of Immortality,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 7 (1970), pp. 451–460; “Pier Nicola Castellani and Agostino Nifo on Averroès’ Doctrine of the Agent Intellect,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 25 (1970), pp. 387– 409; “A Note on Agostino Nifo,” Philological Quarterly, 50 (1971), pp. 125–32. Of Mahoney is also the article on Nifo in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 10, pp. 123–124. Remarkable on some aspects often disregarded is P. Zambelli, “I problemi metodologici del necromante Agostino Nifo,” Medioevo, I (1975), pp. 129–172 (idem and ibidem, “Une reincarnation de Jean Pic à l’epoque de Pomponazzi: les thèses magiques et hérétiques d’un aristotelicien oublié, Tiberio Russiliano Calabrese, 1579,” in Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Abhandlungen d. Geistesund Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse (1977), p. 10. Anecdotic is the volume of G. Monarca, Agostino Nifo (vita ed opere: traccia per una riscoperta) (Scauri, 1975). About the Aristotelian-Averroistic comments of Nifo and to their vicissitudes, editions, and transformations the discourse remains open, at least until a wider exploration and a careful analysis would have dissipated the many doubts that still exist. Concerning his confessed rejection of the originary Averroism and the events surrounding the first publications of his works, many indications are given in the works themselves. Certainly, these indications have to be pondered in regard to their precise significance and exactitude. See the Commentationes in librum Averrois de substantia orbis (Venetiis, 1559), p. 88, where he added: “nam hac aetate non multum in Averrois dictis insistimus, occupati in altioribus.” In the De intellectu (Venetiis 1553), ch. 8, p. 17 v., he observed: “eo tempore quo Averr. probabiliter sequebar.…” In the juvenile comment on de Anima he pointed out (In libros De Anima, proem) as he did also in De immortalitate animae (Venetiis 1521), p. 2 v: “declaravimus autem nos in comm. de anima veteribus, quae in iuventa conscripsimus.” It was Nifo who edited the Venetian edition of 1495–1496 of Aristotle and Averroès, while Vernia cared for the edition of 1483, adding to it a quaestio of his own. See De intellectu. (Venetiis, 1503); the dedication to Badoer was omitted in the edition of 1553: “dicaveram tibi anno superiore questionem meam de intellectu ... eamque ne labores iuventutis mee perditum irent imprimendam esse curavissem, nisi emuli affuissent, qui me hereseos accusassent.... Placuit quedam tollere, mutare alia, addere plurima. Nihil delevi quod sit contra fidem catholicam.” Relying on what Nifo narrates, the first “Averroistic” draft of the commentary on the de animae beatitudine was finished in Padua on 14 May 1492; the de intellectu on 26 August 1492. Concerning the existence of an edition of 1495 there was some doubt, but in confirmation of its existence see Di Napoli, G. Pico della Mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo, p. 205, note 40. The comment on destructio de-

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structionis, dedicated to Grimani was finished in 1597 and published in the same year. In 1503, the de intellectu is printed in an edition reviewed and purged from those errors of his youth. Always in 1503 the collectanea on de anima were corrected (the comment on de anima was finished in Pisa in 1520 and published in Venice in 1522) and dated “September 1498.” However, worthy of our attention are also the other comments, from that on the Physics (“completum in Aviano rure nostro 15 Maij 1506”) to that of Dilucidarium methaphysicarum disputationum (1507–1510). Concerning the de regnandi peritia (Naples, 1523) dedicated to Charles V, and the “plagiarism” from the Principe of Machiavelli see G. Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965), pp. 2–26, and bibliographical information. 9. The Conflict with Pomponazzi The commentaria of Franciscus Lichetus on Duns Scoto were printed by Paganini printer in 1517, and then again in 1589 in Venice with the quodlibeta edited by C. Sarnano. Of Prassicio we already mentioned the Quaestio de immortalitate animae intellectivae of 1521, to which a de praestantia litterarum (Aversa, 1520) will be added. And Nifo himself praised the De rerum naturalium iuxta Aristotelis doctrinam of his student Francesco Peto. 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 About Zimara, father and son, that is on Marcantonio Zimara, the famous “Averroist,” and his son Teofilo who favored a Platonic concordance, Bruno Nardi, in Saggi, pp. 320–363, has done a valuable introduction to their life and works. Marcantonio Zimara of San Pietro in Galatina in Terra d’Otranto was born around 1470, and studied in Padua where he taught in two different periods, with an interlude in Salerno. In 1505, he worked for the heirs of Ottaviano Scoto preparing the edition of the questions on the Metafisica of John of Jandun, adding to it, at the time of printing, three compositions of his own: (1) quaestio de principio individuationis ad intentionem Arist. et Averr.; (2) Annotationes in Joann. Gandav.; (3) quaestio de triplici causalitate intelligentiae. During the 1505 he published also the Parva naturalia of John, adding here too a quaestio of his own. During the same period, in another quaestio he defended against Achillini the existence of the intelligible species. See Tractatus Hieronymi Girelli adversus quaestionem M. A. Zimarae de speciebus intelligibilibus, cum quaest. M. A. Zimarae, (Venetiis, 1561). Prepared between 1505 and 1508, in their first version on 1 July 1508 in Venice were published the famous Solutiones contradictionum in dictis Averrois proceeded by Quaestio de primo cognito (of which the second version will widely be circulated with the “giuntina” edition of the works of Aristotle and Averroès, and will appeared in 1530). Among the editions supervised by him during these years are the various works of Albert the Great. Besides some other minor works (among which a quaestio de motu gravium et levium of 1526 that was preserved in ms. form) the fundamental extant works are: the Tabula dilucidationum in dictis Aristotelis et Averrois (Venetiis, 1537), and the Theoremata seu memorabilium propositionum limitationes, of which the second augmented edition is from Venice in 1539. The numerous additiones to the first Neapolitan edition of 1523 are marked and are based on the additions provided by Zimara son to the printer. The year of Zimara father’s death is unknown, but what is known is that the philosopher was no longer alive at the time in 1537 of the publication of the Tabula, which is interesting also for the continuous discussions of Pomponazzi inserted in the various “voces” of the index. In 1532, Mar-

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cantonio Genoa succeeded to Zimara’s teaching Chair. A course of lessons prepared by Zimara in 1526 on the first four books of the Physics is preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Naples (“VIII. G 97”). About Marcantonio see the monograph of A. Antonaci, Ricerche sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento. Marcantonio Zimara, Vol. 1: Dal primo periodo padovano al periodo presalernitano (Lecce-Galatina, 1971), with a rich bibliography, pp. 455–494. Of Antonaci also see Francesco Storella filosofo salentino del Cinquecento (Galatina, 1966). Concerning the debate between Zimara and Girolamo Girelli on the intelligible species, see A. Poppi, Saggi sul pensiero inedito di Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 161–181). Always about the Paduans see G. Papuli, Girolamo Balduino. Ricerche sulla logica della Scuola di Padova nel Rinascimento (Manduria, 1967). Zimara’s son, Teofilo, was a friend of Cardinal Sirleto of Lecce, and a Platonic philosopher. To Sirleto he dedicated in 1584 an extensive commentary on De anima in which he insisted on the motive of concord. Under the Zimara name in printing can be found: Antrum magico-medicum, totius tractationis et generis philosophandi, quod adhibuit luculentus interpres arcanorum magico-physicorum, sigillorum, signaturarum et imaginum magicarum, secundum Dei nomina et constellationes astrorum... Accessit motus mechanici absque ullo aquae vel ponderis adminiculo conficiendi documento (Francofurti, 1625); and of 1526, a second part of Arcana naturae sympathiae, et antipathiae rerum.... Accesserunt portae intelligentiarum et canones de spiritu, anima et corpore maioris et minoris mundi. Of both book we have examined the copies in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence. But are they the works of Teofilo? About Simplicius and the Simplicians Bruno Nardi wrote in 1951, after this history was published, an important essay in Saggi, pp. 365–442, in which it is discussed also the version of Faseolo (Giovanni Faseolo or Fasolo), a disciple of Genoa, who published his translation in Venice in 1543 with the same kind of aims that Barbaro manifested in publishing the Latin Themistius. As to Bacilieri, a student of Achillini, we know he published in 1508 in Pavia a Lectura in tres libros de anima. Student of Bacilieri and Nifo was Geronimo Taiapietra who published in Venice on 6 April 1506 a Summa divinarum ac naturalium difficilium quaestionum Romae in capitulo generali fratrum minorum ... publice discussarum. The book was discussed in Rome at the residence of Cardinal Grimani on 6 June of the same year. In these questions, the position taken on the de anima was that of Siger of Brabant, as Nardi suggested in Saggi, pp. 281–312. A more extensive discourse would have been convenient in speaking of Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola (1502–1565) who became greatly notorious for a logical polemic concerning the Categories that, on his opinion, were to be expurgated from the Organon. His theses caused the reactions and the answers of Genoa, Vincenzo Maggi, Giacomo Giacomelli Bishop of Belcastro, Ubaldino Bandinelli, and Ludovico Boccadiferro. From all of this originated the Institutio in universam logicam.... In eandem commentarius. Item apologiae libri VIII (Basileae, 1545). His masterpiece and the voluminous compilation were published in Basel in 1562; it was printed with two frontispieces and two different (quite long) titles: Eversionis singularis certaminis libri XL and Disputationes in quibus primum ex professo Monomachia (quam singulare certamen Latini, recentiores Duellum vocant) philosophicis rationibus astruitur…. Due to the solicitations of Manzoli, Bernardi published also a rhetorical work: In tertium librum, in Proemium universale, nec non in cap. I et II libri I Rhetoricorum expositio (Venetiis, 1590) and (Bononiae, 1595). Girolamo Garimberto, a disciple, in 1550 dedicated to Bernardi the book titled Problemi naturali e morali.

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Among the commentators of the Aristotelian books of logic and the writers on logic in general who like Nizolio, Erizzo, Aconcio, and Zabarella expressed original ideas, there was a myriad of compilers and professors. Thus we have the comments on Porphyry of Daniello Barbaro, Exquisitae in Porphirium commentationes (Venetiis, 1542), who also edited many works of Ermolao and was the author of the elegant dialogue Della eloquenza (Venezia, 1557) and of La pratica della perspettiva (Venice, 1568); the publication of the lessons of logic of Girolamo Balduino through the editing of Antonio Lo Faso, Perihermeneias (Milan, 1549). The work generated a polemic: see Michele Calvo Salonia, Apologia de libro Predicamentorum pro omnibus Arist. expositoribus (Venetiis, 1575); Antonio Mocenigo, a Venetian patrician, De eo quod est paradoxa (Venetiis, 1559), which is an interesting discussion on substance (cfr. Poli, Supplimenti, par. 322); Alessandro Piccolomini, L'instrumento della filosofia (Venezia, 1560); Petrella, Quaestiones logicae (Patavii, 1571). Furthermore the teachings of logic of Claudio Betti of Modena were published (these courses are extant in a dozen codices of the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio of Bologna); the teachings of Girolamo Benintendi of Ferrara, of the Cardinal Ferdinando Ponzetti, of the Sicilians Giovanni Bologna, Compendium dialectices (Lovanii, 1550); Lorenzo Bolani, Opus logicum (Catania, 1596); Bartolomeo Castelli, Brevis et dilucida ad Logicam Arist. introductio (Messina, 1596), and, finally, the famous jurist Giulio Pace of Vicenza, editor and commentator of the Organon (1584), author of the fortunate Institutiones logicae (1586), besides other works on Lullus and the orations De honore (Spira, 1597). For informations about Pace see Scrittori vicentini, vol. 5, sect. 137–171. As we will see within the southern circles the one who achieved a certain importance was the already named Girolamo Balduino, whose Quaesita published in Naples in 1551 and again in 1569, came to be annotated by Giov. V. Colle in Naples in 1561. Colle’s Destructio destructionum dictorum Balduin., of 1554 was cited by Bruno and by G. Gomezio Pagano. Colle annotated also Averroès in works published in Naples in 1555 and in Venice in 1569. With these southerner commentators of Aristotle and Averroès others should be mentioned: Petrus Feltrius, Lectio prima in metaphysicam (Naples, 1526) and De fato, (1508); Antonio Marafa, Opus de anima (Naples, 1550); G. Giacomo Pavese, In prologum Averrois super analyticam posteriorem (Patavii, 1552); and on metaphysics (Venetiis, 1556); Francesco A. Vivolo, Commentaria Aristotelis (Naples, 1573); Scipione Fiorillo, Expositio prologi Averrois, etc.; Francesco Maria Storella, who was the editor of the logical and hermetic works of Zimara, Asclepii ex voce Ammonii (Naples, 1575); Bernardino Longo, Prologum (Venice, 1569) and in Naples in 1570 edited by Vivolo; Marco Migliorato, and so on. About Simone Porzio, the most complete work remains the essay of Fiorentino, to be now found in Studi e ritratti, pp. 81–153. To the list of his works, also the school lessons should be added. These lessons are preserved in codices at the Ambrosiana of Milan (“A 153 inf., G 69 inf.; P 197 sup.,”). In them, besides the lectures on metaphysics, are found writings on de partibus animalium, de motu gravium et levium, de potentiis animae, utrum anima sit partibilis, de materia caeli; de creatione; de fato, and others. The Florentine edition of 1551 cites the de humana mente disputatio, and the Opuscula cum Jacobi Antonii Marthae.... Apologia were printed in Naples in 1578. See in “Ashb. 674” the Trattato d’amore al Principe di Salerno. See Angelo Montu, “La traduzione del De mente humana di Simone Porzio. Storia ed esame di un manoscritto inedito,” Filosofia, 19 (1968), pp. 187–194.

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About Castellani see the notices placed beforehand to the Opuscoli volgari editi e inediti pubblicati per cura di F.(rancesco) Z.(ambrini) F.(aentino) (Faenza, 1847), pp. i-xxiv. Of Castellani the De humano intellectu libri tres (Bononiae, 1561) is cited. See Charles B. Schmitt, “Giulio Castellani (1528–1586): A Sixteenth Century Opponent of Skepticism,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 5 (1967), pp. 15–39. Benedetto Manzoli of Modena, Bishop of Reggio, was born about 1530, and died in 1585. He was a student of Castelvetro and a colleague of Patrizi in Padua, to whom he dedicated the fourth book of the Discussioni peripatetiche (“memoria teneo ... dum Patavii Philosophiae gratia uterque essemus”). Famous among his contemporaries, Manzoli composed Breve compendio di tutta la Rettorica d’Aristotele. There is also information that he wrote a De humano intellectu ad Horatium Malagutium, and notes and comments on Aristotelian works; see Tiraboschi, Biblioteca modenese, vol.. 3, pp. 147–152. As to the “great Pendasio” of Mantua, he published very little. Tiraboschi mentioned, only for having personally seen it, the work on the Fisica: Physicae auditionis texturae libri VIII (Venice, 1604). This work consists of a voluminous and extensive compilation dedicated to Vincenzo Gonzaga. Book 8, with a marginal numeration, in the proem contains a special reference to St. Thomas. A work of Pendasio appeared in Mantua in 1555 with the title of De natura corporum caelestium. Federigo Borromeo who knew and loved Pendasio, in De fugienda ostentatione, vol. 1, ch. 1, recalled his rare modesty, and referred to that book: “quumque parvum librum in Aristot. de coelo libros edidisset, suspicatus postea rem non esse perfectissimam, magnopere contendit, ut supprimeret illum librum suum, et exempla omnia sedulo conquisivit.” Brucker, Hist. Critic. philos., (Lipsiae, 1743), vol. 4, ch. 1, mentioned a Censura auscultationis physicae, in which Pendasio supposedly sustained a syncretist position. The Galileian Antonio Nardi stated of Pendasio that he “illustrò la dottrina e mostrò la continuazione della tela aristotelica.” Pendasio was a friend of Cardinal Scipione Gonzaga; he participated with Ercole Gonzaga to the Council of Trent. Of his doctrines and his fame, there are traces in all the thinkers of the period. G. Castellani, Epistolarum. libri, in epistle 87, remembered him with these words: “inter omnes quos audivi philosophos (permultos autem et excellentes audivi) te uno aut subtilius aut gravius elegantius de natura disserentem audivi neminem.” There is an abundance of courses of lessons and quaestiones (de coelo, de sensu et sensibili, de prima materia, de primo cognito, de toto et partibus, de materia coeli) preserved in manuscript form. They exist at Biblioteca Ambrosiana, but there are some also at the Biblioteca Nazionale of Naples. Some of the courses on Aristotle are dated: Padua, 1568; Bologna, 1572. 11. Other Minor Aristotelians Francesco Vicomercato, “erudito, ma lasso alquanto,” of Milan, was professor in Paris from 1540 to 1561, and then came to Turin where he died in 1570. In Paris (1543), he published a comment on the third book of the de anima, followed by a dissertation: de anima rationali peripatetica disceptatio. He commented on the Meteore (Venetiis, 1565), Anima (Venetiis, 1543 and 1574) and on the Fisica (Venetiis, 1584). Moreover, a De principiis rerum naturalium was published in Padua (Venice, 1596). About him, see B. Nardi, Saggi, p. 404. A Vicomercato’s disciple (and also of Amalteo) was Ludovico Settala of Milan, who was born in 1552 and died in 1633. He was famous as a doctor and a political writer more than as a philosopher. He wrote Problemi d’Aristotele (Hanovrae, 1602), a work quite diffused, but also a de ratione status (Francofurti, 1658); see P. Treves, “La politica aristotelica di L. Settala,” in Civiltà

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moderna (1930), pp. 588–621). See N. W. Gilbert, “Francesco Vimercato of Milan: a bio-bibliography,” in Studies in the Renaissance, 12 (1965), pp. 188–217, which establishes the dates of his life as 1512 and 1580 ca. Antonio Montecatini of Ferrara, known also for his political activism at the service of Alfonso II d’Este, professor in Ferrara for many years, where also he died in 1599, commented on De Anima, Fisica, and especially on the Politica of Aristotle and the Republica of Plato (Ferrariae, 1587–1594), enriching them with outlines, summaries, and notes. Writing to Cardinal Cinthio Aldobrandini in 1594, he said: “audio ... te, inter alias disciplinas, philosophia non solum Peripatetica verum tamen Platonica apprime delectari: hacque de causa Franciscum Patritium, virum probum, et in omni scriptorum genere, sed praecipue in Platonicorum doctrina exercitatissimum, apud te tenere... Quales sint hi libri Platonis et quam ad Politica Aristotelis intelligenda necessarii, qua sapientia, quibus mysteriis referti, licet paucae quaedam in iis contra prudentum consensum et contra veritatem cernantur maculae tu optime nosti.... Verum legibus quid augustius, quid in humanis divinius Platone.” And Patrizi exalted him dedicating to him the second book of the Discussiones peripateticae. Of G. F. Burana, see the comments that appeared in Venice in 1524 with those of Girolamo Bagolino, and in 1567. Of Bagolino see the Venetian editions of Aristotle’s de anima (1550), of Alexander (1516, 1549), of Philoponus (1558), of Themistius (1560), and of Sirianus. Felice Accoramboni of Gubbio, was a disciple of Vesalio and anti-Galen, known for his expertise in philology, who wrote on Galen and Theophrastus, but also an Interpret, obscuriorum locorum et sententiarum omnium opp. Aristotelis (Romae, 1590, many times reprinted (Romae 1600, 1603, 1604) with the title Vera mens Aristotelis. Antonio Scaino of Salò, a commentator on De Anima (Venetiis, 1599), on Metafisica (Romae, 1587), on the Fisica and the Politica (Romae, 1578), translated, summarized and annotated also the Nicomachea (Romae, 1574). Aristotelian commentaries were also published by Giovanni Paolo Pernumia, Philos. naturalis ordine definitivo tradita (Patavii, 1570) and the Greek Giovanni Cottunio, De triplici statu animae rationalis (Bononiae, 1628). Cottunio also commented on the de anima (Padua, 1657). However, with Cottunio and Antonio Rocco, the critic of Galileo, the 17th century began. For a more complete enumeration of these names others should be added that represented the Aristotelian-Thomist Scholasticism, like the one of Francesco Silvestri whose quaest. in tres libros Aristototelis de anima and the other comments can be seen in the exhaustive essay of G. Sestili, in Gli scienziati italiani, Edited by A. Mieli and published in Rome in 1921, pp. 128–137; Michele Zanardi of Bergamo, De triplici universo, de physica et metaphysica, commentatioque cum quaestionibus et dubiis in VIII lib. Aristotelis; the Thomist Pietro Manna of Cremona, among many others. Of Bernardino Petrella of Borgo San Sepolcro see the Logicarum disputationum libri septem (Patavii, 1584); Quaestiones logicae (Patavii, 1571). Of Zabarella numerous are the manuscripts containing the university courses and a great part of them are found at the Ambrosiana. Of Genoa in terms that are particularly eulogistic speaks Paolo Manuzio, Epist., lib. IV (Venetiis, 1561), p. 100 v, when writing to G. V. Pinelli he made the observation: “in philosophia quidem cum operam studiose des M. Antonio Genuae, cui veterum doctrinarum arcana patent, quo nemo peritior Aristotelis interpres, nemo vir melior usquam vivit.” In addition, at p. 101 r, he added, “quem ego omnibus iudicii laude antepono.” Tiraboschi mentioned Genoa’s comment on De anima (In tres libros Aristotelis de anima exactissimi Commentarii (Venetiis, 1576), posthumously published and dedicated to Giacomo Zabarella; a disputatio is found in

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the volume “giuntino arist. sull’anima” of 1574. Vedova, Scrittori padovani, vol. 1, pp. 457–460, mentioned the Disputatio de intellectus humani immortalitate ex dissertationibus M. A. G(enuae) (In Monte Regali, 1565). He commented on De caelo, Physica, Metaphysica, and De generatione et corruptione; composed a Discorso della vita tranquilla. Benedetto Dottori of Padua published in Padua in 1575 a Trattato de’ sogni secondo l’opinione d’Aristotile, in which he exposed what Genoa, “all’età nostra solo, per avventura, perfetto,” had observed “ne’ suoi privati ragionamenti.” See, besides the eulogy of Tommasini, Facciolati, Fasti, vol. 2, pp. 274, 279, 283. From the school of Genoa came, besides Zabarella, Tomitano, Speroni, B. Navagero, G. Faseolo, Daniele Barbaro who, as he wrote to Contarini, had the habit of writing down in verses the lessons given by Genoa. About Genoa you can read in B. Nardi, Saggi, pp. 386ff. Of him too many are the courses of lessons preserved in manuscripts. Ludovico Boccadiferro of Bologna was a disciple of Achillini, teacher of F. Piccolomini, accepted in his Aristotelianism also Platonizing elements. He lived between 1482 and 1545, taught in Bologna from 1517 to 1545 (with an interruption from 1524 to 1527) and saw coming out of his school Scaliger, Varchi, Flaminio Nobili, and Pendasio. He commented on Physica (Venetiis, 1558), Meteora (Venetiis, 1563, 1565, 1570), Parva Naturalia (Venetiis, 1570), De anima (Venetiis, 1565), De generatione et corruptione (Venetiis, 1571). See Fantuzzi, Scrittori bolognesi, vol. 2, pp. 210–217. For his Quaestio de immortalitate animae, see B. Nardi, Saggi, p. 412. About Boccadiferro in general, see B. Nardi, Studi su P. Pomponazzi, pp. 320ff., where he speaks of the influence of Boccadiferro on Varchi. See the essay of A. Rotondo in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1969), vol. 11, pp. 2–4. About Mercenario see L. Briguglio, “Arcangelo Mercenario 1578: lezioni sul primo libro del De anima scoperte nell’Archivio di Stato di Padova,” in the volume 9 of Atti del XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia: Aristotelismo padovano e filosofia aristotelica (Florence, 1960), pp. 29–33. 12. Jacopo Zabarella Concerning the logical disputations in Padua see, besides the cited loci in Ragnisco, J. H. Randall, “The development of scientific method in the school of Padua,” Journal of the History of Ideas, I (1940), pp. 177–206, now in the volume The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua, 1961); N. W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concept of Method (New York, 1960). Bernardino Tomitano (1517–1576), professor of logic in Padua between 1539 and 1563, drafted among other things the comments to the logical works of Aristotle and Averroès: animadversiones, solutiones contradictionum, argumenta, included in the “giuntina” edition of the Aristotelian corpus. In Venice in 1544 an Introductio ad sophisticos elenchos. Eiusdem brevis methodus dilucendorum paralogismorum per divisionem, praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in elenchos. Quam methodum ex dialogis Platonis et Aristotelis nuper invenit. It is interesting to see what Tomitano observed about Plato and the Platonists in the lessons published in the “giuntina” edition (Venetiis, 1574) at vol. 1, pt. 3, ch. 39 r): “cuius viri (Platonis) doctrinam, et si paucos hac tempestate, video, qui profiteri cupiant, quia tamen in Aristotelem percipiendo multum afferre luminis satis intelligo.…” And he concluded with a summary exposition of the Platonic system: “Haec Plato. Cuius doctrinam, si ut optabam, illustrare sententiis atque exornare verborum elegantia nobis non licuit.… Eoque magis hoc necessarium duxi, quo inter aetatis nostrae Philosophos qui Platonis profiteatur aut etiam (quod detestabile magis videtur) valde probet, vix unus aut alter exstat” (ch. 40 v). Tied by friendship with Sadoleto, he began his com-

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ment with the praise of his Ciceronian humanitas (ch. 4 r). But the most known works of Tomitano are the Ragionamenti della lingua Toscana, published in 1545, enlarged in 1546 with I precetti della Rhetorica secondo l’artificio d’Aristotile e Cicerone, and finally in a definitive form published in Padua in 1570: Quattro libri della lingua Toscana, ove si prova la Philosophia esser necessaria al perfetto Oratore e Poeta. He was elected member of the Accademia degl’Infiammati, then presided by Speroni. It is interesting to mention the charges of heresy brought against him for having translated the comment of Erasmus on Mathew, for which see his Orazione ... ai Signori della SS. Inquisizione di Venezia (Padua, 1556). See L. De Benedictis, Della vita e delle opere di B. Tomitano (Padua, 1903); E. Riondato, “Per uno studio di Bernardino Tomitano filosofo,” in the cited volume Aristotelismo padovano e filosofia aristotelica, pp. 223–229. About Zabarella see B. Labanca, Sopra Giacomo Zabarella, studio storico (Napoli, 1878); E. Micheli, Di una disputa didattica avvenuta tre secoli fa allo studio di Padova (Palermo, 1878); P. Ragnisco, “G. Zabarella il filosofo. Pietro Pomponazzi e Giacomo Zabarella nella questione dell’anima,” Atti dell’Istituto Veneto, 6, 5 (1886–1887), pp. 949–996; “La polemica tra Fr. Piccolomini e Giacomo Zabarella nella Università di Padova,” ibid., 6th series, 4 (1885–1886), pp. 1119–1252; “Una polemica di logica nell’Università di Padova nelle scuole di Bernardino Petrella e di G. Zabarella,” ibid., pp. 463–502; F. Franceschini, Osservazioni sulla logica di Giacomo Zabarella (Padua, 1937). Concerning the many editions of the works of Zabarella, see especially: Opera logica (Venetiis, 1578, 1586); Tabula logicae (Venetiis, 1580, 1583, 1586); De doctrinae ordine apologia (Venetiis, 1584, 1587); In duos Aristotelis libros posteriores analyticos commentarii (Venetiis, 1582, 1587); De rebus naturalibus (Venetiis, 1590). In addition see the comments on Physica (Venice, 1601) in Frankfurt, 1602, with the comments on de generatione et corruptione, on Meteorologica, and with the short treatises on de augmentatione e de putrefactione qua vinum vertitur in acetum; on de anima (Venice, 1605). There also exist M. Dal Pra, “Una oratio programmatica di G. Zabarella,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 21 (1966), pp. 286–290; M. V. Cardini Baldi, “Una inedita Quaestio an plures sint animae etc.,” Rinascimento, 2nd series,, 11 (1971), pp. 171–190; Ch. B. Schmitt, “Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella’s View with Galileo’s in de Motu,” Studies in the Renaissance, 16 (1969), pp. 80–138; W. F. Edwards, “Iacopo Zabarella: a Renaissance Aristotelian’s View of Rhetoric and Poetry and their Relation to Philosophy,” in Arts liberaux et Philosophic au Moyen Age (1969), pp. 843–854; A. Poppi, La dottrina della scienza in Giacomo Zabarella (Padua, 1972), but see also W. E. Edwards, “The Averroism of Jacopo Zabarella,” in the cited volume of Atti del XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia: Aristotelismo padovano e filosofia aristotelica, pp. 91–107. 13. Cesare Cremonini About Cremonini see, besides the Averroès of Renan, D. Berti, Di Cesare Cremonini e della sua controversia con l’inquisizione di Padova e di Roma (Rome, 1878); L. Mabilleau, Étude historique sur la philosophie de la Renaissance en Italie: Cesare Cremonini (Paris, 1881), with an extensive bibliography and indications about the Venetian and Paduan manuscripts. See also Giacon, Cesare Cremonini etc., from the Annuario della Università di Padova (1949–1950). But consult Galileo’s epistolary in print: Lecturae exordium habitum Patavi (Ferrariae, 1591); Explanatio proemii libri Aristotelis de physico auditu (Patavii, 1596); De formis quattuor corpor. simpl. (Venetiis, 1606), and the various works on the heavens and planets (1613, 1616, 1626), besides the three treatises on sensation published by Lancetta in 1644. Notes derived

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from the lessons of Cremonini are found in Jacobi Gaddii Tractatus sive commentarius in Arist. lib. de an., ms. “Magliab. XII, 24.” The essay “Contro li strologhi giudiziari” can be read in the Raccolta medica et astrologica, Edited by Lootri Nacattel (Troilo Lancetta) in Venice in 1645. Lancetta, a student of Cremonini, was the author, among other things, of an attack against Galen; he compiled also a Paraphrasis super dicta logicalia Caesaris Cremonini that was added to the edition of the lessons of dialectics of Cremonini (Venetiis, 1663). However, the most known work remains the Disciplina civile di Platone divisa in quattro parti (Venice, 1643), in which “il vero lume del sentimento platonico” is disingaged from the dialogical form. See M. A. Del Torre, Studi su Cesare Cremonini. Cosmologia e logica nel tardo aristotelismo padovano (Padua, 1968), with a good bibliography; idem, “La cosmologia di Cremonini e l’inedito De caeli efficientia,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 21 (1966), pp. 373–797. Of Liceti see again De vita libri tres (Genuae, 1606), De anim. coextensione corpori (Patavii, 1616), De natura assistente (Utini, 1637), De natura et arte (Utini, 1640), De pietate Aristotelis erga Deum et homines (Utini, 1645). For a serious analysis of the problem of Aristotelianism in rapport to Platonism, see the very important contributions in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance in the Proceedings of the XVIe Colloque International de Tours (Paris, 1976). For some scientific themes, see Sciences de la renaissance (Paris, 1973).

Sixteen PLATONIC ARISTOTELIAN SYNCRETISM AND PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE (pp. 379–404) 1. Francesco Cattani of Diacceto Information on Francesco Cattani of Diacceto can be found in Ficini Opera, vol. 1, pp. 937, 945. In print there are I tree libri d’amore con un Panegirico all’amore (it includes also the life of Varchi) (Vinegia, 1561); Opera (Basileae, 1563). Concerning the unpublished works and the mss. that contain them, see P. O. Kristeller, Supplementum ficinianum (Florence, 1937), vol. 2, p. 333. The life of Varchi is premised to I tree libri d’amore and a life of Eufrosino Lapini precedes the edition of Basel. P. O. Kristeller wrote on him in “Francesco da Diacceto and Florentine Platonism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Studies, pp. 287–336. Concerning the philosophy of love in general, see P. Lorenzetti, La bellezza e l’amore nei trattati del Cinquecento (Pisa, 1920), taken from Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, vol. 28; L. Tonelli, L’amore nella poesia e nel pensiero del Rinascimento (Firenze, 1933); J-Ch. Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love. The Context of Giordano Bruno’s “Eroici Furori” (New York 1958), with bibliography, pp. 271–274. See the collection of G. Zonta, Trattati d’amore del ’500 (Bari, 1912); Trattati del ’500 sulla donna (Bari, 1913). Zonta’s work was reproduced by Laterza in 1975 with introduction of Mario Pozzi (Bari, 1975). Of Eufrosino Lapini see Stanze sopra la dignità dell’uomo (Florence, 1566), Letione nella quale si ragiona del fine della poesia (Florence, 1567); L’Anassarcho, overo trattato de’ costumi che si debbono tenere nel dare opera a gli studi (Florence, 1571). In recent critical literature all prefer Nelson, the editor of L’amorosa filosofia di Francesco Patrizi (Florence, 1963), but all forget to mention that the book was supposed to be an illustration of the Eroici Furori of Bruno, to whose theories concerning

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love half of the book is dedicated, while almost one third deals with the period from Dante to Ficino so that to the contemporaries of Bruno very little space is given; an adequate treatment capable of expressing the many themes expressed in the literature on love of the century would have been desirable. About the rapports with the writings of L. B. Alberti see M. Aurigemma, “L’Ecatomfila, la Deifira e la tradizione rinascimentale della scienza d’amore,” in Atti e Memorie dell’Arcadia, 3rd series, 4 (1972), pp. 119–171. Pozzi has observed that the threading of the philosophy of love goes also with the development of the literature on art, for which see the collection of texts edited by P. Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 2 (1973), pp. 1611–1711). 2. The School of Diacceto. The “Verini.” Crisostomo Javelli of Casale As to the Orti Oricellari and the persons who met in the place, see G. Toffanin, Machiavelli e il «Tacitismo» (la « politico storica» al tempo della controriforma) (Padua, 1921), pp. 7–30; D. Cantimori, “Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 1 (1927), pp. 83–102; G. Spini, Tra Rinascimento e Riforma. Antonio Brucioli (Florence, 1940), pp. 147–158; R. von Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im Übergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (Bern, 1955), pp. 74–90; F. Gilbert, “Bernardo Rucellai e gli Orti Oricellari. Studio sull’origine del pensiero politico moderno,” in Machiavelli e la vita culturale del suo tempo (Bologna, 1964), pp. 7–58; G. Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965), pp. 26–43 (concerning the Dialogue of the repubblic of Brucioli). Regarding the first Verino, see the history of the University of Pisa that Fabroni wrote (vol. 1, pp. 312ff.). He commented on Aristotle and wrote de pulchritudine et amore, in which “Plato must have supplied more material than Aristotle” (Kristeller, Studies, p. 294). In 1515 the Academic authorities decided to give him as a colleague in physics Pomponazzi, who though accepting never truly went to Pisa. With reference to the second Verino see the cited works and the writings on beauty and love, published in Florence between 1581 and 1588 (Lorenzetti, La bellezza e l’amore nei trattati del Cinquecento, pp. 173–174), and the Ragionamento de l’eccellenza et de piú maravigliosi artifizi della magnanima professione della Filosofia (Florence, 1589), in which he praises “Bernardino Petrella, Logico excellentissimo, e che diecine d’anni le regole della logica insegna, e difende con grandissimo utile e credito” (p. 29). In Vere conclusioni di Platone conformi alla dottrina Christiana (Florence, 1590), p. 41, he praised the teachers Antonio Lapini, “che fu esquisitissimo nell’intelligenza del testo siccome nelle dispute,” Simone Porzio and Fra Girolamo da Ruta. In Trattato della lode, dell’honore, della fama, et della gloria (Florence, 1580), pp. 121ff., he numbered among the greatest philosophers of his time Genova and Branda “grandissimi averroisti,” Vincenzo Maggi, and Francesco Veniero for his “dottissimi discorsi” on Aristotle (I discorsi sopra i tre libri dell’anima d’Aristotele (Venice, 1555); Discorsi sopra i due libri della generatione e corruttione (Venezia, 1579). Of Verino see also the Discorso del soggetto, del numero, dell’uso e della dignità e ordine degl’habiti dell’animo (Florence, 1568), Le Meteore (1573), Il primo libro della nobiltà (1574), Discorso intorno ai demonii (1576), Compendio della dottrina di Platone (Florence, 1577), and Sulle idee.... (1581). Numerous are his writings among the mss. of Magliabechi. Important are the two letters of Aonio Paleario to the first Verino, letters concerning the soul; see Opera (Amsterdam, 1696), pp. 451–456. Polemic is the Liber in quo a calumniis detractorum philosophia defenditur (Romae, 1586). Of Borri see his Del Flusso e reflusso del mare (Florence, 1577). Borri had been a colleague of Selvaggio Ghettini in Pisa, had been praised by Varchi,

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succeeded to Giovanni Strozzi, and had the first Verino as his teacher. A colleague of the second Verino had been instead the Aristotelian Francesco Buonamici: De motu …. (Florentiae, 1591); Discorsi poetici in difesa d’Aristotele, (Venice, 1597). Among the professors of that time in Pisa were counted Giulio de’ Libri, an adversary of Galileo, commentator on Aristotle and Averroès; Carlo Tommasi of Cortona, an interpreter of Plato. And because we mentioned Erizzo for his writings on logic together with Figliucci the translator of Plato into vulgar (The commented version of Timaeus by Erizzo appeared in 1558, united in 1574 with the first tetralogy. Figliucci’s version of Phaedrus came out in 1544; that of Lysis of F. Colombi in 1548; that of Ion of N. Trivisani in 1548, and in 1554 that of Republic by Pamphilo Fiorimbene of Fossombrone), and Petrella, we should also remember Remigio Migliorato, the teacher of Nobili who actually published the opuscules of logic of his teacher (Lucca, 1554), Niccolò Massa’s Loica (Venice, 1549), Tito Giovanni Scandianese’s La Dialettica (Venice, 1563), and the philosophical works of Varchi, works strongly imbued with Aristotelianism though open to the Platonic philosophy of love, on which see U. Pirotti, “Benedetto Varchi e l’aristotelismo del Rinascimento,” in Convivium, 31 (1963), pp. 280–311; B. Nardi, Studi su Pomponazzi, pp. 322–328. In relation to the treatises on love the discussions on impresas and mottos should also be mentioned because in them serious questions on language in general were to be faced. See, for example, the Ragionamento of Giovio, Domenichi, and especially Ruscelli (Milan, 1559). Again, about Varchi see U. Pirotti, Benedetto Varchi e la cultura del suo tempo (Florence, 1971). About the singular figure of Girolamo Borri see the narration of G. Stabile in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1971), pp. 13–17. The first edition of Del flusso e riflusso del mare appeared in Lucca together with a Ragionamento di Telifilo Filogenio della perfettione delle donne, translated by G. Ghirlanda. He was criticized by Buonamici, and he was opposed to Verino. Galileo cited and discussed him. Montaigne in 1581 met him, and will mention him in his Essais, in a caracteristic manner: “Vidi in privato a Pisa un uomo dabbene, ma tanto aristotelico che il piú universale dei suoi dogmi è questo: che la pietra di paragone e la regola di ogni salda concezione e di ogni verità è la conformità alla dottrina di Aristotele; che al di fuori di quella non si hanno che chimere e vanità; che egli ha veduto tutto e detto tutto” (vol. 1, p. 26, translation of Garavini). Of Buonamici who died on 29 September 1603 and could deserve better attention we know that he taught at the Studio of Pisa from 1565 to 1603 A. Koyre analyzed the De motu in Studi galileiani, Italian translation of M. Torrini (Turin, 1976), pp. 19–40. A rich panorama of information can be found in Ch. Schmitt, “The Faculty of Arts at Pisa at the time of Galileo,” in Physis, 14 (1972), pp. 243–272 (where he refers to “Girolamo Borro’s Multae sunt nostrarum ignorationum causae (ms. “Vat. Ross. 1009”) in the cited volume edited by Mahoney, Philosophy and Humanism, pp. 462–476). 3. Gian Francesco Pico’s Skepticism. Adriano of Corneto The works of Gian Francesco Pico are all collected in the second volume of the works of Giovanni Pico in the edition of Basel (Basel, 1573 and 1601). The Examen Vanitatis Doctrinae Gentium was published in 1520 in Mirandola. About Pico see G. Tiraboschi, Biblioteca Modenese (Modena, 1781–1786), vol. 4, pp. 108–122; F. Strowski, “Une source italienne des ‘Essais’ de Montaigne. L’Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium de Francois Pic de la Mirandole,” Bulletin Italien, 5 (1905), pp. 309– 313; A. Corsano, Il pensiero religioso italiano (Bari, 1937), pp. 54–64; R. H. Popkin, A History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, 1960), pp. 19–21; Charles

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B. Schmitt, “Henry Ghent, Duns Scotus, and Gianfrancesco Pico on illumination,” in Mediaeval Studies, 25 (1963), pp. 231–258; Ch. B. Schmitt, “Who Read Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola?” Studies in the Renaissance, 11 (1964), pp. 105–132; id., “Gian Francesco Pico’s attitude toward his uncle,” in L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, vol. 2, pp. 305–313. Concerning his rapports with Pietro Bernardino see G. F. Pico, Operetta in difensione della opera di Pietro Bernardo da Firenze servo di Jesu Cristo (Florence, 1943) (also in La Rinascita, 6 (1943), pp. 507– 509); and C. Vasoli, “Pietro Bernardino e G. F. Pico,” in L’opera e il pensiero, vol. 2, pp. 281–299. For the influence of Crescas see H. A. Wolfson, Crescas Critique of Aristotle (Cambridge Mass., 1929). About Giovanni Mainardi and his rapports with the Picos, see P. Zambelli, “Giovanni Mainardi e la polemica sull’astrologia,” in L’opera e il pensiero, vol. 2, pp. 205–279. For the de imaginatione (perhaps an edition of 1501) see the very useful edition with introduction and notes of Harry Caplan (New Haven, 1930). Regarding the polemic with Bembo see the edition of G. Santangelo of Le epistole “de imitatione” di Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola e di Pietro Bembo (Florence, 1954). For a review of that edition by R. Spongano see in GSLI, 131 (1954), pp. 427–437, and G. Santangelo, Il Bembo critico e il principio d’imitazione (Florence, 1950).Of Gian Francesco Pico two volumes of works exist (Turin, 1972), in anastatic edition edited by Garin. About G. F. Pico see especially Ch. B. Schmitt, G. F. Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533) and his Critique of Aristotle (La Hague, 1967). An expert on the polemic of Pico with Bembo on imitation and De imaginatione, Werner Raith has published an interesting volume Die Macht des Bildes. Ein humanistisches Problem bei Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (München, 1967). The unedited quaestio de falsitate astrologiae a Giovanni Mainardi has been published by W. Cavini in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 13 (1973), pp. 133–171. Very important is Ch. B. Schmitt, “G. F. Pico della Miranda and the Fifth Lateran Council,” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 61 (1970), pp. 161–178. 4. Francesco Giorgio Veneto. Leone Ebreo. The Minor Writers of Treatises on Love About Francesco Giorgio Veneto nicknamed Zorzi (1460–1540) see G. Degli Agostini, Notizie istorico-critiche intorno alla vita e le opere degli Scrittori veneziani (Venezia 1754), vol. 2, pp. 332–362; C. Vasoli, “Testi umanistici sull’ermetismo,” in Archivio di filosofia, (1955), pp. 81–104; F. Secret, Les Kabbalistes chretiens de la Renaissance (Paris, 1964), pp. 126–140. But see especially Vasoli who dedicated to Zorzi a comprehensive study in the cited Profezia e ragione, in the section “Intorno a Francesco Giorgio Veneto e all’armonia del mondo,” pp. 129–403. The motto “ille omnia rite novit, qui bene scit numerare” that was one of the theses of G. Pico, by him attributed to an Abumaron of Babilonia, obtained a particular fame during the beginning of the 16th century, between the end of one century and the starting of the successive, when it almost became the motto of the semi-cabalistic compilations concerning the mysticism of numbers. The motto attracted the attention of Croce who studied it in “Libri sui misteri dei numeri” in Nuovi Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del ’600 (Bari, 1931), pp. 115–123. The work of Pietro Bongo, Numerorum mysteria, opus maximarum rerum doctrina et copia refertum, in quo mirus in primis idemque perpetuus Arithmeticae Pythagoricae cum Divinae Paginae numeris consensus, multiplici ratione probatur (Bergomi, 1599), in which Bongo precisely cited the saying of Abumaron. And in this line of thought should also be added the Cabalistic comments of Arcangelo da Borgonuovo (a

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disciple of Zorzi) on Pico (see Secret, Les Kabbalistes chretiens de la Renaissance, pp. 268, 273), the writings of Ricci (on Paolo Ricci, and his works—to be distinguished from those of Agostino Ricci—see “Secret,” ibid., pp. 87–99), the Settenario dell’humana riduttione of Farra (Venice, 1564). Strongly connected with the interests generated by Pico for the Hebraic gnosis are the works of Pietro Galatino (1460ca.– 1540), who was the Franciscan Pietro Colonna (on whom again see Secret, ibid., pp. 99–106): De arcanis Catholicae veritatis contra obstinatissimam judeorum nostrae tempestatis perfidiam (Ortonae maris, 1518), or of Cesare d’Evoli (1532–1598), De divinis attributis quae Sephirot ab Hehr. nunc. (Venetiis, 1573) (first appeared in Prague, 1571). The Venetian edition of 1589 combined together other writings as well: De caussis Antipathiae et Sympathiae rerum naturalium, De modo et potestate quam Daemones habent intelligendi, Apologia pro Ursula Neapolitana. For the works of Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’amore, the edition used is that of Caramella (Bari, 1929). About Leone Ebreo see H. Pflaum, Die Idee der Liebe. Leone Ebreo (Tubingen, 1926); I. Sonne, Intorno alla vita di Leone Ebreo (Florence, 1934). Most valuable is the introduction of Carl Gebhardt to his reproduction of the Roman edition of 1535 of the Dialoghi (Heidelberg-London, 1929). This introduction in translation appeared in a series of articles in Revista de Occidente, 12 (1934), of José Ortega y Gasset. Worthy of mention is Joachim de Carvalho, Leao Hebreu filosofo (Coimbra, 1918). C. Dionisotti, in a very important and acutely argumented essay, “Appunti su Leone Ebreo,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 2 (1959), p. 428, taking advantage of the ms. “Harleiano 5423” of the British Museum pointed out by Kristeller, has sustained that the author did not write his work in Italian: “Opera sorda a ogni richiamo letterario, ignara o esclusiva di ogni elemento che potesse allentare o distrarre la tensione speculativa, i Dialoghi d’amore anche per questo si rivelano espressione non originale ma mediata perché non recano traccia alcuna del travaglio linguistico e stilistico che necessariamente accompagna lo sviluppo di un’alta speculazione in una lingua restia” (ibid., p. 419). We must mention that Kristeller, Iter Italicum, 2, pp. 452b, 6o6a, listed two mss. of the third dialogue: the first is a “Barberiniano, 3743”; the second is the “26 of Fondo Patetta” (f. 1.: “Philone et Sophia del nascimento d’amore”; incipit: “Philon Philone o Philone. Non odi o non vuoi rispondere?”; Explicat (fol. 160): “verso di te amorosa me obligano. Vale”). See also W. Melczer, “Platonisme et aristotélisme dans la pensée de Leon l’Hebreu,” in the cited volume Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance, pp. 293–306. A document testifying the dissemination of this literature of love is Petri Godofredi, Carcassonensis J. C. I De amoribus, Libri tres / Lugduni Batavorum, / Ex Officina Joannis Maire, / 1648. A jurist, Procurator of King, in his Dialogi de amoribus, the author moves from Bessarion to Leone Ebreo, from Enea Silvio to the Utopia of Thomas More, from the classic poets to medieval jurists and theologians.As to the Marianus to whom Caramella alludes as having familiarity with Pico and whom he is identifying as Mariano Lenzi, the editor of the Dialoghi of 1529, it is more probable instead to identify him as Mariano da Genazzano, who had intimacy with the Picos. 5. Pietro Bembo and the “Asolani.” Castiglione. Mario Equicola and Betussi. Tullia d’Aragona. Flaminio Nobili Concerning the dissolution of the “philosophy of love,” see G. Toffanin, II Cinquecento (Milan, 1929), pp. 122–148; L. Savino, Teoria e pratica d’amore nel secolo della Rinascenza (Naples, 1915).

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A wide list of the treatises on love of the 16th century is found in Lorenzetti, La bellezza e l’amore nei trattati del Cinquecento, pp. 165–175. For their evident Platonism the following treatises among the many should be mentioned: Spositione d’un sonetto platonico fatto sopra il Primo effecto d’Amore, che è il separare l’anima dal corpo dell’amante, dove si tratta de la immortalità dell’anima secondo Aristotele, e secondo Platone (Fiorenza, 1554), a work of Pompeo dalla Barba; the Dialoghi of beauty and love “secondo la mente di Platone” of Niccolò Vito de Gozze, «gentiluomo Ragugeo» (Venice, 1581); the Rime platoniche of Celso Cittadini dell’Angiolieri, “con alcune brevi sposizioni, nelle quali (1’autore) succintamente tratta della scala Theologica e della Platonica di salire al Cielo per le cose create; et alcuni segreti mysterii del nome d’Amore per via della Cabalah” (Venice, 1585); the Lettioni sopra la definitione d’amore posta dal gran filosofo Platone nel libro chiamato il Convito, of Gerolamo Sorboli of Bagnacavallo (Modena, 1590).Regarding the work of Equicola (1495–1515), composed in 1495, in “antiquo romano sermone,” was translated “in la comune italica lingua” by a nephew of the author, and then reviewed by him for the printer (1525). See D. Santoro, Della vita e delle opere di M. Equicola (Chieti, 1906); D. De Robertis, “La composizione del De natura de amore e i canzonieri antichi maneggiati da Mario Equicola,” in Studi di filologia italiana, 17 (1959), pp. 189–220. In the first historical part, the poets and the philosophers who treated the theme of love are introduced, from Guittone to G. J. Calandra (whose work Aura has been lost). References to Equicola “amicissimus noster” are in Nifo, De pulchro et amore (1529) (edition of Lugduni, 1549), pp. 91, 145, which is interesting for all allusions to contemporaries. As to Nobili, the Trattato dell’Amore con le postille autografe di T. Tasso, edited by P. D. Pasolini (Rome, 1895). About Nobili see Paganini, F. Nobili, studio biografico (Turin, 1884). Nobili (1533–1591), a professor in Pisa, produced some interesting works: De hominis felicitate libri III; De vera et falsa voluptate libri II; De honore liber unus (Lucca, 1563). Among the dialogues of Tasso see especially the following: Il Molza, ovvero dell’Amore; Il Minturno, ovvero della Bellezza. Of Antonio Minturno there are L’amore innamorato (Venice, 1559); Panegirico in laude d’amore (Venice, 1559). Concerning the mentioned discussion on the topic of love in Ferrara, see Francesco Muti of Cosenza, De pulchritudine Thaeses Alphonso II Ferrariae Duci dicatae (Ferrara, 1589). A special mention is proper for L’amorosa filosofia of Francesco Patrizi of Cherso, published from an autograph codex by J. Ch. Nelson (Florence, 1963). The work was drafted in 1577 in Modena. Concerning the continuation of these themes in the 17th century see Luca Belli, Commento sopra il Convito di Platone (Macerata, 1614). 6. Agostino Steuco of Gubbio and Perennial Philosophy. Iacopo Mazzoni. Minor Platonists Of Steuco there is a complete collection in three volumes of his works: Opera Omnia (Venetiis, 1591), previously published in Paris in 1577. About Steuco exist the essays of H. Ebert, “A. Steuchus und seine philosophia perennis,” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 42 (1929), pp. 342–356; 43 (1930), pp. 92–100; Th. Freundenberger, Augustinus Steuchus (Munster, 1935). About him see the Capuchin Filippo of Cagliari 0. F. M., Influssi di Agostino Steuco e di Ambrogio Catarino nella “Explanatio in Genesim” di S. Lorenzo da Brindisi (Rome, 1963); Ch. B. Schmitt, “Perennial Philosophy: Steuco to Leibniz,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1966), pp. 505–532; G. Di Napoli, “Il concetto di philosophia perennis di Agostino Steuco nel quadro della tematica rinascimentale,” in the cited volume Filosofia e cultura in Umbria, pp. 459–489; F.

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Wiedmann, “Das Problem der ‘Christlichen Philosophie’ nach Augustinus Steuchus,” ibid., pp. 491–499; Ch. B. Schmitt, “Prisca Theologia e Philosophia Perennis due temi del Rinascimento italiano e la loro fortuna,” in the proceedings of the Conference of Montepulciano in 1968: Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento e il nostro tempo (Florence, 1970), pp. 211–236. Under many aspects useful is the introduction of Schmitt to the anastatic reproduction of the De perenni philosophia (New YorkLondon, 1972), pp. v–xvii, with a complete bibliography; see also J.-E. d’Angers, “Epictète et Sénèque d’apres le De perenni philosophia d’Augustin Steuco (1496– 1549),” in Revue des sciences religieuses, 35 (1961), pp. 1–31; H. J. De Vleeschauwer, “Perennis quaedam philosophia,” in Studia Leibniziana, Supplement I, 1, pp. 102–122. About Mazzoni, whose importance is remarkable also for his rapports with Galileo, see G. Rossi, “J. Mazzoni e l’eclettismo filosofico nel Rinascimento,” in Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei, Scienze morali, 5th series, 2 (1893); in relation to Galileo see A. Favaro, G. Galilei e lo studio di Padova (Florence, 1883), pp. 1, 32ff. Concerning the polemic with Patrizi, see his Discorso (Cesena, 1573), and on his critical positions, G. Toffanin, La fine dell’Umanesimo (Turin, 1920), pp. 165–167. Again about Mazzoni see especially P. Galluzzi, “I1 platonismo del tardo Cinquecento e la filosofia di Galileo,” in the volume of various authors, Ricerche sulla cultura dell’Italia moderna, Edited by P. Zambelli (Bari, 1973), pp. 37–95. Giulio Camillo Delminio in recent times has attracted the attention of scholars. Paolo Rossi has dedicated to him a major part of the book, Clavis Universalis (MilanNaples, 1960), and so did F. A. Yates, L’arte della memoria (Turin, 1972), an Italian version of the English original of 1966. Of all this C. Vasoli speaks in the rich essay, I miti e gli astri (Naples, 1977), pp. 185–245, and in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Roma, 1974), vol. 17, pp. 218–230, G. Stabile provided more information and a good bibliography. Camillo’s De transmutatione has also been recently published by L. Bolzoni, “Eloquenza e alchimia in un testo inedito di Giulio Camillo,” Rinascimento, 14 (1974), pp. 243–276. About the Sicilian Platonists, see V. Di Giovanni, Storia della filosofia in Sicilia dai tempi antichi al secolo xix (Palermo, 1873), 2. vols. Of Giannini, besides the mentioned works, see the information provided by Borsetti in Storia dell’Università di Ferrara. About Liceti here incidentally mentioned see the letters of Galilei. As to Gabriello Buratelli of Ancona, of the Eremites (Hermits), there is mention also in Mazzoni. His work, Praecipuarum controversiarum Aristotelis et Platonis conciliatio. Opus diu desideratum, et a veteribus, ac recentioribus pollicitum, non tamen absolutum, was printed in Venice in 1573 (see the informations provided by Mazzucchelli). Paolo Beni of Gubbio (see the eulogy of Tommasini), born ca. 1552, died in Padua in 1625, where he taught for a long time and became famous especially for a commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle. It appears that he also composed a poetics of Plato. Of him read In Timaeum Platonis, sive in naturalem atque divinam Platonis et Aristotelis Philos. decades tres (Romae, 1594). Of G. B. Bernardi, a Venetian patrician, dead in 1570, the son published in Venice in 1582 the cited Seminarium ... opus sane mirabile, et omni eruditorum generi perquam utile, quod Platonis ac Aristotelis eorundemque interpretum tam Graecorum quam Latinorum ac etiam Arabum quaestiones, conclusiones, sententiasque omnes integras et absolutas miro ordine digestas complectitur (Venice, 1582–83; 1589, 1599; and Lyons, 1599, 1605). The work is in reality a reasoned alphabetical catalogue, without any constructive pretense. Always in line with the theme of Platonism, with syncretist tendencies and antithesis between Plato and Aristotle, Bernardino Donato’s De Platonicae et Aristotelicae philosophiae differentia (Venetiis, 1540), (it contains also a work of Pletho), and Uberto

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Foglietta, “De nonnullis in quibus Plato ab Aristotile reprehenditur,” in Opuscola nonnulla (Romae, 1574) should be mentioned. With them and not to be forgotten is Scipione Agnelli, Disceptationes de ideis (Venetiis, 1615). Niccolò Contarini, Ioannis Gabrielis filius, in his work De perfectione rerum libri sex (Venetiis, 1576), maintained a vision of the desire that the whole of reality must ascend to God, an ascension that man must realize through contemplation, love, and music. Platonic, hermetic and cabalistic are the works of Giulio Camillo Delminio. These works were partially published by Dolce and Patrizi in two volumes in Venice in 1560. A theological and cabalistic text of Delminio exists in ms. format in Naples (Oratoriana), in Pavia (University), and Dublin (Trinity College). On this text see GCFI, 38 (1959), p. 159; P. Rossi, Clavis universalis (Milan-Naples, 1960), p. 294. Platonic glosses are found in the cited work of Castelvetro (Opere vane e critiche, pp. 197ff.). See also M. A. Mocenici, De transitu hominis ad Deum lib. unus, in quo singulae quaestiones de anima explicantur (Venetiis, 1568). As to the positions of Contarini, A. Tenenti in Bollettino dell’Istituto di storia della società e dello stato veneziano (Venezia, Fondazione Cini, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 155–166, must be consulted. Concerning all the writings of these “giovani patrizi veneti,” however, read the note in GCFI, 40 (1961), pp. 134–136. Of another Mocenigo, named Filippo, are the Universales institutiones ad hominis perfectionem (Venetiis, 1581). Among the translators, an eminent place is taken by Dardi Bembo who translated into Italian the whole Plato, in addition to other Alessandrian writings, “for the purpose of making known to everybody in what manner the gentile philosophers deprived of the evenagelical truth and with the sole light of reason spoke of God, providence and immortality, and tried to show to humankind how to walk to the achievement of that happiness and truth that we expect to enjoy and know in heaven” (a fine conoscano tutti in che maniera i Filosofi Etnici, privi della verità evangelica col solo lume dell’intelletto e colla guida della dottrina si ponessero a parlare con Dio, della Provvidenza e dell’immortalità nostra, e si studiassero d’incamminarci all’acquisto di quella felicità e verità che si aspetta di goder e conoscere perfettamente in cielo) in the words of Commento di Jerocle filosofo (Venice, 1604).Concerning some weak manifestations of the waning of Platonism see R. De Mattel, “Difese italiane di Platone nel Cinque e nel Seicento,” in the miscellany Scritti in memoria di W. Cesarini Sforza (Milan, 1968), pp. 265–288, which includes writings about Crisostomo Javelli, Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, and Tommaso Campanella; G. Papuli, “Platonici salentini del tardo Rinascimento,” in Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Lecce, 12 (1967), mentions Cesare Raho, Teofilo Zimara, Matteo Tafuri, and Francesco Scarpa. Particularly rich with indications and suggestions on these subjects is the cited volume Platon et Aristote (Paris, 1976) that collects the proceedings of the 16th Colloque International de Tours.

Seventeen BETWEEN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY (pp. 405–426) 1. Luca Pacioli. Leonardo Da Vinci Friar Luca Pacioli of Borgo San Sepolcro of the Order of the Minor Friars and teacher of Sacred Theology published in 1494 in Venice the Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni e Proportionalità; the Divina Proportione came also out in Ven-

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ice in 1509 by the types of Paganino de’ Paganini (reprinted in Winterberg, Wien 1889). He lived in Rome “piú e piú mesi” with Alberti, “homo de grandissima perspicacia et doctrina, ... in proprio domicilio con lui a sue spese sempre ben tractato.” See about Pacioli, L. Olschki, Geschichte der neusprach. wissenschaften Literatur (Heidelberg-Leipzig, 1919–1929), vol. 1, pp. 151–251; B. Nardi, “La scuola di Rialto e 1’umanesimo veneziano,” in the vol. Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano (Florence, 1963), pp. 101–115; A. Frajese, “Luca Pacioli nella storia della matematica,” in the volume Filosofia e cultura in Umbria, pp. 367–376; E. Mirri, “Elementi di filosofia platonica in Luca Pacioli,” ibid., pp. 377–389; P. Speziali, “Luca Pacioli et son ceuvre,” in the cited volume Sciences de la Renaissance, pp. 93–106. The surviving folios of Leonardo amount to more than seven-thousand, for which see G. Calvi, I manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci (Bologna, 1925); and also E. Verga, Bibliografia vinciana (Bologna, 1931), 2 vols., that must be integrated with the successive material published periodically in Raccolta Vinciana. Among the best editions there are those of the Codice Atlantico with the transcription of G. Piumati (Milan, 1894–1891); those of the mss. of the Institut de France edited by Ravaisson-Mollien, in six volumes (Paris, 1881–1891), and in part those of the Commissione Vinciana (Rome, 1936, 1938, and 1941); that of the Trivulziana Collection by De Toni (Milan, 1939); that of the Arundel Codex of the Commissione Vinciana (Rome, 1923–1930), in 4 vols. On the anthological collections, see J. P. Richter, The literary works of Leonardo da Vinci compiled and edited from the original manuscripts (London, 1883 and 1939); G. Fumagalli, Leonardo “omo sanza lettere” (Florence, 1939); Scritti letterari, Edited by A. Marinoni (Milan, 1952); Scritti scelti, Edited by A. M. Brizio (Turin, 1952). About Leonardo, see P. Duhem, Études sur Leonard de Vinci (Paris, 1906– 1913), 3 vols.; E. Solmi, “Le fonti dei manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci. Contributi,” in GSLI, suppl. 10–11 (1908), pp. 1–344; “Nuovi contributi alle fonti...,” ibid., 58 (1911), pp. 297–357; E. Garin, “Il problema delle fonti del pensiero di Leonardo da Vinci,” in Atti del Convegno di Studi Vinciani. Firenze-Pisa-Siena, 1953 (Florence, 1953), pp. 157–172. For Leonardo’s thought, see F. M. Bongioanni, Leonardo pensatore (Piacenza, 1935); G. Gentile, Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento (Florence, 1940), pp. 115–150, and B. Croce, “Leonardo filosofo” of 1906, inserted thereafter in Saggio sullo Hegel (Bari, 1913), pp. 211–240. The centennial celebrations of 1952 originated a revival of studies of which we recall only the volume of C. Luporini, La mente di Leonardo (Florence, 1952); for the other publications in the centennial year see the review of A. Chastel, “Leonardiana,” in Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 16 (1954), pp. 386–397, and of E. Garroni, “Leonardo e il suo tempo,” in Rassegna di filosofia, 4 (1955), pp. 5–37; and the most interesting essay of C. Dionisotti, “Leonardo uomo di lettere,” in Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 5 (1964), pp. 183–216. The most significant event about Leonardo da Vinci has been the finding of two new codices in Madrid in 1967. In 1974, the transcription together with a reproduction of the codices appeared thank to Ladislao Reti, who for the occasion published also a miscellany (Milan, 1974) with contribution of A. M. Brizio, M. V. Brugnoli, A. Chastel, L. H. Heydenreich, and others. This finding gave way on one hand to the possibility of reconstructing in a different manner Leonardo’s library through the list given in folios 2v–3r of codex 8936; on another hand, the so-called “Madrid I” has given a text that is orderly, almost organic, and almost exclusively dealing with problems of mechanic so that it appeared to have been prepared for the printer (see A. Marinoni, I codici di Madrid, XIV Lettura vinciana (Florence, 1975).

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Naturally the finding has originated a certain important production of new studies. In fact, besides the mentioned work of Reti, the anthology of Letture vinciane, Edited by P. Galluzzi (Florence, 1974) has been published with studies of Marinoni, Heydenreich, Brizio, Reti, De Toni, Mariani, Salmi, Pedretti, Steinitz, Maccagni, Garin, and Vasoli; A. Marinoni, Scritti letterari (Milan, 1974), and the reprint with introduction of Garin of Solmi, Scritti vinciani (Florence, 1976). 2. Girolamo Cardano About Cardano, see S. Fimiani, Note e appunti sulla cultura filosofica del Rinascimento: G. Cardano, la vita e Ie opere (Bari, 1904); E. Rivari, La mente di G. Cardano (Bologna, 1906); G. Muoni, La mente e la fama di G. Cardano (Milan, 1908), with bibliography; E. Rivari, I concetti morali del Cardano (Bologna, 1914); Roger Charbonnel, La pensée italienne au xvi siècle et le courant libertin (Paris, 1919); L. Thorndike, History, vol. 5, pp. 562–579; L. Firpo, “I praecepta ad filios di G. Cardano,” in Studia Oliveriana, 3 (1956); G. Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli, pp. 80–94; A. Mondini, Gerolamo Cardano, matematico, medico e filosofo naturale (Rome, 1962). Cardano’s works were collected in 10 vols. (Lugduni, 1663). The judgment given in the text is of De Ruggero, Rinascimento, pp. 187–189. The thesis of fragmentation and unorganization of these inquirers was already sustained by L. Olschki who insisted in regard to Ulisse Aldovrandi on his incapacity of going beyond the Aristotelian vision of reality that remained unchanged, though with the contribution of some new and particular observations (in Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. 2, pp. 28ff.). Of Aristotle, Aldovrandi spoke in this way: “me enim quamvis abstrusas rerum causas ac recondita principia sedula indagatione investigaverit, aditumque nobis ad complurima maximis difficultatibus percipienda patefecerit; tamen et ego nonnulla observavi propria experientia.” But of himself he said in Ornithologiae libri XII (Bononiae, 1641), p. 124: “arduum atque difficile est, confusum in suas partes ordine referre.” In regard to some pre-Vichian themes in Cardano, see the pages of Gentile, Studi vichiani (Florence, 1927), pp. 33–34. Against the de subtilitate (1550) of Cardano, G. C. Scaligero (1484–1558) wrote Exotericarum exercitationum lib. XV de subtilitate ad H. C. (Paris, 1557). Cardano naturally answered with Actio in calumniatorem that is found in the appendix to the edition of Basel of the de subtilitate (1560). Concerning this polemic, see the significant article of Bayle in the Dictionnaire (1740), vol. 2, pp. 51–56. Besides the notes published by Corsano in GCFI, 40 (1961), pp. 87–91, 175–180, 499–507; 41 (1962), pp. 56–64, see J. C. Margolin, “Jérôme Cardan, Christophe Colomb et Aristote,” Bibliotheque D’Humanisme et Renaissance, 27 (1965), pp. 655– 668, “Rationalisme et irrationalisme dans la pensée de Jérôme Cardan,” in Revue Universitaire de Bruxelles (1968–1969), pp. 86–128; J. Ochman, “Il determinismo astrologico di Girolamo Cardano,” in the cited volume Magia, astrologia e religione nel Rinascimento (Warsaw, 1972), pp. 123–129; J. C. Margolin, “Analogie et causalité chez Jérôme Cardan,” in Sciences de la Renaissance, pp. 67–81; idem, “Cardan interprète d’Aristote,” in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance, pp. 307–333. 3. Girolamo Fracastoro The works of Fracastoro, all assembled, were published in Venice by the Giunta Printers family in 1555. The volume was many times reprinted: Homocentricorum sive de stellis, liber unus; De causis criticorum dierum libellus; De sympathia et antipathia rerum liber unus; De contagionibus et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri

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tres; Naugerius sive de poetica dialogus; Turrius sive de intellectione dialogus; Fracastorius sive de anima dialogus; De vini temperatura sententia; Syphilidis sive de morbo gallico libri tres; Ioseph libri duo; Carminum liber unus. The De causis criticorum dierum libellus was published in Italian in the already mentioned Raccolta medico et astrologica of Troilo Lancetta, pp. 91–130; a volume of unpublished writings appeared as Scritti inediti (1955). There were reprints of Carminum liber unus (Verona, 1954); of Syphilidis sive de morbo gallico, with translation of F. Winspeare (Florence, 1955). A special consideration should be given to Naugerius sive de poetica with the glosses of Tasso, edited by A. M. Carini and published as Studi Tassiani, vol. 5 (1955), pp. 107–145. The volume contains good general and specific indications at pp. 108–109; more are in P. Rossi, “Il metodo induttivo e la polemica antioccultistica in G. Fracastoro,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 9 (1954), pp. 485–499. About Fracastoro, Thorndike, History, vol. 5 (1941), pp. 488–497 is unclear. Among the reprints and translations of Naugerius see those of W. Bundy (Urbana, Illinois, 1924) and of G. Preti (Milan, 1945); N. Badaloni, “Il significato filosofico della discussione sulla salvezza,” Logos, 3 (1969), pp. 40–69; E. Peruzzi, “I manoscritti fracastoriani della Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona,” Physis, 18 (1976), pp.. 342ff. 4. Giambattista della Porta In regard to Della Porta, F. Fiorentino, “Della vita e delle opere di G. B. Della Porta,” in Studi e ritratti della Rinascenza, pp. 233–340, is still very worthy; see also B. Spampanato, Quattro filosofi napoletani nel Carteggio di Galileo (Portici, 1907), pp. 61–88; L. Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. 2, pp. 262ff.; G. Gabrieli, “Bibliografia di G. B. della Porta,” in Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei, Scienze morali, 6th series, vol. 8 (1932), pp. 206–277; “G. B. della Porta Linceo,” in GCFI, 8 (1927), pp. 360–397, 423–431; G. Paparelli, “La Taumatologia di Giovambattista Della Porta,” in Filologia romanza, 2 (1955), pp. 418–429; idem, “Giambattista Della Porta,” in Rivista di storia delle scienze mediche e naturali, 47 (1956), pp. 1–47; N. Badaloni, “I fratelli Della Porta e la cultura magica e astrologica a Napoli nel ’500,” Studi storici, 1 (1959–1960), pp. 677–715. See also the well documented G. Aquilecchia, Schede di italianistica (Turin, 1976), pp. 219–254, where is reproduced the essay “Appunti su G. B. Della Porta e l’inquisizione,” that appeared previously in Studi Secenteschi, 9 (1968), pp. 3–31). 5. Andrea Cesalpino About Cesalpino, see again F. Fiorentino, “A. Cesalpino,” in Studi e ritratti, pp. 195– 231; U. Viviani, Vita ed opere di A. Cesalpino (1922); the introduction of M. Dorolle to the anthological version of the Quaestiones peripateticae (Paris, 1929), pp. 1–93 (with bibliography); L. Thorndike, History, vol. 6, pp. 324–338. The mention is made here of the writings of some eclectic popularizers of scientific knowledge, who used the vulgar with the purpose of making the scientific findings more accessible. First among all was Alessandro Piccolomini with his logic: Instrumento della filosofia (Rome, 1551); with Filosofia naturale, completed in mid-century and many times reprinted (Venice, 1551–1554), 2 vols.; with Sfera del mondo (Venice, 1540). The Sfera was translated into Latin by J. N. Stupanus, De sphaera libri quatuor. De cognoscendis stellis fixis. De magnitudine terrae et aquae and was published in Basel by Perna in 1568. In these works Cesalpino clearly distinguished the scientific inquiry that proceeds hypothetically independently from faith: “Tutto si ha da intendere come necessità di suppositione, supponendo cioè 1’ordine e 1i principi che a sola

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natura si convengono; riserbando la necessità assoluta e infallibile al giudizio della Ecclesia Santa.” Of Cesalpino consult also In mechanicam quaestiones … de certitudine mathematicae disciplinae (Romae, 1547). In addition we have Camillo Agrippa, Trattato di Scientia d’arme con un dialogo di filosofia (Rome, 1553); Ludovico Dolce, who wrote on everything and even on mnemotechniques, composed a Somma di tutta la natural filosofia d’Aristotele (Venice, 1550); Domenico Delfino published a Sommario di tutte Ie scienze (Venice, 1566); Corbinelli brought out La Fisica of Paolo del Rosso (Paris, 1578); in 1545 came out Tre libri della sostanza e forma del mondo di Giovanni Maria Memo. Many were the other astronomical and astrological publications, for which see Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. 2, passim. Of the Dialogi … della naturale philosofia of Antonio Brucioli (Venice, 1544) we will speak later. Here we mention only Problemi naturali e morali (Venice, 1549) of Girolamo Garimberto; the Discorso sull’Anima (Venice, 1558) of the Peripatetic Rinaldo Odoni; the Istoria dell’uomo (Perugia, 1577) of Ludovico Sensi; the Breve Sposizione di tutta l’opera di Lucrezio (Rome, 1589) with a comparison between Epicureanism and Aristotelianism of Girolamo Frachetta. Among the commentaries on the physics of Aristotle see the Lectiones supra Aristotelis de physica auditu (Perugia,, 1572) of Gian Ludovico Cartario of Bologna, whose other works are: Anima (Bologna, 1587) and Logica (Bologna, 1590); the Theoremata Physicae Aristotelis (Venice, 1571) of Friar Cagno; the Quaestiones peripateticae de rebus naturalibus ad mentem Aristotelis examinatae (Venice, 1617) of G. B. Contarini. Of curious interest is the De mundi exustione (Basel, 1562) of Girolamo Maggi. About Cesalpino see of various authors, Considerations about Cesalpinus’ and Harvey’s Works on the Blood Circulation Discovery (New York, 1964); C. Colombero, “Il pensiero filosofico di Andrea Cesalpino,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 32 (1977), pp. 269–284. An interesting iconographic and facsimiles collection is S. Folaron, Andrea Cesalpino ikonografia (Nowa Ruda, 1972). About Alessandro Piccolomini see F. Cerreta, Alessandro Piccolomini letterato e filosofo senese del Cinquecento (Siena, 1960); R. Suter, “The Scientific Work of Alessandro Piccolomini,” Isis, 60 (1969), pp. 210–222. Particular attention should be given to figures like the one of Ulisse Aldrovandi, about whom see G. Olmi, “Ulisse Aldrovandi, Scienza e natura nel secondo Cinquecento,” in Quaderni di storia e filosofia della scienza dell’Università di Trento, num. 4 (Trent, 1976), with in appendix a De arte Raimondi Lulli; S. Tugnoli Pattaro, “La formazione scientifica e il Discorso naturale di Ulisse Aldrovandi,” ibid., num. 7 (Trent, 1977), with in appendix the Discorso naturale. For an overview, see C. Vasoli, “La cultura dei secoli xiv–xvi,” in the proceedings of the first international conference on the sources for the history of Italian science: I secoli xiv–xvi, Edited by C. Maccagni (Florence, 1967), pp. 31–105, with a discussion on the correlation.

Eighteen THE NEW THOUGHT FROM TELESIO TO BRUNO (pp. 427–488) 1. Bernardino Telesio. His Works. Relationship with Maggi. The De rerum natura. Objections of Patrizi. Replies of Telesio and Persio The De rerum natura of Telesio is available in three volumes in the edition of Vin-

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cenzo Spampanato (Modena-Genova-Roma, 1910–1923). The first three volumes are the only ones that appeared in the series “Filosofi Italiani” created by Felice Tocco for the Società filosofica italiana. A new edition that includes an Italian translation with the original text, the variants of previous editions, the translation of Martelli, the manuscript corrections, some of which are autographs preserved in some exemplars, is in the process of preparation through the work of Luigi De Franco, Bernardini Telesii De rerum natura (Cosenza, 1965). Reaching almost a thousand pages, this work already offers to students a remarkable quantity of materials and information. The new edition by De Franco of Telesio’s major work began in 1974 in Cosenza with the publication of the first two volumes; the third, containing books 7–9 was published in Florence in 1976. In the appendix, pp. 481–584, De Franco offered the material preserved in the mss. “Ottoboniani latini 1292 and 1306” (on which see S. G. Mercati, “Manoscritti telesiani,” in Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania, 25 (1956), pp. 3–17), which are autographes, but in a disorderly classification and hard to read. As De Franco declared, he recuperated 281 folios out of a total of 470, and of the recovered ones only some are of the De rerum natura. Even though in this condition, the edition of De Franco brings up a conspicuous quantity of materials, which together with an edition that takes advantage of the previous ones and of the identification of sources, is also enriched by a new translation. A fourth volume of opuscules will allow the scholars to bring attention to the originality of this well deserving author. The proem of the first edition in two volume (Rome, 1565) had already been reproduced by Gentile in appendix to his Bernardino Telesio (Bari, 1911) together with other important texts and a useful bibliography. The most relevant work for the wealth of documentation remains that of Fiorentino, Bernardino Telesio, ossia studi storici su l’idea della natura nel Risorgimento italiano (Florence, 1872–1874), in 2 vols., of which the second (pp. 305–469) contains a precious appendix of documents. But see furthermore E. Zavattari, La visione della vita nel Rinascimento e Bernardino Telesio (Turin, 1923); N. C. Van Deusen, Telesio: The First of the Moderns (New York, 1932), a thesis at Columbia University; N. Abbagnano, Bernardino Telesio (Milan, 1941); G. Soleri, Telesio (Brescia, 1945); P. O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers, pp. 91– 109. For the summary made (“ristretto”) by Quattromani see the edition of E. Troilo (Bari, 1914), with introduction and bibliographical notes. The translation in two books by Francesco Martelli (Delle cose naturali libri due) from the ms. “Palat. 844” of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence, was published by F. Palermo, I manoscritti palatini di Firenze ordinati ed esposti (Florence, 1868), pp. 1–232, with the omission, however, of Trattato del Mare and Delle cose che per l’aria si fanno. By the explicit confession of Martelli his vulgarization of Telesio work contains variants introduced by Telesio himself. On this see Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, pp. 442–450. Recent is A. Nowicki, “La presenza del pensiero di Bernardino Telesio nella cultura moderna,” in Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche di Napoli, 79 (1968), pp. 331–333. Of Telesio’s De fulmine, C. Delcorno gave a critical edition in “Il commentario De fulmine di Bernardino Telesio,” Aevum, 41 (1967), pp. 474–506, utilizing the material of the autograph “Ottoboniano lat. 1292,” and showing the strata of the formation of the opuscule in such a way that it is possible to see the Telesian work in its becoming. About Ascanio Persio see the introduction of Fiorentino to Discorso intorno alla conformità della lingua italiana con le più nobili antiche lingue e principalmente con la greca (Naples, 1874); on Antonio Persio, G. Gabrieli, “Notizia della vita e degli scritti di Antonio Persio Linceo,” Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei, Scienze morali, 6th

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series, 9 (1933), pp. 471–499; E. Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, pp. 432–441 (with unpublished material). Of Antonio Persio see the Liber novarum positionum etc. (Venetiis, 1575); the Trattato dell’ingegno dell’huomo (Venice, 1576); the Del bever caldo costumato dagli antichi Romani (Venice, 1593); Index capitum librorum ... De recta ratione philosophandi et De natura ignis et caloris (Romae, 1613). I have published the Apologia of Telesio from codex “Magliab. XII, 39” in a series. In “Magliab. XII, i,” there is an Apologia in Telesium of Antonio Solino, a Mantuan physician and philosopher; it is totally a violent invective against Telesio in defense of Aristotle concerning the argument of heat and humid. In the answers of Persio there are references to direct discussions with Patrizi and valuable observations: “Iam dum in colloquio familiari hoc discuteremus.... Existimas Telesium dum de materia loquitur ac mole remanente, materiam intelligere Ari. et veterum ... philos. Qui ... incorporeum quid eam ... imaginati sunt ... T. non solum corpoream, sed molem esse eam.... Per naturas agentes T. intelligere id quod Peripatetici formas vocant.... Calor itaque velut genus formarum, eius gradus species sunt singulae. Quanto ergo gradu ens aliquod differt a summo, differret ab eo ente, quod eo gradu est praeditum” (chs. 5–6). Agostino Doni deserved a special consideration. His research on human beings has been cited more often than read: Augustini Donii Consentini Medici et philosophi de natura hominis libri duo: in quibus, discussa tum medicorum, tum philosophorum antea probatissimorum caligine, tandem quid sit homo, naturali ratione ostenditur. Ad Stephanum Sereniss. Regem Poloniae (Basileae Apud Frobenium, 1581). The work is characterized by a strong rigid naturalism. About Agostino Doni L. De Franco wrote, L’eretico Agostino Doni medico e filosofo cosentino del ‘500 (Cosenza, 1973) that includes in appendix the rare text of De natura hominis with translation. Important is the part dedicated to Doni in the book of Rotondo, Studi e ricerche di storia ereticale italiana del Cinquecento (Turin, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 393–470, 531–545 (with letters of Doni); but in Rotondo’s book there is information also on Pucci, Grataroli, Patrizi, and many others. 2. Francesco Piccolomini. His Polemic with Zabarella. Pietro Duodo and Stefano Tiepolo About Piccolomini, see the essay of Ragnisco, La polemica tra F. Piccolomini e Giacomo Zabarella and the edition of Breve discorso della istituzione di un principe with Compendio di scienza civile, Edited by Stefano Pieralisi (Rome, 1858). The well-informed Jacopo Gaddi declared that the texts published under the names of Tiepolo and Duodo were of Piccolomini. This was accepted by Placcio in his Teatrum anonymorum et pseudonymorum (Hamburgi, 1708), pp. 244 and 584. For a more profound analysis see GCFI, 40 (1961), pp. 134–136. 3. Francesco Patrizi of Cherso For a bibliography on and of Patrizi: Onoranze a Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Mostra bibliografica (Trieste, 1957), pp. 31–39. Of his most important works we spoke in the text. An edition of Panarchia different from the one in printing exists in appendix to E. Garin, “Note su alcuni aspetti delle Retoriche rinascimentali e sulla Retorica del Patrizi”, in the series of Testi umanistici sulla Retorica of Archivio di filosofia, (1953), pp. 48–56. Of Nelson’s edition of L’amorosa filosofia (Florence, 1963) we already treated. For the contrasts with the Ecclesiastical authorities, see L. Firpo, “Filosofia italiana e Controriforma,” in Rivista di filosofia, 41 (1950), pp. 150–173; 42 (1951),

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pp. 30–47; T. Gregory, “L’Apologia ad censuram di Francesco Patrizi,” in Rinascimento, 4 (1953), pp. 89–104; idem, “L’Apologia e le Declarationes di Francesco Patrizi,” in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di B. Nardi (Florence, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 385–424. On his Greek manuscripts: E. Jacobs, “Francesco Patrizi und seine Sammlunggriechischer Handschriften in der Bibliothek des Escorial,” in Zentralblatt fur Bibliothekwesen, 25 (1908), pp. 19–47. Concerning his thought: P. M. Arcari, II pensiero politico di Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (Rome, 1905), with bibliography at pp. 297–332; B. Brickman, An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s “Nova de universis philosophia” (New York, 1941), a thesis; P. O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers, pp. 110–126. Always consult F. Fiorentino, Telesio, vol. 2, pp. 364–414; see also S. Cella, Pagine scelte (Padua, 1965). Teodoro Angelucci who studied in Paris wrote against the “discussions” of Patrizi: Quod metaphysica sint eadem quae physica, nova T. Angelucci sententia, qua multa obiter obscuriora Aristotelis, et magis recondita dogmata, mira subtilitate, et facilitate explicantur (Venetiis, 1584), in which Patrizi is combined with Nizolio; on the contrary there is the praise (p. 6) of “Julius Sirenus, philosophus nostrae aetatis ... in libro de subiecto primae philosophiae.” Patrizi reacted by dedicating to Cremonini, “vir modestissimus” an Apologia contra calumnias T. Angelucci eiusque novae sententiae quod metaphisica. eadem sint quae physica eversio (Ferrariae, 1584), to which Angelucci immediately replied: Exercitationum T. Angelucci cum F. Patrizi libri (Venetiis, 1585). The already cited Francesco Muti came in defense of Patrizi with Disceptationum libri quinque contra calumnias T. Angelutii (Ferrariae, 1588). Patrizi alluded to Muti in Nova philosophia, p. 128: “Bernardinus Telesius vir admirandus et Franciscus Mutus, auditor eius.” See also the cited Discorso polemico of Mazzoni (Cesena, 1587). An articulate panorama of the studies and editions of Patrizi in these last ten years is due to Paolo Rossi, “La negazione delle sfere e l’astrobiologia di Francesco Patrizi,” in the cited volume Il Rinascimento nelle corti padane, pp. 403–404. The most important editions of texts are, besides the cited Amorosa filosofia, edited by Nelson in 1963: Della Poetica, Edited by D. Aguzzi Barbagli (Florence, 1969–1973), 3 vols. in which the work is completed with the unedited parts or “deche” (decades) that in the bibliographies are said to have been written down but never printed; Lettere ed opuscoli inediti (Florence, 1975). On the editions of Aguzzi Barbagli see the observations of L. Bolzoni, “A proposito di una recente edizione di inediti patriziani,” in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 16, pp. 133–156; idem, “La Poetica di Francesco Patrizi da Cherso,” in GSLI, 151 (1975), pp. 33–56); P. Zambelli, “Aneddoti patriziani,” in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 7 (1967), pp. 309–318. About history see G. Cotroneo, I trattatisti dell’Ars historica (Naples, 1971), pp. 205–267. Concerning very relevant themes, see M. Mucillo, “La storia della filosofia nelle Discussiones peripateticae di Francesco Patrizi,” in La Cultura, 13 (1975), pp. 48–105; H. Vedrine, “L’obstacle réaliste en mathématiques chez deux philosophes du xvi siècle: Bruno et Patrizi,” in the volume Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance, pp. 239–248. 4. Marcello Palingenio Stellato. Aonio Paleario. Scipione Capece The Zodiacus vitae was printed for the first time without date in Venice, and was dedicated to Ercole II; from references to contemporary events it is possible to assume that it was printed between 1520 and 1534. It was reprinted very many times and often translated. Very little is known about Palingenio, but see E. Troilo, Un poeta filosofo del ’500. Marcello Palingenio Stellato (Rome, 1912); G. Borgiani, Marcello Palingenio Stellato e il suo poema lo “Zodiacus Vitae” (Città di Castello, 1913), which is

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well informed and has a good bibliography. See also A. Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York, 1958), pp. 24–27. We have followed the edition of Amsterdam of 1696 for all the works of Paleario. A modern reprint of the Actio in pontifices romanos was included in G. Paladino, Opuscoli e lettere di riformatori italiani del Cinquecento (Bari, 1813–1927), vol. 2, pp. 1–168. The de immortalitate animorum was often reprinted. An Italian version in verses with the original text exists in R. Pastore, La filosofia della natura di Tito Lucrezio Caro e confutazione del suo deismo e materialismo, col poema di Aonio Paleario dell’immortalità degli animi (London, 1776), vol. 2, pp. 209–357. About Paleario consult G. Morpurgo, Un umanista martire. Aonio Paleario e la riforma teorica italiana nel secolo xvi (Città di Castello, 1912); A. Ingegno, “La cultura filosofica e scientifica,” in the cited volume Il Rinascimento nelle corti padane, pp. 389–400. Of Parisetti see the Epistolae (Regii, 1541 and Bononiae, 1560) and de divina in hominem benevolentia (Venetiis, 1552). Many are the editions of Scipione Capece, but see the Venetian edition 1754, with the other writings, the version and the notes of F. M. Ricci, the information of Mazzucchelli and various other useful things. 5. Giordano Bruno: Life and Works, Trials and Condemnation Bruno’s bibliography is most extensive and we recommend V. Salvestrini, Bibliografia di Giordano Bruno (1582–1950), 2nd posthumous edition of Luigi Firpo (Florence, 1958). To this we are adding some extra information that we consider essential, with the indication of the works particularly used for this work or that have been written after 1950. For the Latin works see the national edition edited by F. Fiorentino, F. Tocco, G. Vitelli, V. Imbriani, and C. M. Tallarigo (Napoli-Firenze, 1879–1891), 3 vols. in 8 parts. Add to the above the edition of G. Aquilecchia of Due dialoghi sconosciuti e due dialoghi noti (Rome, 1957); “Praelectiones geometricae” and “Ars deformationum” (Rome, 1964). Among the Italian works printed in Bari between 1923 and 1927, there was the third edition of the Candelaio edited by Gentile. The second edition had been edited by V. Spampanato in Bari in 1923. The edition of Gentile, with the title Dialoghi italiani appeared again in one volume edited by G. Aquilecchia (Florence, 1958). La Cena delle Ceneri was also edited by Aquilecchia (Turin, 1955). About Bruno’s life and trials see Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno (Messina, 1921), 2 vols.; idem, Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno (Florence, 1934); A. Mercati, Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno (Città del Vaticano, 1942); L. Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno (Naples, 1949).For the most recent bibliography on Bruno see the elegant profile of G. Aquilecchia, Giordano Bruno (Rome, 1971). Aquilecchia has also edited and commented on the dialogues, De la causa, principio et uno (Turin, 1973). Among the translations see the Portuguese one of the De l’infinito of Aura Montenegro, with introduction of V. Matos e Sá (Lisboa, 1968). Among the most recent studies see H. Vedrine, La conception de la nature chez Giordano Bruno (Paris, 1967) with bibliography; A. Ingegno, “Il primo Bruno e l’inftuenza di Marsilio Ficino,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 22 (1968), pp. 149–170, and “Ermetismo e oroscopo delle religioni nello Spaccio bruniano,” Rinascimento, 7 (1967), pp. 157–174. For a study of the rapport between the thought of Giordano Bruno and the Reformation consult the cited volume Magia, astrologia e religione nel Rinascimento, pp. 130–147; F. Papi, Antropologia e civiltà nel pensiero di Giordano Bruno (Florence, 1968); A. Nowicki, “Giovanni Braccesco e l’antropologia di Giordano Bruno,” Logos, 3 (1969), pp. 589–627; A. Corsano, “Un ventennio di studi italiani su Giordano Bruno,” Cultura e scuola, 7 (1968), num. 27, pp. 94–113.

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6. Giordano Bruno: His Thought Concerning the thought of Bruno, the best works are: F. Tocco, Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno esposte e confrontate con le italiane (Florence, 1889); idem, Le opere inedite di Giordano Bruno (Naples, 1891); idem, “Le fonti piú recenti della filosofia di Bruno. Nota,” in Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei, Scienze morali, vol. 1 (1892), pp. 503–538, 585–622; G. Gentile, Giordano Bruno nella storia della cultura (Palermo, 1907); E. Troilo, La filosofia di Giordano Bruno (Torino-Roma, 1907–1914), 2 vols.; L. Limentani, La morale di Giordano Bruno (Florence, 1924); L. Olschki, Giordano Bruno (Bari, 1927); A. Corsano, Il pensiero di Giordano Bruno nel suo sviluppo storico (Florence, 1940); C. Vasoli, “Umanesimo e simbologia nei primi scritti lulliani e mnemotecnici del Bruno,” in Umanesimo e simbolismo (Padua, 1958), pp. 251–304; P. Rossi, Clavis universalis (Milan-Naples, 1960), pp. 109–134; A. Guzzo, Giordano Bruno (Turin, 1960); P. H. Michel, La cosmologie de Giordano Bruno (Paris, 1962); F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964); P. O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers, pp. 127–144. Of Vanini see the edition of L. Corvaglia, Le opere di G. C. Vanini e le loro fonti (Milan-Rome, 1933–1934), 2 vols.; and the translation of G. Porzio, Le opere di G. C. Vanini (Lecce, 1912), 2 vols. with bibliography, on which see the observations of G. Gentile in Studi sul Rinascimento, pp. 179–188. The documents have been gathered by E. Namer, Documents sur la vie de J.-C. Vanini de Taurisano (Bari, 1965). A posthumous work of Corvaglia, “Valutazioni inedite sull’opera e la personalità di Giulio Cesare Vanini,” in La Zagaglia, 11 (1969), pp. 243–319. See also A. Mowicki, Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619) La sua filosofia dell’uomo e delle opere umane (Wroclaw-Warszawa-Krakow, 1968).

Nineteen POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS MOTIVES (pp. 489–512) 1. Niccolò Machiavelli Of the extensive literature on Machiavelli only some indications for orientation are given. An acceptable edition of his works with an introduction of G. Procacci is that of Feltrinelli Editore (Milan, 1960–1965). For the manuscripts and various editions, see A. Gerber, N. Machiavelli. Die Handschriften, Ausgaben, und Übersetzungen seiner Werke im 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Gotha, 1912–1914). As for his life, activity, and thought consult P. Villari, Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi, 3 vols. (Milan, 1912); 0. Tommasini, La vita e gli scritti di Niccolò Machiavelli nella loro relazione col Machiavellismo, 3 vols. (Turin-Rome, 1889–1911); fundamental, however, is R. Ridolfi, Vita di Niccolò Machiavelli (Rome, 1954); F. Ercole, La politica di Machiavelli (Rome, 1926); A. Norsa, Il principio della forza nel pensiero politico di Niccolò Machiavelli (Milano, 1936); A. Renaudet, Machiavel. Etude d’histoire des doctrines politiques (Paris, 1942, 1955); L. Malagoli, Il Machiavelli e la civiltà del Rinascimento (Milan, 1941); U. Spirito, Machiavelli e Guicciardini (Florence, 1945); L. Russo, Machiavelli (Rome, 1945 and Bari, 1957); J. M. Whitfield, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1947); G. Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli. Storia del suo pensiero politico (Naples, 1958); J. R. Hale, Machiavelli and Renaissance (London, 1961); F. Gilbert, Machiavelli e la vita culturale del suo tempo (Bologna, 1964). The writings of F. Chabod are still fundamental: Scritti su Machiavelli (Turin, 1964). Concerning the fortune of Ma-

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chiavelli, see F. Meinecke, L’idea di ragion di stato nella storia moderna, (Florence, 1942–1944), 2 vols.; G. Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965), with the indicated bibliography. A useful review of various studies is E. W. Cochrane, “Machiavelli: 1940–1960,” in The Journal of Modern History, 33 (1961), pp. 113– 136. In addition to the above and anterior to the celebrations of 1969, for the bibliographical and political part, see R. Fido, Machiavelli (Palermo, 1965); G. Sasso, Machiavelli e Cesare Borgia. Storia di un giudizio (Rome, 1966), 2 vols.; idem, Studi su Machiavelli (Naples, 1966). Important are also the posthumous contributions of D. Cantimori in Garzanti Publisher’s Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan, 1966), vol. 4, pp. 7–53 (Machiavelli), 87–142 (Guicciardini); vol. 5 (Milan, 1967), pp. 7–87 (“Le idee religiose del Cinquecento. La storiografia”). An overview of twenty years of studies, with indications of previous synopses, can be found in C. V. Goffis, “Gli studi machiavelliani nell’ultimo ventennio,” in num. 33–34 of Cultura e Scuola, 9 (1970), pp. 34–55, that in its first part (pp. 1–292) is dedicated to “Machiavelli nel V centenario della nascita.” In 1969, the third edition of Machiavelli’s biography by Ridolfi (2 vols.) appeared perfectly renewed in its notes and bibliographical critical references. On the production during the centennial celebrations in regard to methods and general orientations G. Sasso, “In margine a un centenario,” La Cultura, 8 (1970), pp. 169– 214, wrote insightful pages. Of Machiavelli works in 1965 Feltrinelli published vol. 8 of Scritti Letterari, Edited by F. Gaeta; in 1966 Mursia of Milan published its edition edited by E. Raimondi that included a precious bio-bibliographic note (pp. xxv–xlvi); in 1971 the edition of Martelli of Florence with a bibliography listing the most recent production; in 1973 the volumes of Laterza of Bari, edited by Fredi Chiappelli, a volume that includes Legazioni, Commissarie, Scritti di Governo of the years 1498–1503. In 1973, D. Maffei, for reason of a homonym, believed to be able finally to clarify the dark years of the youth of Machiavelli with Il giovane Machiavelli con Berto Berti a Roma (Florence, 1973); M. Martelli providing a rich documentation proved that this “giovane Machiavelli” was someone else, “L’altro Niccolò di Bernardo Machiavelli,” in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 14 (1974), pp. 39–100. The discussion generated a series of documents of great interest. Here is a selection of the many publications, proceedings of conferences or articles in journals connected with or posterior to the centennial celebrations of 1969: Niccolò Machiavelli. Colloquio indetto dall’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome, 1970), containing essays of Abbagnano, Dionisotti, Praz, Procacci, Ridolfi; “Saggi su Machiavelli,” in Studi Storici, 10 (1969), num. 4, pp. 675–918, with essays of Badaloni, Tenenti, Raimondi, Ciliberto, Paggi, Perini; I1 pensiero politico, 2 (1969), pp. 329– 596, with the essays presented in Perugia at the Conference on Machiavellism and anti-Machiavellism during the 16th century; Il pensiero politico di Machiavelli e la sua fortuna nel mondo (Florence, 1972) publishing the proceedings of the Convegno Firenze-Sancasciano containing those essays (Firpo, Gaeta, Battista, Maravall, Tamborra, Helbling, Cochrane, Gabrieli, Badaloni) that aimed at presenting a panorama of the fortune of Machiavelli in the world, from one nation to another; Studies on Machiavelli, Edited by M. P. Gilmore (Florence, 1972); Studi machiavelliani (Verona, 1972); Machiavelli nel V Centenario della nascita (Bologna 1973); J. H. Whithfield, Discourses on Machiavelli (Cambridge, 1969); V. Masiello, Classi e Stato in Machiavelli (Bari, 1971); Cl. Lefort, Le travail de l’oeuvre. Machiavel (Paris, 1972). About precursors, followers and adversaries, consult R. De Mattel, Dal premachiavellismo all’antimachiavellismo (Florence, 1969).

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2. Francesco Guicciardini. Politicians and Utopians About Guicciardini see before anything else R. Ridolfi, Vita di Francesco Guicciardini (Rome, 1959). Still remarkable is A. Otetea, Francois Guichardin. Sa vie politique et sa pensée politique (Paris, 1926). Then see Vincenzo de Caprariis, Francesco Guicciardini dalla politica alla storia (Bari, 1950). With rich information is V. Luciani, Francesco Guicciardini e la fortuna dell’opera sua, P. Guicciardini ed. (Florence, 1949). Very important is Le cose fiorentine ora per la prima volta pubblicate da R. Ridolfi (Florence, 1945); fundamental is the edition of Ricordi by R. Spongano (Florence, 1951). His entire body of unedited works was published in 10 vols. by Piero and Luigi Guicciardini between 1857 and 1867 in Florence. A new edition with all the complete works was printed by Laterza Editore in the series “Scrittori d’ltalia.” On Guicciardini see the essay of Felix Gilbert as introduction in the first volume of the new edition of Storia d’Italia, Edited by S. Seidel Menchi (Turin, 1971), 3 vols. Some more recent bibliography: R. von Albertini, Das fiorentinische Staatsbewusstsein im Uebergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (Bern, 1955), with the Italian version in 1970; E. Gusberti, “Il Savonarola del Guicciardini,” in Nuova rivista storica, 55 (1971), pp. 21–89. With reference to the “mondanizzazione degli ideali” or vulgarization of ideals and the treatises written on honor, see what we have written above on Bernardi. To the fourth edition of the work of his brother (Venice, 1558) A. Possevino added his own book on honor. See also Dario Attendolo of Bagnacavallo, Il duello. Discorso intorno all‘honore (1564). The Duello of Muzio appeared in Venice in 1551. In Venice, in 1558, the work of G. B. Susio was also printed: I tre libri della ingiustizia del duello. The literature, however, on honor was truly abundant, and here we only mentioned the most famous names. Regarding the utopias of the 16th century see some of the texts collected by Curcio, Utopisti e riformatori sociali del Cinquecento (Bologna, 1942), and Utopisti italiani del Cinquecento (Rome, 1944). Of the same author see also Dal Rinascimento alla Controriforma (Rome, 1934); but the beautiful book that must be read is that of L. Firpo, Lo stato ideale della Controriforma. Ludovico Agostini (Bari, 1957). About the utopians see L. Firpo, “Thomas More e la sua fortuna in Italia,” I1 pensiero politico, 9 (1976), pp. 209–236; V. Gabrieli, “Giovanni Pico and Thomas More,” Moreana, 4 (1967), pp. 43–57; T. Wheeler, “T. More in Italy, 1535–1700,” ibid., 7 (1970), pp. 1–23; S. I. Camporeale, “Da Lorenzo Valla a Tommaso Moro,” Memorie Domenicane, 4 (1973), pp. 9–102. Particularly about Doni, see P. F. Grendler, “Utopia in Renaissance Italy: Doni’s New World,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965), pp. 479–494. B. Widmar offer an anthology of texts in Scrittori politici del ’500 e ’600 (Milan, 1964). Among the commentators on Aristotle considered as a politician or those who dealt with politics Aristotelianly, besides Felice Figliucci widely mentioned elsewhere for other reasons (De la Politica ovvero Scienza civile secondo la dottrina d’Aristotele (Venice, 1583)) and Brucioli, author of a version in Italian of the Politics dedicated to Piero Strozzi (Gli otto libri della Repubblica, che chiamano politico d’Aristotele (Venice, 1547)), also see Ciriaco Strozzi who integrated the Aristotelian text with two more books (Florence, 1562); Montecatini, In politica Aristotelis progymnasmata, 3 vols. (Ferrariae, 1587–1597); Scaino, La politica ridotta in modo di parafrasi…. Con annotazioni e sei discorsi (Rome, 1578), 2 vols.; Vettori, Commentarii in VIII libros de optimo statu civitatis (Florentiae, 1576); Giason de Nores, Breve institutione dell’ottima repubblica. Introdutione ridotta in alcune tavole sopra i tre libri della rhetorica d’Aristotile (Venice, 1578); De constitutione partium universae humanae et civilis philosophiae quam Aristoteles conscripsit praefatio (Patavii, 1584).

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See also the translations of Segni (Florence, 1549) and the editions of Acciaiuoli (Argyropulos) (Venetiis, 1566). 3. Religious and Political Reformers Regarding the available texts, besides the already mentioned two volumes of Paladino containing Beneficio di Cristo, Lettere di valdesiani, Ochino, Aonio Paleario, Olimpia Morata, and Curione, see the anthology prepared by D. Cantimori and E. Feist, Per la storia degli eretici italiani del secolo xvi in Europa (Rome, 1937), Croce’s edition of Juan de Valdés (Bari, 1938), the two volumes of the works of Aconcio edited by Radetti (Florence, 1944–1946), the two volumes of the works of Olimpia Morata edited by L. Caretti (Ferrara, 1940–1954), the writings of Pucci edited by Firpo and Piattoli, Lettere Documenti e Testimonianze (Florence, 1955–1959); L. Firpo, Gli scritti di F. Pucci (Turin, 1957). In addition, there are the popular small volumes published in the 19th century, in the series Biblioteca della riforma italiana (Roma-Firenze, 1883– 1886), with the writings of Vergerio, Vermigli, and Ochino. About this abundant literature see D. Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento. Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1939); B. Nicolini, Il pensiero di Bernardino Ochino (Naples, 1939); B. Becker, Autour de Michel Servet et de Sebastien Castellion (Haarlem, 1953); F. Ruffini, Studi sui riformatori italiani, edited by L. Firpo, A. Bertola, E. Ruffini (Turin, 1955); M. Kutter, Celio Secondo Curione. Sein Leben und sein Werk (1503–1569) (Basel, 1955); Courants religieux et humanisme a la fin du xv et au debut du xvi siècle. Colloque de Strasbourg 9–11 mai 1957 (Paris, 1959); E. Cione, Juan de Valdés. La sua vita e il suo pensiero religioso (Naples, 1963); Italian Reformation Studies in Honour of Laelius Socinus, edited by J. A. Tedeschi (Florence, 1965). See also F. C. Church, I riformatori italiani, D. Cantimori, trans. (Florence, 1935), 2 vols., with bibliography in vol. 2, pp. 231–272. Of the complete works of Alberico Gentili only two volumes were published in Naples in 1770; of the De iuris interpretibus of 1582, see the edition of G. Astuti (Turin, 1937). Concerning some aspects of the religious life and wishes for a reform, besides the already cited Memorie Domenicane dedicated to Umanesimo e teologia tra ’400 e ’500 the most important contribution is F. Lenzi, “I dialoghi morali e religiosi di Giulio Landi, Lefèvre d’Etaples ed Erasmo,” pp. 195–216. See S. Menchi Seidel, “Sulla fortuna di Erasmo in Italia. Ortensio Lando e altri eterodossi della prima metà del Cinquecento,” in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 24 (1974), pp. 527– 634; “Alcuni atteggiamenti della cultura italiana di fronte a Erasmo 1520–1536” in the volume Eresia e Riforma nell’Italia del Cinquecento, Miscellanea I (FlorenceChicago, 1974); “Spiritualismo radicale nelle opere di Ortensio Lando attorno al 1500,” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 65 (1974), pp. 210–277. Of A. Rotondo, besides the cited volume Studi e ricerche di storia ereticale italiana del Cinquecento, see the edition edited by Camillo Renato of Opere, Documenti e testimonianze (Florence-Chicago, 1968). Of Grendler, see also Critics of the Italian World, 1530–1560. Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco and Ortensio Lando (Madison, Milwauke and London, 1969). Finally, see Italian Reformation Studies in Honour of Laelius Socinus, Edited by J. A. Tedeschi (Florence, 1965); A. Stella, Dall’anabattismo al socinianismo nel Cinquecento veneto. Ricerche storiche (Padua, 1967); A. Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinatarismo in Italia nel xvi secolo. Nuove ricerche storiche (Padua, 1969).

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Twenty PROBLEMS OF AESTHETICS AND MORALITY (pp. 513–528) 1. Mario Nizolio Even in a rapid consideration of the new rhetoric, we should mention the translation with commentary prepared by O. Toscanella of the influential work of Rodolfo Agricola who studied in Pavia and Ferrara: Della invention dialettica (Venice, 1567). The most important work of Toscanella, however, still is his reduction to schemes and tables of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (Venice, 1561). In 1535 Nizolio published the Observationes in M. T. Ciceronem, which became the Thesaurus ciceronianus. The polemic with Maioragio (Anton Maria Conti di Maioragio, 1514–1555) exploded when Maioragio criticized the “paradoxes” of Cicero in Antiparadoxa sive suburbanarum quaestionum libri sex in quibus omnia M. T. Ciceronis paradoxa refelluntur (Lugduni, 1546). Nizolio responded with Epistola ad M. A. Majoragium that provoked the Apologia of Maioragio, an Antapologia of Nizolio, the Reprehensionum libri duo contra M. Nizolium of Maioragio and, finally, the De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra philosophos libri IV. In quibus statuuntur ferme omnia vera verarum artium et scientiarum principia ... et praeterea refelluntur fere omnes M. A. Majoragii obiectationes contra eundem Nizolium (Parmae, 1553). Maioragio died in 1555. In 1670 (and in 1674) only a collection of copies with a new frontispiece of the works of Nizolio were published by Leibniz in Frankfurt with the title Antibarbarus Philosophicus, sive Philosophia Scholasticorum impugnata libris IV. De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra Pseudophilosophos. In regard to Maioragio, his polemic with Celio Calcagnini should also be remembered. Calcagnini had published Disquisitiones aliquot in libro officiorum Ciceronis (Basileae, 1544), to which Conti (Maioragio) replied with Decisiones XXV quibus M. Tullium Ciceronem ab omnibus Caelii Calcagnini criminationibus liberat (Lugduni, 1544), which was a work that met with the approval of Nizolio. The De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi exists in an optimal edition of Quirinus Breen (Rome, 1956), 2 vols., with a rich introduction on the complete activity of Nizolio, about whom a work with an abundance of informations has been that of a series of contributions of G. Pagani in Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei, series V, 2 (1893), pp. 554–575; 630–660; 716–741; 819–826; 897–922. See also R. Battistella, M. Nizolio umanista e filosofo, 1489–1576 (Treviso, 1905); P. Rossi, “La celebrazione della retorica e la polemica antimetafisica nel De Principiis di M. Nizolio,” in the volume La crisi dell’uso dogmatico della ragione, Edited by A. Banfi (Milan, 1953), pp. 99–121.On these matters see the cited volume of Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo (about Nizolio, pp. 603–632), and Studi sulla cultura del Rinascimento, pp. 257–344, in which is analyzed among many other things the work of Gerolamo Capodivacca, a Paduan professor of medicine since 1553, and author of De differentiis doctrinarum (Patavii, 1562), in which the discussions on method are noteworthy (Vasoli, pp. 302–307). About some authors of the period see the two volumes of A. Crescini, Le origini del metodo analitico. Il Cinquecento (Udine, 1965) and Il problema metodologico alle origini della scienza moderna (Rome, 1972).

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2. Problems of Aesthetics On this matter see Saintsbury, A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe (Edinburgh-London, 1900–1904), 3 vols.; J. E. Spingern, La critica letteraria nel Rinascimento (Bari, 1905); C. Trabalza, La critica letteraria (Milan, 1915); G. Toffanin, La fine dell’umanesimo (Turin, 1920); G. Zonta, “Rinascimento, aristotelismo e barocco,” in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, (1934), pp. 104–163, 185–240; E. De Bruyne, Geschiedenis van de Aesthetica. De Renaissance (Antwerpen, 1951); the essays of Bernard Weinberg on Robortello and Castelvetro in the volume edited by R. S. Crane, Critic and Criticism (Chicago, 1952); G. Della Volpe, Poetica del Cinquecento (Bari, 1954); C. Vasoli, “L’estetica dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento,” in Momenti e problemi dell’estetica italiana (Milan, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 325–453 (with a rich bibliography); F. Ulivi, L’imitazione nella poetica del Rinascimento (Milan, 1959); B. Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961) 2 vols., with bibliography; R. Montano, L’estetica del Rinascimento e del Barocco (Naples, 1962). Between 1970 and 1974, B. Weinberg published 4 vols. of studies on Trattati di poetica e di retorica del ’500 for the series Scrittori d’Italia of Fratelli Laterza Editori. These volumes constitute a conspicuous amount of relevant material and illustrations; the critical note and the Annali in vol. 1, pp. 566–581, are optimal helping means. Connected with the above works are the three volumes of Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento fra Manierismo e Controriforma, collected and egregiously presented by Paola Barocchi (Bari, 1960–1962), who has thereafter made a rich and organic selection of Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (Milan-Naples, 1971–1977). Of Lomazzo we have Scritti sulle arti, Edited by R. P. Ciardi (Florence, 1973–1974), 2 vols. containing also the singular Libro dei sogni, and the edition commented by Robert Klein of the Idea del tempio della pittura (Florence, 1973), 2 vols. If to this kind of texts we were to add Tasso’s Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, as presented by L. Poma (Bari, 1964), it would be truly on new bases that the historian would initiate an analysis of the theoretical positions of the arts in the 16th century. He or she would be able to connect different fields of experience, and firmly reconnect the meditation on the great Greek thinkers with our contemporary works, techniques, and reflections. Often the reading itself of these pages, at times as new as those of an unedited work, would impose the revision of many accepted common loci. Read the remarkable book of C. Ossola, Autunno del Rinascimento. “Idea del Tempio” dell’arte nell’ultimo Cinquecento (Florence, 1971). With reference to the rich literature concerning the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle we will limit ourselves to one simple remark, referring the reader to the above notes. The Latin version of the Poetica of Aristotle by Giorgio Valla is of 1498, but had been preceded by fifteen years by the use that Politian did of the Greek text in the course of lessons on the Andria of Terence, a course offered at the Studio of Florence. Of 1525 are the writings of Bembo, of 1527 the Poetics of Vida, of 1529 the beginning of the publication of the six division of the Poetics of Trissino that were completed in 1563. Of 1536 (Venice) is the book Della poetica of Bernardino Daniello. The translation made by Pazzi, finished in 1524 was published only in 1536. Then we had the comments of Robortello (1516–1567), Ars poetica cum versione et comm. (Florentiae, 1548); the Italian version of B. Segni in 1549; the comment of V. Maggi and B. Lombardi (Venice, 1550) against Robortello (Obiectiones adv. Robortelli explicationes) comes directly from the Lettioni of Varchi in 1553. To this illustrating activity soon were added the systematic treatises on poetics, rhetoric, and history; see, in addition to the works totally rhetorical of G. M. Memo (1545), of Tomitano (1545) and of

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Sansovino (1546), the Poetica of Muzio in three books in free verses of 1551, the Dialoghi della invenzione poetica of Alessandro Lionardi of 1554; the treatise Della vera poetica of G. B. Capriano of 1555; the Naugerius sive de Poetica of Fracastoro, of 1555; the De poeta of Minturno (Alessandro Sebastiani) of 1559 in Latin (reduced to six books into four in the Italian version of 1563); and published posthumous in Lyons in 1561, the work of Scaliger (1484–1558) Poetices libri septem, is a true and proper systematizing of this cultural movement. In the second half of the century among the Aristotelian commentators the best is P. Vettori (1499–1585), a famous philologist, expositor of the Rhetoric, of the Ethics, and of Politics, author of Commentarii in primum librum Arist. de Arte poetica (Florentiae, 1560); of 1570 is the comment of Castelvetro; in 1575 in Venice the Annotazioni alla poetica d’Aristotele of Alessandro Piccolomini are published; in 1579 in Anversa the Poetica latina of Viperano; in 1579 in Venice the De arte poetica of A. Riccoboni appeared (and in 1584 the Poetica…. Poeticam Aristotelis per paraphrasim explicans et nonnullas L. Castelvetri captiones refellens); in 1586 there is the Poetica of Patrizi, Platonic, in which we see the concepts of the poetic furors, of enthusiasm and genius, which are at the center of the works of Verdizzotti (Genius: de furore poetico, 1575), of Frachetta (Dial. del furor poetico, 1581) and of Summo (Discorsi poetici, 1600). Finally, in 1613 the commentary of Beni was made public. In a parallel way the works of Bernardino Partenio are developed (Della imitazione poetica in 1560 and in Latin De poetica imitatione libri quinque in 1565), the Discorso de la poesia rappresentativa of Angelo Ingegneri (1598); the Ragionamento sopra le cose pertinenti alla poetica (Florence, 1580) of M. A. Segni; the writings of Ieronimo Zoppio (1583, 1587); the Discorsi of Romei, a friend of Patrizi (Ferrara, 1585); the works of Giason de Nores, Discorso intorno a quei principi, cause ed accrescimenti che la Commedia, la Tragedia e il Poema Heroico ricevono dalla philosophia morale (Padua, 1587); Poetica … nella quale per via di divisione si tratta secondo l’opera d’Aristotele della Tragedia ecc. (Padua, 1588); the Discorsi poetici (Florence, 1597) of Fr. Buonamici; the Sogno ovvero della poesia of G. Zinano; without speaking of the writings of Dolce, Giraldi Cinthio, Pigna, Gelli, Salviati, of the polemics of Tasso, of the discussion on Ariosto, on the disputations on Dante, Petrarch, on all the things that are not pertaining to the theme of this chapter. Enough to mention the most famous rhetorical treatises of Speroni (1552), Cavalcanti (1559), and Patrizi (1562); and the essays on history of Robortello (1548), Atanagi (Ragionamento de la eccellenzia e perfezione de la storia, 1559), Viperano (De scribenda historia liber, 1569), Foglietta (1574), and Patrizi (De historia libri X). About the writers of treatises dealing with history besides the cited volume of Cotroneo, I trattatisti dell’Ars historica (1971), it is useful to read the work of N. S. Struever, The language of History in the Renaissance. Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970), and of G. Huppert, although limited to France, The Idea of Perfect History. Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana-Chicago-London, 1970). 3. Problems of Morality About Brucioli see the cited work of Spini; on Piccolomini see Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. 2, pp. 222–238. Piccolomini’s work in its first edition had this title: Della Institutione di tutta la vita dell’uomo nato nobile et in città libera Libri dieci in lingua toscana dove et peripateticamente et platonicamente, intorno alle cose dell’Etica et Iconomica et parte della Politica, è rac-

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colta la somma di quanto può concorrere alla perfetta et felice vita di quello. Composti d’Alessandro Piccolomini a beneficio del nobilissimo fanciullino Alessandro Colombini, pochi giorni innanzi nato, figliuolo della immortale Mad. Laudomia Forteguerri, al quale, havendolo egli sostenuto a battesimo secondo l’usanza de’ Compari, dei detti libri fa dono (Verona, 1542). The second edition, modified in many parts, appeared in Venice in 1560: Della institution morale di Alessandro Piccolomini libri XII, ne’ quali egli levando le cose soverchie, e aggiungendo molte importanti ha emendato, e a miglior forma, e ordine ridotto tutto quello, che già scrisse in sua giovanezza della Institution dell’huomo nobile. A French translation was published in 1581 in Paris by Pierre de Larivey. Figliucci’s comment on the Politics of Aristotle has been already mentioned. Verino’s works also have been already introduced, but in regard to the Nichomachean Ethics see also L’etica di Aristotele, ridotta in compendio (by B. Latini) con avvertimenti di Jacopo Corbinelli (Lyons, 1568). About Florimonte see G. Tommasino, Tra umanisti e filosofi. Una nobile figura sessana di letterato e di uomo attraverso l’epoca del pieno Rinascimento: Philalethes (Maddaloni, 1921), 2 vols.; S. D’Onofrio, Il “Galateo” di Monsignor G. della Casa e “Il Libro delle inezie” di Galeazzo Florimonte (Naples, 1938). Of Florimonte, friend of Contarini, Della Casa discussed in Vita Gasparis Contareni (Joannis Casae Monimenta) (Florentiae, 1564), p. 95: “G. Flor ... vir cum omnibus honestis artibus perpolitus, tum praecipue castus atque integer, tum religione ac pietate in primis incensus: in notandi autem reprehendendisque amicorum vitiis unus omnium maxime acer ac liber; castigator nonnunquam etiam subamarior.” Concerning the rapports with Seripando, see Jedin, vol. 2, pp. 292ff. About Speroni see A. Fano, Sperone Speroni (Padua, 1909); of his works consult the edition of Venice of 1740; F. Bruni, “Sperone Speroni e l’Accademia degli Infiammati,” in Filologia e Letteratura, 13 (1967), pp. 24–71. Of Gelli—on whom consult A. De Gaetano, G. B. Gelli and the Florentine Academy. The Rebellion against Latin (Florence, 1976)—exists the precious edition of the Dialoghi, Edited by Tissoni (Bari, 1967). Of Doni see the edition of Cordié in the series Classici Ricciardi (Milan-Naples, 1977) that reproduces relevant texts; A. Del Fante, “Note su Anton Francesco Doni. Gli spiriti folletti,” in Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere, “La Colombaria,” 27 (1976), pp. 173–209). About Paruta see E. Zanoni, P. Paruta nella vita e nelle opere (Livorno, 1904); of his works the two volumes edition of 1852 in Florence. Of Baldi see the edition of F. Ugolini and F. L. Polidori (Florence, 1859). In addition to the cited writers see the Operette morali (Venice, 1550) of Girolamo Muzio, the Dialoghi of Lodovico Domenichi (Venice, 1562), the Discorsi del Conte Annibale Romei ... divisi in sette Giornate (Venice, 1585), the comment on Aristotle of Lelio Pellegrini of Sonnino (Rome, 1600) and also his De affectionibus animi noscendis (Rome, 1598) and De honore et nobilitate (Rome, 1601). Tiraboschi listed also the writings of Saba of Castiglione, Ricordi, ovvero ammaestramenti di cose onorate per un gentiluomo (Venice, 1560); of Girolamo Muzio, Avvertimenti morali ... i quali sono ... Il prencipe giovinetto, Introduttione alla virtù (Venice, 1550, 1571); of Lodovico Dolce; of Orazio Lombardelli, De scientiarum dignitate, oratio; Degli ufici ... de’ giovani (Florence, 1585); Della tranquillità dell’anima (Siena, 1574); of Stefano Guazzo, La civile conversazione (Venice, 1575); of Francesco de’ Vieri; of Francesco Bocchi, Ragionamento sopra l’uomo da bene (Florence, 1600); of Scipione Ammirato; of Isabella Sforza, Trattato della vera tran-

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quillità; of Leonardo Salviati, Dialoghi dell’amicizia; of Pietro Belmonti of Rimini, L’istituzion della Sposa. Tiraboschi listed then other thousand books of this kind (“mille altri libri di tal natura”) like the Discorsi of Marco della Fratta (Venice, 1551); I segni della natura dell’uomo (Venice, 1545) and Della vita solitaria e dello sprezzamento della morte (Venice, 1568) of A. Pellegrini; the works of Doni and Erizzo; the Dieci libri della felicità humana, ove si tratta della moral filosofia, altrimenti di quella che Aristotele ed altri antichi trattarono (Naples, 1574) of Ciarletta Caracciolo, a work highly esteemed by Ammirato; and the Universales institutiones ad hominum perfectionem (Venice, 1581) of Filippo Mocenigo. All this was listed without again insisting on thousand of treatises and small treatises concerning particular ethical questions: Pompeo della Barba, Discorsi (Venice, 1554); Idem, Dialoghi (Venice, 1561), the first of which was listed in the Index of prohibited books; G. Horologgi, L’Ingratitudine (Venice, 1561) and L’Inganno (1562); G. Landi, Le azioni morali (Venice, 1564 and Piacenza, 1575); V. Marcellino, Il diamero (Venice, 1565); A. Sardo, I discorsi (Venice, 1586); G. B. Muzi, Della cognizione di se stesso (Florence, 1595). Of special interest are the collections of series of letters and of relevant correspondence like that of C. Tolomei and Sadoleto. Of equal importance are the essays or monographs of political nature like the ones of Sansovino, Del governo et amministratione di diversi regni et republiche (Venice, 1578), or the collection of orations and prolusions like those, so often reprinted, of Sigonius and Muretus, considered Italian because of his culture; or dissertations with a historical background like the Discorsi of Cosimo Bartoli.

Twenty-One THE COUNTER REFORMATION (pp. 531–560) 1. Ancients and Moderns. A. Tassoni, D. Bartoli, and Sforza Pallavicino The general part of this section was written in 1944 and under the inspiration of B. Croce, Storia dell’età barocca (Bari, 1929) depending on it. An exposition that were to keep into account decades of discussions, would have to be entirely rewritten. The indications that follow would offer a first beginning. Though written with particular interest for literary problems, see L. Anceschi, “Le poetiche del Barocco letterario in Europa” in Momenti e problemi di storia dell’estetica (Milan, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 435–546, including a good bibliography. Some significant contributions exist in the volume Retorica e Barocco, Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, 1954 (Rome, 1955); valuable the volume of Atti del Congresso Internazionale “Manierismo, Barocco, Rococò” of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome, 1961). For general indications capable of stimulating discussions, see Antologia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by M. Vitale (Milan, 1966) vol. 3, pp. 631–706, where the introduction to the 17th century (Seicento) is by A. Asor Rosa, thereafter repeated with modifications in Letteratura Italiana Laterza, directed by Muscetta (Bari, 1974) and the essay, again of Rosa, “Il Seicento. La nuova scienza e la crisi del Barocco” with a bibliography, pp. 39–47; and the volume Retorica e barocco, Edited by E. Castelli (Rome, 1955), being the proceedings of a conference of 1954 in Venice; Storia di Napoli, Edited by N. Badaloni (Naples, 1972–1973), containing Badaloni’s “Fermenti di vita intellettuale a Napoli dal 1500 alla metà del

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’600,” in vol. 5, pp. 641–689, Quondam’s “Dal Barocco all’Arcadia,” vol. 5, pp. 809– 1094, De Giovanni’s “Il ceto intellettuale a Napoli fra la metà del ’600 e la restaurazione del Regno,” vol. 6, pp. 401–534, Galasso’s “Il rinnovamento culturale della Restaurazione in Napoli nel viceregno spagnolo dal 1648 al 1696,” vol. 6, pp. 85–120. About Venice see W. J. Bouwsma, Venezia e la difesa della libertà repubblicana. I valori del Rinascimento nell’età della Controriforma (Bologna, 1977), of which the original appeared in 1968. The judgment on the worldly wisdom as vain and mad (vana e pazza), is found in G. B. Guarini, Della vera sapienza libri sei, ne’ quali s’insegna cosa sia la vera sapienza, presso a chi si ritrova, la via, che a lei conduce, e i mezzi di farne acquisto. E con vari discorsi si mostra la Sapienza mondana essere fallace, vana e pazza, molto utili a ogni sorte di persone, Sacerdoti, Predicatori, Religiosi e Laici di qualunque età, stato, grado, qualità, e condizione (Venice, 1609). Concerning the question about the ancients, besides Tassoni, see Secondo Lancellotti, L’Hoggidí o vero il mondo non peggiore né piú calamitoso del passato (Venice, 1623); idem, Farfalloni degli antichi historici notati (Venice, 1636). Lancellotti, in the second part of L’Hoggidí, overo gl’ingegni non inferiori a’ passati, discussed at length “M. Antonio Zimara Filosofo di nome, ch’a guisa di trombettiero mi dà le mosse contro gli hoggidiani.” And in disinganno 13, in which he celebrates the modern philosophers, he particularly mentioned Cremonini (“ho sentito piú d’una volta … il Cremonini”), the Perusian Giglioli, Telesio who tried to bankrupt the Aristotelian School, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and Malvezzi among the Tacitians. Among these was also Filippo Cavriana, author of Discorsi (Florence, 1597), who had rapports with Jacopo Mazzoni and Francesco Buonamici, both of Pisa. Of Flavio Querengo, De genere dicendi philosophia, seu de sapientiae et eloquentiae divortio (Lugduni Batavini, 1639), see also the introduction to the morality of Aristotle (Florence, 1641). About Sforza Pallavicino and on his philosophical importance Croce has spoken many times. An eulogy of Pallavicino was written by Giordani as a premise to Perfezione cristiana in the edition of Pallavicino’s works used in this history (Milan, 1834), 2 vols. Concerning Giordani’s judgment on Seicento (17th century), see S. Timpanaro, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano (Pisa, 1965), pp. 48–49, 120ff. About some texts cited see the anthology prepared by M. Puccini, I panegirici dei secoli XVII e XVIII (Milan, n.d.). A curious moralistic novel is L’Hosteria del Mal Tempo of Antonio Mirandola de Petrucci (Bologna, 1639). Of Torquato Accetto see “Della dissimulazione onesta,” in Politici e moralisti del ’600 (Bari, 1930) various volumes edited by B. Croce and S. Caramella. About Accetto see Croce, Età barocca, pp. 156–159, and his preface to the same edition of the same opuscule (Bari, 1929), together with Nuovi saggi sulla letteratura italiana del ’600 (Bari, 1931), pp. 82–90. As to minor moralists and politicians of the century, see the above volumes of Croce and Caramella in which can be found the writings of Famiano Strada (1572– 1649), Zuccolo, Settala, Accetto, A. G. Brignole Sale, and Virgilio Malvezzi. About Malvezzi Croce spoke in Nuovi saggi, pp. 91–105, but see R. Brändli, Virgilio Malvezzi politico e moralista (Basel, 1964). About the politicians, G. Toffanin wrote Machiavelli e Tacitismo (Padua, 1921); Meinecke, L’idea di ragion di stato nella storia moderna; and Ferrari, Corso sugli scrittori politici italiani. Particularly on Zuccolo see Croce in La Critica, issue 24, pp. 300–317; issue 25, pp. 117–128 (a reprint of the “Ragion di Stato”); the miscellany Convegno di studi in onore di L. Zuccolo nel quarto centenario della nascita (Faenza, 1969); E. Garin, “Studi su Ludovico Zuc-

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colo,” in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 26 (1971), pp. 90–96. Of Gabriele Zinano see Il segretario and Il consigliere (Venice, 1625). The judgment on “nicodemismo” was made by Cantimori in Gli eretici, p. 70. 2. Paolo Sarpi Concerning the thought of Sarpi see the edition of Scritti filosofici e teologici editi e inediti, published by R. Amerio (Bari, 1951) that has substituted the unsatisfying one edited by Papini (Lanciano, 1910). Another editor on Sarpi’s works with valuable information and unknown facts is that of G. Cozzi. See also E. Troilo, “La filosofia di Paolo Sarpi,” in Dottrine e figure di pensatori (Naples, 1937), vol. 1, pp. 171–240; R. Amerio, Il Sarpi dei pensieri filosofici inediti (Turin, 1950). Always valuable is P. Cassani, Paolo Sarpi e le scienze matematiche e naturali (Venice, 1882). For many observations we used the information in the life of Friar Fulgenzio in Opere (Helmstad-Verona, n. d.), vol. 1, pp. 26–27. Sarpi was introduced to Scotism by Father G. M. Capello of Cremona and always valued Ockham. His Opere was edited by G. and L. Cozzi (Milan-Naples, 1969). Cozzi wrote also the section on Sarpi in Storia letteraria Garzanti, vol. 5, pp. 415–470. About Sarpi as scientist see L. Sosio, “I pensieri di Paolo Sarpi sul moto,” Studi veneziani, 13 (1971), pp. 312–392. In regard to the Scotism of the 17th century, see D. Scaramuzzi, Il pensiero di Giovanni Duns Scoto nel mezzogiorno d’Italia (Rome, 1927). In general the treatments of this topic, even when useful, are without originality starting from that of Bartolomeo Mastrio to that more famous of Montefortino, rooted on the constant and punctilious opposition to Thomism. With Mastrio we should mention also Bonaventura Bellotti o Belluto and a large group of Sicilians: A. Botti, Illuminato Oddo, Gaspare Sghemma, Angelo Titone, Raffaele Bonerba, who tried to find a conciliation between Scotus and Thomas through Giles of Rome, while Gesualdo de’ Bologni showed himself a pure anti-Aegidian Scotist (so did Di Giovanni, vol. 1, pp. 144ff.). Thus in Ferrara Alessandro Rossi organized Scotist-Thomist disputes, while Girolamo Scarpari of the Religious Order of Serviti tended toward Henry of Ghent. During the century there is a continuous growing proliferation of new Aristotelian and Thomist manuals, the passion for logical discussions and for Lullism. Followers of Lullus are P. Vittorio of Palermo and Filippo Triolo; logicians are G. Trimarchi, Serafino Rotella, Agostino Spinò, G. B. Giattimo (translator, among others, of Sforza Pallavicino), Giuseppe Vita, and others. More known are Giuseppe Polizzi of Piazza (1603–1691), author of Philosophia absolutissima in 3 vols. (Palermo, 1671–1672) and of Disputazioni Filosofiche (Palermo, 1673–1685), in which he gives some value to the process of induction; Gregorius Fantius, author of Aristotelian Praelectiones (Rome, 1616); Ludovico Meda who wrote on Aristotelian logic (1609); Giulio Pace working on the Lullian art. Again usually are mentioned Flaminio Langhi of Novara for an Aristotelian Novissima philosophia (Milan, 1679); Giovanni Morandi of Verona, one of the most rigid Aristotelian, who wrote a course of philosophy in 3 volumes (Venice, 1667); Sigismondo Serbelloni with Philosophia in 2 vols. (Milan, 1657); Spinola of Genoa, a Somascan Father who also wrote Philosophia (Naples, 1660; Pavia, 1768); finally, Leonardo Cinnano of Palermo who wrote Microscopium Aristotelicum that was published in 1703. In 1637, A. Masò printed Theatrum philosophicum that appeared to Di Giovanni more liberal than the tradition, from which did not move away substantially neither Giulio Ambrosini, Methodus inventiva (Bononiae, 1625), nor Giovan Battista De Benedictis

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with his Philosophia Peripatetica, tomis quinque comprehensa (Naples, 1688). De Bendictis was the clear champion against the Cartesian and Galileian innovations. Greater interest was shown by the Platonists, starting with Michel Angelo Andrioli of Verona, still dreaming an Aristotelian conciliation with his Philosophia experimentalis praeside Platone in concilio veterum et neotericorum convocato, seu physica reformati Platonis (Clagenfurti, 1708), to the Sicilian Raimondo del Pozzo (1619– 1694), a disciple of Pallavicino, author of Circolo Tusculano, ove si trattano alcune proposizioni platoniche del Timeo, e si aggiunge la Scola Aristotelica con le sette de’ Filosofi (Messina 1656). A particular place and a treatment by himself is deserved by the Capucin Valeriano Magni. 3. The Moralists Of Malvezzi we have already spoken. As to Mascardi see the introduction written by A. Bartoli for the edition he prepared of Dell’arte istorica (Florence, 1859). About Valeriano Magni mentioned in this chapter’s section and elsewhere see M. Da Guspini, “Il contatto dell’uomo con Dio nell’atto conoscitivo secondo Valeriano Magni O.F.M., Cap. (1586–1661),” Collectanea Franciscana, 28 (1958), pp. 241–271, 374– 396; idem, “La conoscenza di Dio in Valeriano Magni,” ibid., 30 (1960), pp. 264–297. 4. La Ragion di Stato. Tacitism Concerning this theme we recommend to see the works already mentioned. A useful repertory is the volume of T. Bozza, Scrittori politici italiani dal 1550 al 1650 (Rome, 1949). For Botero see particularly the edition of L. Firpo, Della ragion di Stato con tre libri Delle cause della grandezza della città due Aggiunte e un Discorso sulla popolazione di Roma (Turin, 1948), with a valuable bibliography of and on Botero. See S. Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini e ortodossi nella storiografia barocca (Florence, 1973); G. Toffanin, in 1972, published the important Machiavelli e il Tacitismo. La Politica storica al tempo della controriforma that was first published in 1921. 5. Aesthetics Deserving to be studied are the Proginnasmi poetici of Udeno Nisiely of Vernio Academico Apatista, that is Benedetto Fioretti, very rich with notices and discussions. The first two volumes were printed in Florence in 1620 and were dedicated to “reverendissima religione de’ venerabili padri Gesuiti.” The definitive edition in five volumes, with the addition of many Proginnasmi,” dedicated to Giovanni Gastone of Tuscany, appeared in Florence in 1695. Fioretti wrote also on morality. To have an idea of the themes, see Prose of Ciampoli (Venice, 1661). About Matteo Pellegrini see Croce, Problemi di estetica (Bari, 1923), pp. 311– 348. Of Tesauro we have used the edition of Venice of 1702: Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia, Idea dell’arguta et ingegnosa elocutione, che serve a tutta l’Arte oratoria, lapidaria, et simbolica. Esaminata co’ principi del divino Aristotele. This work has been reproduced in anastatic format with an introduction by A. Buck (Bad Homburg v. d. H.-Berlin-Zürich, 1968). For general information see M. Costanzo, Dallo Scaligero al Quadrio (Milan, 1961), in which for Scaligero see pp. 11–66, for Tesauro pp. 60–100, for Pallavicino pp. 103–156; E. Raimondi, La letteratura barocca, Studi sul Seicento italiano (Florence, 1961) with his introduction to the volume Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento (Milan-Naples, 1960); K.-P. Lange, Theoretiker des Literarischen Manierismus. Te-

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sauros und Pellegrinis Lehre von der «Acutezza» oder von der Macht der Sprache (München, 1968). About Ciampoli and others see G. Inzitari, Poesia e scienza nelle opere di G. Ciampoli (Vibo Valentia, 1962); M. Costanzo, Critica e poetica del primo Seicento. Vol. 1: Inediti di G. Ciampoli. Vol 2: Maffeo e Francesco Barberini, Cesarini, Pallavicino (Rome, 1969–1970).

Twenty-Two TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (pp. 561–604) 1–6. Two scholars during the last decades have especially stimulated the remarkable production of editions, studies, bibliographical subsidies on Campanella: Romano Amerio and Luigi Firpo, excellent editor and lucky finder of texts. It is to Firpo that we owe bibliographical subsidies of the best kind: Bibliografia degli scritti di T. Campanella (Turin, 1940); Campanella nel secolo xix (Naples, 1956) (obtained from Calabria nobilissima, 6–10 (1952–1956); “Cinquant’anni di studi sul Campanella (1901– 1951),” in Rinascimento, 6 (1955), pp. 209–348; “Un decennio di studi sul Campanella (1951–1960),” in Studi secenteschi, 1 (1960), pp. 126–164. We highly recommend these works of Firpo. Among recent editions of Campanella’s works we recommend the following ones: the Italian version of Senso delle cose, Edited by A. Bruers (Bari, 1925); the Lettere, Edited by V. Spampanato (Bari, 1927); L’Epilogo Magno, Edited by C. Ottaviano (Rome, 1939); Quod Reminiscentur, 11. 1–2, Edited by R. Amerio (Padua, 1939) (and Quod Reminiscentur, 11. 3–4, Edited by R. Amerio (Florence, 1955–1960); Aforismi politici, Edited by L. Firpo (Turin, 1941), who also edited Poetica (Rome, 1944), Antiveneti (Florence, 1945), Discorsi ai principi d’ltalia (Turin, 1945), Discorsi universali del governo ecclesiastico (Turin, 1949), Opuscoli inediti (Florence, 1951). Contemporaneously and regularly, Amerio worked for the publication of the Theologia in an edition with Italian translation on the side, of which fifteen volumes have appeared. On the other hand, Firpo began the publication of all the works of Campanella, of which the first volume appeared in 1955 in Milan, and contains Poesie, Poetica (in Italian and Latin), Rhetorica, Grammatica and Historiographia. Firpo has also accomplished the anastatic reproduction of Metaphysica, making thus available a fundamental and rare text. He continued with the reproduction of Monarchia Messiae (Turin, 1960) and other opuscules. We must mention the edition of Città del sole, Edited by N. Bobbio (Turin, 1941) and the anthologies published by Firpo (Turin, 1949) and by Amerio (Milan-Naples, 1956). For the biography we must still rely on the volumes of L. Amabile, Fra’ Tommaso Campanella, la sua congiura, i suoi processi, la sua pazzia (Naples, 1882), 3 vols.; Fra’ Tommaso Campanella ne’ castelli di Napoli, in Roma, in Parigi (Naples, 1887). See also the researches of Firpo, Ricerche campanelliane (Florence, 1947). About Campanella’s thought is available L. Blanchet, Campanella (Paris, 1920); in addition, there are some essays of Amerio, for instance, the Introduzione alla teologia di Tommaso Campanella (Turin, 1948) and the profile of Campanella (Brescia, 1947); A. Corsano, Tommaso Campanella (Bari, 1961); N. Badaloni, Tommaso Campanella (Milan, 1965).

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For a richer biographical profile with comprehensive information on Campanella’s works see the essay of Firpo in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1974), vol. 17, pp. 372–401, inclusive of the works on Campanella for the fourth centennial of his birth. Among the published works there is now the translation into Italian of the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata: T. Campanella, La filosofia che i sensi ci additano, introduced, translated and commented by L. De Franco (Naples, 1974); the editions of book 17 of the Theologia: De remediis malorum, Theologicorum lib. XVII, critical text and translation of R. Amerio (Rome, 1975); the edition of Articuli prophetales, critical edition by Germana Ernst (Florence, 1977); the volume of Opere letterarie, Edited by Bolzoni (Turin, 1977), which contains his poetry, the Italian Poetica, the Latin Poetica with translation, and the Commentaria. Among the most recent literature see the volume of the proceedings of the International Conference dell’Accademia dei Lincei on the theme Campanella e Vico (Rome, 1969); R. Amerio, Il sistema teologico di Tommaso Campanella (Milan-Naples, 1972); G. Di Napoli, Studi sul Rinascimento (Naples, 1973), pp. 427–968; A. Asor Rosa, “Tommaso Campanella,” in Letteratura italiana Laterza (Bari, 1974), vol. 5, pp. 179–242; G. Bock, Thomas Campanella, Politisches Interesse und Philosophische Spekulation (Tubingen, 1974).

Twenty-Three GALILEO AND HIS SCHOOL (pp. 605–628) 1. Galileo and Philosophy The national edition of the works of Galileo in twenty volumes published in Florence between 1890–1909 was edited by A. Favaro and was reprinted with the addition of more documents between 1929 and 1939. This edition was reproduced in 1968. The first volume edited Opere dei Discepoli di Galileo, Edited by P. Galluzzi e M. Torrini, contains part of the correspondence: Vol. 1: Carteggio, 1642–1648 (Florence, 1975). Two volumes of Bibliografia galileiana exist: the first was edited by A. Carli and A. Favaro (Rome, 1896); the second volume that continues from where the first ended, was edited by G. Boffito, and arrives to 1940 (Rome, 1943). A precious integration of the two previous volumes of bibliography from 1940 to 1964 is E. McMullin’s appendix to his collection of important essays in Galileo Man of Science (New York, 1967), pp. 1–82. A well organized bibliography is that of Asor Rosa in “Galileo Galilei” in the cited Letteratura italiana Laterza (1974), pp. 243–328. A first essay on a Galileo’s lexicon has been given by P. Galluzzi for the work La bilancetta (text, concordance, indices) (Rome, 1973). Among the editions of particular works we will mention Discorsi e dimostrazioni intorno a due nuove scienze, Edited by A. Carugo and L. Geymonat (Turin. 1958), with a rich commentary; Opere, Edited by Franz Brunetti (Turin, 1964), 2 vols.. Among the commented works are: L. Sosio, Il saggiatore (Milano, 1965); Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Turin, 1970). All the contributions of Favaro are very precious. The opuscule Trent’anni di studi galileiani (Florence, 1907) enumerates 160 entries, of which it is important the mention of the work Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova (Florence, 1883), 2 vols. (which we have often used). For a biography and an integrated bibliography see A. Banfi, Vita di Galileo Galilei (Milan-Rome, 1930 and again Milan, 1962); idem, Galileo Galilei

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(Milan, 1948 and 1961); G. De Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago, 1955), which was translated into Italian as I1 processo di Galileo (Milan, 1960); L. Geymonat, Galileo Galilei (Turin, 1957); G. De Santillana, F. Zagar, L. Geymonat, R. Team, L. Bulferetti, L. Morandi, Fortuna di Galileo (Bari, 1964); P. Paschini, Vita e opere di Galileo Galilei (Città del Vaticano, 1964), 2 vols. Among the publications determined by the celebrations of the fourth centennials of the birth most remarkable is Saggi su Galileo Galilei, collected and published by Carlo Maccagni (Florence, 1972), who offers precious materials also on disciples and contemporaries; the volume of Archivio di filosofia dedicated to Cusano and Galileo (Padua, 1964); the Atti del Symposium internaz. di storia, metodologia, logica e filosofia della scienza (Florence, 1964); the pamphlet De homine (1965) pp. 13–14; Hommage to Galileo, Edited by M. E. Kaplon (The Mass. Institute of Technology, Cambridge Mass. 1965); Nel quarto centenario della nascita di Galileo Galilei (Università. Cattolica, Milan, 1966); Scritti e discorsi nel IV centenario della nascita di Galileo Galilei (Padua, 1966); Galilée. Aspects de sa vie et de son ceuvre (Paris, 1968). Of the most important and more useful works for the comprehension of Galileo see R. Caverni, Problemi naturali di Galileo e di altri autori della sua scuola (Florence, 1874); E. Wohlwill, Galilei und sein Kampf für die kopernikanische Lehre (Leipzig, 1909–1926); L. Olschki, Galilei und seine Zeit (Halle, 1927); A. Koyrè, Etudes galiléennes (Paris, 1939), 3 vols.; R. Giacomelli, Galileo Galilei giovane e il suo “de motu” (Pisa, 1949); V. Ronchi, Il cannocchiale di Galileo e la scienza del seicento (Turin, 1959); J. H. Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of the Modern Science (Padua, 1961); G. Morpurgo Tagliabue, I processi di Galileo e l’epistemologia (Milan, 1963). And in more recent time: L. Bulferetti, Galileo Galilei nella società del suo tempo (Manduria, 1964); A. Pasquinelli, Letture galileiane (Bologna, 1968); M. Clavelin, La philosophie naturelle de Galilée. Essai sur les origines et la formation de la mécanique classique (Paris, 1968); Paolo Rossi, Aspetti della rivoluzione scientifica (Naples, 1971); W. R. Shea, La rivoluzione intellettuale di Galileo, Translation of P. Galluzzi of the original of 1972 (Florence, 1974); M. L. Soppelsa, Genesi del metodo galileiano e tramonto dell’aristotelismo nella scuola di Padova (Padua, 1974), a book to be kept in mind for the interpretation of Andrea Argoli, Stefano Degli Angeli, Claudio Berigard, Geminiano Montanari, Domenico Guglielmini, Giovanni Poleni, Antonio Vallisnieri, Carlo Rinaldini, Michelangelo Fardella, Tommaso Pio Maffei. Among the numerous essays see R. Fredette, “Galileo’s de motu antiquiora,” Physis, 14 (1972), pp. 321–348; on this also consult C. Maccagni, Le speculazioni giovanili “de motu” di Giovanni Battista Benedetti (Pisa, 1967), with the text of the two editions of Demonstratio motuum localium contra Aristotelem et omnes philosophos; M, Clavelin, “L’antiaristotelisme de Galilée: Réalité ou légende?” in the cited volume Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance (1976), pp. 261–276; Stillman Drake, “Galileo and the Career of Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), pp. 19–32. 2–4. About the disciples of Galileo and his adversaries, besides the different monographies of Favaro and the Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia (Florence, 1891–1898) of Raffaello Caverni, see the research of Alessandro Paoli, “La scuola di Galileo nella storia della filosofia,” in Annali delle Università toscane, 22 (1899), pp. 1–327. For the text of Viviani see in A. Favaro, Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova, vol. 1, pp. 144-145; A. Favaro, “Viviani,” in Atti del R. Istituto veneto, 72: 2, (1912–1913), pp. 1–155. G. Loria and G. Vassura published The works of Torricelli (Faenza, 1909), but

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see the proceedings of the Convegno di studi torricelliani, 1958 (Faenza, 1959); the writing of Dati in Problemi of Caverni is found at pp. 10ff. About Ricasoli Rucellai see the study of A. Alfani, Della vita e degli scritti di 0. Ricasoli Rucellai (Florence, 1872) and the Considerazioni polemiche of F. Palermo (Prato, 1872), who in his Manoscritti palatini, vol. 3, pp. 243–675, had published twenty-five dialogues of Ricasoli Rucellai. G. Turrini published (Florence, 1868) the sixteen dialogues Della Provvidenza which Carducci minutely revised. About Nardi see the definitive study of G. Capone-Braga, “Un filosofo dell’estremo Rinascimento (A. Nardi),” in Atti e memorie della R. Accademia Petrarca in Arezzo, new series, 5 (1925), pp. 36–135 (with an abundant bibliography). About Berigardo P. Ragnisco see Da Giacomo Zabarella a Claudio Berigardo. Consider also the same voice in Bayle. Gentile in Florence, in 1928, republished Il sonno e la vigilia of G. Zambeccari, adding a bibliographical note, pp. 87–92. The first edition of Saggi di naturali esperienze appeared in Florence in 1667, and was the work of Magalotti who as secretary of the Accademia del Cimento between September 1662 and September 1667 produced three drafts of the same. The Saggi were reprinted in 1691, 1711, 1761, 1806, and 1841 (and included V. Antinori, Notizie storiche relative all’Accademia del Cimento). They again were republished by G. Abetti and P. Pagnini in the first volume of the national edition of the Opere dei discepoli di Galileo (Florence, 1942), reprinted again by E. Falqui (Rome, 1947). Of Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712) you must see Lettere familiari on atheism see the edition with notes of D. M. Manni (Venice, 1762), 2 vols.; Lettere scientifiche ed erudite (Florence, 1721) that exists also in the first volume of Opere (Milan, 1806), Lettere familiari ... e di altri insigni uomini a lui scritte (Florence, 1769), 2 vols. This last work is very important for a reconstruction of the cultural history of Tuscany during the 17th century and is due to Fabroni, who in 1773 published another volume, no less relevant than the previous one: Lettere inedite di uomini illustri. Having mentioned atheism, we suggest also the reading of the satires of Menzini and Rosa, and writings such as Epulone, opera melo-drammatica esposta con le prose moralicritiche del P. Francesco Fulvio Frugoni, Minimo (Venice, 1675), or L’incredulo senza scusa of Segneri (Florence, 1690). Within the sphere of the interests that Fabroni expressed in 1773 for “la storia filosofica del passato secolo” falls the most significant collection of Lettere d’uomini illustri che fiorirono nel principio del Secolo Decimosettimo non piú stampate (Venice, 1744), in which many texts of Galileo and Galileians are included. Of Carlo Rinaldini of Ancona, professor in Pisa between 1649 and 1662, see Philosophia rationalis, naturalis atque moralis (Padua, 1681–1688), 2 vols. Of Albizzini exists the Philosophica asserta ex lucubrationibus praestantissimi viri Galilei deprompta, publice discutienda proponit Jo. Cosmus Villafranchi Volaterranus, patrocinante Excellentiss. Dom. Jo. Andrea Albizzini Florentino in Pisana Academia Extraordinariam philosophiam publice profitente.… (Pisis, 1662). The de motu animalium of Borelli appeared in Rome, in two tomes in 1680–1681; another edition was printed in Lugduni Bataviorum in 1682. About Borelli’s mathematical and physical works, see A. Koyré, La révolution astronomique (Paris, 1961), pp. 459–520. The Danish Niels Stensen (1638–1684) known in Italy as Niccolò Stenone lived in the cultural ambiance of Florence and Pisa, among Galileians, and deserved to be remembered as a philosopher and scientist of European fame. He is the author of theological and moral writings almost completely unpublished. Fabroni gives a list of the

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surviving mss. in appendix to Stenone’s life in Vitae Italorum (Pisis, 1779), vol 3, pp. 1–63. Now we have Nicolai Stenonis, Opera philosophica (Copenaghen, 1950), 2 vols.; Nicolai Stenonis, Epistulae, Edited by Gustav Scherz (Friburgi Germaniae, 1952). Of Notizie degli aggrandimenti delle scienze fisiche accaduti in Toscana nel corso di anni LX del secolo xvii raccolte dal Dottor Targioni Tozzetti, in 4 vols., which constitutes an indispensable primary source, there is now an anastatic reprint (Bologna, 1967). About Cimento, consult Celebrazione dell’Accademia del Cimento, (Pisa, 1958). A collection of necessary texts is found in the volume of M. L. Altieri Biagi, Scienziati del Seicento (Milan, 1969) where you can find texts of F. Cesi, B. Castelli, B. Cavalieri, E. Torricelli, V. Viviani, G. A. Borelli, F. Redi, M. Malpighi, L. Magalotti, L. Bellini, D. Bartoli, and F. Lana Terzi. About Berigardo see A. Checchini Degan, Nuovi studi su Claude Beauregard (Padua, 1971); M. Bellucci, “La filosofia naturale di Claudio Berigardo (con appendice di lettere inedite),” in Rivista Critica di Studi della Filosofia, 36 (1971), pp. 363–411; M. Bellucci, “Un commento al De anima del secolo xvii,” in Ricerche sulla cultura dell’ltalia moderna, Edited by P. Zambelli (1973), pp. 81–95; M. Soppelsa, Genesi del metodo galileiano e tramonto dell’aristotelismo nella scuola di Padova, pp. 92–112. About Magalotti see G. Güntert, Un poeta scienziato del Seicento: L. Magalotti, (Florence, 1966). About Torricelli see edition of Opere scelte, Edited by Lanfranco Belloni (Turin, 1975). On this consult also P. Galluzzi, “Evangelista Torricelli. Concezione della matematica e segreto degli occhiali,” in Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1 (1976), pp. 71–95. On Rinaldini, again M. Soppelsa, Genesi del metodo galileiano e tramonto dell’aristotelismo nella scuola di Padova, pp. 170–176. On Cavalieri, see the translation with introduction and notes of Geometria degli indivisibili, Edited by L. Lombardo Radice (Turin, 1966). Of Malpighi, see the Opere scelte, Edited by Luigi Belloni (Turin, 1967); and on Malpighi see the monumental work of H. B. Adelmann, M. Malpighi and the Evolution of Embriology (Ithaca-New York, 1966), 5 vols. and idem, The Correspondence of M. Malpighi (Ithaca and London, 1975), 4 vols.; on Borelli, see in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 12 (1970), pp. 543–551; P. Galluzzi, “Lettere di G. A. Borelli ad Antonio Magliabechi,” in Physis, 12 (1970), pp. 267–298. About Redi, besides the essays indicated in the anthology Scienziati del Seicento, pp. 312–313, and in particular in C. A. Madrignani, “Scienza e filosofia in Francesco Redi,” in La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, 66 (1962), pp. 85–99, see Altieri Biagi, “Lingua e cultura di Francesco Redi, medico,” in Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria” 33 (1968), pp. 189–304. About Bellini, besides the significant preface of Antonio Cocchi to Discorsi di anatomia (Naples, 1742), pp. 3–48, see introduction of Anna Dolfi, Rime inedite (Urbino, 1975), on L. Bellini Medicina, filosofia e poesia nella Toscana del secondo Seicento, pp. 7–126. About Stenone, see G. Scherz, “Niels Stensen und Galileo Galilei,” in Studi su Galileo Galilei, Edited by C. Maccagni, pp. 731–794. Finally, about Marchetti, to whom we will return, see the volume of M. Saccenti, Lucrezio in Toscana. Studio su Alessandro Marchetti (Florence, 1966); N. Badaloni, “Intorno alla filosofia di Alessandro Marchetti,” Belfagor, 23 (1968), pp. 283–316 and the translation of Lucretius of Badaloni (Turin, 1975). Furthermore, consult S. Rotta, “Scienza e pubblica felicità in Geminiano Montanari,” in Miscellanea Seicento, Isti-

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tuto di filosofia del1’Università di Genova, (Florence, 1971), pp. 63–208; C. Costantini, Baliani e i Gesuiti. Annotazioni in margine alla corrispondenza del Baliani con Gio. Luigi Confalonieri e Orazio Grassi (Florence, 1969); M. Torrini, “Giuseppe Ferroni, gesuita e galileiano,” Physis, 15 (1973), pp. 411–423; U. Baldini, “Un libertino accademico del Cimento: Antonio Oliva,” in the first supplement to Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (1977).

Twenty-Four THE NEW CULTURE AND ITS DIFFUSION (pp. 629–678) 1. Reasons for the Diffusion of Cartesianism in Italy Berthé de Besaucèle, Les Cartésiens d’Italie (Paris, 1920), pp. 373–374. Concerning this time period, see G. Maugain, Etude sur l’évolution intellectuelle de I’ltalie de 1657 a 1750 environ (Paris, 1909), on which we have G. Gentile, Studi vichiani (Florence, I927), pp. 3–14; R. Cotugno, La sorte di G. B. Vico e le polemiche scientifiche e letterarie dalla fine del secolo xvii alla metà del xviii secolo (Bari, 1914). See also F. Nicolini, La giovinezza di Vico (Naples, 1932), an edition no longer available with the precious commentary suppressed in the edition of Bari in 1932. It should be underlined that the researches of these recent years have brought contribution very remarkable. If these researches do not change the general perspectives, they correct inexact things and offer a new light on the full cultural movement into which Vico will insert himself. We will give here the most influential works: B. De Giovanni, Filosofia e diritto in Francesco D’Andrea, Contributi alla storia del previchismo (Milan, 1958); N. Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico (Milan, 1961). In reality, the work of Badaloni constitutes a rich historical reconstruction of the philosophical culture between the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. And S. Mastellone, “Note sulla cultura napoletana al tempo di Francesco D’Andrea e Giuseppe Valletta,” in Critica storica, 1 (1962), pp. 369–398 (a work that integrates the previous two ones); V. J. Comparato, “Giuseppe Valletta e le sue opere,” in Archivio storico per le province napoletane, Series 3, 2 (1962) (in Naples in 1963); idem, “Tra autobiografia e memoriale: l’Istoria de’ libri di D. Costantino Grimaldi scritta da lui medesimo,” in Critica storica, 3 (1964), pp. 239–345; Costantino Grimaldi, Memorie di un anticurialista del Settecento (Florence, 1964), with excellent introduction and notes; S. Mastellone, Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda metà del Seicento (Messina-Firenze, 1965). The D’Andrea’s loci are found in N. Cortese, I ricordi di un avvocato napoletano del ’600, Francesco d’Andrea (Naples, 1923), p. 38. When Di Capua was attacked, D’Andrea took his defense, drafting, as Mastellone demonstrated, two letters of Risposta against De Benedictis. After all he favored the cause of the atomists against the friars and an indication is what he wrote to Magliabechi on 23 August 1685 (or 1695) from Naples: “Mi trovo impegnato di fare un’apologia in difesa degli atomisti, contro le prediche di un frate.... Gli ha trattati da atei, da ignoranti, con cento altri propositi, parlando del Gassendo e di Renato e di tutti gli altri.…” (Nicolini read 1695, and induced Cortese to think that D’Andrea was alluding to the defense of Di Capua; Mastellone corrected 1695 into 1685). About Camillo Colonna, see pp. 13ff., where we can see what he was teaching: “quei termini astratti non erano che puri concetti della nostra mente, ma non aveano niente di reale; sicché la filosofia delle scuole,

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alla quale han dato nome di peripatetica, non era che un giuoco di parole per parere dotti appresso il volgo,” while “l’umano intendimento ... non può intendere quello che non conosce per mezzo del senso.” About Colonna you must see F. Nicolini, “Su Camillo Colonna e la sua accademia filosofica. Documenti bancari,” in Archivi storici delle aziende di credito, 1 (Rome, 1956), pp. 381–392, and the observations of G. Costa, “Un collaboratore italiano del Conte di Boulainviller: Francesco Maria Pompeo Colonna (1644–1726),” in Atti dell’Accademia toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria,” 29 (1965), pp. 207– 295. For the text of Muratori see Lamindo Pritanio, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto nelle science e nelle arti (Venice, 1717), pp. 2, 235. The reaction of Marchetti to the reader is in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, 21, pp. 242–243. The text published by Rolli in the edition of London of 1717 is partially different. Of Marchetti see the life written by his son Francesco and the short biography in Fabroni, Vitae, vol. 2 (1778), pp. 329–354 (with a bibliography that includes also the unpublished works). For some poetical apologies of Epicureanism, see Nicolini, La giovinezza, p. 135. Furthermore, see the work on the Neapolitan culture before Vico; about the Academy of Investigators, see. M. H. Fisch, “The Academy of the Investigators” in Science, Medicine and History. Essays in the Evolution of the Scientific Thought and Medical Practice, Written in Honour of Charles Singer (Oxford, 1953), pp. 521–563; about the Accademia di Medinacoeli and Vico’s formation, S. Suppa (Naples, 1971); M. Donzelli, Natura e humanitas nel giovane Vico (Naples, 1970) with some orations given at the academy by Niccolò Sersale, Niccolò Capasso and Agostino Ariani; E. Garin, “Da Campanella a Vico,” in Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo. Studi e ricerche (Pisa, 1970), pp. 79–118; about Francesco D’Andrea, S. Mastellone, Francesco D’Andrea politico e giurista (1648–1698). L’ascesa del ceto civile (Florence, 1969). In these we have important questions and the most relevant figures: M. Rak, La fine dei grammatici, Teoria e critica della letteratura nella storia delle idee del tardo Seicento italiano (Rome, 1974); R. Ajello, Arcana juris. Diritto e politica nel Settecento italiano (Naples, 1976). A rare document of the fortune of Epicureanism is the work of Ottavio Scarlattini, Dell’Epicuro contro gli Epicurei (Bologna, 1679), in which through 830 pages we may assist to the process of beatification of Epicurus. About the fortune of Lucretius there is the edition generously commented by the Florentine Giovanni Nardi (Florence, 1647). 2. Tommaso Cornelio, Niccolò A. Stigliola, Leonardo Di Capua, and Carlo Buragna The eulogy of Descartes is found in Thomae Cornelii Consentini. Progymnasmata physica (Venetiis, 1683), p. 44. The words referring to Descartes are preceded by those remembering the fellow countryman Telesio who freed philosophy, so that by the time of Descartes it was already independent from tyranny for the interventions of Gilbert, Stelliola, Campanella, Galileo, Bacon, Gassendi, Digby, and Hobbes. In 1688, to the Venetian edition presented by Leonardo Di Capua a new Neapolitan edition edited by Giacomo Raillard followed. New writings were added to the Progymnasmata, published with a new frontispiece and a new enumeration (Opera quaedam posthuma numquam antehac edita Ad Nobilissimum Virum Franciscum d’ Andrea). After a letter of Carlo Cornelio to Francesco D’Andrea and the requests with the concessions for the printing, the volume contains de sensibus (pp. 1–83), Elegiarum liber posthumus (pp. 87–114), some Epigrammata posthuma (115–119). An unedited work exists, of which Fiorentino gave notice in Telesio, vol. 2, pp. 243ff. and that Badaloni

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has minutely analyzed. It is a dialogue titled Giannettasius vel de animarum transmigratione Pythagorica Dialogus (and also De Metempsycosi seu de Trasmigratione Pythagorica). About Cornelio see Spampanato, Quattro filosofi, pp. 30ff.; A. Aceti, Un genio cosentino negletto (Cosenza, 1933); very important N. Badaloni, Introduzione, pp. 115–124, 181–193. Among the contemporaries, see Giannone, Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1723), vol. 4, pp. 492ff. Among the Lettere inedite di uomini illustri, published by Fabroni, one letter of the Englishman John Fink exists (though the date is erroneous) in which, p. 266, it is said: “Egli è Cartesiano e gran difensore delle cose nuove, e per questo in Napoli è odiato da quelli che giurano fedeltà a’ loro maestri. Dice nel suo libro di essere stato inventore dell’ipotesi della compressione e forza elastica dell’aria prima del Pecquetto e di qualunque altro: è Calabrese di nazione, uomo vivo e acuto, e come suol esser la maggior parte di essi molto caldo.” Of Marco Aurelio Severino (1580–1656) Badaloni spoke wittily and completely in Introduzione, pp. 25–37, giving many indications about his works in print. It is assumed that he composed Philosophia de naturali ductu ad omniscentias omnesque artes via ratioque demonstrata in omni natura et sapientium monumentis. About him exists Elogio of P. Magliari (Naples, 1854). Concerning the rapport between Severino and Cornelio many documents exist. In a letter from Rome of 28 August 1649 (therefore contemporary with De cognatione aeris et aquae, dedicated to Severino) Cornelio discusses about his tractate: Della respirazione degli animali, in two books, “nel primo de’ quali, seguendo i miei particolari principi fisici, vo investigando la natura e generazione dell’aria, e manifestando molte proprietà di questo corpo, non mai da alcuno altro pubblicate; nel secondo discorro degli organi che servono alla respirazione, con opinione molto diversa da quelle, che sinora si son lette; 1’opera riesce vaga, e piena di bellissime osservazioni ed esperienze nuove.” (Lettere memorabili, istoriche, politiche, ed erudite raccolte da Antonio Bulifon (Pozzuoli, 1693), vol. 1, pp. 226–230. Cornelio placed the letter addressed by Ade to Timaeus of Locri under the name of Severino and dedicated it to Borelli. The letter is very interesting for the presentation of the “moderns,” among whom are listed Bruno, Stelliola, and Donio who asks about what people think of the “new thoughts” he exposed in de natura hominis, while Stelliola exalts and praises his Encyclopaedia. In addition, see Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, pp. 119– 133; F. Crispini, Metafisica del senso e scienze della vita (Naples, 1975); M. Torrini, Tommaso Cornelio e la ricostruzione della scienza (Naples, 1977); L. De Franco, “Un falso secentesco: a proposito di una pretesa opera di T. Cornelio,” in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 30 (1975), pp. 421–432 (in which it is rigorously demonstrated that Giannettasius is not a work of Cornelio); Garin, “A proposito di Tommaso Cornelio,” ibid., 31 (1976), pp. 467–470. About Severino see Ch. B. Schmitt and C. Webster, “Harvey and M. A. Severino, A Neglected Medical Relationship,” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 45 (1971), pp. 49–75. About Stelliola and his writings, see Fiorentino, Telesio, vol. 2, pp. 235ff., 466ff.; Spampanato, Quattro filosofi napoletani, pp. 48ff.; G. Gabrieli, “N. A. Stelliola filosofo e linceo napoletano,” in GCFI, 10 (1929), pp. 469–485; the judgment of the Galileian Nardi in Capone-Braga, “Un filosofo dell’estremo Rinascimento (A. Nardi),” p. 107. Nardi accepts as true the diffused saying that Ferrante Imperato bought and then published as his own the work titled Dell’historia naturale, composed instead by Stelliola. In regard to Buragna see C. Bertani, Il maggior poeta sardo, C. Buragna (Milan, 1905). Concerning the fame and success of Della Casa see the comment of the Tele-

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sian Sertorio Quattromani (Naples, 1616), and that of Severino, “secondo l’idee d’Ermogene” (Naples, 1654) that Caloprese integrated; Della Casa, Rime, a cura di A. Seroni (Florence, 1944), p. 29. See also the essay of L. Rossi in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 15 (1972), pp. 367–368. Buragna commented Timaeus, Archimedes and Apollonius, but treated also music, De musicis tonis et intervallis, and published a De rerum natura, showing his interest for experimentalism and materialism. Of Leonardo di Capua besides Parere (to which you should add Ragionamenti intorno all’incertezza de’ medicamenti) read Lezioni intorno alla natura delle mofete (of this book we used the edition of Bologna, 1714). The cited loci of Parere in the text are from the second edition, pp. 35, 101, 275, 395. About Di Capoa see Fabroni, Vitae, pp. 16, 133ff., and the Introduzione of Badaloni; M. Rak, “Una teoria dell’incertezza (Note sulla cultura napoletana del secolo xvii),” Filologia e Letteratura, 15 (1969), pp. 233–297; M. Torrini, “Uno scritto sconosciuto di Leonardo da Capua in difesa dell’arte chimica,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, 4 (1974), pp. 126–139. 3. G. A. Borelli and Giuseppe Valletta. Debates on Jansenism. C. Grimaldi The question concerning the soul of beasts caused widely many reactions even from the field of theology and saw the contrasting alignment of the supporters of automatism on one side and the traditionalists on another. Fighting automatism were: P. A. Papi medico e filosofo Sabinese risponde a Sofilo Molossio Pastore degli Armenti automatici in Arcadia. In difesa dell’anima sensitiva esistente in detti Armenti... (Rome, 1706); J. H. Sbaragli, Entelechia seu anima sensitiva brutorum demonstrata contra Cartesium…. (Bononiae, 1716); I. Gastoni, Trattato dell’anima delle bestie (Venice, 1713). Supporters of automatism, among others, were L. A. Barbieri of Vicenza, Verità filosofiche fondamentali (Bassano, 1743); G. A. Costantini (Count A. S. Pupieni), Lettere critiche ecc. (Venice, 1749 and 1751), vol. 2, pp. 109–213. About the controversy see Domenico Pino, Trattato sopra l’essenza dell’anima delle bestie (Milan, 1766); consult also A. Montanari, Trattenimento metafisico intorno ai principali sistemi dell’anima delle bestie (Verona, 1764). Moreover, see P. Fassoni, Libro sull’anima delle bestie (Rome, 1760); F. Feroni, Theses philosophicas (Florence, 1729); J. Ph. Monti, Anima brutorum (Naples, 1742); and the anonymous Anima brutorum (Lucca, 1761), which in reality was the reprint of the volume of the Barnabite Monti with the addition of notes of P. Sacchetti. An examination of this problem from the origin to its developments and how it presented itself could be extremely interesting starting with a consideration of the book of Rorarius, Quod animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine, composed around the middle of the 16th century and placed in circulation by Naude about one century later. See the famous article of Bayle, and for the works in general of Girolamo Rorario da Pordenone (1485–1556), P. Paschini, “L’autore di un dialogo satirico contro Giulio II,” Atti dell’Accademia degli Arcadi, vol. 18, 13–14 (1934– 1935), pp. 85–98, and Memorie storiche forogiuliesi, 30 (1934). See also Toppi’s reference to the Neapolitan physician G. A. Capella, Opusculum paradoxicum quod ratio partecipatur a brutis, printed in 1641. Genovesi conceded that the beasts have a spiritual soul (Elementa metaphisica, vol. 2, p. 2), so did Jacomo Maria Della Torre (Scienza della natura particolare, 1711), and Benedetto Stay. Boscovich in his comment on Stay (Supplementum ad librum I, ch. 1), basing himself on Leibniz’s concept of the continuity of nature, observed: “sunt quaedam quae nec corpus sunt, nec spiritus ut per philosophos plerosque brutorum animae.…” No different position was that of Antonio Filippo Adami, who is recognized as the translator of Pope and known to

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support the concept of a limited spirituality for animals, “La immortalità dell’anima provata colla dimostrazione della sua spiritualità,” Magazzino letterario di Livorno of 8 March 1753, p. 80. Lami strongly supported the position of the spirituality of the soul of animals in Novelle letterarie of 2 January, 20 February, and 6 March of 1761. Mentioning the cult due to God, he observed: “Ma qual culto gli daranno le bestie? Un culto di maggior senso e cognizione, perchè dotate d’intelligenza, e in conseguenza d’anima discorsiva, e peró spirituale e immortale, come il nostro dotto Lorenzo Magalotti ha sostenuto, e con lui altri filosofi egualmente dotti e ortodossi; e il P. (Alfonso) Nicolai….” Ludovico Barbieri in Verità filosofiche fondamentali instead confessed that the soul of the brutes “ripugna alla sapienza e alla bontà divina”; and thus it is “Dio che produrrebbe ciaschedun movimento, come Egli li produce in noi pure a norma delle volizioni e delle tendenze dello spirito nostro” (God is the one to produce each movement as he does in us in accordance with the volitions and tendencies of our spirit). God therefore, as P. Zaccaria concluded, is the soul of beasts. Pure automata are the animals for Girolamo Giuntini in his annotazioni a’ libri tre delle meteore, poema filosofico di G. L. Stecchi (Florence, 1712), professor in Pisa and eulogizer of Marchetti: “Come la pura sottilissima fiamma animante le membra de’ bruti….” Analogous is the position of P. Fortunato da Brescia, Philosophia sensuum, physica particularis, vol. 2, p. 4; vol. 3, pp. 44–55. Costantini, Lettere critiche, pp. 199–213, spoke of “uno spirito, che si diminuisce ed accresce, e che con la morte totalmente svanisce; e come è visibile, che la sua restituzione si fa col respirar 1’aria, cosí quando totalmente si stacca, nell’aria ritorna” (a spirit that increases and decreases and with death totally vanishes; and as it is visibly manifest that it depends fully from respiration of air, so when it detaches totally from the body, in the air it returns). We could continue on this issue, but prefer to introduce this truly exciting citation from the anonymous treatise Anima brutorum (Lucca, 1761), p. 206: “Kantius Leibnitianae et Wolfianae philosophiae caeteroquin amantissimus ex concessis ab ipso Wolfio Brutorum animabus proprietatibus, non immateriales tantum sed spirituales illas vult esse quin inde sequi debeat esse etiam, ut nostras, immortales.” And in the note we have: “Kant. Phil. Leibn. et Wolf. usus in Theol. c. 2. Sect. 4, § 18.” The Kantius mentioned here is Israel Theophilus Kant, author of Usus Philosophiae Leibnitianae et Wolfianae in theologia. About Ceva, besides Maugain, see Fabroni, Vitae, pp. 18, 205ff.; R. Ramat, La critica del P. Ceva (Città di Castello, 1947). Of Ceva you must read, besides the poem Jesus Puer, the De natura gravium of 1699 and the digression de intelligentia quae in opere naturae elucescit. His writings appeared in Venice in 1730 in the Italian translation of Compastore Olpio Acheruntino. About Guido Grandi see: (Giammaria Ortes), Vita del padre D. Guido Grandi Abate Camaldolese ecc. (Venice, 1744); A. M. Bandini, G. Grandi Ab. Cam. et Mathematici praestantissimi elogium (Florentiae, 1745); A. Paoli, “La scuola di Galileo nella storia della filosofia. Lettere di dotti italiani e stranieri tratte dal carteggio del padre Guido Grandi,” in Annali delle Università toscane, 22 (1899), pp. 1–327 (Roman numbers) and 1-6; A. Paoli, “La scuola di Galileo ecc., Documenti, Corrispondenza del P. Grandi col P. Ceva” in Annali delle Università toscane, tome 28, pp. 1–44; tome 29 (1910), pp. 1–102. With Grandi was connected Claudio Fromond (1703–1765) of Cremona, his student, professor in Pisa, author of Nova et generalis introductio ad philosophiam (Venice, 1748). See the Elogio of I. Bianchi (Cremona, 1781); Fabroni, Vitae, vol. 14, pp. 356ff.; and De Martini, Logica seu ars cogitandi (Naples, 1728).

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Regarding the Cartesian and the anti-Cartesian philosophical poems we will speak when considering dell’Adamo of Campailla. Here we must mention the Jesuit from Ragusa Benedetto Stay (1714–1801) author of a long Cartesian poem published in Venice in 1744 and reprinted in Rome in 1747, Philosophia versibus tradita, libri sex. In an introductive letter sent to him by his brother Cristoforo, there is the announcement of also a Newtonian poem, which was in reality published in Rome between 1755 and 1792: Philosophiae recentioris versibus traditae libri X. The famous Dalmatian Ruggero Boscovich (1725–1787) began a valuable and excellent commentary on the work of Stay that was later abandoned. Of the works of Boscovich, see Philosophiae naturalis theoria, redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium that was successively printed in 1758, 1762, and 1764; on Boscovich, Fabroni, Vitae, vol. 14, pp. 284ff. V. I. Comparato, “Giuseppe Valletta e le sue opere,” in Archivio storico per le province napoletane, series 3, 2 (1962), has narrated the complex history of the works of Valletta, especially of the Discorso and Historia filosofica. Of the Discorso we used the copy contained in ms. “XV. B. 4” of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Naples; of Historia the exemplar in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Bologna. This has 232 pages, had been the property of Filippo Monti, and on the frontispiece in ink is written: Istoria della filosofia corpuscolare di Gioseppe Valletta Napoletano. Concerning the link of free philosophy and atomism consult the encyclopedia of the Jewish philosopherphysician Isaac Cardoso, Philosophia libera, in septem libros distributa. In quibus omnia quae ad philosophiam naturalem spectant, methodice colliguntur (Venetiis, 1673). About Cardoso see GCFI, 35 (1956), pp. 443–444. About Elia Astorini who could deserve special consideration see GCFI, 38 (1959), pp. 286–288. The letters exchanged between Muratori and Tartarotti in 1732–1733 in regard to Valletta are remarkable. Muratori in Epistolario, Edited by Campori (Modena, 1901 and successive years), num. 7, 3078, 3174, had written: “Per quanto io sappia, non è stata pubblicata lettera alcuna dal fu signor Valletta intorno alla moderna filosofia. Quel solo ch’io so e che il ... Grimaldi, parimente napoletano, ha dato alla luce tre libri, in uno dei quali impugna la filosofia aristotelica, e in un altro impugna la moderna. Probabilmente ivi sarà quanto dianzi era stato meditato dal signor Valletta.” After Tartarotti sent him the letter he printed, Muratori on 17 March 1733, letters num. 7, 3117, 3233, commented: “Veramente degna di luce era la lettera del Sig. Valletta ... che può servire a reprimere alcuni troppo innamorati e zelanti della scuola peripatetica.… Ma ... il sig. Valletta ha voluto troppo, e 1’ha fatta da declamatore prendendo tutto ciò che gli è venuto alle mani per iscreditare Aristotele. La verità è che quel filosofo ... non è quel miserabile ch’egli vorrebbe far credere. Ed è altresí vero che neppure Cartesio è quell’angelo di luce, che molti si van figurando. Anzi ai miei giorni ho veduto calare non poco la di lui riputazione, valendosi gl’inglesi dei principî di Newton, e i tedeschi di quei di Leibniz.” As for Tartarotti, he had published in 1731 in Rovereto Idea della logica degli scolastici e de’ moderni. In 1747 he published Del congresso notturno delle Lamie libri III, including two dissertations on the magical arts in the edition of Rovereto in 1748. Scipione Maffei followed this line of thought with Arte magica dileguata, a letter to P. Ansaldi, then in Venice between 1750–1751, Osservazioni on the letter of Maffei; Arte magica destrutta of A. Fiozio, a reply to Maffei; a Dissertazione degli omicidi commessi con sortilegio of B. Melchiori; Animadversioni critiche on the opuscule of Tartarotti, an Apologia of Tartarotti, and a dissertation of B. Prati against Maffei. Notice that Maffei in the Idea della logica degli scolastici e de’ moderni confessed to the

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reader that “in materie dalla religione affatto lontane” (in matters not alien to religion) he had not hesitated to present also the opinions of the protestants. See E. Fracassi, G. Tartarotti. Vita e opere illustrate da documenti inediti (Feltre, 1906). A work on the question of the soul of beasts unfortunately does not yet exist, but see M. T. Marcialis, “Alle origini della questione dell’anima delle bestie,” in Saggi sull’Illuminismo (Cagliari, 1973), pp. 319–411. About Boscovich, who is an important figure, see the article of P. Casini nel Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1971), vol. 13, pp. 221–230. With an excellent book of I. Comparato, G. Valletta. Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del Seicento (Naples, 1970) also appeared an edition of Valletta, Opere filosofiche, Edited by M. Rak (Florence, 1975), who had previously published La parte istorica. Storia della filosofia e libertinismo erudito (Naples, 1971). Concerning the polemic on witches see L. Parinetto, Magia e ragione. Una polemica sulle streghe in Italia intorno al 1750 (Florence, 1974). About Astorini and his lullism see E. Garin, op, cit., pp. 135–152; L. De Franco, “Gli Elementa Euclidis del filosofo e matematico cosentino frate Elia Astorini (1651–1702),” Quaderni della Mathesis, num. 2 (Cosenza, 1973). 4. The School of Caloprese. F. M. Spinelli. Tommaso Campailla. Michelangelo Fardella and Matteo Giorgi Of Spinelli we have Vita e studi di Francesco Maria Spinelli, principe della Scalea, scritta da lui medesimo in una lettera, in Calogerà, Raccolta d’opuscoli, 19 (Venice, 1753), pp. 483, 509. Of P. M. Doria, Risposte ... ad un .libro stampato in Napoli nella Stamperia di Felice Mosca l’anno 1733 col titolo Riflessioni di Francesco Maria Spinelli principe della Scalea su le principali materie della prima Filosofia fatte ad occasione di esaminare la prima parte di un libro intitolato Discorsi critici filosofici intorno alla filosofia degli antichi, e de’ moderni, ecc. di P. M. Doria (Naples, 1733), pp. 2–3. Concerning the studies of Spinelli you should see what he wrote in his autobiography at p. 496: “Questi studi adunque 1’obbligarono a ritornare alla Metafisica, come a scienza che dee esser la guida, e direm la polare dell’intelletto in tutte le altre. E perché non avea piú il Cartesio, si volse per esercitarvisi a quattro principali dialoghi di Platone, cioè al Parmenide, al Fedone, al Timeo e al Sofista, i quali gli risvegliarono il pensiero d’allontanarsi sempre piú da quegli Universali Peripatetici, e sopra tutti il Parmenide gli diede motivo di ritrovar la vera distinzione reale e sostanziale tra le menti e i corpi, cioè che quelle debbano esser sempre Uno, laddove i corpi non posson essere, che sempre perpetui piú.” About Caloprese see Cotugno, La sorte di G. B. Vico e le polemiche scientifiche e letterarie dalla fine del secolo xvii alla metà del xviii secolo; A. Pepe, “L’estetica del Gravina e del Caloprese,” in Rinnovamento of Cosenza, January 1923, about which see Croce, in La critica, 21 (1923), pp. 310–311. Also see the exposition of F. A. Gravina on the theories of Caloprese in relation to his comment on Della Casa and Basilio Giannelli (1662–1716) in regard to the education of his son (Croce, Età barocca). On Caloprese see also A. Quondam, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 16 (1973), pp. 801–805; S. Suppa, L’Accademia di Medinacoeli fra tradizione investigante e nuova scienza civile (Naples, 1971), which deals widely with Caloprese and of him published the lessons on Dell’origine degli imperi, pp. 177–212. Of Lucantonio Porzio, and his rapports with Vico, speaks N. Badaloni in “Una polemica scientifica ai primi del ’700 ed uno sconosciuto parere del Vico,” in Società, 14 (1958), pp. 1147–1160 (this article completes B. Croce, “Il Vico e Lucantonio Porzio,” in Aneddoti di varia letteratura (Bari, 1953), pp. 232–239. See also Badaloni,

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Introduzione a Vico (Milan, 1961), pp. 101–107. Concerning the importance of the dissertatio logica of Porzio in Opera omnia (Naples, 1736), vol. 1, pp. 378ff., I too dealt in GCFI, 38 (1959), pp. 423ff., publishing some of its parts and mentioning Giacinto Gimma, his biographer and eulogizer as well as a defender of the “moderns.” I published a letter of Porzio in La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, 58 (1954), p. 245; see his letter to Carlo Musitano. Gimma, however, as author of Nova Enciclopedia, which is still unpublished, at times has a Lullian flavor, and deserves a greater consideration than many other works in print,. About Gimma, C. Vasoli, Profezia e ragione, pp. 821–912 (in which there are two interesting texts, pp. 887–912). About Campailla, besides the general works already mentioned, see G. Foti, Tommaso Campailla (Palermo, 1920); M. M. Rossi, “Il viaggio di Berkeley in Sicilia ed i suoi rapporti con un filosofo poeta,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (1921), pp. 156–164 (the letters of Berkeley are cited in “Al savio lettore” of Don Jacopo de Mazara and Echebelz, in L’Adamo (Milan, 1744), vol. 1, b 2–b 3; in appendix to second volume, Discorso sulla fermentazione in a reply to the oppositions of Giuseppe Moncada, Riflessioni on the poem of A. Gravina with the replies of Campailla; see also F. Stanganelli, “Un poeta filosofo dimenticato,” in Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale (1914), pp. 259–289. For the editions and vicissitudes of Campailla, see Di Giovanni, Filosofi siciliani, vol. 1, pp. 278ff.; interesting information is found in D. Scinà, Prospetto della storia letteraria di Sicilia nel secolo xviii (Palermo, 1859), pp. 42ff. The edition of all his works appeared in Siracuse in 1783. About Fardella, K. Werner, “Die cartesisch-malebranchesche Phil. in Italien,” in Sitzungsberichte (der philos.-hist. Classe) der Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 103 (Wien, 1883); E. Garin, “Michelangelo Fardella,” GCFI, 14 (1933), pp. 395–408, with bibliographical information to be supplemented by “Michelangelo Fardella e Antonio Magliabechi,” GCFI, 35 (1956), pp. 362–371, where many summaries of the letters to Magliabechi are given (obtained from ms. “Magliab. VIII, 1072”). Of Matteo Giorgi d’Albenga, physician, see the Summa supremae partis philosophiae bipartita, seu de homine, in two books, of 1713. The polemic with Fardella started in 1694. A consideration apart could have been dedicated to the Cartesianism of the physicians; the philosophical writings of Pascoli and his Nuovo metodo (Venice, 1721) are indeed deserving more attention. On Fardella, see also M. Soppelsa, Genesi del metodo galileiano, pp. 177–194. Of Natale see La filosofia leibniziana esposta in versi toscani (Florence (Palermo), 1756); Scinà, Prospetto della storia letteraria di Sicilia nel secolo xviii, pp. 156ff. “Le lodi del Cento” is in Natale, p. 140. A characteristic document of the diffusion of Gassendism is the edition of the works of Gassendi on the inspiration of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Muratori suggested to Tartarotti the reading of Fardella to counter the poison of the followers of atomism (Epistolario, 7, num. 3223, 3118): “(Legga) 1’opera del Fardella, lettore in Padova ai miei giorni, il quale ha trattato questa materia secondo S. Agostino.” About Luca Tozzi who succeeded to Cornelio consult Garin, “Luca Tozzi o la filosofia dei medici,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 27 (1972), pp. 75–78. 5. Father Giovenale. B. Trevisan and P. M. Doria. Controversy with Spinelli Of Father Giovenale see the edition edited by Jules Fabre d’Envieu (Paris, 1878); on him, the essay of Chiocchetti in Atti dell’Accademia Roveretana degli Agiati, (1923), pp. 13–54. Of Valeriano Magni see the edition of Bologna of 1886 (and also the singular book of Uldericus a Gablinga, Imago Dei Immortalis Anima Rationalis (Calaris, 1777). As to Trevisan, he was born on 17 March 1652 (but according to Giornale de’

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letterati d’Italia on February 1653), was an Arcadian of the Colonia Animosa of Venice with the name Arcandro Botachido, and died near Conegliano on 29 January 1720. In 1699, Trevisan published Immortalità dell’anima. Saggio delle meditazioni di Bernardo Trevisan Patricio Veneto, a defense against the atheism of a position rich with Platonic tones. In 1704 the Meditazioni filosofiche in three volumes appeared in Venice (the third volume, Immortalità, with the exception of the frontispiece, seems identical to the edition of 1699). He was a public lecturer of philosophy in Venice in 1711, and in 1712 gave to the printers the first volume of the Cursus philosophicus. What remained unedited was the Nuovo Sistema filosofico, nel quale col fondamento di principii particolari si discorre de’ corpi, de’ movimenti, e della natura e proprietà degli intelligenti. See Crescimbeni, Notizie degli Arcadi morti (Rome, 1721), vol. 3, pp. 249–252. Some attention should be given to the Trattato della Laguna Veneta (Venice, 1715). Probably the polemic in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia on the De antiquissima of Vico was due to Father Giovenale. See Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Edited by Marino Berengo (Milan, 1962), pp. 23–33. 6. Tommaso Russo S. Bono, “Studi intorno a Paolo Mattia Doria,” in Rassegna di filosofia, 4 (1955), pp. 214–232 has provided a good although incomplete review on Doria, which we recommend together with the note in GCFI, 35 (1956), pp. 137–140. There is a letter of Doria in GCFI, 35 (1956), p. 448. Regarding the polemics on the subject of mathematics, which are intertwined with his fight against the “moderns,” see GCFI, 38 (1959), pp. 424–426 (with references to unedited materials). It is public knowledge that besides the published works, there are many unedited other ones. See Vidal, Il pensiero civile di Paolo Mattia Doria negli scritti inediti, con il testo del manoscritto “Del commercio del Regno di Napoli” (Milan, 1953). To the works of Doria cited in the text, we must add the confirmation on his Cartesianism: Considerazioni sopra il moto e la meccanica de’ corpi sensibili e de’ corpi insensibili (Augusta, 1711); the polemic against Lucantonio Porzio; the Capitano filosofo (of which the first part appeared in Naples in 1739), in which he opposed the Platonic Onasander to the Arte della guerra of Machiavelli. About Rossi, Tulelli in Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana (num. 6–7) has an essay; Ragnisco wrote B. Spinoza e T. Rossi (Salerno, 1873); Werner G. Zocchi reprinted La mente sovrana del mondo, in appendix to his monograph on Rossi (Naples, 1866). See L. Ventura, T. Rossi e la sua filosofia (Geneva, 1912); A. Cozzi, T. Rossi nella vita, nelle opere, nella scienza e nella critica (Benevento, 1915). For some anti-Spinozism hints, see E. Boscherini Giancotti, “Note sulla diffusione della filosofia di Spinoza in Italia,” GCFI, 42 (1963), pp. 339–362. About Doria the essay of P. Zambelli is interesting, “Il rogo postumo di P. M. Doria,” in the cited Ricerche sulla cultura dell’Italia moderna, pp. 149–198 (in appendix there are the condemned articles on Idea d’una perfetta Repubblica); see the important introduction of G. Galasso to V. Conti, Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli (Naples, 1973), pp. 5–47. 7. Antonio Conti. G. V. Gravina, and L. A. Muratori Conti, Prose e poesie (Venice, 1739–1756), 2 vols. In G. Toaldo, Nolizie intorno alla vita e agli studi del Sig. Ab. A. Conti, pp. 1–308, with documents of Conti. From the mss. of the Biblioteca Comunale of Udine, M. Baravelli has published some pages of Della virtú in Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 13 (1958), pp. 209–216. About Conti see F. Moffa, Le teorie filosofiche di A. Conti (Naples, 1902); M. Melillo, “L’opera filosofica di A. Conti patrizio veneto,” L’Ateneo veneto (1910), pp. 325–374,

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and (1911), pp. 21–165; G. Gronda, “Antonio Conti e l’Inghilterra,” English Miscellany, 15 (1964), pp. 135–164. About Conti the philosopher we have now the comprehensive volume of N. Badaloni, Antonio Conti. Un abate libero pensatore tra Newton e Voltaire (Milan, 1968), to which must be added the volume of Scritti filosofici (some of which unedited), Edited by Badaloni, with introduction and notes (Naples, 1972) that assembled the total correspondence with Vallisneri, pp. 345–346. On Conti the writer, see M. Ariani, Drammaturgia e mitopoiesi. Antonio Conti scrittore (Rome, 1977). In 1966 Gronda who studied the relations with England had published for Laterza’s series Scrittori d’Italia the Versioni poetiche (among others from Pope, Lady Montagu, Racine, and Voltaire). In Opuscoli filologici, Edited by Gamba (Venice, 1832), there are historical pages and very important consideration on contemporary thought. In Discorso in onore della filosofia italiana indirizzato al March. Scipione Maffei, Conti concludes (in the Edition Gamba, pp. 19–20): “A due cose ho avuto principalmente riguardo: all’ordine, ed alla sensata filosofia. Gli stranieri ci rimproverano, che i nostri libri non sono che abbondanti di repliche e digressioni, e che quando si legge non si sa mai ne donde si venga ne dove si vada. La piú certa risposta che potria loro farsi, non è di moltiplicare all’infinito le logiche, come essi fanno, ma di scrivere i libri e i trattati con ordine. Nella sensata filosofia si debbe distinguere ciò ch’è dimostrato, da ciò ch’è probabile; onde ne nasce la filosofia esperimentale ch’è veramente scienza, e la filosofia ipotetica che propriamente non è che opinione. Nella filosofia esperimentale da’ fenomeni analiticamente si scoprono le leggi della natura, e dalle leggi scoperte sinteticamente si discende alla spiegazione di altri fenomeni. Nella filosofia ipotetica, o si propongono le ipotesi come questioni da decidersi per le osservazioni e per le esperienze, ed allora la filosofia ipotetica è la parte problematica della filosofia esperimentale; o le ipotesi si propongono come principii che hanno dipendenza e connessione fra loro, ed allora la filosofia ipotetica è lo stesso che la sistematica.... Io mi sono proposto di favellare (senza però niente decidere) secondo 1’una e 1’altra di queste filosofie; alla filosofia esperimentale non dando che le cose certe e dimostrate; all’ipotetica, che le opinioni fondate sopra i diversi gradi di verisimiglianza che nelle ipotesi io soglio riguardare come gli analisti riguardano le verisimiglianze nelle sorti de’ giocatori.” In the preface to the Dialoghi, opportunely republished by Badaloni (pp. 316– 317), Conti furtherly deepened the thought underlining how in the “civil life” the method of proceeding is that of verisimilarities and how the rigorosity of the verisimilar arguments must be based on probability: “Non potendo noi sempre per 1’esperienza e per la dimostrazione assegnar la ragion sufficiente de’ fenomeni, si suppongono o si fingono de’ dati o de’ principi che li spieghino, modo convenevolissimo alla nostra capacità, alla nostra disposizione, la qual comincia da tentativi, come fa nella division de’ numeri e, nel mettersi in cammino, scegliendo a caso 1’idea che le par piú opportuna e accorgendosi che nel progresso non soddisfa, successivamente la corregge, come si fa nella regola della falsa posizione, nella regola del1’algebra e nell’astro-nomia stessa, di cui basta leggere la storia del progresso per convincersi che, a forza d’ipotesi, si determinarono i sistemi che piú facilmente spiegano le apparenze. Altri di questi dati o supposti son congetture, ed è questa la materia della filosofia che si chiama congetturale; altri sono ipotesi arbitrarie e fanno la filosofia ipotetica propriamente detta, da cui deriva la romanzesca. Le congetture non meno che la filosofia sperimentale hanno i fatti per oggetto, ma fatti oscuri e non ben anche certi e che perciò lasciano sempre qualche dubbio o sospetto dell’opposto. Non s’e potuto ancora

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determinar 1’arte di pesare i vari gradi delle verisimiglianze, e pur questa è un’arte necessaria al par di quella delle dimostrazioni nell’uso delle scienze e molto piú nella vita civile ove, incerti dell’esito delle cose, non ci resta che il calcolar le verisimiglianze.” And very much in an illuministic way he began to argue with “the systems”: “Che direm mai di questi filosofi che fabbricarono dei mondi, come ne avessero preso ad imprestito da Dio il modello, che descrissero le interiora della terra, delle stelle fisse, delle comete, come se vi avessero viaggiato? E per far simile in tutto la natura all’arte assegnarono figure certe e determinate alle particelle del fuoco, del1’acqua e dell’aria, come se 1’avessero vedute col microscopio? Pure di queste arbitrarie ipotesi s’innamorò la maggior parte de’ letterati.” An idea of the kind of Cartesian, Gassendist, and Newtonian discussions that became fashion in Padua can be obtained from the academic lectures of Professor Tommaso Volpi, known among the Arcadians as Ulipio Grinejo, a philosopher sufficiently famous, who discussed vacuum, space, physics and translated “nella toscana favella” the dialogue of Zacharias of Mitilene against those who sustained the eternity of the world (Padua, 1735). About Tommaso Cattaneo consult the Supplimenti of Poli, p. 375. About Gravina wrote B. Croce, “G. V. Gravina l’illuminante,” in Nuovi saggi sulla letteratura italiana del ’600 (Bari, 1949), pp. 352–357. Nicolini and Corsano accepted and followed his observations and conclusions. For a correction of Croce’s positions see in GCFI, 35 (1956), pp. 577–578. Of the Idra mistica we followed the edition of 1761: “Idra mistica, ovvero della corrotta moral dottrina. Dialogo di N. N.”, in Raccolta di varie scritture e documenti sugli affari presenti dei P. P. Gesuiti, in Raccolta XVIII (Lugano, 1762) and in Venice an edition was paid by Giuseppe Bettinelli. See also N. Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico, pp. 236ff. Of Gravina now exists an excellent edition of Scritti storici e teorici, Edited by Amedeo Quondam (Bari, 1973) and studies focusing on his works by the same A. Quondam, Cultura e ideologia in Gianvincenzo Gravina (Milan, 1968); idem., Filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del Gravina (Naples, 1970). See also G. Ricuperati, “Recenti studi sul primo ’700 italiano, G. V. Gravina e Antonio Conti,” Rivista storica Italiana, 82 (1970), pp. 610– 644. About Sergardi see Quondam, “Le satire di Ludovico Sergardi, Contributo ad una storia della cultura romana tra Sei e Settecento,” La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, 73 (1969), pp. 206–272; “Note ed enarrationes alle Satyrae del Sergardi: problemi di attribuzione,” Filologia e Letteratura, 17 (1971), pp. 251–281. Of Muratori see the Corrispondenza fra L. A. Muratori e G. G. Leibniz, conservata nella R. Biblioteca di Hannover, Edited by M. Campori (Modena, 1892); Epistolario, Edited by M. Campori (Modena, 1901–1922); and for the writings on morality the two excellent editions edited by P. G. Nonis, abundant with data and information: Trattato della carità cristiana e altri scritti sulla carità (Rome, 1961); La filosofia morale e altri scritti etici inediti ed editi (Rome, 1964), pp. 248–298, with a critical bibliography. Particular attention should be given to Opere di Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Edited by G. Falco and F. Forti (Milan-Naples, 1964). Concerning the numerous literature on Muratori, often insignificant, consult the indications given in the indicated authors. In particular see F. Soli-Muratori, Vita del proposto L. A. Muratori (Venice, 1756); “Miscellanea di studi muratoriani,” in Atti e Memorie della R. Deputazione di Storia Patria delle Provincie Modenesi, series 8 (Modena, 1933); “Scritti sul Muratori,” in Convivium, new series (1950), pp. 481–712; Miscellanea di studi muratoriani, Atti e Memorie del Convegno di Studi storici in onore di L. A. Muratori (Milan, 1951); F. Forti, L. A. Muratori fra antichi e moderni

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(Bologna, 1953); G. Faicco, “Il pensiero civile di L. A. Muratori,” in Pagine sparse di storia e di vita (Milan-Naples, 1960); S. Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in L. A. Muratori (Naples, 1960). Regarding the known confutation of Huet, he already in 1728 had written (Epistula num. 2799): “ubi cum voluntate prava etiam ingenium mediocre iungatur, leve negotium est ita adversus omnia excitare fumos et umbras, ut nihil certi statuas.” The Censura philosophiae cartesiane of Huet appeared also in Bologna in 1722. It is worthy to cite the judgment on Hobbes (Epistula num. 2708): “il signor Cocchi mi lodava l’Hobbes. Oibò. Brutto guadagno empirsi il capo d’empie visioni e di sacrileghe argomentazioni.” Concerning the theological polemics of Muratori, see Scinà, Prospetto della storia letteraria di Sicilia nel secolo xviii, pp. 85–88. Three volumes have been published as part of the National Edition of Muratori Correspondence by Centro di Studi Muratoriani (Florence, 1973–1975): L. A. Muratori e la cultura contemporanea; L. A. Muratori storiografo; La fortuna di L. A. Muratori With reference to the “buon gusto” of Lamindo Pritanio, for the fortune of an expression, see C. Ettorri, II buon gusto nei componimenti retorici (Bologna, 1696), in which the way is taught of “farsi virtuosamente popolare” (and on Ettorri, besides Croce, Problemi d’estetica, pp. 379ff., see G. Toffanin, L’Arcadia (Bologna, 1946), pp. 33–36, which should be consulted also for some observations on Gravina and Conti. 8. Pietro Giannone Of Giannone see the Professione di fede ..., p. 20; the Opere postume (Lausanne, 1760); Il triregno, Edited by Parente (Bari, 1940), 3 vols.; Vita scritta da lui medesimo, Edited by S. Bertelli (Milan, 1960) (with a bibliographical note). About Giannone see G. De Ruggiero, Il pensiero politico meridionale nei secoli xviii e xix (Bari, 1922), pp. 7–41; G. Gentile, Albori della nuova Italia (Lanciano n. d.), pp. 1–70; A. Corsano, “Il pensiero religioso di P. Giannone,” in the cited volume Il pensiero religioso italiano; L. Marini, Pietro Giannone e il giannonismo a Napoli nel Settecento (Bari, 1950); E. Malato, Introduzione a P. Giannone nel quadro dell’anticurialismo napoletano del Settecento (Naples, 1956).Finally, for his Lettre ... sur le caractère des italiens, see Pietro Calepio of Bergamo (1693–1762), on whom consult M. Biscione, “P. Calepio e la cultura italiana,” in GCFI, 21 (1940), pp. 18ff. (with bibliography at pp. 204–205); but see P. Calepio, Lettere a J. J. Bodmer, Edited by R. Boldini (Bologna, 1964).About Giannone again see G. Ricuperati, L’esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan-Naples, 1970) and the edition of his works by S. Bertelli e G. Ricuperati (Milan-Naples, 1971). Concerning the diffusion of the writings of Giannone see S. Bertelli, Giannoniana (Naples, 1968).

Twenty-Five GIAMBATTISTA VICO (pp. 679–712) 1–5. To the untiring activity of Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini are due some of the fundamental instruments for the study of Vico and an eminent edition of his works. Begun in 1903 by Croce and then tirelessly continued and completed with the help of Nicolini, the Bibliografia Vichiana (Naples, 1947–1948) constitutes a reasoned and

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documented history of the editions, translations, mss. of the works of Vico, of the fortune and criticism up to our days. For the succeeding period, see Paolo Rossi, “Lineamenti di storia della critica vichiana,” in I classici italiani nella storia della critica, Edited by W. Bini (Florence, 1961). Of Vico’s works the first edition was edited in 6 vols. by Giuseppe Ferrari (Milan, 1835–1837; and again in 1852–1854). The Laterza edition in 8 vols. appeared in Bari between 1914 and 1941 and was edited for the most by Nicolini. Croce and Gentile contributed for the first volume. Nicolini published a critical edition with an abundant and fundamental commentary of Scienza Nuova seconda (Bari, 1911–1916). The commentary was reviewed, enlarged and published by itself as Commento storico alla seconda “Scienza Nuova” (Rome, 1949–1950), 2 vols. Then Nicolini published another useful anthology of Vico’s works in one volume, Opere (Milan-Naples, 1953). Among the contributions besides those due to the activity of Nicolini is also the edition of some selected works edited by P. Rossi (Milan, 1959). Anyone wishing to become aware of all the interpretive trends of this century will have to rely first on the celebrated monograph of Croce, on the studies of Gentile, De Ruggiero, and then on the positions of Paci, Badaloni, Corsano, on the research of Fubini or Pagliaro, on the new evaluations of Abbagnano, and on the positions taken by Catholic historians, from Chiocchetti to Franco Amerio. In no way it is possible to give here an outline of these vicissitudes, for which we invite the readers to discover them in the works and histories mentioned. We only wanted to indicate some authors from which it would be necessary to begin. In the last decade the Vichian studies have taken an impressive acceleration in Italy and abroad. We are giving only bibliographical indications: B. Croce and F. Nicolini, Bibliografia Vichiana (Bari, 1948); E. Gianturco, A Selective Bibliography of Vico Scholarship (1948–1968), a Supplement to Forum Italicum (Florence, 1968); M. Donzelli, Contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1948–1970) (Naples, 1973). About the publication for the centennial of 1968 see the panorama of G. Cacciatore, “Il tricentenario vichiano del 1968,” in Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana, 19 (1970), pp. 343–363; for the period 1968–1975, A. Battistini, “Rassegna vichiana (1968–1975),” in Lettere Italiane, 28 (1976), pp. 76– 112, has given a penetrating and complete evaluation. Since 1971 the Bollettino del Centro di studi vichiani of Naples brings yearly information on the literary production on Vico, thank to the activity of Pietro Piovani and colleagues. Among the editions of Vico’s works there are the two volumes: Opere filosofiche and Opere giuridiche, Edited by P. Cristofolini with introduction of N. Badaloni (Florence, 1971–1974); S. Monti, Sulla traduzione e sul testo delle orazioni inaugurali di Vico (Naples, 1977).Among the critical contributions we have: Omaggio a Vico (Naples, 1968); “A Homage to Vico in the Tercentenary of His Birth,” in Forum Italicum, 2, 4 (1968), pp. 299–627; “Giambattista Vico nel terzo centenario della nascita,” in Quaderni contemporanei, 2 (1968); Giambattista Vico. An International Symposium, Edited by G. Tagliacozzo (Baltimore, 1968); P. Rossi, Le stermimate antichità. Studi vichiani (Pisa, 1969); Various authors., Giambattista Vico, Edited by G. Tagliacozzo (Rome, 1975; L. Pompa, Giambattista Vico. Studio sulla Scienza Nuova (Rome, 1975); I. Berlin, Vico and Herder, Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976); Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, Edited by G. Tagliacozzo and D. Ph. Verene (Baltimore and London, 1976); “Vico and Contemporary Thought,” in Social Research, 43 (1976), pp. 391–914.

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Twenty-Six THE ENLIGHTENMENT (pp. 715–748) 1. Jansenist Motives. Diffusion of Locke’s Doctrines About Jansenist motives see the extensive and remarkable introduction of E. Codignola to Carteggi dei giansenisti liguri (Florence, 1941), and especially llluministi, giansenisti, giacobini nell’ltalia del Settecento (Florence, 1947), in which is the essay “II giansenismo nella storiografia italiana,” pp. 287–362; A. C. Jemolo, Il giansenismo in Italia prima della Rivoluzione (Bari, 1928). Muratori characterized Jemolo as “Precursore inconscio del giansenismo” and “ben tepido giansenista.” Jemolo insisted on the theological character of Jansenism, “Dottrine teologiche dei giansenisti italiani dell’ultimo Settecento,” Rivista trimestrale di Studi filosofici e religiosi, 1 (1920), pp. 430–469). In regard to Muratori see Lamindi Pritanii de ingeniorum moderatione (Venetiis, 1768); De superstitione vitanda, sive censura voti sanguinarii (Mediolani, 1740); A. C. Jemolo, “Il pensiero religioso di L. A. Muratori,” Rivista trimestrale di Studi filosofici e religiosi, 4 (1923), pp. 23–78. Concerning the long controversy that derived from it see for what concerns Sicily, but not only Sicily, the copious indications in Scinà, Prospetto della storia letteraria di Sicilia nel secolo xviii, pp. 85–88. Concerning the philosophical thought of 18th century in general and in respect to particular individuals, consult G. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento (Padua, 1942), 3 vols., but also G. Natali, Il Settecento (Milan, 1929), 2 vols., and Maugain, Étude sur l’évolution intellectuelle de I’ltalie de 1657 a 1750 environ. Of the most recent literature see the volume of M. Fubini, La cultura illuministica in Italia (Turin, 1964) 2nd. edition with the contributions of Fubini, F. Venturi, F. Valsecchi, G. Faico, W. Binni, M. Puppo, E. Bonora, U. Segre, R. Romeo, E. Passerin, D. Cantimori, R. Bacchelli. In addition, see the 3 vols. hitherto published of llluministi italiani, di F. Venturi (Milan-Naples, 1958–1965) and the anthology edited by S. Romagnoli, Illuministi settentrionali (Milan, 1962). Important texts and research can be found in the anthology of Venetian periodicals (daily newspapers) of the 18th century: Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Edited by Marino Berengo (Milan, 1962). A study on the diffusion of Locke in Italy is not available. What can instead be consulted is H. Bedarida, L’influence française en Italie en dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1936). An independent consideration could also be assigned to the translation of philosophical works, some of which very significant, among many and unsuspected productions that go from Locke to the Discorsi of Rousseau (Ferrara, 1760), from Hartley to the writings of Hume printed even with the original beside. About De Soria see Maugain, L’influence française, p. 229; Gentile, Studi sul Rinascimento, pp. 283–302, also in English in the series “Classics in the Philosophy of History,” in History and Theory, 4 (1965), pp. 315–327; G. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 88ff. Lami fought against De Soria under the name of G. Clemente Bini, Lettere VII teologiche e metafisiche due delle quali inedite contro i ragionamenti metafisici del Signor.… (Milan, (Florence), 1746), in which Bandini republished with the writing of De Soria one of his own retractions. F. R. Adami (Gelaste Mastigoforo) gave an answer to Lami in Lettere... (Lucca, 1746– 1747); Cialli gave an answer to Adami in Riflessioni... (Florence, 1747). Consult G. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, p. 89 footnote. Of De Soria see also Raccolta di opuscoli filosofici, e filologici (Pisa, 1766), 3 vols., and

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Raccolta di opere inedite (Livorno, 1774), 2 vols. Of Moniglia see Dissertazione contro i fatalisti (Lucca, 1744), 2 vols.; and Dissertazione contro i materialisti e altri increduli (Padova, 1750), and, finally, Osservazioni critico-filosofiche contro i materialisti (Lucca, 1760). A. F. Adami, the translator of Pope, also questioned Moniglia concerning his arguments. About Francesco Raimondo Adami (1711–1792) and his polemic see in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1960), vol. 1, pp. 233–234, essay of G. Miccoli. Anton Filippo Adami (died in 1770), Knight of S. Stefano, besides the translation of the Essay on Man of Pope in I principi della morale, o sia saggio sopra l’uomo, poema di A. Pope tradotto in versi sciolti italiani (Arezzo, 1756)—a version criticized by Lami— composed a Dimostrazione dell’esistenza di Dio provata con la contingenza della materia (Livorno, 1753), and the reasoning Della educazione di un gentiluomo (Arezzo, 1759) that contains some illuministic cues. See A. F. Adami’s voice by N. Carranza in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, (1960), vol. 1, pp. 232–233. About Radicati see F. Venturi, Saggi sull’Europa illuminista. Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin, 1954), vol. 1. As to Jerocades see G. Capasso, Un abate massone del sec. xviii (Parma, 1887). See his Saggio dell’umano sapere (Naples, 1768); “Orazione intorno alla concordia della filosofia e della filologia”; Bacone e Vico (Naples, 1792). On the philosophical thought and the culture in general of the age of illuminism in Italy, see the synthesis of P. Casini, Introduzione all’Illuminismo. Da Newton a Rousseau (Bari, 1973), pp. 265–352, 495–538, with a rich bibliography; N. Badaloni, La cultura (dal primo Settecento all’Unità), in Storia d’ltalia Einaudi (1973), vol. 3, pp. 699–984; F. Venturi, Settecento riformatore: vol. 1, Da Muratori a Beccaria; vol. 2, La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti. 1758–1774 (Turin, 1969–1976). With llluministi Italiani in the series Classici Ricciardi in 1975 has appeared Opere del Galiani, Edited by F. Diaz and L. Querci. The voluminous book of P. Zambelli contains much more than what the title suggests: La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1972) that in reality describes in a wide panorama the discussion in Italy and the rapport with foreign cultures during the first half of the century, with continuous inquiries and references to successive decades. Abundance of cues and ample explorations are found in the volume of F. Diaz, Per una storia illuministica (Naples, 1973). Still missing are sistematic researches on the fortune in Italy of the great illuminists. For some observations on the diffusion of Bayle and Hobbes, see Garin, Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, pp. 153–193; S. Rotta’s rich in data essays: “Montesquieu nel Settecento italiano: Note e ricerche,” in Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica, Edited by G. Tarello (Bologna, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 57–209; “Voltaire in Italia. Note sulle traduzioni settecentesche delle opere voltairiane,” in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Lettere e Filosofia, 39 (1970), pp. 387–444, and S. Rota Ghibaudi, La fortuna di Rousseau in Italia. 1750–1815 (Turin, 1961). 2. F. M. Zanotti. R. G. Boscovich About Zanotti, besides the short biography in Fabroni, Vitae Italorum, vol. 5, pp. 326– 368, see G. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 4ff. Concerning his thought see especially L. Fabris, “F. M. Zanotti e i suoi scritti filosofici,” in GCFI, 12 (1931), pp. 126–153; and then Buonafede, Ritratti poetici (Venice, 1788), vol. 2, pp. 269–274. Zanotti’s major known work Della forza de’ corpi che chiamano viva libri tre, dedicated to Morgagni, appeared in Bologna in 1752. Zanotti was a friend of Buonafede who participated in the polemic on morality. Of all his works see the selection in 4 vols. published in Milan in 1818. See also M.

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Losacco, “Le dottrine edonistiche italiane del sec. xviii. Saggio storico psicologico,” Atti della R. Accademia di scienze morali e politiche di Napoli, 34 (1902), pp. 181– 308. The polemic of Zanotti is attached to the version of the essay of Maupertius, Raccolta di trattati di diversi autori concernenti alla Religion Naturale e alla Morale Filosofia dei Cristiani e degli Stoici (Venice, 1756), 2 vols. Within an atmosphere of an inquiry merely naturalistic are the writings of a disciple and continuator of Genovesi, Francesco Longano (1729–1796), Dell’uomo naturale (Naples, 1767) (of which we used the edition Cosmopoli, 1778); Filosofia dell’uomo (Naples, 1783–1786) (two parts, in 4 vols.; of the second part “dell’uomo religioso e cristiano,” I know only vol. 1: Dell’uomo religioso; Philosophiae rationalis elementa (Naples, 1791), 3 vols. His book on Viaggi per lo regno di Napoli (Naples, 1788) is truly interesting. About Longano see F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 331–346; G. A. Arena, La rivolta di un abate. Francesco Longano (Naples, 1971). In the appendix to the book, Arena published a letter of Longano to Isidoro Bianchi, unedited documents on the censure of the tractate are still missing today, Sull’esistenza del Purgatorio, limitato ai lumi della ragione (1779), which procured so many troubles to Longano. An anonymous, perhaps a certain F. A. Zaccaria, attacked Longano with Lettere critiche contro l’autore di certo Purgatorio politico (Siena, 1779). Attached to that there are some interesting texts and even a portrait attributed to Buonafede, pp. 144–152. Being a mason, Longano had no good fame: “Non una volta quest’altro regnicolo Vanino si è sottratto dalle mani della giustizia. Piú e piú volte gli venne proibita la scuola, ordinato il carcere ed intimato lo sfratto. Ma niuno ammirerà come abbia potuto liberarsene, quando può ben rinvenire ne’ suoi libri medesimi 1’eclettico prestigio di comparire quando ateo e quando cristiano e quando né ateo né cristiano né ragionevole; ed arguire che con questa enfatica fantasima appunto si fe’ vedere e non vedere e confuse la vista e scappò dalle mani de’ giudici.” It is helpful to remember that in 1778 Longano published an annotated translation of Saggio politico sul commercio of Malon. An appealing document of illuministic mentality is found in Lettere of Ganganelli (Florence, 1845), with the praises of Genovesi (pp. 168–170) for the thought of the 18th century (Settecento), and with the suggestion for the reader to read Sarpi, Giannone, “i fogli periodici” of Lami (p. 80), for the purpose of learning how to think properly “per imparare a ben pensare.” About Isidoro Bianchi, who had rapports with Longano, besides the indications that Capone-Braga gives, in La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 50ff., see also Gentile, Il tramonto della cultura siciliana (Bologna, 1919), pp. 35–36. Regarding the influence of Charron it is useful to mention besides the Italian version of N. Salengio (Kohln, 1698) the curious short story narrated by Casanova in Mémoires (Paris, without date), vol. 3, pp. 70–72. As it is well known, Cesarotti felt strongly the influence of the Sagesse. See finally the article about Bianchi by F. Venturi in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1968), vol. 10, pp. 132–139. Of Pilati see L’esistenza della legge naturale impugnata e sostenuta (Venice, 1764); Ragionamenti intorno alla Legge Naturale e Civile (Venice, 1766); on Pilati M. Rigatti, Un illuminista trentino del secolo xviii, C. A. Pilati (Florence, 1923); and F. Venturi, Settecento riformatore (1976), pp. 250–325. The Newtonianism for ladies or dialogues concerning light, colors and attractions appeared in 1737 in Naples (truly in Milan). Editions of Newton’s works were done in Livorno, in 9 vols., in 1764; in Cremona, in 10 vols., in 1778; and thereafter in Venice, in 17 tomes, in 1791. The essays, including the one on Descartes, pp. 401–431, were edited by G. Da Pozzo, and were published in a critical edition in Bari, in 1963. Of all

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the studies worthy of consideration of A. Scaglione, see “Il pensiero dell’Algarotti,” Convivium, 25 (1956), pp. 404–426. About Algarotti see the voice of E. Bonora in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1960), vol. 2, pp. 356–360; the commemoration of M. Fubini, “Commemorazione di F. Algarotti nel secondo centenario della morte,” Atti dell’Istituto Veneto, 123 (1964–1965), pp. 9ff. and of B. Talluri, “I riflessi della cultura europea del xviii secolo nei saggi filosofici di F. Algarotti,” in Miscellany Di Carlo (Trapani, 1959). Boscovich deserved a longer consideration, but besides the Theoria philosophiae naturalis redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium (Vienna, 1758) and (Venice, 1763) with in appendix De anima et Deo, and De spatio et tempore, the notes and supplements to the poems of Benedetto Stay must be studied: Philosophiae recentioris versibus traditae libri decem (Romae, 1755–1760). The supplements of Boscovich are at vol. 1, pp. 331–490; vol. 2, pp. 299–504. About Boscovich see R. J. Boscovich, Studies of the Life and Work on the 250th Anniversary of his Birth (London, 1961) (with useful studies of H. Hill on the biography, of L. Law Whyte, on atomism, and of Z. Markovic, on Theoria philosophiae naturalis). 3. Antonio Genovesi In Natali, Il Settecento, vol. 1, pp. 353–354, see the bibliography on Genovesi; G. Galanti, Elogio storico del Sig. Ab. A. Genovesi, published in 1772 (in 1781, in Florence, the third edition appeared); G. Racioppi, A. Genovesi (Naples, 1871) (and again in Naples, 1958); G. Gentile, Dal Genovesi al Galluppi (Naples, 1903) and a 2nd edition with the title Storia della filosofia italiana dal Genovesi al Galluppi (Florence, 1937); G. M. Monti, Due grandi riformatori del Settecento: A. Genovesi e G. M. Galanti (Florence, 1926). For more recent researches especially see Studi in onore di Antonio Genovesi nel bicentenario della istituzione della cattedra di economia..., Edited by Domenico Demarco (Naples, 1956); Lucio Villari, Il pensiero economico di Antonio Genovesi (Florence, 1959), with bibliography; F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 1–46; P. Zambelli, “Nota genovesiana,” 16 (1961), pp. 321–327. Particularly worthy of attention is the volume of Genovesian texts edited by G. Savarese (Milan, 1962). For a discussion well focused on some motives, see A. Santucci, “Il problema della conoscenza nella filosofia dell’abate Antonio Genovesi,” Il mulino, 2 (1953), pp. 680–710. Santucci observed (p. 689), among other things, in regard to ideas that “non v’ha dubbio che l’accentuazione oggettivistica e dommatica ch’è dato scorgere nella sua determinazione limita contraddittoriamente 1’esigenza empirica, se non addirittura fenomenista del Genovesi: ne fa fede la critica all’innatismo che è condotta sul presupposto che tutte le idee siano concretate alla mente.” Concerning the interesting polemic about the problem of evil with abbé Magli, see the Lettere filosofiche ad un amico provinciale per servire di rischiaramento agli elementi metafisici dell’Ab. A. Genovesi (Naples, 1759), in two parts and with an appendix titled “Dissertazione prima dell’Ab. Magli sulla guisa con cui il Signor D. Antonio Genovesi tenta di conciliar l’infinita Beneficenza e Benivoglienza e Amor del Creator ver le Creature sue ragionevoli e Libere con quel Mal Morale ch’è da costoro commesso e con quanto Mal Fisico è da esso loro patito,” with notes and confutations for each point by Genovesi. To the many polemics of religious nature Buonafede alluded in Ritratti poetici, vol. 1, pp. 266ff.: “i suoi malevoli gridarono, che da fonti guasti aveva attinto lo scetticismo, la licenza del pensare e l’irreligione.” On the other hand, Buonafede himself reproached Genovesi for his exaggerated love for ultramontane writers (“De gran figli di Borea avido amante / svolgo da mille leggi i lacci infesti, / e i

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diritti del cielo e delle genti.” / Dicesti; ed io: “fuggi le nubi e i venti: / torna al patrio tuo campo e ai studi agresti.” / Udí; ma troppo era trascorso innante). About Leonardo Gambino, a Sicilian follower of Genovesi, see Scinà, Prospetto della storia letteraria di Sicilia nel secolo xviii, pp. 158–159. Zambelli has dedicated also an essay to Magli: “Tra Vico, la Scolastica e l’Illuminismo: Pasquale Magli,” in Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, 1 (1971), pp. 20–52 (of Zambelli see also “Prime iniziative di un Cappellano Maggiore: una lettera inedita di Celestino Galiani,” ibid., 7 (1977), pp. 113–121). Of Magli the following works should be seen: Raccolta di vari trattati filosofici e teologici di Pasquale Magli, detto Polimate Epimeta nell’Agoreuterio degli Emuli (Naples, 1746–1747), 2 vols.; Dissertazioni filosofiche di Pasquale Magli in cui si oppongon piú Difficoltà a parecchi principalissimi pensieri in Metafisica de’ Filosofi Leibnitziani e spezialmente del Signor D. Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1759). Among the anti-Genovesi documents see Antonio Vetrani, Animadversiones theologico-criticae in universam Antonii Genuensis theologiam (Napoli, 1775). Furthermore consult G. Galasso, “Il pensiero religioso di A. Genovesi,” in Rivista Storica Italiana, 82 (1970), pp. 800–823; E. De Mas, Montesquieu, Genovesi e le edizioni italiane dello “Spirito delle leggi” (Florence, 1971); and again F. Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, pp. 523–644. 4. The School of Genovesi See G. De Ruggiero, Il pensiero politico meridionale nei secoli xiii e xix (Bari, 1922); B. Croce, Storia del Regno di Napoli (Bari, 1925); on Caracciolo, idem, Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, vol. 2; on the life of Palmieri, B. De Rinaldis, Sulla vita e sulle opere del marchese G. Palmieri (Lecce, 1850), and F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 1087–1114, with bibliography; on Grimaldi, M. Delfico, Elogio di Grimaldi (Naples, 1784), and in Opere (Teramo, 1904), vol. 3, pp. 223ff.; F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 509–525; on Galanti, G. M. Monti, Due grandi riformatori del Settecento: A. Genovesi e G. M. Galanti, and, fundamental also for the references to manuscript sources, F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 941–985; on Briganti, T. Persico, “Il pensiero di F. Briganti nei suoi aspetti politico-sociali,” in Atti dell'Accademia Pontaniana (1926) (in addition to Losacco, “Le dottrine…,” pp. 44ff.). About Galiani see. F. Nicolini, Il pensiero dell’Ab. Galiani. Antologia dei suoi scritti editi e inediti (Bari, 1909) (with a bibliographical essay that Croce discussed in Saggio sullo Hegel (Bari, 1913), pp. 325–334); F. Nicolini, “G. B. Vico e il Galiani,” in GSLI, 71 (1918), pp. 137ff.; idem, La signora d’Epinay e l’abate Galiani (Bari, 1927); F. Flora, Le piú belle pagine dell’Ab. Galiani (Milan, 1927); E. Troilo, “Pensieri filosofici dell’Ab. Galiani,” in Figure e dottrine, pp. 271–299. Nicolini published anew Galiani’s Della moneta (Bari, 1915); Del dialetto napoletano (Naples, 1923); and Dialoghi sul commercio dei grani (Naples, 1959), with additions to the bibliography of 1909. The edition of Della moneta, Edited by A. Merola (Milan, 1963) is also valuable for the appendix of documents and the preface of A. Caracciolo. F. Diaz is responsible for the works of Galiani published in the series Classici Ricciardi (NaplesMilan, 1975), for which he provides also the introduction. The Quaderno num. 211 of the Atti del Convegno linceo Ferdinando Galiani deals with Problemi attuali di scienza e cultura (Rome, 1975). About Filangieri, see the discourse of Villari prefaced to the edition of Florence, of 1865, of the Scienza della legislazione and the editions of the fourth book by G. Nisio (Rome, 1904) and of S. Carassali (Turin, 1922); U. Spirito, Il pensiero pedagogico di G. Filangieri (Florence, 1924); A. Bertolino, “Il problema della popolazione nel pen-

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siero di G. Filangieri e le sue relazioni con le correnti intellettuali del secolo xviii,” in Studi senesi, 40 (1926), and especially S. Cotta, G. Filangieri e il problema della legge (Turin, 1954). Useful also for the bibliography is F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 603–659. The truly fundamental studies on Pagano of G. Solari have been gathered together by L. Firpo: G. Solari, Studi su F. M. Pagano, Edited by L. Firpo (Turin, 1963), who has renewed the bibliography of the works of Pagano, pp. 337–453. For any other indication consult F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 783–833. As to Delfico, see the edition of the works in 4 vols. (Teramo, 1901–1904); for the bibliography see R. Aurini, M. Delfico (Teramo, 1958); but, in general always check F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 5, pp. 1161–1188, also for bibliographical indications. The work of Spedalieri has this complete title: De’ diritti dell’uomo libri VI. Ne’ quali si dimostra, che la piú sicura Custode de’ medesimi nella Società Civile è la religione cristiana; e che però l’unico Progetto utile alle presenti circostanze è di far rifiorire essa Religione. About Spedalieri see G. Cimbali, N. Spedalieri pubblicista del sec. xviii (Città di Castello, 1888), 2 vols. A clear idea of the mentality of Spedalieri is manifest in his Analisi of Freret (Assisi, 1791), 2 vols. In the studies of Cimbali news are given on the Sicilian movement; on Tommaso Natale see G. Majorana, Tommaso Natale e i suoi tempi (Catania, 1918); 0. Ziino, Tommaso Natale e il pensiero pubblicistico in Sicilia nel secolo xviii (Cortona, 1931); idem, “Vicende siciliane di scritti contro il Rousseau,” in Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto (1936). See, furthermore, R. De Mattei, “Le idee sociali di un siciliano del Settecento (F. P. di Blasi),” in Rivista d’Italia (15 September 1923). About Salfi, see Gentile, Dal Genovesi ecc., pp. 64–68; C. Nardi, La vita e le opere di F. S. Salfi (Rome, 1925); B. Barillari, Il pensiero politico di F. S. Salfi (1759– 1832) (Turin, 1960). Carducci praised Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola as the “Autore del primo libro che in Italia portasse il titolo di Filosofia della storia (Pavia 1787),” a propagator of German culture among us, interested in studies of aesthetics (Saggio sopra la favola). Characteristic of his position is the description of the morality with which Reason concludes a dispute between Society and Solitude: “L’una e 1’altra di voi temo / degli inganni nell’estremo. / L’uom fra entrambe parta i giorni: | lasci 1’una e all’altra torni; / e il saper che da voi colga / mischi insieme, e a un segno volga. / Ma con una sol di voi / sodo bene ei raro acquista: / tutto d’altri tu lo vuoi, / tu vuoi renderlo egoista.” 5. The Verris and Cesare Beccaria About Piro, his writings, and his polemics with Gherardo De Angelis and Alessandro Marini see Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 86–87; on Fuginelli, ibid., p. 83; on Baldinotti, see Troilo, Figure e dottrine, pp. 301– 314, and Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 3, pp. 198– 207. Of De recta mentis humanae institutione (Padua, 1787) see the Roman edition of 1855. Among the minor Lockians Giuseppe Capocasale (1754–1828) deserved a mention; his Cursus philosophicus sive universae philosophiae institutiones (Naples, 1792) was for a long time adopted in the schools and it is even mentioned by De Sanctis. For other writings of Capocasale, see Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, p. 86, who lists again among Lockians G. Tettoni, Dei principii del diritto morale e pubblico (Bassano, 1771). However, among the most diffused scholastic manuals in Southern Italy was T. Troisi, Istituzioni metafisiche (Naples, 1829), 3 vols. About Francesco Antonio Piro see the two volumes of P. Addante, F. A. Piro.

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Contributo alia Storia della Calabria e del Pensiero Filosofico del Settecento (Corigliano Calabro, 1964–1965). Of Addante see also Alessandro Marini e la polemica su Pierre Bayle nella filosofia del ’700. Contributo di ricerche storicofilosofiche sul ’700 (Bari, 1976). Of Baldinotti (1747–1821), who in 1817 published in Padua Tentaminum Metaphysicorum libri tres, we must remember that in the Appendix to the first Tentamen, De Kantii philosophandi ratione et placitis ut ad Metaphysicam Generalem referuntur, he tried to counter-opposed, he who was a student of Locke, a series of critiques to the Kantian apriorism (consult the voice “Baldinotti” of S. Gori Savellini in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1963), vol. 5, pp. 490–492, and the premise of M. Dal Pra to the unedited dissertation in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 29 (1974), pp. 171–190. About Capocasale see the voice of G. M. Pagano in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1975), vol. 18, pp. 585–586. A more careful attention to Capocasale is desirable not only because of the Cursus philosophicus that had great fortune in the schools, but also because of other works like Saggio di politica per uso de’ privati ricavato da’ puri fonti della sperienza e della ragione (Naples, 1790), destined to a various fortune and modifications. In regard to Lockians in Piedmont, see Calcaterra, Il nostro imminente risorgimento (Turin, 1935). Regarding the influence of Condillac see Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 89ff. Carlo Castone della Torre di Rezzonico (1742–1796) versified Condillac in the poem L’origine delle idee (1778) and in Ragionamento sulla filosofia del secolo xviii (1778), addressed to Catherine II. He observed that the century is certainly philo-sophical (philo-sofia) but not sophical (sophia). The wisdom that could give back happiness to humankind can be achieved only with a perpetual peace. We must recall Rezzonico’s activism in the Freemasonry. Also the Dominican Ottavio Chiarizia (1729–1824) in Dieta filosofica (Naples, 1808) will invoke this perpetual peace though his work was anonymously published. For this same motive P. Borreli will attack Hegel. Giuseppe Gorini Corio (1685–1761), almost the precursor of the writers of Il Caffè (the journal founded by Pietro Verri in 1764) has been considered the critic of religious superstitions in Le leggi di Dio e del mondo (1724), in Politica, diritto e religione ecc. (1742), and an associationist who might induce to think of Hartley in L’uomo. Trattato fisico e morale (Lucca 1756), of which exists a French translation (Lausanne, 1761). Critical of Gorini Corio was Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799), famous in mathematics as well as in philosophy; see L. Anzoletti, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan, 1900). About Verri, L. Negri, “Saggio bibliografico su P. Verri,” in Archivio storico lombardo (1926), pp. 136–151, 337–351, 499–521; see also, in addition to the writings of I. Bianchi, Custodi, Pecchio and Salvagnoli, E. Bouvy, Le comte P. Verri, ses idées et son temps (Paris, 1889); A. Ottolini, P. Verri e i suoi tempi (Palermo, 1921); C. A. Vianello, La giovinezza di Parini, Verri e Beccaria (Milan, 1933); N. Valeri, P. Verri (Milan, 1937) (but see also L. Negri, “P. Verri e le sue ‘Idées sur la Société,’” in Nuova Rivista Storica, 13 (1929); S. Caramella, I problemi del gusto e dell’arte nella mente di P. Verri (Naples, 1926). Of fundamental importance is the correspondence between Pietro ( 1728–1797) and Alessandro (1741–1816) Verri, Carteggio di P. e A. Verri (Milan, 1910–1942), 12 vols. covering the period until 1782. Papini re-published Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Lanciano, 1910). A good selection of Verri’s writings was published in 1964 in Milan by R. De Felice with the title Del piacere e del dolore e altri scritti di filosofia ed economia. About Verri and more in

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general about Northern Italy see F. Venturi, Settecento riformatore, pp. 644–747 (“La Milano del Caffè”). Of Venturi is the voice Beccaria in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1965), vol. 7, pp. 458–469. See also Il Caffè, Edited by S. Romagnoli in Collana di periodici italiani e stranieri of Feltrinelli Publisher (Milan, 1960). On the thought of Beccaria consult G. Zarone, Etica e politica nell’utilitarismo di Cesare Beccaria (Naples, 1971). About Beccaria, besides the writings and the judgments of Lomonaco, Cattaneo, Villari, Cantú in Beccaria e il diritto penale (Florence, 1862), see Scritti e lettere inediti, collected and illustrated by E. Landry (Milan, 1910). Also see C. A. Vianello, La vita e l’opera di Cesare Beccaria (Milan, 1938); the edition of all the works Opere is due to S. Romagnoli (Florence, 1958); F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 3, pp. 1–26; R. Mondolfo, Cesare Beccaria (Milan, 1960). L. Firpo produced a facsimile of the original edition of Dei delitti e delle pene (Turin, 1964); “Omaggio a Beccaria,” in Rivista storica italiana, 76 (1964), pp. 670ff.; “Secondo centenario della pubblicazione Dei delitti e delle pene di C. Beccaria,” in Atti delle celebrazioni indette ... dal1'Accademia nazionale dei Lincei (Rome, 1965). About Cesarotti see the selection of Ortolani (Florence, 1945–1946), 2 vols. 6. Alfieri, Foscolo, Monti, and Leopardi About Alfieri see U. Calosso, L’anarchia di V. Alfieri (Bari, 1924 and 1949); P. Gobetti, “La filosofia politica di V. Alfieri,” in Risorgimento senza eroi: Radicati, Giannone (Turin, 1926); G. Gentile, L’eredità di V. Alfieri (Venice, 1926); L. Russo, Ritratti e disegni storici, 3rd ed. (Firenze, 1963). About Parini, G. Petronio, Parini e l’illuminismo lombardo (Milan, 1960). About Foscolo, E. Donadoni, U. Foscolo pensatore, critico, poeta (Palermo, 1910), with a 3rd edition in 1964, with a critical bibliographical apparatus of R. Scrivano. About Leopardi, M. Losacco, Indagini leopardiane (Lanciano, 1937); G. Gentile, Poesia e filosofia in G. Leopardi (Florence, 1939); G. De Robertis, Saggio sul Leopardi (Florence, 1944); C. Luporini, Filosofi vecchi e nuovi (Florence, 1947), and the miscellaneous volume Leopardi e il Settecento (Florence, 1964). On the thought of A1fieri see A. Signorini, Individualità e libertà in Vittorio Alfieri (Milan, 1972). Of Leopardi see the edition Tutte le opere, Edited with introduction of W. Binni (Florence, 1969), 2 vols., with a bibliography in collaboration with E. Ghidetti. Consult S. Timpanaro, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano (Pisa, 1965), and the new edition of La filologia di G. Leopardi (Bari, 1978). A characteristic document of the diffusion of a theme previously mentioned is the early work Dissertazione sopra l’anima delle bestie, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 567–572. About Bocalosi see the voice of C. Francovich in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1968), vol. 10, pp. 816–819 (“Dell’educazione da darsi al popolo italiano” was included in the anthology Giacobini italiani, Edited by Cantimori and R. De Felice (Bari, 1964), vol. 2, pp. 5–205, 531–535. About Carli see F. Struffi, “Il pensiero politico di Gian Rinaldo Carli,” in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 21 (1966), pp. 40–69. About Frisi see S. Tomani, I manoscritti filosofici di Paolo Frisi (Florence, 1968), with an appendix of texts; concerning the rapport with Boscovich consult G. Costa, “I1 rapporto Frisi-Boscovich alla luce di lettere inedite di Frisi, Boscovich, Mozzi, Lalande e Pietro Verri,” in Rivista Storica Italiana, 79 (1967), pp. 819–876. Of an anecdotic interest are the many poetical compositions on arguments of philosophy and science, for which see E. Bertana, In Arcadia (Naples, 1900). Natali in Settecento, vol. 1, pp. 257–259 listed them according to their subject matter. We will mention only J. A. Sanvitale, Poema parabolico ecc. (Venice, 1746); 0. Arrighi Landini, Il tempio della filosofia (Venice, 1755) on

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Newton; G. M. Ortes, Saggio di filosofia degli antichi (Venice, 1757); G. B. Sottavia, La loica (Mantua, 1758); G. Colpani, La filosofia (Lucca, 1774); G. B. Corniani, La vera filosofia (Brescia, 1782); G. Tartarotti, La tesi del vacuo difesa da’ scotisti (Venice, 1765); G. R. Carli, “L’andropologia” (against Rousseau), in Opere, pp. 16ff.; against Rousseau, see also L’uomo libero, completed in 1776 and published in 1778. About Carli see F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 3, pp. 417–437; concerning the polemics about Rousseau see S. Rota Ghibaudi, La fortuna di Rousseau in Italia, 1750–1815 (Turin, 1961). Part of the tradition are the many small volumes of philosophical sonnets of R. Calbi (Faenza, 1715) and (Ravenna, 1723). We will recognize here the names and works of some minor writers in the age of enlightenment. They were to some extent renowned within the history of Italian illuminism. Girolamo Bocalosi of Florence wrote Sulla riflessione (Le Havre, 1788) and on him G. Calò, Dall’umanesimo (Firenze 1940); F. V. Barkovich, Saggio sulla natura e l’origine delle passioni; Michele de Tommaso, Istituzioni di metafisica (Genova 1804); G. Prandi, Lettera critica sul senso morale (1808); I. Valdastri, Lezioni sull’origine delle idee (Milan, 1807); Corniani, Piaceri dello spirito (Bassano, 1790); L. Gemelli, Saggi (Naples, 1801) and Elementi (Naples, 1793); the activity of G. Piazzi; G. Donzelli, Logica o arte del pensare (Palermo, 1818); the writings of logic, metaphysics, psychology, and theology (1777–1791) of the Pisan professor Cristoforo Sarti. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 105ff. already spoke of Marcantonio Vogli and Ubaldo Cassina. About the pedagogues like De Felice, Carli, and that curious spirit that was Gorani (see F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 3, pp. 479–494), Gozzi, Torri, De Cosmi, consult Calò, Dall’umanesimo, vol. 1, pp. 217ff.: “L’illuminismo pedagogico italiano.” Someway connected with the sources of enlightenment were Paolo Frisi of Monza, collaborator with the writers of Il Caffè, professor of moral philosophy in Pisa, eulogizer of Galileo (on Frisi see Elogio of Fabroni of 1786; the Memorie of P. Verri, and F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 3, pp. 287–304); Luigi Malaspina; Danieli, Saggio di ricerche critico-filosofiche (Vicenza, 1785); Melli, L’abuso della filosofia (1780); A. De Sanctis; J. Belgrado, Della rapidità delle idee (Modena, 1770); A. Marioni, Ars vere philosophandi (Venice, 1757), 2nd edition. On the other hand, G. M. Amati could arrive to an empirical foundation of morality from Aristotelian presuppositions and grounds: Ethica ex tempore concinnata in publica Universitate Neapolitana (Neapoli, 1721). Of all these thinkers Father Belgrado, at least for his rapport with Locke, should deserve special attention and comments. Of him see Delle sensazioni del calore e del freddo (Parma, 1764); Dell’esistenza di Dio da teoremi geometrici dimostrata (Udine, 1777); on Belgrado see the voice of V. Cappelletti in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1965), vol. 7, pp. 574–578. For some particular aspects, G. Muresu, Le occasioni di un libertino (G. B. Casti) (Messina-Florence, 1963) must be seen.

Twenty-Seven TRADITIONAL CURRENTS OF THOUGHT (pp. 749–762) 1. O. Corsini and I. Facciolati. The Historians of Philosophy About Corsini see, besides some notices in Maugain, R. Bobba, Saggio intorno ad alcuni filosofi italiani meno noti prima e dopo la pretesa riforma cartesiana (Benevento, 1868), pp. 209–263. About Capasso, ibid., pp. 176–188; Tulelli, “Intorno

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alla vita e alla storia della filosofia di G. B. Capasso,” Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana, num. 6. About Facciolati (1682–1769), Bobba, Saggio, pp. 287–339; of Facciolati see especially, besides the Logica, Orationes XX et alia (Patavii, 1752). About Buonafede, whose essay on homicide should be remembered, see Natali, Il Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 1192–1193, and the voice, well informed, of G. B. Salinari in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1972), vol. 15, pp. 100–104. About Capasso historian of philosophy see P. Zambelli, Formazione filosofica di Genovesi, pp. 95–104, and the voice of G. Ricuperati in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1975), vol. 18, pp. 396– 397. 2. Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil About the philosopher Gerdil see G. Allievo, G. S. Gerdil educatore e filosofo (Turin, 1896); A. Vesco, Revisione dell’ontologismo di G. S. Gerdil (Turin, 1946); A. Lantrua, G. S. Gerdil filosofo e pedagogista, nel pensiero italiano del secolo xviii (Padua, 1952), with bibliography; A. Gnemmi, L’apologia razionale religiosa, fondamento parmenideo e affermazione di Dio nel contributo di G. S. Gerdil (Padua, 1971). An excellent bibliography exists in Boffito, Bibliografia di scrittori barnabiti, vol. 2, pp. 169–214; vol. 4, pp. 403–404. The complete works of Gerdil were published in 20 vols. (Rome, 1806–1821). About P. Fortunato of Brescia, see Bobba, Saggio, pp. 189– 208. 3. Ermenegildo Pini About Pini see Bova, Saggio intorno alla Protologia di E. Pini (Turin, 1870); B. Nardi, “La Protologia di E. Pini,” pt. 1: “Il problema del Pini e la sua posizione storica,” La cultura filosofica, 10 (1916), pp. 466–493. 4. Vincenzo Miceli About Miceli see S. Mancino, Elementi di filosofia (Florence, 1845), vol. 2, pp. 228– 245; but especially the writings of Di Giovanni who was his praiseworthy editor: Il Miceli, ovvero dello ente uno e reale (Palermo, 1864); Il Miceli, ovvero l’apologia del sistema (Palermo, 1864); Storia della filosofia in Sicilia, vol. 1, pp. 419ff. For the history of those who remained outside of the movement of the enlightenment see again the Philosophia mentis of Tricoronato (1762), continuator in the 18th century of the Metafisica of Pasqualigo, Matteo Terralavoro, Ignazio Tellino (Poli, Supplementi, par. 376). Poli again (pars. 382–383) mentioned that among those mostly tied to the tradition were Joannis Jacobus Letus, Nihil sub sole novum; Recens systema (Turin, 1718), Giustino Antonio Ferrari, Philosophorum peripateteticorum adversus veteres et recentiores praesertim Philosophos (Venice, 1746); to which we can add Premoli, De existentia Dei (1754) and Aristotelis redivivus in Entis et Naturae systemate Apologia vindicata contra universalem veterum Philosophorum hypothesin a recentioribus Atomistis renovatam (Catania, 1741); and also the many works of the Florentine Jesuit Andrea Spagni (1716–1788). At the beginning of the 19th century, we saw the psychology (Parma, 1818) and the ethics (Reggio, 1818) of the Jesuit Andrea Draghetti, with an anti-Condillac position, and Saggio (Milan, 1812) of Michele Araldi, who was praised by Rosmini. A curious episode of a bizarre provincial culture are the 8 vols. of Theo-anthro-phisia (Palermo, 1815–1821) of Domenico Romano-Miceli (1753–1823), on whom see Di Giovanni, Storia, vol. 2, pp. 65ff. About him see the very interesting essay of A. Postigliola, “Dom Deschamps et I’ltalie,” in the miscellany published by J. D’Hondt, Dom Deschamps et sa metaphysique (Paris, 1974), pp. 105–119, where the rapport between the Miceli of Mons. Di Giovanni and the Deschamps of Beaussire is described. In the De existentia Dei (Palermo, 1771) Isidoro Bianchi through Spinoza

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probably attacked also the “micelismo.” For Miceli see the voice in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani by F. Venturi (1968), vol. 10, p. 134. In 1770, he published at Monreale with the name of one of his disciples, Giuseppe Sparacio, a De immortalitate animorum disputatio, which he will later republished, changing preface and frontispiece, with the name of Isidorus Plancus. In 177 he wrote in Palermo an apologetical dissertation: “Delle scienze e belle arti, contro il primo discorso di Rousseau.” A special place could be assigned to the abbè G. B. Roberti, a polemicist on luxury, who wrote a worthy treatise on the love for the fatherland, Dell’amore verso la patria (Bassano, 1787). His complete works were published many times, beginning from the first edition of 1789 in 12 vols., at Bologna, Florence, and Venice on the initiative of Antonelli from 1830 onward, with the insertion of him by G. B. Giovio (Venice, 1830), vol. 1, pp. 13–182. About him, besides the essay of Tommaseo, Storia civile nella letteratura (Turin, 1872), pp. 317–364, see L. Rossi, Della vita e degli scritti di G. B, Roberti (Padua, 1906). 5. Thinkers of Piedmont About all these thinkers of Piedmont in the 18th century, see C. Calcaterra, Il nostro imminente risorgimento (Turin, 1935), pp. 27–119 and passim. About Galeani Napione see the biography of P. A. Paravia in De Tipaldo, Biografia degli italiani illustri, vol. 1, p. 87. Napione’s major work is Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana. Of Denina see especially De studio Theologiae et norma fidei (Turin, 1758), 2 vols., which is his thesis for the degree in theology, the Epistola in free verses addressed to Zanotti (Florence, 1763), in which he attacked Rousseau. Of 1776 is the Bibliopea (the art of making books); between 1769 and 1770 the 3 vols. of Delle rivoluzioni d’ltalia, which made him famous. Remarkable also are his writing on German culture and history, motivated by his journey into Prussia. About Denina, see F. Venturi, Illuministi italiani, vol. 3, pp. 699–713. For his polemic in Piedmont against Rousseau consult the Réflexions of F. De la Tour (Turin, 1778). It is worthy to mention here though briefly Landi, Ragione e religione (Turin, 1789), Count B. of San Raffaele, Della falsa filosofia (Turin, 1777). Of Ansaldi, whom we mentioned elsewhere for his polemic with Zanotti, see Saggio intorno alle immaginazioni ed alle rappresentazioni della felicità umana (Turin, 1775), and what Calcaterra said in Il nostro imminente risorgimento, p. 103, n. 71. On Casto Innocente Ansaldi see the voice of M. Rosa in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1961), vol. 3, pp. 362–365. N. Badaloni dedicated to Ansaldi much attention in “La Cultura” in Storia d’Italia Einaudi, vol. 3, pp. 797–807, 826–827. Giuseppe Pavesio compiled a series of fortunate manuals: Elementa logices ad Subalpinos per analysim sensationum et idearum delineata (Turin, 1793); Elementa metaphysicae (1724); Elementa philosophiae moralis (1795). On him see the bibliographical indication of Calcaterra, ibid., p. 103, n. 74; and idem, I filopatridi (Turin, 1941), pp. 379ff. Author of an easy and widely diffused Logica elementare (Vercelli, 1787) was Giuseppe Rostagni (see Calcaterra, ibid., p. 104, n. 81). Of Falletti see the Meditazione filosofica su l’Ateismo e Pirronismo antico e moderno (Rome, 1776); Discorso filosofico su l’istoria naturale dell’anima umana (Rome, 1777); Saggio dell’Ab. di Condillac sopra l’origine delle umane cognitioni, trad. dal francese con l’aggiunta di varie note e con le osservazioni critiche di T. V. Palletti (Rome, 1784 ). For the bibliography on Falletti, see Calcaterra, pp. 102–103, n. 68. About Ottavio Falletti and his activity consult besides the Aperçus philosophiques

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(Turin, 1816–1817), S. Caramella, La formazione della filosofia giobertiana (Geneva, 1927), pp. 74–75. About Tommaso Valperga of Caluso, see besides Calcaterra, who speaks extensively about him, Boucheron, De Thoma Valperga Calusio (Taurini, 1833). Of him, see also the Curiosi problemi filosofici (Rome, 1783). Greater attention should be paid to a certain type of literature that intended to contrast the new illuministic philosophy that “rivestendo in gonna di giovinette falsità vecchie d’oltre a mill’anni s’accinge a saettare e combattere le immobili verità” (which dressing in skirts of young girls falsities as old as thousand years dare to thunder and fight truths that never changed). They are the words of Count Benvenuto Robbio di San Raffaele in the introduction to volume one of Della falsa filosofia alla Sacra Real Maestà di Vittorio Amedeo Re di Sardegna (Turin, 1777). In this book were equally derided “quanti come bachi soggiacquero stupidamente docili al giogo voluto del1’Aristotelica tirannia, studiando sempre gli scritti d’un uomo, né mai la Natura; sempre le opinioni, né mai la verità,” and those who, falling into the opposite excess, believe as philosophy those superficial discourses done “tra i signorili banchetti e i garruli ginecei” (among lavish banquets and garrulous lady rooms). There was no lack of the usual invective against “lessici di poca mole e di minor pregio: compendi d’ogni scienza che pesan due scrupoli: atlanti da porre in scarsella” (the lexicons in small size and of less value; synopses of every science that are worthy almost nothing; atlases in miniature that fit the pocket). Even the polemic against the Chinese, Persian, American fashions was present: “si loda 1’Asia, si scusa 1’Africa, si esalta 1’America, per oltraggiare, riprendere e canzonar solennemente l’Europa” (They praise Asia, excuse Africa, exalt America, but to offend, laugh at, and solemnly deride Europe). And what is amazing is the effort of connecting with empiricism (baconism underlined by Calcaterra), of correlating the authority of P. Segneri to that of Montesquieu (often cited), and even of Hume, against the empiety and the spirit of systematism of Spinoza or Helvetius: “Mentre io sto scrivendo, mi giunge un nuovo libro. Leggo sul frontespizio il nome d’Elvezio. ... Oimé! In quale abisso si piomba per alterigia di spirito, per ribellion di cuore, per ostinatezza di sistema! ... Troppo avrebbesi a fare, se qui impugnar si volessero stesamente gli errori di questo adiroso codicillo, il qual di vero altro non sembrami, che una matassa informe d’oscenità, d’ingiurie, e di sbagli. Dopo aver pensato in vita come Spinosa, lascia 1’Elvezio al par di Spinosa una compiuta apostasia dopo la morte.”

Twenty-Eight VICO’S INHERITANCE AND ETHICAL INQUIRIES (pp. 763–782) 1. Damiano Romano. Emmanuele Duni. Polemic with Finetti For all this part keep in mind especially B. Labanca, G. B. Vico e i suoi critici cattolici (Naples, 1898); Gentile, Studi vichiani (Florence, 1927); Croce-Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, vol. 2; Paolo Rossi, Lineamenti di storia della critica vichiana. As to Finetti see the Difesa dell’autorità della Sacra Scrittura contro G. B. Vico. Dissertazione del 1768 con intr. di B. Croce (Bari, 1936) (and see also my note on “Sulla fortuna di Hobbes nel Settecento italiano,” in Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 17 (1962), pp. 521ff.). Born in Gradisca in 1705, Finetti, whose layman name was Germano

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Federigo, and Padre Bonifazio in the Domenican Order, published his work under the name of his brother Gian Francesco. The works of Duni together with the texts of the polemic with Finetti were published by Achille Gennarelli, in Rome in 1845, in 5 vols. and with an introductive essay. About Duni besides the pages dedicated to him in the Bibliografia Vichiana, see M. Ascoli, Saggi vichiani, of which the first is “La filosofia giuridica di Em. Duni” (Rome, 1928). In regard to the work of Emanuele’s brother, Saverio Duni, Della giurisprudenza universale di tutte le nazioni (Naples, 1793), 2 vols., see my article above at p. 523. On the general question of ‘Vichianism’ see G. Oldrini, “La questione del vichismo meridionale,” in Ricerche sulla cultura dell’Italia moderna, pp. 199–213 (and the bibliographic indications given); F. Brancato, Vico nel Risorgimento (Palermo, 1969). 2–3. Mario Pagano. Jacopo Stellini Pertaining to Stellini is the introduction of A. Rocco to the edition of Scritti filosofici (Milan, 1942), with a bibliography, pp. 42–47. Of De ortu et progressu morum atque opinionum ad mores pertinentium specimen we used the version of Lodovico Valeriani. Worthy is the premiss of Valeriani to Simone Stratico (Siena, 1829), 4th edition reviewed, pp. v–xlvi. Of great interest is the essay on Stellini and Vico published by Giovanni Scola in “Giornale Enciclopedico” of May 1779, in the collection of Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Edited by Marino Berengo (Milan, 1962), pp. 424–429. The personality of Scola, on whom P. Zambelli promised an essay in Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 20 (1965), p. 441, is one of the most celebrated figures that has been illustrated and made known by the work of Berengo (see the “Lettere ai seguaci del sistema sintetico,” in Giornali veneziani del Settecento, pp. 429–478). About Stellini see P. Zambelli, “Un episodio della fortuna settecentesca di Vico: Giacomo Stellini,” in Omaggio a Vico, pp. 363–415. 4. The Morality of Pietro Tamburini Of Tamburini’s works, besides the ones mentioned in the text, see the Lezioni di filosofia morale (Pavia, 1803–1821), 7 vols.; Elementa juris naturae (Milan, 1815); and Cenni sulla perfettibilità dell’umana famiglia (Milan, 1823). About Tamburini, see E. Rota, Il giansenismo in Lombardia sulla fine del secolo xviii (Brescia, 1927); R. Mazzetti, P. Tamburini, la mente del giansenismo italiano (Messina, 1948). About Giuseppe Taverna (1764–1850), Lockian at first and then Kantian for the influence of Testa, see what of him said G. Chiari in G. Tamburini pedagogista, letterato e filosofo piacentino del secolo xix (Turin, 1910). 5. Cataldo Jannelli and Vincenzo Cuoco About C. Jannelli, Gentile wrote in Dal Genovesi al Galluppi, pp. 66–70 and then in Storia, vol. 1, pp. 92–98; Croce-Nicolini in Bibliografia vichiana, vol. 1, pp. 465–470; P. Rossi in Clavis universalis, pp. 11–13. See also F. Zerella, “Il metodo storico di C. Jannelli,” in Logos, 19 (1936); B. Barillari, La metodica storica secondo C. Jannelli (Naples, 1938). Fausto Nicolini and Nicola Cortese have edited and published again the works of Cuoco: the Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, seguito dal Rapporto al Cittadino Carnot, was edited by F. Nicolini (Bari, 1929); the Platone in Italia, also edited by F. Nicolini (Bari, 1916–1924), in 2 vols.; the collection of Scritti vari, was edited by N. Cortese and F. Nicolini (Bari, 1924), 2 vols. About Cuoco, besides De Ruggiero, Il pensiero politico meridionale, pp. 156–205, see the studies of Battaglia (Florence, 1925), Cortese (Florence, 1933), M. Romano (Florence,

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1933–1934), without missing the well-known work of Gentile (Venice, 1929). As to the proposed edition of the works of Vico by Cuoco, see in Scritti vari, vol. 1, pp. 314–315. See, finally, R. La Porta, La libertà nel pensiero di V. Cuoco (Florence, 1957). Nicolini edition of Saggio storico has been reproduced with an introduction of P. Villani (Bari, 1976). Concerning the thought of Cuoco the research of F. Tessitore is the most important: Lo storicismo giuridico-politico di Vincenzo Cuoco (Turin, 1962); Lo storicismo di Vincenzo Cuoco (Naples, 1964); Vincenzo Cuoco fra illuminismo e storicismo (Naples, 1971) that is from vol. 81 of Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze morali e politiche dclla Società Nazionale di Napoli); Il realismo politico di Vincenzo Cuoco (Naples, 1974), where the appendix offers a bio-bibliographical profile, pp. 81–102. Consult also M. A. Visceglia, “Genesi e fortuna di una interpretazione storiografica: la rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 come rivoluzione passiva,” in Annali della Facoltà di Magistero dell’Università di Lecce (1972); C. Campanelli, Il realismo politico di V. Cuoco (Naples, 1974); P. De Tommaso, “Il ‘Platone in Italia’ del Cuoco,” in Belfagor, 29 (1974), pp. 389–410. Some annotations of Cuoco to an exemplar of the Philosophie de Kant of Villars preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale of Naples have been published by F. Zambelloni, Le origini del Kantismo in Italia (Milan), pp. 373–380. About Jannelli and others at the time of the ideology see S. Moravia, “Vichismo e ideologia nella cultura italiana del primo Ottocento,” in Omaggio a Vico, pp. 417–482. About Lomonaco, see the miscellany Per F. Lomonaco (Naples, 1975).

Twenty-Nine THE IDEOLOGISTS (pp. 783–808) 1. Francesco Soave About Soave see Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 124–159. The Le Ricerche of 1772 and the Riflessioni of 1774, appeared together with the editions of the Istituzioni in a volume of Opuscoli metafisici at least in the edition of Pisa, in 1814. A series of all Soave’s works was printed in Milan in 19 volumes between 1815 and 1817. For Soave the expositor and critic of Kant see the already cited F. Zambelloni, Le origini del kantismo in Italia (Milan, 1971). The first edition appeared in 1803: La filosofia / di Kant / esposta ed esaminata / da Franccsco Soave / C.R.S. // Modena / Per gli Eredi di Bartolomeo Soliani. / 1803; and consult also C. Rossi Ichino, “F. Soave e le prime scuole elementari” in the volume of various authors Problemi scolastici ed educativi nella Lombardia del primo Ottocento (Milan, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 93–185. 2. Melchiorre Gioia About Gioia see G. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 2, pp. 160–217. His minor works were collected and published in Lugano by the printers Giuseppe Ruggia & Co., in 17 vols. between 1832 and 1839. In 1850, always in Lugano, the Printing Co. of Italian Switzerland that succeeded to that of Ruggia printed in two voluminous tomes a selection of the Opere minori: Dettati politici, filosofici, statistici tratti dalle opere minori di M. Gioia (Lugano, 1850). The literature on Gioia is of a poor quality and quite abundant: G. Semprini, M. Gioia e la sua dottrina politica (Genoa, 1934); B. Donati, Rosmini e Gioia (Florence,

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1949). See also Romagnosi, “Elogio storico di M. Gioia,” in Biblioteca Italiana, 52 (1828), pp. 392ff., and Giuseppe Sacchi, “Cenni sulla vita e sulle opere di Melchiorre Gioia col ritratto del medesimo,” in Annali Universali di Statistica, 29 gennaio 1829, but published also apart. See N. Badaloni, “La cultura,” in Storia d’ltalia, pp. 908– 915; A. Macchioro, “L’economia politica di M. Gioia,” in Studi di storia del pensiero economico e altri saggi (Milan, 1970). 3–4. Gian Domenico Romagnosi For the biography of Romagnosi see C. Cantú, Notizia di G. D. Romagnosi. Seconda ed. con l’aggiunta di alcuni opuscoli intorno alla vita e alle opere del medesimo. Tip. Guasti (Prato, 1840). The opuscules are: Biografia di Giuseppe Sacchi, pp. 127–175; Necrologia di Defendente Sacchi, pp. 177–188; Alcune notizie intorno alla vita e alle opere, pp. 189–238. See also G. Ferrari, La mente di G. D. Romagnosi, Edited by 0. Campa (Milan, 1913). Almost useless is L. G. Cusani Confalonieri, Notizie storiche e biografiche. Bibliografia e documenti (Carate Brianza, 1928). Of the complete works of Romagnosi two editions exist, and both are variously incomplete: the Florentine edition in 19 vols. (24 tomes) is of 1832–1840; the one edited by Alessandro de Giorgii in 8 volumes was printed in Milan between 1841–1848, which was in reality completed in 1852. The Accademia d’Italia also published 3 volumes of selected works in 1936–1937: (1) Vedute fondamentali sull’arte logica, Edited by L. Caboara; (2–3) Della costituzione di una monarchia nazionale rappresentativa, Edited by G. Astuti. About Romagnosi, besides the many pages dedicated to him by Cattaneo, see in more recent literature: G. A. Belloni, Romagnosi (Milan, 1931); A. Norsa, Il pensiero filosofico di G. D. Romagnosi (Milan, 1930); Alessandro Levi, Romagnosi (Rome, 1935). A useful critical review is that of L. Ricci Garotti, “G. D. Romagnosi nella critica recente,” in Società, 15 (1959), pp. 109–140. Finally, see the selection of texts and authors: Opere di G. D. Romagnosi, C. Cattaneo, G. Ferrari, Edited by E. Sestan (Milan-Naples, 1957). S. Moravia has published a selection of Scritti filosofici of Romagnosi in two vols. (Milan, 1974) with an ample introduction and a complete bibliography. For a clarification of certain positions held by the ideologists in Italy, see again Moravia, Il tramonto dell’Illuminismo. Filosofia e politica nella società francese (1770–1810) (Bari, 1968); Il pensiero degli ideologues. Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780-1815) (Florence, 1974). Though Moravia restricts himself to the situation in France, nevertheless his inquiries help for the understanding of the situation of Italy. 5. Minor Ideologists About minor ideologists, besides the Supplimenti of Poli, see Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, vol. 3, pp. 70ff. About Bonfadini (1771–1835) and on his Kantism see E. Troilo, “Jacopo Bonfadini,” in Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana, 5 (1936), pp. 173–190. Bonfadini’s “Discorso analitico sulla critica della ragion pura di Kant” was pronounced on 15 June 1830 at the Academy of Padua and it demonstrates, contrary to what Troilo wrote in “Jacopo Bonfadini,” and rightly with Zambelloni’s Le origini del Kantismo in Italia, a profound incomprehension of Kantism. See also the voice of Virgilio Cappelletti in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1970), vol. 12, pp. 1–3. For Compagnoni as well as for other authors whom we mentioned in these chapters, see the two volumes of collected works by Delio Cantimori and R. De Felice, Giacobini italiani (Bari, 1956–1964), and the notes to the texts. Of Paolo Costa we used the edition of Opere complete in 4 vols. printed in Flor-

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ence in 1839, and preceded by the eulogy of Fruttuoso Becchi. For the writings on aesthetics consider also the three books Della Callofilia of G. Venanzio (Padua, 1830), dedicated to Cicognara. As usual, an entire chapter could have been dedicated to the polemic against “materialism” of which the ideologists are usually accused. It was not an amusingly edifying kind of literature since it had a specific political intent, but it was quite diffused within the Italian cultural ambience. Thus, between 1813 and 1814, two memories against Cabanis appeared in Padua: Vero rapporto del fisico e del morale dell’uomo. Opera analitica dell’Ab. N. N. M. C. in risposta all’opera del Sig. Cabanis, in which it is clearly indicated that the motive of the polemic is practical. Indeed, once the spirituality and substantiality of the soul is denied, then the system of prizes and punishments connected with the immortality of the soul also falls into a crisis. With that the crisis extended itself to the constituted orders of society. The anonymous abbè (L’Ab. N. N.), with an ancient and always modern method, opposed to the subverters of today not the ancient authorities but the subverters of yesterday, the like of Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Bolingbroke, who appear as columns of moderation in comparison with the excesses of recent materialists. Some decades thereafter this work appeared anonymously in different editions—I know two of them: one of Benevento and one of Ferrara that presents itself as 3rd edition, though both carry the date of 1838—Saggio di analisi e confutazione degli elementi di ideologia del conte Destutt de Tracy. Rispetto ai principii e conseguenze morali riprovate dal buon senso, dalla ragione e dall’autorità specialmente di Locke e di Condillac encomiati dallo stesso Conte di Tracy, e riconosciuti per suoi maestri e fondatori della Ideologia; con una aggiunta di Riflessioni sul progresso del secolo. Diretto a vantaggio della italiana gioventú. However, it is obvious that the enumeration could continue. On the Jacobins, besides Cantimori’s works, see also R. De Felice, I giornali giacobini italiani (Milan, 1962).

Thirty SOUTHERN ITALIAN THOUGHT AND PASQUALE GALLUPPI (pp. 811–844) 1. The Crisis of Ideology For this chapter, we recommend again the bibliographical information found in the work of Gentile, Dal Genovesi al Galluppi, and in the volumes many times mentioned of the work of Capone-Braga. As to Dragonetti see F. Zerella, “Il pensiero neoguelfo di Luigi Dragonetti,” Nuova Rivista Storica, 30 (1946), pp. 91–110. The discussion on the origins of Kantism in Italy has been totally insufficient and Credaro in Alfonso Testa e i primordi del kantismo in Italia (Catania, 1913) is the first to admit it. Of the same is convinced Karl Werner, in both the short essay Kant in Italien (Wien, 1881), and in the fourth volume of his work Die italienische Philosophie des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Wien 1886), 4 vols. It would also be convenient to speak of the translation Critica della ragion pura based on the German original by V. Mantovani, ex-professor of practical medicine in the Royal University of Pavia and Head Military Surgeon. The Critica appeared in eight small volumes in Pavia in the series “Classici Metafisici” under the editorship of Giuseppe Germani, Luigi Rolla, and Defendente Sacchi. In this series, Kant had been preceded by Saggi di estetica of M. Pagano, and by Saggi sull’intelletto umano di Hume (in two tomes). The task as-

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sumed by Mantovani was certainly not easy and he discussed it with grace, mentioning the works of contemporaries and underlining the necessity of introducing the knowledge of Kant through the reading of Locke, Hume, Wolff, and Leibniz. For his translation, Mantovani used the edition of 1794, which is rather incorrect, and helped himself with the translation of Born. From Latin he translated the preface to the first edition and inserted a notice on the life and works of Kant, “Della vita e delle opere di Kant” in vol. 1, pp. 15–88, which is not without interest especially because of the narration of his travel to Königsberg, where he often heard people saying in regard to Kant that “niuno essere stato mai piú asciutto sí dell’anima che del corpo.” In the note at p. 83, there is also a mention of the polemics against Kant who “fu tacciato qual idealista non solo, ma qual capo d’illuminati da chi non fu mai degno di tal nome in verun senso.” The notes to the translation were derived from Villers, Degerando and, for the historical part, from Buhle. The notice on the life and works of Kant inserted at the beginning of the first volume was obtained from what Reichart had written of Kant in Urania, a scientific almanac for the year 1812 (“da quanto ne scrisse da pochi anni (1812) Reichart in una specie d’Almanacco scientifico, abbastanza noto sotto il nome di Urania”). At the end of the last tome, the editors added in the translation of Abbè Antonio Strambio, the work of Charles Ancillon, Saggio sopra il primo problema della filosofia. Testa published in Piacenza between 1829 and 1834 the Filosofia dell’affetto (constituted by an introduction and 2 vols.), in 1836 the Filosofia della mente, and between 1843 and 1849 a critical analysis of the Ragion pura, with the addition of historiccritical information on the movement of thought up to Schelling (“giunta storicocritica del movimento del pensiero infino a Schelling”). He was harshly attacked in Piacenza, where nevertheless he remained, though he had been invited to Pisa. His Prolusione alla scuola di logica e metafisica of 1 May 1848 (printed by Tipografia Nazionale, Piacenza) that contains together with a profession of Kantism a passionate defense of his activity. He was accused of not teaching an Italian philosophy, in relation to which he declared that kind of language to have no meaning “questo linguaggio per me è assurdo, come chi dicesse che bramerebbe una Geometria italiana.” They reproached him, an abbè, to profess liberal doctrines, and he answered: “ Non vi seducano i figli della notte, che con tanta enormità vanno predicando, che il mondo sarebbe migliore, ove fossero piú pochi quelli che studiano. Tanto loro profitta 1’universale ignoranza!... Là nei campi di Lombardia si combatte una guerra formidabile.… L’ltalia non sarà piú tra breve intieramente nelle mani de’ suoi capi, come era in passato; ma il popolo prenderà parte alla sua sorte, entrerà ne’ suoi affari, avrà una rappresentanza. Voi sarete un giorno Elettori e Deputati alla grande opera del reggimento civile.” His listeners, therefore, must provide themselves with the culture of mind (“quella cultura di mente”) without which they would be incapable of facing the new tasks. Concerning the eclecticism of Southern Italy it is necessary to beging with the “discorso” of Giuseppe De Vincenzi, Dell’eclettismo in Francia ovvero della nuova scuola filosofica del Royer-Collard e del Cousin (Naples, 1835), taken from Il progresso delle scienze, delle lettere e delle arti (1835). Then see F. Zerella, L’eclettismo francese e la cultura filosofica meridionale nella prima metà del secolo xix (Rome, 1952), reliable for the bibliography. In general, for the influence of Cousin, see S. Mastellone, Victor Cousin e il Risorgimento italiano (Florence, 1955). The exposition of Kant by D. Winspeare in Saggi di filosofia intellettuale, vol. 1: Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (Naples, 1843), pp. 325–347. In the Preface, the work is presented based on an explicit opposition of Reid to Kant, in favor of a return

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to Reid and a reaction to the bad use of Reid in contemporary times: “nulla v’ha di piú povero de’ commenti, che ne sono stati fatti.” Very important is the vol. 2 of the Saggi: it is divided into two parts that appeared in 1844 and 1846; it includes the Dizionario della ragione, a true philosophical lexicon preceded by a Discorso preliminare, pp. iii-xciii, which introduces a classification of the sciences. See Luigi Blanch, “Sulla introduzione allo studio della filosofia di Winspeare,” in Museo di scienze e letteratura, (1844), pp. 2–22. Of Blanch see the three vols. of Scritti storici, published by Croce (Bari, 1945); and F. Zerella, L’eclettismo, pp. 22–26. To the above indications add M. F. Sciacca, La filosofia nell’età del Risorgimento (Milan, 1948). About the diffusion of Kantism always see Zambelloni, Le origini del kantismo in Italia (Milan, 1971). In particular for Naples and under certain aspects for the culture of Southern Italy, constantly consult the excellent work of G. Oldrini, who through a systematic exploration of primary sources and critical literature has constructed an ample panorama that goes from the Revolution of 1799 to the formation of Croce presenting information on the major and minor among them. It is a book desirable for every cultural center in the varied Italian geography 2–7. Pasquale Galluppi A good bibliography on Galluppi exists in M. A. Rocchi, P. Galluppi storico della filosofia con un saggio di bibliografia galluppiana (Palermo, 1934); the same is found in G. Di Napoli, La filosofia di P. Galluppi (Padua, 1947) and G. De Giuli, La filosofia di P. Galluppi (Palermo, 1935). For their research on Galluppi during the last decades, the authors deserving mention are E. Di Carlo and A. Guzzo. Of Guzzo see especially the introduction to the edition of Lettere filosofiche (Florence, 1925), 2nd edition; of Di Carlo, besides the reprint of the opuscle Sull’analisi e la sintesi (Florence, 1935), must be seen the many particular contributions (which are listed for the period up to 1930 in GCFI, 11 (1930), pp. 400–402; the successive ones up to 1935 in the cited work of De Giuli; those up to 1947 in the volume of Di Napoli, pp. 292–294). Always of Di Carlo see “Intorno al primo scritto di P. Galluppi,” Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana, 6 (1937), pp. 115–124. Also for Galluppi see of Oldrini, besides the cited work, the recent edition of Opuscoli politico-filosofici sulla libertà (Naples, 1976), within which is found the opuscule Della libertà di stampa, believed to have been irremediably lost (and also the unedited parts of Pensieri filosofici from ms., together with the other two opuscules: Dalla libertà di coscienza and Lo sguardo dell’Europa sul regno di Napoli. In the commented bibliography, at the end of the volume (pp. 111–122), Oldrini introduced the critical literature on Galluppi. 8. Ottavio Colecchi. The Influence of Cousin Regarding the influence of Galluppi among the writers most close to him, see C. Rodriguez, Lettera su la filosofia soggettiva e oggettiva del B. P. Galluppi (Messina, 1833); A. Catara Lettieri, Cenno sugli “Elementi di filosofia” del barone Galluppi (Messina, 1836); La filosofia del barone P. Galluppi considerata rispetto all’origine e alla realtà del concetto di Dio (Messina, 1854); “Opinione del Galluppi sopra il lockismo,” in L’Eco (1857); L. Palmieri, Due questioni filosofiche esposte ... per rispondere a due chiarissimi scrittori contemporanei. Questione seconda: Quali attinenze ha la filosofia del Galluppi con la filosofia scozzese? (Naples, 1846); S. Cofone, “Pasquale Galluppi e le sue dottrine,” in Il progresso delle scienze, delle lettere e delle

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arti (1846); L. M. Greco, Cenni sulla vita e sulle opere del barone Pasquale Galluppi (Cosenza, 1847); D. Giella, Filosofia critica sulla filosofia del barone P. Galluppi (Naples, 1856); D. Trotta, Saggio sul Razionalismo e l’Empirismo, sul subbiettivo e l’obbiettivo. Con la critica delle principali dottrine del Kant, del Cousin, del Galluppi (Naples, 1859). As to the fortune of Galluppi in Sicily, see the second volume of Storia della filosofia in Sicilia dai tempi antichi al secolo xix of Di Giovanni. Galluppi was in correspondence with V. Tedeschi Paternò, author of a most popular manual of philosophy (Catania, 1832), on whom see Emerico Amari, “Sopra gli Elementi di filosofia del Prof. V. Tedeschi,” in Effemeridi scientifiche e letterarie per la Sicilia, 8 (1833). In Sicily, the Elementi of Galluppi also were for a time the officially adopted school text. About Colecchi check Gentile, Storia, vol. 2, pp. 137–249 (with bibliography and unedited texts). It is interesting to notice that the refusal of continuing the printing of the Questioni came from the reviewer abbè Giuseppe Maria Mazzarella, who was also a writer on philosophy and not a total stranger to Galluppi’s fame and personality. He was a disciple of Giuseppe Capocasale, an ideologue and author of an often used Cursus philosophicus; he, too, published two manuals for the schools: Corso d’ideologia elementare (Naples, 1926); Catechismo filosofico istorico apologetico della religione cristiana per istruzione dei giovani filosofi (Naples, 1843), and some lectures Sulla scienza della storia (Naples, 1854). He even reprinted with some additions the Metafisica of Genovesi (consult also the Supplimenti of Poli). Regarding the eclecticism in Italy in general, see Gentile, Storia, pp. 111–135; V. Di Giovanni, S. Mancino e l’eclettismo in Sicilia (Palermo, 1867), and Poli, par. 420, who among the eclectics mentioned not only Tedeschi Paternò, but also Francesco Zantedeschi, Elementi di psicologia empirica (Verona, 1832–1834); Giuliano Ricci, for his articles on Cousin in Antologia of 1826, num. 27, 36, and 42; Giuseppe De Vincenzi, Riccobelli and Rivato for their essays in Commentarii dell’Ateneo di Brescia (1828–1829), (1831). See again E. Di Carlo, Lettere inedite di S. Mancino a V. Cousin (Palermo, 1938). From eclecticism Giuseppe Romano da Termini Imerese (1810-78) will move to ontologism; he was the author of Scienza dell’uomo interiore, delle sue relazioni con la natura e con Dio (Naples, 1845). Romano will defend the Jesuits against Gioberti with a “Lettera con la quale nella sua qualità di Gesuita protesta contro le lodi di lui fatte da Gioberti nei Prolegomeni,” 17 giugno 1845. About him see V. Di Giovanni, Il p. G. Romano e l’ontologismo in Sicilia nella prima metà del secolo xix (Palermo, 1879); S. Scimé, Il trionfo dell’ontologismo in Sicilia. G. Romano (Roma-Mazzara, 1949). Of Poli see the Saggio filosofico sopra la scuola de’ moderni filosofi naturalisti (Milan, 1927); the Filosofia elementare (Milan, 1829–1832), 3 vols. The Saggio of De Grazia was reprinted in Milan in 5 vols. between 1847 and 1848. About De Grazia see F. Fiorentino, “Sulla vita e sulle opere di V. De Grazia,” printed in 1877 in Giornale Napoletano, and reprinted by Gentile in F. Fiorentino, Ritratti storici e saggi critici (Florence, 1935), pp. 115–164; F. S. Varano, V. De Grazia (Naples, 1931). Remarkable is the Discorsi su la logica di Hegel e su la filosofia speculativa (Naples, 1850); but see also “La verità dell’intimo senso e il dato della filosofia prima. Conseguenze per la morale e per la religione,” in Il Pontano, (1847). Consult E. Cione, Napoli romantica, 1830–1848 (Milan, 1942). In Oldrini, La cultura filosofica napoletana, pp. 158ff. and note at p. 161 see what is said about the work of A. Cristallini, Ottavio Colecchi, un filosofo da riscoprire (Padua, 1968). Interesting to notice how little attention Croce and Nicolini paid to the

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“vichismo” of Colecchi in their Bibliografia vichiana, even in the edition of 1947– 1948, though all the final part of Colecchi’s second volume of Questioni filosofiche (Naples, 1943), pp. 225–304, or even better of Sopra alcune questioni le piú importanti della filosofia: osservazioni critiche, when speaking of the Legge morale, Colecchi appropriated Vico also in the language he used. Concerning the criticism of Cousin and the presence of Cousin in Italy, see S. Mastellone, Victor Cousin e il Risorgimento Italiano (dalle carte dell’Archivio Cousin) (Florence, 1955).

Thirty-One ANTONIO ROSMINI AND THE ROSMINIAN CONTROVERSIES (pp. 845–890) 1–9. Life and Works Concerning the extensive literary production of Rosmini and on Rosmini, see C. Caviglione, Bibliografia degli scritti di A. Rosmini (Turin, 1925) together with D. Morando, “Bibliografia degli scritti su A. Rosmini” in vol. 1 of the national edition of Rosmini’s Opere (Rome, 1934), pp. 1–208, and the additions of F. Lopez de Oñate, “A proposito di una recente bibliografia rosminiana,” Sophia, 4 (1936), pp. 218–248, 476–504. The volumes, unfortunately not always satisfactory, that appeared in the national edition of the works amount to 32. They are: (1) Scritti autobiografici inediti, Edited by E. Castelli; (2) Introduzione alla filosofia, by U. Redano; (3–5) Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee, by F. Orestano; (6) Compendio di etica, by E. Castelli; (7– 14) Teosofia, by C. Gray, including unpublished parts; (15–18) Psicologia, by G. Rossi, including unpublished writings; (19–20) Rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, by D. Morando; (21) Principi di scienza morale, by D. Morando; (22–23) Logica, by E. Troilo, with unpublished material; (24) Progetti di costituzione, by C. Gray; (25) Antropologia in servizio della scienza morale, by C. Riva; (26) Trattato della coscienza morale, by G. Mattai; (27–28) Antropologia sopranaturale, by G. Pusineri; (29–30) Aristotele esposto e esaminato, by E. Turolla; (31–32) Opuscoli morali, editi e inediti, by R. Bessero Beiti. The edited works used in this exposition are: Nuovo Saggio sull’origine delle idee (Rome, 1830); Principii della scienza morale (Milan, 1831); Il Rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia, proposto dal conte T. Mamiani della Rovere ed esaminato da A. Rosmini Serbati (Milan, 1836); Filosofia della morale; Storia comparativa e critica dei sistemi intorno al principio della morale (Milan, 1837); Antropologia in servizio della scienza morale (Milan, 1839); Filosofia della politica. La società e il suo fine (Milan, 1839); Ascetica (Milan, 1840); Filosofia del diritto (Milan, 1841); Sistema filosofico di A. Rosmini (Turin, 1845); Teodicea (Milan, 1845); Vincenzo Gioberti e il panteismo (Milan, 1846); La Costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale, con un’appendice sull’Unità d’ltalia (Milan, 1848); Delle cinque piaghe della S. Chiesa (Lugano, 1848); Psicologia (Novara, 1849); Introduzione alla filosofia (Casale, 1850); Logica, (Turin, 1854); Del principio supremo della metodica e di alcune sue applicazioni in servizio dell’umana educazione (Turin, 1857), posthumously published like the following ones: Aristotile esposto ed esaminato (Turin, 1857); Teosofia, vols. 1–3 (Turin, 1859, 1863, 1864); vols. 4–5 (Intra, 1869, 1874); Della missione a Roma di A. Rosmini Serbati negli anni 1848–1849 (Turin, 1881); L’introduzione del Vangelo sec-

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ondo Giovanni, commentata (Turin, 1882); Saggio storico critico sulle categorie e la dialettica (Turin, 1882); Scritti vari di Metodo e di Pedagogia (Turin, 1882); Antropologia soprannaturale (Casale, 1884); Della naturale costituzione della società civile (Rovereto, 1887); Compendio di etica e breve storia di essa (Rome, 1907). And, finally, the Epistolario, in thirteen volumes (Casale, 1905), but truly 1887–1894. Concerning the formation of Rosmini, we have the precious studies of Solari that Pietro Piovani has collected with all his Rosminian pages: G. Solari, Studi rosminiani, (Milan, 1957). Connected with the researches of Solari are those of L. Bulferetti, Antonio Rosmini nella Restaurazione (Florence, 1942). A remarkable contribution is that of I. Mancini who also offers unpublished documents in Il giovane Rosmini, vol. 1: La metafisica inedita (Urbino, 1963). The available biographies of Rosmini are: N. Tommaseo, A. Rosmini (Turin, 1855); F. Paoli, Memorie della vita di A. Rosmini (Turin, 1880); W. Lockart, La vita di A. Rosmini (Venice, 1888); (G. B. Pagani), La vita di A. Rosmini, written by a priest of the Istituto della Carità (Turin, 1897), 2 vols., of which there is a revised edition by G. Rossi (Rovereto, 1959), 2 vols.; G. Pusineri, A. Rosmini (Rovereto, 1928). About Rosmini and his philosophy, see A. Pestalozza, La mente di Rosmini (Milan, 1855); A. Paoli, Schopenhauer e Rosmini (Rome, 1878); G. Calza and P. Perez, Esposizione ragionata della filosofia di A. Rosmini (Intra, 1878–1879), 2 vols.; D. Jaja, Studio critico sulle categorie e forme dell’essere in Rosmini (Bologna, 1878); G. Buroni, Rosmini e S. Tommaso (Turin, 1878); L. von Sarburg, Manzoni e Rosmini, (Berlin, 1884); R. Benzoni, Dottrina dell’essere nel sistema rosminiano (Fano, 1888); G. Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti (Pisa, 1898 and Florence, 1955); G. Vidari, Rosmini e Spencer (Milan, 1899); P. de Nardi, Rosmini e Kant (Forlí, 1902); P. Carabellese, La teoria della percezione intellettiva di A. Rosmini (Bari, 1907); F. Palhoriès, Rosmini, (Paris, 1908); F. Orestano, Rosmini (Rome, 1908); C. Caviglione, Il Rosmini vero (Voghera, 1912) (the books discusses the interpretations of Gentile, Bonatelli, Guastella, Martinetti, and Carabellese); G. Galli, Kant e Rosmini (Città di Castello, 1914); G. Capone-Braga, Saggio su Rosmini. Il mondo delle idee (Milan, 1914); G. Chiavacci, Il valore morale nel Rosmini (Florence, 1921); G. Esposito, Il sistema filosofico di A. Rosmini (Milan, 1933); F. Carassale, A. Rosmini (Turin, 1936); M. Casotti, Le basi filosofiche della pedagogia rosminiana (Milan, 1937); G. B. Bianchi, Rosmini (Milan, 1937); M. F. Sciacca, “La filosofia morale di Rosmini,” in Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana, 3 (1937); 1–3 (1938), thereafter collected in a volume (Naples, 1938 and in 4th edition in Milan, 1960); G. Bozzetti, C. Boyer, P. Carabellese, G. Capograssi, U. Redanò, G. Rossi, M. F. Sciacca, Studi rosminiani (Milan, 1940); A. Brunello, Rosmini (Milan, 1941); Bozzetti, Ciampini, Fossi, Marrucchi, Rosmini (Milan, 1942); P. Prini, Introduzione alla metafisica di A. Rosmini (Milan, 1953); M. T. Antonelli, Studi rosminiani (Domodossola, 1955); Atti del Congresso Internationale di filosofia A. Rosmini (Florence, 1957), 2 vols.; P. Piovani, La teodicea sociale di Rosmini (Padua, 1957); C. Giacon, L’oggettività in A. Rosmini (Milan, 1960). The Rosminian periodicals should be consulted: La sapienza (1879 & ff.); Il Rosmini (1887–1889); Il Nuovo Rosmini (1889); Il nuovo Risorgimento (1892–1894); and from 1906 the Rivista rosminiana. Special consideration should be given to the special issues in 1955 of the following journals: Crisis, Giornale di metafisica, Humanitas, Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, Rivista rosminiana, and Teoresi. These documents are part of the history of Rosminianism: S. Sordi, Lettere intorno al “Nuovo Saggio” (Modena, 1843); M. Liberatore, Della conoscenza intellettuale (Naples, 1855), 2 vols.; G. Buroni, Dell’essere e del conoscere (Turin, 1877); P.

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Cornoldi, Il rosminianesimo, sintesi dell’ontologismo e del panteismo (Rome, 1881). See also Fogazzaro, Allievo, Petrone, Billia and others, Per A. Rosmini nel primo centenario della sua nascita (1897), 2 vols.; Billia, 40 proposizioni attribuite ad A. Rosmini, coi dati originali completi dell’Autore (1889); Morando, Esame critico delle XL proposizioni (1905). The Rosminian bibliography has now (1978) been renewed by G. Bergamaschi, Bibliografia rosminiana, vol. 1 for 1814–1934; vol. 2 for 1935–1966 (Milan, 1967); Bibliografia degli scritti editi di Antonio Rosmini Serbati (Milan, 1970), 2 vols. For the biography there is G. F. Radice, Annali di Antonio Rosmini Serbati (Milan, 1967–1970), 3 vols.; and the various volumes of correspondence Carteggio edito e inedito Tommaseo-Rosmini, Edited by V. Missori (Milan, 1967). Consult also G. F. Ferrarese, Ricerche sulle riflessioni teologiche di A. Rosmini negli anni 1819–1828. Saggio ed inediti (Milan, 1967) where the unpublished works appear at pp. 109–226. A good aide for the reading of Teosofia are the volumes edited by M. A. Raschini, Teosofia. Riduzione organica con introd. e note (Milan, 1967). Concerning the thought of Rosmini see M. F. Sciacca, Interpretazioni rosminiane (Milan, 1963), 2nd ed.; P. Print, Rosmini postumo (Rome, 1962), 2nd ed.; T. Manferdini, Essere e verità in Rosmini (Bologna, 1965); E. Verondini, La filosofia morale di A. Rosmini (Bologna, 1967); F. Traniello, Società religiosa e società civile in Rosmini (Bologna, 1966); F. Piemontese, La dottrina del sentimento fondamentale nella filosofia di A. Rosmini (Milan, 1966); F. Traniello, Cattolicesimo conciliatorista. Religione e cultura nella tradizione rosminiana lombardo-piemontese (1825–1870) (Milan, 1970). About Manzoni see, besides the old work of E. Gabbuti, Il Manzoni e gli ideologi francesi (Florence, 1936), L. Caretti, Manzoni. Ideologia e stile (Turin, 1972); A. C. Jemolo, Il dramma di Manzoni (Florence, 1973); Atti del Convegno di Studi Manzoniani (Roma-Firenze, 12–14 marzo 1973), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, (Rome, 1973). For a comparison with Sismondi there is Atti del Colloquio internazionale sul Sismondi (Pescia, 8–10 settembre 1970), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome, 1973). 10. Gino Capponi, Raffaello Lambruschini, and Silvestro Centofanti About Tommaseo in particular see R. Ciampini, Vita di N. Tommaseo (Florence, 1945); on Tuscan culture and Capponi, see G. Gentile, G. Capponi e la cultura toscana del secolo xix (with a chapter on Centofanti and Lambruschini) (Florence, 1926). The Lettere del Capponi, were prepared by A. Carraresi (Florence, 1882– 1890), 6 vols.; the Scritti, Edited by M. Tabarrini (Florence, 1877), 2 vols.; the writings on pedagogy in A. Gambaro, La critica pedagogica di G. Capponi. Con l’edizione di tutti i suoi scritti sull’educazione (Bari, 1956); and more recently—in addition to G. Macchia, G. Capponi, Scritti inediti, preceded by a commented bibliography (Florence, 1957)—the excellent edition and fragment Sull’educazione, Edited by R. Ridolfi (Florence, 1976); also R. Gentili, Gino Capponi. Un aristocratico toscano dell’800 (Florence, 1974); G. Nencioni, E. Sestan, E. Garin, R. Ridolfi, Gino Capponi, linguista storico pensatore (Florence, 1977). About Lambruschini see especially A. Gambaro, Primi scritti religiosi di R. Lambruschini (Florence, 1918); idem, Riforma religiosa nel carteggio inedito di R. Lambruschini (Turin, 1924), 2 vols.; and the edition of his writings edited by Gambaro for La Nuova Italia of Florence. See also N. Tommaseo, Delle innovazioni religiose e politiche buone all’Italia. Lettere inedite a Raffaello Lambruschini (1831–1832), edited by R. Ciampini and G. Sofri (Brescia, 1963). About Centofanti, see D. Bondi, Un dimenticato: S. Centofanti nella vita e nell’opera (Pisa, 1927), with a bibliography.

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Thirty-Two VINCENZO GIOBERTI (pp. 891–922) Given the enormous bibliography of Gioberti, see A. Bruers, Gioberti (Rome, 1924) in the series of Guide Bibliografiche Leonardo; G. Balsamo Crivelli, Le carte giobertiane della Biblioteca civica di Torino (Turin, 1928); and the Nuova protologia, Edited by G. Gentile (Bari, 1912), 2 vols. for a systematic selection of the works in which a bibliography is included. Among the editions of the works of Gioberti see that of Capolago in 24 volumes (1844–1851), that of Naples in 37 volumes (1848; 1860–1974). The Postume in the. Massari edition comprehends the fragments Della riforma cattolica (1856), La filosofia della rivelazione (1857), Della Protologia (1857), Pensieri e miscellanee (1859–1860). Solmi has published Meditazioni inedite (1909), La teorica della mente umana. Rosmini e i Rosminiani. La libertà cattolica (1910). The most noteworthy reprints are: Del Primato, Edited by Balsamo-Crivelli, (Turin, 1919–1920), 3 vols. (with a significant introduction); Rinnovamento, Edited by F. Nicolini (Bari, 1911–1912), 3 vols.; La Riforma cattolica e la libertà cattolica, Edited by G. Gentile and G. Balsamo Crivelli (Florence, 1924). The national edition of the Epistolario, Edited by Gentile and Balsamo Crivelli (Florence, 1927–1937) is already available in 19 volumes. They are: (1) Prolegomeni al “Primato,” Edited by Castelli; (2–3) Il Primato, by Redanò; (4–5) Introduzione alla filosofia, by Calò; (8–10) Degli errori filosofici di A. Rosmini, by Redanò; (11) Del Bello, by Castelli; (12) Del Buono, by Castelli; (13–18) Il gesuita moderno, by Sciacca; (19) Cours de philosophie, by Battistini and Calò. See also Carteggi di V. Gioberti (in the Biblioteca Scientifica dell’Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, section 2, Sources); among which noteworthy is that with Baracco (Rome, 1936). The most relevant literary production on Gioberti can be reduced to the following: B. Spaventa, La filosofia di Gioberti (Naples, 1863); Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti (1899); Solmi, Mazzini e Gioberti (Milan, 1913); G. Saitta, Il pensiero di V. Gioberti (Messina, 1917 and Florence, 1927); A. Anzilotti, Gioberti (Florence, 1922); Gentile, I profeti del Risorgimento italiano (Florence, 1923); S. Caramella, La formazione della filosofia giobertiana (Genoa, 1927); U. Padovani, V. Gioberti e il cattolicismo (Milan, 1927); Palhoriès, Gioberti (Paris, 1929); R. Rinaldi, V. Gioberti e il problema religioso del Risorgimento (Florence, 1929); A. De Rubertis, Gioberti e la Toscana (Florence, 1933); K. Morawski, Gioberti (Warsaw, 1936); G. Bonafede, V. Gioberti (Palermo, 1942); L. Stefanini, Gioberti (Milan, 1947), with an exhaustive bibliography. Regarding the discussion, vicissitudes, and fortune of Gioberti’s philosophy see, among others, the works that D’Acquisto published between 1836 and 1871 (Di Giovanni, Filosofi siciliani, vol. 2, pp. 580–581), G. Romano, La scienza dell’uomo interiore (Palermo-Napoli, 1840–1849), 4 vols.; Elementi di filosofia (Palermo, 1853), 2 vols., about which see A. Franchi, Teorica del giudizio (Milan, 1870); A. Testa, “Considerazioni sopra l’introduzione allo studio della filosofia per V. Gioberti,” a letter of 1845 to D. F. Rossi; Niccolò Garzilli, Saggio filosofico sulle attinenze ontologiche della formula ideale coi piú rilevanti problemi della filosofia secondo Gioberti (Palermo, 1847); P. A. Paravia, V. Gioberti (Turin, 1853); A. Mauri, Della vita e delle opere di V. Gioberti (Geneva, 1853), about which see A. Franchi, Appendice alla

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filosofia delle scuole italiane (Milan, 1866); F. Toscano, Corso elementare di filosofia (Naples, 1857) (see again Franchi, Teorica del giudizio, letter num. 10); V. Di Giovanni, Sulla riforma cattolica e sulla filosofia della rivelazione di V. Gioberti (Palermo, 1859); R. Mariano, La philosophie contemp. en Italie (Paris, 1860); A. Chiarolanza, Elementi di filosofia speculativa (Naples, 1861); Saggio di un nuovo diritto universale (Naples, 1861); Lezioni di logica, metafisica e etica (Naples, 1869); P. Luciani, Gioberti e la filosofia nuova italiana (Naples, 1866–1972) (see also Del libro di Bertrando Spaventa su V. Gioberti (Naples, 1864); D. Morkos, Spiegazione analitica della formula ideale di V. Gioberti (Turin, 1865); Mamiani in Filosofia delle scuole italiane, 2 (1870); P. D’Ercole, in the commemorative volume of the first centennial, 1801–1901. For his heroic end and for his precocious strength of mind, the Sicilian Niccolò Garzilli, murdered by Bourbon fire in a square of Palermo, deserves to be mentioned again with his Saggio filosofico sulle attinenze ontologiche della formula ideale coi piú rilevanti problemi della filosofia secondo Gioberti (Palermo, 1847). About him see Di Giovanni, Filosofi siciliani, vol. 2, pp. 199–210. Concerning the influence of Gioberti see U. Padovani, Vito Fornari, Saggio sul pensiero filosofico in Italia nel secolo xix (Milan, 1924); V. Fornari (Turin, 1931). The national edition of the works of G. Mazzini appeared in one hundred volumes (Imola, 1906–1943). About Mazzini an enormous amount of literature exists; see G, Salvemini, Mazzini (Catania, 1915); Alessandro Levi, La filosofia politica di G. Mazzini (Bologna, 1917); G. Gentile, I profeti del Risorgimento italiano (Florence, 1923); G. M. Monti, Pensiero e azione. Cattaneo, Mazzini, Romagnosi (Milan, 1926); N. Rosselli, Mazzini e Bakunin (Turin, 1927). The complexity of Gioberti’s activity has reemerged in the most recent historic discussions, and particularly indicative are the pages of A. Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo. Saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia (Rome, 1965), pp. 19–102. Among the editions of his works the one edited by L. Quattrocchi, Del Rinnovamento civile d’Italia (Rome, 1969), 3 vols., deserves careful attention. For the first time are given the stages of the eleboration, the stratifications which result from the preparatory drafts: “Gli inediti—Quattrocchi observes— vengono pubblicati nella loro interezza; troppi brani sono monchi e preclusi a ogni tentativo, anche spregiudicato, di suturazione. Vengono dati tutti quelli composti o ricomponibili in un discorso ben articolato, rinunciando alla pubblicazione ogni qual vo1ta potesse non essere del tutto fugato il sospetto dell’arbitrio.” If the selection of the material is questionable, nevertheless the material here offered has particular interest and can contribute to a new reading of Gioberti’s text. In 1970, edited by A. Cortese, always in the national edition has appeared in the first and second edition the Teoria del sovrannaturale, o sia discorso sulle convenience della religione colla mente umana e col progresso civile delle nazioni. In 1972, in a third volume, Cortese, besides an introduction to the discussion on Gioberti’s positions, has presented a complex of unedited material that even in its polemical form is much interesting. Cortese has the merit of having reconstructed the vicissitudes that brought Gioberti to the writing of Discorso preliminare of the second edition of 1850. Thus, the rapport between the edition of 1938 and that of twelve years later is characterized. At the same time it is analyzed the attack that under the name of T. Zarelli, G. M. Caroli moved against the Teorica: I1 sistema filosofico di V. Gioberti (Paris, 1848); Il sistema teologico di V. Gioberti (Paris, 1849); volumes that in 1850 were combined under the name of G. C. Caroli, Il sistema filosofico e teologico di V. Gioberti (Bologna, 1850), to which will follow Discorso preliminare of 1950, and under the name of Caroli the

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small volume A un discorso nuovo di Vincenzo Gioberti, prime note (Ferrara, 1851) some aspects of the polemic with Rosmini are examined. About Gioberti, besides the works already cited,, see L. Giusso, Gioberti (Milan, 1948); A. Bonetti, Gioberti, la realtà come atto creativo (Milan, 1960); M. Moro, La creazione nel pensiero di Gioberti (Rome, 1968). About “giobertismo” see G. De Crescenzo, La fortuna di Vincenzo Gioberti nel Mezzogiorno d’ltalia (Brescia, 1964). On the southern Neo-Guelphism see F. Tessitore, Aspetti del pensiero neoguelfo napoletano dopo il Sessanta (Naples, 1962). Regarding Mazzini see F. Della Peruta, Democrazia e socialismo nel Risorgimento (Rome, 1965); Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani (Milan, 1974), and the introduction to the volume Scrittori politici dell’Ottocento (Milan-Naples, 1969).

Thirty-Three HUMANISM AND SKEPTICISM (pp. 923–936) 1. Giuseppe Ferrari In regard to the thought of the second half of the 19th century, besides the works of Ferri, Di Giovanni (for Sicily), and Werner, see especially G. Gentile, Origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia (Messina, 1917–1923), 4 vols.; G. Alliney, I pensatori della seconda metà del secolo xix (Milan, 1942). In all these works, though different, the bibliography provided is exhaustive. Alliney, pp. 341–423, opportunely lists the writings of the various authors, books and articles, followed by the various studied done on them until 1942. We will limit ourselves therefore to mentioning the most important things and those published afterward. See F. Fiorentino, La filosofia contemporanea in Italia (Naples, 1876); A. Conti, “Sullo stato presente della filosofia in Italia,” a letter (of 1863) to Prof. E. Naville, in appendix to Gloria della filosofia (Florence, 1888), vol. 2, pp. 551–578. Of Ferrari see especially, besides the writings cited in the text and the essays on Vico and Romagnosi, “La philosophie catholique en Italie,” in Revue des deux mondes (1844); Corso sugli scrittori politici (Milan, 1862); Teoria dei periodi politici (Milan, 1874); and the reprints of Filosofia della rivoluzione (Milan, 1923) and again by R. Miceli (Milan, 1942). Very useful is the volume of texts of Romagnosi, Cattaneo, and Ferrari, edited by E. Sestan for the series of Ricciardi (Milan-Naples, 1957), with a complete bibliography. About Ferrari, besides the cited works, see A. Ferrari, G. Ferrari (Geneva, 1914); G. Perticone, “La concezione etico-politica di G. Ferrari,” Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto (1922); A. Levi, “Il pensiero politico di G. Ferrari,” Nuova Rivista storica (1931); C. A. Sacheli, “G. Ferrari scettico,” Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Padova, 48 (1932); B. Brunello, Il pensiero di G. Ferrari (Milan, 1933); F. Della Peruta, “Il socialismo risorgimentale di Ferrari, Pisacane e Montanelli,” Movimento operaio, 7 (1956), pp. 1–22; A. Agnelli, Il diritto secondo Ferrari (Padova, 1958). Of Ferrari again see Scritti politici (Turin, 1973), Edited by S. Rota-Ghibaudi, who also wrote G. Ferrari, L’evoluzione del suo pensiero (Florence, 1965). On this see C. D’Amato, “Ideologia e politica in G. Ferrari,” Studi Storici, 11 (1970), pp. 743– 754); N. Tranfaglia, “G. Ferrari e la storia d’ltalia,” Belfagor, 25 (1970), pp. 1–32; D’Amato, “La formazione di G. Ferrari e la cultura italiana della prima metà

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dell’800,” in Studi Storici, 12 (1971), pp. 693–717; C. D’Amato, “Le basi ideologiche della filosofia della storia di Giuseppe Ferrari,” in the cited volume Ricerche sulla cultura dell’Italia moderna (1972), pp. 217–254. Of D’Amato see also Il mito di Vico e la filosofia della storia in Francia nella prima metà dell’Ottocento (Naples, 1977). 2. Carlo Cattaneo The works of Cattaneo were published through the activity of Bertani: Opere edite e inedite (Florence, 1881–1892), 7 vols., to which you must add the Scritti politici ed epistolario, edited by G. Rosa and J. White Mario (Florence, 1892–1901), 3 vols. The Scritti filosofici were republished by Arcangelo Ghisleri in 2 vols. (Milan, 1926). After the II World War we saw a revival of studies and new editions: Epistolario, edited by R. Caddeo (Florence, 1949–1956), 7 vols.; Scritti economici, by Bertolino (Florence, 1956), 3 vols.; Scritti storici e geografici, by G. Salvemini and E. Sestan (Florence, 1957), 4 vols.; Scritti filosofici, by N. Bobbio (Florence, 1960), 3 vols.; Scritti politici, by M. Boneschi (Florence, 1965), 3 vols. Add to these editions the anthology of Paolo Rossi, La società umana (Milan, 1950), and the collection of Scritti filosofici, letterari e vari, edited by F. Alessio, who premised it with an essay on “Cattaneo illuminista” (Florence, 1957). To be always remembered is the anthology edited by Salvemini (Milan, 1922). About Cattaneo, see Alessandro Levi, II positivismo di C. Cattaneo (Bari, 1928), with a bibliography; B. Brunello, Il pensiero di C. Cattaneo (Turin, 1925); E. Sestan, “Cattaneo giovane,” Belfagor, 2 (1947), pp. 664–689; P. Rossi, “Umanesimo e positivismo nel pensiero filosofico di C. Cattaneo,” in GCFI, 31 (1952), pp. 208–217; A. Bertolino, “I fondamenti delle idee economiche di C. Cattaneo,” in Studi in onore di Armando Sapori (Milan, 1957), vol. 2, pp. 1433–1469; L. Ricci Garotti, “Le idee di C. Cattaneo,” in Società, 14 (1958), pp. 520–544; P. C. Masini, “La scuola di C. Cattaneo,” Rivista storica del socialismo, 7–8 (1959), pp. 501–536; L. Ambrosoli, La formazione di C. Cattaneo (Milan-Naples, 1960), with an appendix of unpublished or forgotten documents. See also the volume Le carte di C. Cattaneo, prepared by the direction of the historical Collection of the Municipality of Milan (Milan, 1951); L. Ambrosoli, “Rassegna di studi cattaneani,” Belfagor, 7 (1952), pp. 678–692. For our research on Cattaneo there are now excellent tools: G. Armani, Gli scritti su C. Cattaneo (1836–1972) (Pisa, 1973); of Tutte le opere, edited by L. Ambrosoli, see vol. 4: Scritti dal 1848 al 1852 (Milan, 1967), and vol. 5, containing Archivio Triennale (Milan, 1974), 2 vols.; a collection of Scritti sulla Lombardia, edited by L. Anceschi e G. Armani (Milan, 1971), 2 vols.; one volume of Scritti scientifici e tecnici published by C. G. Lacaita (Florence, 1969). An important selection of Opere has been published by D. Castelnuovo Frigessi (Turin, 1972), 4 vols., with an ample introduction and a bibliographical note well done. Concerning the thought see N. Bobbio, Una filosofia militante. Studi su Carlo Cattaneo (Turin, 1971); C. G. Lacaita has edited the contributions presented to the Conference in Milan in 1974: L’opera e l’eredità di Carlo Cattaneo. In vol. 1: L’opera (Bologna, 1975) (texts of L. Ambrosoli, G. Armani, N. Bobbio, L. Borghi, L. Bulferetti, L. Cafagna, D. Castelnuovo Frigessi, S. Fontana, C. G. Lacaita, E. Rotelli, U. Puccio). A number of studies has been collected in num. 2 of Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 25 (1970), pp. 115–184 (C. G. Lacaita, F. Alessio, L. Ambrosoli, U. Puccio, N. Bobbio). To Cattaneo is dedicated also num. 117 (May 1970) of Aut Aut, introduced by an essay of E. Paci, “L’ora di Cattaneo,” with contributes of F. Catalano, U. Puccio, P. A. Rovatti, and a bibliography prepared by U. Puccio (pp. 73–86). Of Puccio see also “A proposito dell’attualità

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di C. Cattaneo,” in I1 Ponte, 25 (1969), pp. 1443–1454, and Introduzione a Cattaneo (Turin, 1977). 3. Ausonio Franchi The three volumes of Franchi’s Saggi di critica e polemica (Milan, 1871–1872) offer certainly great interest since they form an anthology of a large quantity of brief writings that appeared in different journals and particularly in La Ragione: vol. 1, contains Questioni filosofiche, of which the first is “Della vera e della falsa filosofia” of the Rev. Father Gioachino Ventura.About Franchi see A. Franzoni, L’opera filosofica di A. Franchi (Cremona, 1901); A. Colletti, A. Franchi e i suoi tempi (Turin, 1925); V. Suraci, A. Franchi filosofo e pedagogista, vol. 1: L’apostata (Rome, 1936). Most recent is C. G. Lacaita, “Carlo Cattaneo, Ausonio Franchi e il socialismo risorgimentale,” in Rivista storica del socialismo, num. 20 (1963), pp. 505–560. 4. Bonaventura Mazzarella About Mazzarella see P. d’Ercole, Esposizione ed esame della Critica della scienza del prof. B. Mazzarella (Berlin, 1862).

Thirty-Four SPIRITUALISTS, ONTOLOGISTS, KANTIANS MYSTICS, AND THOMISTS (pp. 937–960) 1. Terenzio Mamiani On the rich literary production of Mamiani see the Filosofia delle scuole italiane from 1870 to 1885 (issues num. 1 through 31), the four vols. of Atti dell’Accademia di filosofia italica, (1852–1860). Besides the documents cited in the text, see Dell’ontologia e del metodo. Discorso (Florence, 1843); Fondamenti della filosofia del diritto..., Lettere di T. Mamiani e di P. S. Mancini (Turin, 1853), with the discourses on sovereignty, etc.; Di un nuovo diritto europeo (Livorno, 1860); Confessioni di un metafisico (Florence, 1865), 2 vols.; Teorica della religione e dello stato (Florence, 1868); Le meditazioni cartesiane rinnovate nel secolo xix (Florence, 1868); Della religione positiva e perpetua del genere umano. Libri sei (Milan, 1880); Delle questioni sociali e particolarmente dei proletari e del capitale. Libri tre (Rome, 1882). Valuable is the Prose letterarie (Florence, 1867), which among other documents contains some of the inaugural discourses for the Accademia di filosofia italica; remarkable are the Lettere dall’esilio, vol. 1 (1831–1845); vol. 2 (1846–1849), published by Ettore Viterbo (Rome, 1899). In appendix to the edition of Florence of 1836 of Rinnovamento the articles can be read of Luigi Blanch (from num. 26 of Progresso of Naples, 1835), of Ferrari (from num. 234 of Biblioteca Italiana of June 1835), of Michele Parma (from Ricoglitore italiano e straniero of Milan, November 1835). About Mamiani it is convenient to see the general works indicated; they have an anecdotal interest: G. Saredo, T. Mamiani (Turin, 1860); P. Sbarbaro, La mente di T. Mamiani (Rome, 1866), and F. Zerella, Il pensiero sociale di T. Mamiani (Rome, 1960). Most recently appeared M. Pincherle, Moderatismo politico e riforma religiosa in Terenzio Mamiani (Milan, 1973).

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2. Luigi Ferri The major works of Ferri have been mentioned in the text, but see his essays and articles in Filosofia delle scuole italiane, num. 1–32; in Rivista italiana di filosofia, num. 1–10 (1886–1895); in Nuova antologia, (1863–1895), and in Memorie dei Lincei (1875–1876, 1885, 1887, 1888, 1890). About Ferri, Cantoni and Barzellotti wrote many times; but see also G. Tarozzi, La vita e il pensiero di L. Ferri (Palermo, 1895) (extracted from Rivista di Sociologia) and V. Di Giovanni in Critica religiosa e filosofica, vol. 2. 3. Luigi Ornato About L. Ornato see L. Ottolenghi, Vita, studi e lettere di L. Ornato (Turin, 1878); of Bertini, Gobetti has published the Saggi Platonici (Lanciano, 1928), with an extensive introduction and complete bibliography; G. Mazzantini, Idea di una filosofia della vita (Florence, 1933), with introduction; M. F. Sciacca, a selection (Milan, 1942), with introduction. See also besides the cited writings of Franchi and Rosmini, Spaventa, Da Socrate a Hegel (Bari, 1905), pp. 1–50; C. Cantoni in Filosofia delle scuole italiane, num. 17, pp. 224–240, 300–360; num. 20, pp. 37–66 (1878–1879); B. Vignoli Boldrini, “G. M. Bertini,” Archivio di storia e filosofia italiana, (1937–1938); G. Bianchi, “Contributo allo studio di G. M. Bertini,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, (1938), with information about mss. 4. Francesco Bonatelli On the writings of Bonatelli see issue num. 2, of 1910, of Cultura filosofica, which is dedicated to him and contains essays of F. De Sarlo, B. Varisco, A. Aliotta, G. Calò etc.; the studies of A. Gnesotto in Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Padova, of 1906, 1907 and 1908; B. Varisco, F. Bonatelli (Chiari, 1912); P. Cheula, Saggio sulla filosofia di F. Bonatelli (Milan, 1934). About Bonatelli, although an important personage, little can be added, see U. Scatturin, “Francesco Bonatelli,” Filosofia, 3 (1952), pp. 433–439, and the rich voice in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1969), vol. 11, pp. 594–597, is a redaction. Consult also Lettere di Antonio Labriola a F. Bonatelli, edited by E. Giammancheri, reviewed in Pedagogia e vita (1973–1974), vol. 1, pp. 83–108. 5. Giuseppe Allievo and Francesco Acri A bibliography of the works of Allievo exists, prepared by Gerini, in Cultura filosofica, 4 (1910) (in which there is also an article of Calò). Of Gerini is La mente di G. Allievo (Turin, 1904). An anthology of Opuscoli pedagogici editi e inediti appeared in Turin in 1909. About Allievo see R. Berardi, “La libertà di insegnamento in Piemonte nel 1848–1859 e un saggio storico di G. Allievo,” Quaderni di cultura e Storia sociale, 2 (1955), pp. 60–66, and the voice of P. Corvino in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1960), vol. 2, pp. 503–504. Of Acri there is Videmus in aenigmate (Bologna, 1907); Dolore Amore Fede (Bologna, 1908); Dialettica turbata (Bologna, 1911); Dialettica serena (Rocca S. Casciano, 1917). About Acri, P. E. Lamanna, “F. Acri,” in Cultura filosofica (1913), and the article in Scienziati italiani, directed by A. Mieli, num. 1, pp. 219–234, with bibliography; E. Chiocchetti, “F. Acri,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica (1913), pp. 566– 568; R. Mondolfo, F. Acri (Bologna, 1914); F. Calderaro, Lo spiritualismo di F. Acri (Rome, 1941); A. Carlini, “F. Acri,” Filosofia, 1 (1950), pp. 355–364; L. Paggiaro, La filosofia di F. Acri (Padova, 1953). L. Ambrosini prepared a selection of thoughts: Le

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cose migliori (Lanciano, 1910), and wrote about Acri an important essay in Rinnovamento (1909), pp. 313–368. Concerning the polemic with Fiorentino, see Fiorentino, La filosofia contemporanea in Italia, an answer to Professor F. Acri (Naples, 1876). About Acri, besides the reprint of the commemoration of Mondolfo in the volume Da Ardigò a Gramsci (Milan, 1962), pp. 101-38, it is possible to read an excellent essay of Piero Treves, “Francesco Acri e il platonismo italiano del secolo xix,” premised to the edition Einaudi of the translations of the dialogues of Plato (Turin, 1970). The voice of Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1960), vol. 1, pp. 201–203 is of F. Corvino. 6. Augusto Conti and Baldassare Labanca See the works of Conti: Evidenza, Amore e Fede, o: I criteri della filosofia (Florence, 1858); Il bello nel vero (Florence, 1872); Il buono nel vero (Florence, 1873); Il vero nell’ordine (1876); L’armonia delle cose (1878), etc. About Conti see C. Salotti, Il pensiero e l’anima di A. Conti (Rome, 1905); A. Alfani, Della vita e delle opere di A. Conti (Florence, 1906). See of Labanca Della filosofia razionale (Florence, 1864), 2 vols.; Della filosofia morale (1867); Della dialettica (1876), 2 vols. See also Ricordi autobiografici (Agnone, 1913), with a list of publications from 1857 to 1908. Noteworthy is the selection of Saggi storici e biografici (Palermo, 1911) especially for the profiles of Pious IX, Leo XIII and Pious X. 7. Return to Kant: Cantoni, Fiorentino, Tocco, and Barzellotti About Cantoni see the issues of Rivista filosofica of 1906 that were dedicated to him, with writings of A. Faggi, G. Vidari, B. Varisco, and A. Piazzi. Of the works of Fiorentino, we have spoken in the text. A great amount of the articles that appeared in Nuova antologia (1878–1880), Rivista bolognese, etc. have been reprinted in Scritti rari (Naples, 1876), in Studi e ritratti della Rinascenza, prepared by Gentile (Bari, 1911), in Ritratti storici e saggi critici by Gentile (Florence, 1935). About Fiorentino, see Mondolfo, “F. Fiorentino,” Nuova Rivista Storica (1925); D. Bosurgi, “F. Fiorentino,” Logos (1932); “Il pensiero filosofico di F. Fiorentino,” in Logos (1934–1935); A. Renda, Il pensiero di F. Fiorentino (Catanzaro, 1935); M. Barillari, Il pensiero di F. Fiorentino (Naples, 1935); Onoranze a F. Fiorentino (Naples, 1935), with essays of Gentile, Calogero, F. Montalto, Mondolfo, Bosurgi and Barillari; V. G. Galati, “Interpretazione dell’opera di F. Fiorentino,” Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana (1936), pp. 288–322, with a bibliographical note, pp. 317–322. On Fiorentino the modified essay of R. Mondolfo, Da Ardigò a Gramsci, pp. 43–97, has been reprinted, but see also P. Landucci Ruffo, “Note su F. Fiorentino storico della filosofia del Rinascimento,” in Ricerche sulla cultura, pp. 257–271; N. Siciliani de Cumis, “Lettere di Antonio Labriola a Francesco Fiorentino (1872–1884),” Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana, 25 (1976), pp. 165–184; and again Oldrini, La cultura filosofica napoletana. About Tocco see the issue of the journal Cultura filosofica (1911), num. 5–6 dedicated to him, with essays of Masci, Zuccante, Mondolfo, Calò, Melli, and De Sarlo. For a bibliography see Alliney, I pensatori della seconda metà del secolo xix, pp. 413–418; and the more recent E. Garin, La cultura italiana fra ’800 e ’900 (Bari, 1976), 4th edition, pp. 70–79; L, Malusa, “La storiografia religiosa di Felice Tocco,” Studia Patavina, 19 (1972), pp. 580–609; L. Malusa, “Un parere di Felice Tocco sulle facoltà teologiche,” in Esperienza religiosa e filosofia (Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate) (Padua, 1972), pp. 185–199. Consult also E. P. Lamanna, “Felice Tocco,” in Filosofia, 19 (1968), pp. 349–364, who does not diverge from the

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limited judgment of Gentile. About Barzellotti see Gentile, Le Origini, vol. 1, pp. 333– 353; Alliney, I pensatori della seconda metà del secolo xix, pp. 345–346, and the voice of Virgilio Cappelletti in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1965), vol. 7, pp. 16–18 (with contemporary bibliography). 8. Neo-Thomism. Gioacchino Ventura About the Rev. Father Ventura, see Di Giovanni, Storia della filosofia in Sicilia, vol. 2, pp. 142–176, 595–596, with a bibliography. Concerning Neo-Thomism see A. Masnovo, Il neotomismo in Italia (Milan, 1923); P. Dezza, Alle origini del neotomismo (Milan, 1940). Of Dezza see the anthology I neotomisti italiani del xix secolo (Milan, 1942), with a bibliography, pp. 17–22. Consult also G. F. Rossi, Le origini del neotomismo nell’ambiente di studio del Collegio Alberoni (Piacenza, 1957); and the recent works of M. Giammarino, “Alle origini del neo-tomismo. Il cardinal Tommaso Zigliara (1833–1893) nelle sue opere filosofiche e nel suo epistolario,” in Memorie Domenicane, special supplement num. 6; Tomismo e neo-tomismo (Pistoia, 1975), pp. 167–339; Saggi sulla rinascita del Tomismo nel sec. xix (Rome, 1974); San Tommaso. Fonti e riflessi del suo pensiero (Roma 1974), with a research of A. Piolanti, “Pio IX e la rinascita del tomismo.”

Thirty-Five THE HEGELIANS (pp. 961–976) 1. The Hegelians of Tuscany. Augusto Vera About the Hegelians in general see Gentile, Le origini, vol. 3, part 2: Gli hegeliani. Precious notices are found in Carteggi di Vittorio Imbriani. Gli hegeliani di Napoli, Edited by Nunzio Coppola (Rome, 1964); but see also G. Vacca, “Nuove testimonianze sull’hegelismo napoletano,” in Atti dell’Accademia di scienze morali e politiche, 76 (1965). There are two anthologies with texts, introductions, and bibliographies: Gli hegeliani d’ltalia. Vera, Spaventa, Jaja, Maturi, Gentile, Edited by A. Guzzo and A. Plebe (Turin, 1953); Gli sviluppi dello hegelismo in Italia. F. De Sanctis, S. Tommasi, A. Labriola, Edited by M. Rossi (Turin, 1957). About Mazzoni see the studies of Losacco in Educazione e pensiero (Pistoia, 1911), and in Bullettino storico pistoiese (1914); see the edition of the writings of Mazzoni that he himself prepared, L’educazione filosofica ed altri scritti inediti (Bari, 1913). About him see Oldrini, Il primo hegelismo, pp. 96–106, with reproduction of some texts; A. Saitta, Sinistra hegeliana e problema italiano negli scritti di A. L. Mazzini (Rome, 1967–1968), 3 vols., vol. 1, pp. 27–31, and A. Birindelli, “Domenico Mazzoni e la conoscenza di Hegel e Schelling in Toscana nella prima metà dell’Ottocento,” in num. 1 (1976) of Archivio di Filosofia, dedicated to Schelling, pp. 161–172. About Passerini, see the Carteggi Imbriani, pp. 15–18, and the indications included. Passerini translated Hegel’s Filosofia della storia and premised it with a rich introduction (Capolago, 1840). About Vera, see G. Oldrini, Gli hegeliani di Napoli. Augusto Vera e la corrente ortodossa (Milan, 1964), which we recommend also for the many bibliographical references. Passerini translated also Odoardo Schmidt’s Delineazione della storia della filosofia (Capolago, 1844), premising (pp. 7–47) an important introduction in which already can be seen the thesis of an Italy that, making itself the continuator of German philosophy, reenter within the circle of the great theo-

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retical speculation, and beyond Hegel inserts itself in the tradition of Bruno and Campanella: “È però questo il tempo opportuno anche per 1’Italia di informarsi dello stato della filosofia germanica, perché in alcun paese non si potranno fare lavori utili, a meno di prendere la scienza dal punto in cui colà fu condotta.... E noi facciamo voti perché questo onore rivenga all’Italia, e perché essa, come a chiari indizi ora mostra di voler farlo, entri nuovamente nell’aringo filosofico da essa quasi sempre abbandonato dopo il bel periodo della rinascenza e 1’infelice destino di Bruno e Campanella.” Of Passerini, besides Oldrini, G. M. Bravo reprints part of Pensieri filosofici in the volume Scritti di socialisti (Naples, 1972), pp. 359–390 (with texts also of F. Buonarroti, A. L. Mazzini, C. Pisacane, and C. Cafiero). Concerning the Hegelians in general and in particular about Spaventa, De Sanctis, and Labriola (given, but not agreed, that Labriola were ever a true Hegelian) the literary production has been abundant and important. Among the books that deal in general, besides that of Oldrini, with the Neapolitan culture, see also his own collection of texts in Il primo hegelismo italiano, with Preface of E. Garin (Florence, 1969). It has an ample historical introduction (pp. 17–89), comprehensive notices on single figures and general and particular bibliographies (of Domenico Mazzoni, G. B. Passerini, Cusani, Gatti, De Sanctis, Vera and Spaventa). A collection of studies on Hegel in Italy is found in the volume edited by F. Tessitore, Incidenza di Hegel (Naples, 1970): E. Garin, “Problemi e polemiche dell’hegelismo italiano dell’Ottocento, 1832–1860,” pp. 625–662; G. Oldrini, “L’hegelismo ‘ortodosso’ in Italia,” pp. 663–682; V. A. Bellezza, “La riforma spaventiano-gentiliana della dialettica hegeliana,” pp. 683–756; I. Cubeddu, “B. Spaventa riformatore di Hegel nella cultura italiana del ’900,” pp. 757–790; F. Tessitore, “Storicismo hegeliano e storicismo crociano,” pp. 843–910; G. Cacciatore, “Hegel in Italia e in italiano. Bibliografia,” pp. 1057–1130. Among comprehensive works, see S. Onufrio, Lo Stato “etico” e gli hegeliani di Napoli (Naples, Celebes Editore, 1972); P. Zambelli, “Tradizione nazionale italiana e sovranità etica nazionale nell’ideologia degli hegeliani di Napoli,” in the volume of various authors, Problemi dell’unità d’ltalia (Rome, 1962), pp. 521–572, and its review by G. Vacca, “Recenti studi sull’hegelismo napoletano,” in Studi Storici, 7 (1966), pp. 131–182. Of Vacca, again see Gli hegeliani di Napoli nella politica e nella storia, Carteggi (Bari, 1966) (from the series of Annali della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza della Università di Bari). Particular attention should be given to the work of Saitta for the novelty of the material and the originality of perspectives: Sinistra hegeliana e problema italiano negli scritti di A. L. Mazzini (Rome, 1967–1968), 3 vols., of which the Appendix in two volumes is of 1967 and contains the writings of Mazzini. The first volume of 1968 is an analysis of the texts of Mazzini, a documented picture of all the cultural process “between Hegel and Canapone” (tra Hegel e “Canapone”), a processs “from the ontology of Gioberti to Hegelian leftism” (dall’ontologia giobertiana alla sinistra hegeliana) (see vol. 1, pp. 1–197). 2. Bertrando Spaventa On the writings of Spaventa see the bibliography of Gentile and Alliney. Gentile edited Scritti filosofici (Naples, 1900), with an extensive introduction and bibliography, pp. i–clii; Principi di etica (Naples, 1904); Da Socrate a Hegel (Bari, 1905); La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea (Bari, 1908); Logica e metafisica (Bari, 1911); La politica dei gesuiti (Milan, 1911); Introduzione alla critica della filosofia empirica (Pisa, 1915). Alderisio wrote “Uno scritto inedito di B. Spaventa sul problema della cognizione e in generale sullo spirito,” Atti dell’Acca-

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demia dei Lincei (1933). See A. Pastore, “Sulla ‘parentesi’ inedita di B. Spaventa,” Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana (1934), pp. 218ff., now re-edited: Sul problema della cognizione e in generale dello spirito (Turin, 1958). About Spaventa see F. Fiorentino, in Giornale Napoletano (1883); D. Jaja prefaced the posthumous work Esperienza e metafisica (Turin, 1888); Gentile, B. Spaventa (Florence, 1920); Fazio-Allmayer, “Il problema della nazionalità nella filosofia di B. Spaventa,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana (1920); Gentile, Riforma della dialettica hegeliana (Messina, 1913); Alderisio, “L’esigenza realistica nell’idealismo di B. Spaventa,” Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana (1935) and successive years; Vigorita, B. Spaventa (Naples, 1938); A. C. De Meis, Ricordi di B. Spaventa (published by Gentile in) GCFI (1940), pp. 279ff.; F. Alderisio, Ripresa spaventiana (Naples, 1959); and especially the ample monograph of I. Cubeddu, Bertrando Spaventa (Florence, 1964), which we recommend also for any other information. Of Spaventa exists a splendid edition of all his works that were published and reprinted by Gentile in three volumes (Florence, 1972), the last containing a vast bibliography (pp. 857–1036) prepared by I. Cubeddu that gives the works of Spaventa and on Spaventa. In the first volume is reprinted by way of Preface the discourse that Gentile did not proposed for Scritti filosofici (1900), but the one in the reviewed form of the volume Bertrando Spaventa of 1924 for Vallecchi Publisher. An important previously unpublished document has been made available, with introduction and note: Lezioni di antropologia, edited by D. D’Orsi (Messina-Firenze, 1976), who is also the author of the solid volume generously illustrated of Scritti inediti e rari (1840–1880) (Padua, 1966). An anthology of texts with introduction has been also presented by G. Vacca with the title Unificazione nazionale ed egemonia culturale (Bari, 1969). Of special value are S. Landucci, “L’hegelismo in Italia nell’età del Risorgimento,” in Studi storici, 6 (1965), pp. 597–628; G. Vacca, Politica e filosofia in Bertrando Spaventa (Bari, 1967) (see review in the above mentioned bibliography of Cubeddu, pp. 1028–1035); R. Bortot, L’hegelismo di Bertrando Spaventa (Florence, 1968). On the teaching of Spaventa N. Siciliani de Cumis gives important information in “Herbart e herbartiani alla scuola di B. Spaventa,” in his volume Studi su Labriola (Urbino, 1977), pp. 89–161. About Silvio Spaventa in particular see E. Croce, Silvio Spaventa (Milan, 1969); G. M. Chiodi, La giustizia amministrativa nel pensiero politico di Silvio Spaventa (Bari, 1969). In the volume of F. Tessitore, Crisi e trasformazione dello Stato. Ricerche sul pensiero giuspublicistico italiano fra Otto e Novecento (Naples, 1963), pp. 11–50 are dedicated to the Spaventa brothers within the frame of the southern Hegelianism. 3–4. Circulation of Thought Of Tari see Estetica ideale (Naples, 1863); Lezioni di estetica generale (Naples, 1884); Saggi di critica (Trani, 1886); Lettere in difesa dell’Innominabile (Trani, 1905); Saggi di estetica e metafisica, Edited by B. Croce (Bari, 1911). About Tari see N. Gallo, A. Tari (Palermo, 1884); Croce, Letteratura della nuova Italia (Bari, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 393–411, 420; C. Dentice d’Accadia, “Il bello in natura. Estetica esistenziale di A. Tari,” La critica, 21 (1923), pp. 159–172, 301–309; 22 (1924), pp. 38–48, 101–107, 162–171, 223–228, 356–367; 23 (1925), pp. 45–54, 113– 117, 227–234, 291–297, 356–360; 24 (1926), pp. 95–106, 283–288, 361–374. Of Ceretti see the Pasaelogices specimen (Intra, 1864–1866), 3 vols., translated into Italian (Turin, 1888–1905), 9 vols., by C. Badini and E. Antonietti, with notes and introduction of P. D’Ercole. About Ceretti see P. D’Ercole, Notizia degli scritti e del

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pensiero filosofico di P. Ceretti (Turin, 1886); Saggio di panlogica, ovvero l’Enciclopedia filosofica dell’hegeliano P. Ceretti (Turin, 1904), 2 vols.; V. Alemanni, P. Ceretti ecc. (Milan, 1904); P. Martinetti, “P. Ceretti,” in Saggi e discorsi (Milan, 1926). On the writings of De Meis see Alliney, I pensatori della seconda metà del secolo xix, pp. 372–376; about De Meis see A. Del Vecchio Veneziani, La vita e l’opera di A. C. De Meis (Bologna, 1921). About Maturi see Guzzo’s Introduction to the reprint of Bruno ed Hegel (Florence, 1926). A bibliography of the works of Maturi exists in the reprint by Gentile of Introduzione alla filosofia (Bari, 1913). But especially M. Dal Pra, Il pensiero di S. Maturi (Milan, 1943). Of Florenzi Waddington see Pensieri filosofici (Florence, 1840), the translation of Bruno of Schelling with comment and introduction of Mamiani, the letter of Schelling and the version of the Monadologia of Leibniz (Florence, 1844); the Lettere filosofiche (Paris, 1848), Filosofemi di cosmologia e ontologia (Perugia, 1863); Saggio sulla natura (Florence, 1866); Saggio sulla filosofia dello spirito (Florence, 1868). About Florenzi keep in mind Le lettere which the volume of A. Zucconi, Lodovico innamorato (Milan, 1944) appropriated; but also see M. A. Degli Innocenti Venturini, “Marianna Florenzi Waddington: una traduttrice italiana di Schelling,” in the special issue dedicated to Schelling of Archivio di Filosofia (1976), pp. 173–184. About Ragnisco, see G. Marchesini, “Commemorazione di P. Ragnisco,” in Atti dell’Istituto Veneto, 80 (1921); L. Malusa, “Pietro Ragnisco, storico della filosofia patavina,” Quaderni per la storia dell’Università di Padova, 5 (1972), pp. 107–144. Of Labriola see the national edition of his Opere, Edited by L. Dal Pane (Milan, 1959, 1961, 1962), 3 vols. The editions prepared by Croce are always to be checked: Socrate (Bari, 1911); Scritti vari di filosofia e politica (Bari, 1906); La concezione materialistica della storia (Bari, 1938), with Croce’s essays: “Come nacque e come morí il marxismo teorico in Italia”; Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Bari, 1939). An excellent bibliography exists in appendix to the edition of Saggi, edited by V. Gerratana and A. Guerra (Rome, 1964 and 1977), pp. 388–457. See also the introduction to the edition of Saggi that I prepared (Bari, 1965). New editions appeared: Scritti filosofici e politici, edited by F. Sbarberi (Turin, 1973), 2 vols.; idem, Opere (Naples, 1972); Scritti politici 1886–1904, edited by V. Gerratana (Bari, 1970); I problemi della filosofia della storia, edited by N. Siciliani de Cumis (Naples, 1977). There have been important reprints and some identifications of journalistic collaborations before unknown in the volumes of Siciliani: Filosofia e università. Da Labriola a Vailati 1882–1902 (Urbino, 1975); Studi su Labriola (Urbino, 1977). Of his correspondence, see especially Lettere a Benedetto Croce 1885–1904 (Bari, 1975). The letters to Gentile published by Dal Pane in 1968, are now easily available in G. Gentile, La filosofia di Marx. Studi critici, edited by V. A. Bellezza (Florence, 1974), pp. 265–275. For a quick profile and essential information, see the voice completed up to 1976 by E. Garin in F. Andreucci and T. Detti, Il movimento operaio italiano. Dizionario biografico. 1853–1943 (Rome, 1977), 3 vols., vol. 1, pp. 21–39. L. Dal Pane has rewritten, with important additions, the fundamental monography of 1935, Antonio Labriola nella politica e nella cultura italiana (Turin, 1975). More complete and renewed is the volume of 1968 of G. Mastroianni, A. Labriola e la filosofia in Italia (Urbino, 1976), with rich and precise comparisons between Gentile and Croce. Strongly critical not only of Labriola but of the whole cultural position is F. De Aloysio, Studi sul pensiero di A. Labriola (Assisi-Roma, 1976). About De Sanctis, besides what Croce in many ways has collected and published see L. Russo, F. De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana (Florence, 1928); S. Landucci,

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Cultura e ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis (Milan, 1964); and recently C. Muscetta, in Letteratura Italiana Laterza (1975), vol. 8, pp. 355–462; A. Asor Rosa, La cultura, nella Storia d’Italia Einaudi (1975), vol. 4, pp. 850–878, and F. Ghilardi, Il superamento del kantismo e l’esperienza politica di Francesco De Sanctis (Naples, 1974). Of De Sanctis, particularly interesting for the history of thought, after the volume edited by F. Brunetti, Memorie, Lezioni e Scritti giovanili. La giovinezza e Studi hegeliani (Bari 1962), see vol. 14 of Einaudi edition, L’arte, la scienza e la vita. Nuovi saggi critici, conferenze e scritti vari, Edited by M. T. Lanza (Turin, 1972), of which the introduction is very important (pp. 13–90). Of De Sanctis’ juvenile writings see also the edition of A. Marinari that includes the school fragments of the lessons of 1842–1848: Purismo, illuminismo, storicismo (Turin, 1975), with its rich introduction.

Thirty-Six POSITIVISM (pp. 977–992) The reaction to the negative judgment that the idealistic historiography has made for a long time concerning positivism hereto manifested itself especially in an emphatic and rhetorical form with generic, not yet motivated reevaluations and with condemnation and refusal of the idealistic culture. The contemporary most active scholar of Ardigò is not Italian, Wilhelm Büttemeyer, to whom we owe the continuation of Ardigò bibliography: Appendix 2, in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 25 (1970), pp. 447–455 (that completes the bibliography begun by A. Levi and L. Limentani). Büttemeyer has published also the correspondence Villari-Ardigò: Roberto Ardigò and Pasquale Villari, Carteggio 1868–1916 (Florence, 1973), and some remarkable essays: “Robert Ardigò e la concezione materialistica della storia,” ACME, 22 (1969), pp. 171–180; Roberto Ardigò e la psicologia moderna (Florence, 1969); Der erkenntnistheoretische Positivismus Roberto Ardigòs mit seinen zeitgeschichtlichen Beziehungen (Meisenheim am Glan, 1974). See also the voice of A. Bortone in Dizionario biografico degli ltaliani (1962), vol. 4, pp. 20–27; A. Guerra, Il mondo della sicurezza. Ardigò, Labriola, Croce (Roma-Firenze, 1963); S. Mandolfo, I positivisti italiani (AngiulliGabelli-Ardigò) (Padua, 1966); G. M. Pozzo, Il problema della storia nel positivismo (Padua, 1967); R. Tisato, I1 problema del metodo nella pedagogia positivistica (Padua, 1967) and Studi sul positivismo pedagogico (Padua, 1967); A. Saloni, I1 positivismo e Roberto Ardigò (Rome, 1969); G. Landucci, “La formazione di Roberto Ardigò,” Atti dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria,” 37 (1972), pp. 43–87; G. Landucci, “Note sulla formazione del pensiero di Roberto Ardigò,” GCFI, 53 (1974), pp. 16–60. About the Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica see M. Costenaro, “La Rivista di Filosofia scientifica e il positivismo italiano,” GCFI, 51 (1972), pp. 92–117; idem, “Scienza, filosofia e metafisica nella Rivista di filosofia scientifica,” GCFI, 54 (1975), pp. 263–301. In particular about Lombroso see the monography of L. Bulferetti, Lombroso (Turin, 1975), with a large bibliography (pp. 458–579). Concerning some general questions, see V. Cavallo, “Discussioni e polemiche alle origini del positivismo italiano,” in I1 Protagora, 101–102 (1975), pp. 27–69. About Angiulli see the voice of E. Garin in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1961), vol. 3, pp. 294–297; G. C. A. Brofferio, and his rapports especially with Mill, see the voice of G. M. Pagano in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (1972), vol. 14, pp. 413–414. About the pedagogists and in a more general way about all major positivists see again Il pensiero pedagogico del positivismo, Edited by U. Spirito (but in collaboration with F. Valentini) (Florence, 1956). Concerning a truly important theme, Darwinism, see

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Landucci, Darwinismo a Firenze. Tra scienza e ideologia (1860–1900) (Florence, 1977). Consult the introduction of Paolo Rossi to the reprint of A. Fogazzaro, Ascensioni umane. Teoria dell’evoluzione e filosofia cristiana (Milan, 1977), pp. 7–46. 1. Salvatore Tommasi and Pasquale Villari Concerning positivism in general see A. Espinas, La philosophie experimentale en Italie (Paris, 1880); L. Limentani, “Il positivismo italiano” in the volume La filosofia contemporanea in Italia dal 1874 al 1920 (Naples, 1928), which is what already appeared in Logos throughout 1924; S. Caramella, Studi sul positivismo pedagogico (Florence, 1921); G. Tarozzi, “Considerazioni sintetiche sul positivismo italiano nel secolo xix,” in Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana (1935), pp. 277–296. Of Salvatore Tommasi see Il naturalismo moderno (Bari, 1913); about Tommasi, see Russo, F. De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana., pp. 172ff.; M. Di Giandomenico, S. Tommasi medico e filosofo (Bari, 1965). About Villari, see C. Barbagallo, L’opera del prof. Villari quale filosofo e teorico della storia e quale storiografo (Catania, 1901); of Villari see his philosophical writings in Arte, storia e filosofia (Florence, 1884); Scritti vari (Bologna, 1894). 2. A. Gabelli, N. Marselli, A. Angiulli, P. Siciliani, and N. Fornelli Of Gabelli see the reprint of L’uomo e le scienze morali, Edited by Credaro (Turin, 1915), and the introduction of Codignola to Metodo d’insegnamento (Florence, 1924); R. Miceli, “Aspetti del positivismo italiano, il Gabelli,” in Archivio di storia della filosofia italiana (1934), pp. 218ff. About Marselli and his work (with a bibliography) see Gentile, Le origini, vol. 2, pp. 85ff.; about Angiulli see F. Orestano, A. Angiulli (Rome, 1907); about Siciliani, besides Gentile and Caramella, see F. Giuffrida, Il fallimento della pedagogia scientifica (Città di Castello, 1921). 3. Roberto Ardigò About Ardigò exists an excellent “Bibliografia ardighiana” by A. Levi and L. Limentani in Rivista di filosofia, 19 (1928), pp. 400–428; 20 (1929), pp. 179–196, 395–420, with an appendix in 31 (1940). Ardigò’s Opere filosofiche was published in 11 vols., in Padua, by Edizione Draghi. See also Scritti vari, Edited by Marchesini (Florence, 1922) and, posthumously, La relatività del pensiero (Milan, 1928) also prepared by Marchesini. Concerning the thought of Ardigò, see G. Marchesini, La vita e il pensiero di R. Ardigò (Milan, 1907); L’uomo e l’umanista (Florence, 1922); E. Troilo, R. Ardigò (Milan, 1926); idem, Pagine scelte di R. Ardigò (Geneva, 1913); G. Tarozzi, R. Ardigò (Rome, 1928); R. Mondolfo, Il pensiero di R. Ardigò (Mantua, 1908); L. Limentani, “R. Ardigò,” in Logos (1921), pp. 136–157; F. Olgiati, “R. Ardigò” in Uomini piccoli e uomini grandi (Milan, 1921), pp. 7–123, but see also P. Orano, Ardigò (Milan, 1909); G. Papini, “Il teologo del positivismo,” in Leonardo, June 1904, pp. 10–18; J. Bluwstein, Aus der modernen italienischen Philosophie; die Weltanschauung R. Ardigò’s (Leipzig, 1911); A. Espinas, La philosophie experimentale en Italie, pp. 86–113, 148–157; Höffding, Moderne Philosophen (Leipzig, 1905), pp. 38– 53). An accurate comprehensive view is that of F. Amerio, Ardigò (Milan, 1957). 4. Simone Corleo About Corleo, besides Gentile, see the essay of Orestano in Gravia Levia (Rome, 1914) with a complete bibliography of the writings of Corleo; see also Aliotta, “Il principio d’identità nella filosofia del Corleo,” Rivista di filosofia (1917).

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Thirty-Seven EPILOGUE: REBIRTH AND DECLINE OF IDEALISM (pp. 995–1066) 1. Orientations of Italian Philosophy The work of Alf Nyman to which we referred is Italienskt tankeliv genom tvenne århundraden 1760–1960 (Lund, 1965), 2 vols. In the book, Nyman dedicates about 800 pages to the philosophy of the 20th century with some references to that of the 19th century. Within this extensive exposition to Varisco, only one page is dedicated, to Carabellese few lines, and to Martinetti the most rapid reference. It may be useful to be aware of impression of different readers and of different cultural ambiances! Concerning the matter dealt in this epilogue see the issue of Logos, 7 (1924), pp. 1–153, dedicated to the Italian thought of the first quarter of the century, with various contributors: L. Limentani, “Il positivismo”; A. Masnovo, “Il neotomismo”; Adolfo Levi, “L’idealismo critico”; M. Maresca, “Il neocriticismo”; G. Della Volpe, “Il neohegelismo”; E. P. Lamanna, “Il realismo psicologistico.” L. Limentani and R. Mondolfo, “Formes et tendences actuelles du mouvemenf philosophique en Italie,” in Revue de Synthèse, 12 (1936), pp. 141–162; R. Miceli di Serradileo, Filosofia (Milan, 1937); M. F. Sciacca, Il secolo xx (Milan, 1942); F. Lombardi, La filosofia italiana negli ultimi cento anni (Asti, 1957); E. Paci, La filosofia contemporanea (Milan, 1957); La filosofia contemporanea in Italia (Asti, 1958) of various authors. See also my Cronache di filosofia italiana, 1900–1943 (Bari, 1955), the third edition of which contains an addition “Quindici anni dopo, 1945–1960” that we recommend for the bibliographical indications. Finally keep in mind the self-representative collections: Filosofi italiani contemporanei, by M. F. Sciacca (Como, 1944); Filosofi che si confessano, by G. M. Sciacca (Messina, 1948); La mia prospettiva filosofica (Padua, 1950).Concerning the discussions on southern Hegelianism and especially on Spaventa and Labriola, see G. Vacca, “Recenti studi sull’hegelismo napoletano,” in Studi storici, 7 (1966), pp. 131–182. To the additions that follow, especially for those of a general character, it is necessary to premise a notice, given the impossibility of reaching satisfying indications concerning the particulars. The past decade (1965–1975), with the massive insertion of always different new influences, the many “conversion,” with ideological and apologetical rather than historical and critical intents, saw a clear refusal of the interpretive tendency of the history of Italian thought of which this work shares many aspects. In many cases, if the past has not been completely rejected, if all the most recent culture has not been repudiated as provincial and without importance, nonetheless some possible anticipations (precorrimenti) of ancestors, no matter whether authentic or fictitious, of present positions have been preferred, without any preoccupation for rigorous readings, with impatience toward factual exactitude, within the singular reemergence of an exasperated “actualism.” Anyway, and this is what we wished to make the reader aware of, often even those writings that have profound motives of truth, constitute—rather than contributions for a new and more adequate historiographic reconstruction and evaluation—general programs and projects, not at all useless, if they are not indulging too much on anathemas or apologies. In any case, of this shall be aware anyone wishing to retrace the long and tormented path of the Italian

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thought between the 19th and the 20th century. Thus among the works of general character see N. Bobbio, “Profilo ideologico del Novecento,” in Storia della letteratura italiana directed by E. Cecchi e N. Sapegno (Milan, 1969), vol. 9, pp. 115–228; M. Quaranta, “Positivismo ed hegelismo in Italia,” in Storia del pensiero filosofico e scientifico, directed by L. Geymonat (Milan, 1971), vol. 5, pp. 577–617; idem, “La filosofia italiana fino alla seconda guerra mondiale,” ibid., vol. 6 (1972), pp. 294–392; L. Geymonat e M. Quaranta, “La filosofia italiana contemporanea,” ibid., vol. 7 (1976), pp. 687–755; P. Piovani, “Il pensiero idealistico,” in Storia d’Italia Einaudi, see “I documenti,” (Turin, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 1551–1581; C. Luporini, “Il marxismo e la cultura italiana del Novecento,” ibid., pp. 1586–1611; A. Asor Rosa, “La cultura dall’Unità a oggi,” ibid., vol. 4 (1975), pp. 821–664; R. Luperini, “La crisi del positivismo” in Letteratura italiana Laterza (Bari, 1976), vol. 9, pp. 3–117; N. Badaloni and C. Muscetta, “Labriola, Croce, Gentile,” ibid. (Bari, 1976), vol. 9, pp. 97–229. Furthermore see V. Verra, “Parlano i filosofi italiani,” in the volume edited by Verra, La filosofia dal ’45 a oggi (Turin, 1976), pp. 447–540; and for a position sternly critical A. Efirov, La filosofia borghese italiana del xx secolo (Florence, 1970) (the original appeared in 1968 in Moscow). Especially see E. Garin, Intellettuali italiani del xx secolo (Rome, 1975), 2nd edition (about Croce, Vailati, Michelstaedter, De Ruggiero, Codignola, Cantimori, Banfi and the group of Studi filosofici, Curiel, and Gramsci, with a bibliography reaching up to the year 1975). 2. The Heritage from Positivism Concerning some of the themes covered in the text see M. Di Giandomenico, Salvatore Tommasi medico e filosofo (Bari, 1965). 3. Positivism and Socialism About Enrico Ferri (1856–1929) see Marx and Engels, Corrispondenza con Italiani, 1848–1895 (Milan, 1964); R. Salvadori, “Enrico Ferri politico. Dal radicalismo all’adesione al Partito socialista,” in Rivista storica del socialismo, 3 (1960), pp. 499– 544 (valid also for the rapports with positivism). About Filippo Turati see the first volume of the Rivista storica del socialismo (1958), pp. 1–165, dealing totally with Turati; L. Cortesi, Turati giovane. Scapigliatura, positivismo, marxismo (Milan, 1962). Of Alessandro Groppali of Cremona, a disciple of Ardigò in Padua, see the Elementi di sociologia (Geneva, 1905); Filosofia del diritto (Milan, 1906); La morale sociale (Livorno, 1915). 4. The Crisis of Positivism Concerning the discussions about Cattaneo, to which we alluded in the text, see S. Romagnoli, “Carlo Cattaneo tra illuminismo e positivismo”, in Rivista storica del socialismo, 1 (1959), pp. 229–244; P. C. Masini, “La scuola del Cattaneo: a. Il pensiero politico di Gabriele Rosa; b. Arcangelo Ghisleri e il ‘ritorno’ a Cattaneo,” in Rivista storica del socialismo, 2 (1959), pp. 501–536; L. Ricci Garotti, “Heidegger contra Hegel,” in Studi filosofici (Urbino, 1965), pp. 9–51. For the debate about Cattaneo, see particularly the already mentioned volume of Bobbio, Una filosofia militante. Studi su Carlo Cattaneo, pp. 182–209, which implies an evaluation on the whole Italian philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries: “Se fosse vissuto in Inghilterra sarebbe stato contemporaneo di John Stuart Mill. In Italia fu contemporaneo di Antonio Rosmini. Se mai, egli s’ingannò grandemente credendo che 1’oscurantismo filosofico, le ‘scole braminiche’, fossero alle sue spalle, e la loro riap-

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parizione fosse un episodio di breve durata dopo la splendida stagione dell’illuminismo. Le ‘scole braminiche’ non erano un evento sporadico ne combatterono una trascurabile scaramuccia di retroguardia. Erano puramente e semplicemente un dato permanente della nostra storia intellettuale e hanno contrassegnato il ‘carattere della filosofia italiana’. Cattaneo le aveva alle spalle: non si accorse di averle anche di fronte. Credeva rappresentassero un morto passato: non sapeva che avrebbero avuto un fulgido avvenire.” For certain aspects of the discussion see Atti del convegno su Gaetano Salvemini (Firenze, 8–10 novembre 1975) (Milan, 1977). 5. Positivism and Irrationalism About Giovanni Marchesini (1868–1931) see L. Limentani, “Giovanni Marchesini,” Rivista pedagogica, 25 (1932), pp. 1–30, with the list of the writings. Also “Ein italienischer Fiktionalist, Giovanni Marchesini,” in the volume Die Philosophie des Als Ob und das Leben. Festschrift zu Hans Vaihinger 80. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1932), pp. 92–103. Of Marchesini especially see La filosofia dell’utile (Palermo, 1900); Il simbolismo nella conoscenza e nella moralità (Turin, 1901); Le finzioni dell’anima (Bari, 1905); L’intolleranza e i suoi presupposti (Turin, 1909); La dottrina positiva delle idealità (Rome, 1913) and the already mentioned writings on Ardigò. Erminio Troilo has presented Marchesini’s doctrines in many historical and theoretical works (Paci called the doctrines “un realismo neobruniano e neospinoziano”): Idee e ideali del positivismo (Rome, 1909); Il positivismo e i diritti dello spirito (Turin, 1912); two series of Figure e dottrine di pensatori (Naples, 1937 and Padua, 1941). About Giuseppe Tarozzi (1866–1958) see E. Guastalla, Giuseppe Tarozzi (Turin, 1951); D. Fiorensoli, Il pensiero filosofico di Giuseppe Tarozzi (Padua, 1964) (with a list of his works). Of him in particular see Della necessità nel fatto naturale ed umano (Turin, 1896–1897); Apologia del positivismo (Rome, 1928); L’esistenza e l’anima (Bari, 1930); La ricerca filosofica (Naples, 1936); L’infinito e il divino (Bologna, 1951). For some interesting themes of the production of Marchesini see V. Mura, Cattolici e liberali nell’età giolittiana. I1 dibattito sulla tolleranza (Bari, 1976). About Alessandro Levi see G. Marino, La filosofia giuridica di Alessandro Levi fra positivismo e idealismo (Naples, 1976). 6. The Crisis of Marxism Concerning what is said about Labriola see E. Garin, La concezione materialistica della storia (Bari, 1965), and the appendix to the edition of Saggi sul materialismo storico, by V. Gerratana and A. Guerra (Rome, 1964), pp. 388–457. Important information exists in E. Ragionieri, Socialdemocrazia tedesca e socialisti italiani, 1875– 1895 (Rome, 1961). 7. The Crisis of Science Concerning this matter see A. Aliotta, La reazione idealistica contro la scienza, (Palermo, 1912) (About Aliotta we will speak later). Concerning some general discussions keep in mind the journal of Scientia established in 1907 by Federigo Enriques and Eugenio Rignano. Of Enriques the volume Problemi della scienza (Bologna, 1906) acquired a widespread fame. A remarkable collection of texts was due to L. Lombardo-Radice, Natura, ragione e storia (Turin, 1958). Of Aliotta in 1970, in Naples, was reprinted La reazione idealistica contro la scienza, Edited by C. Carbonara. About Federigo Enriques, not only about his figure, but also the problems and methods of his research, many contributions exist in Atti del Convegno Linceo of

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1971 on Storia, pedagogia e filosofia della scienza a celebrazione del centenario della nascita di Federigo Enriques (Rome, 1973). Valentino Annibale Pastore (1868–1956), faced in an original manner the problem of science, developing a philosophy of science and a logic. Of him, see Logica formale dedotta dalla considerazione dei modelli meccanici (Turin, 1906); Sillogismo e proporzione (Turin, 1910); Il problema della causalità, con particolare riguardo alla teoria del metodo sperimentale (Turin, 1921); Il solipsismo (Turin, 1923); La logica del potenziamento (Naples, 1936); Logica sperimentale (Naples, 1939) (but see also La filosofia di Lenin (Milan, 1946); La volontà dell’assurdo. Storia e crisi dell’esistenzialismo (Milan, 1948). 8–10. Benedetto Croce and His Formation Of Croce (1866–1952) see the edition of all his works from Fratelli Laterza, consulting the complete Catalogue published in 1966 at the occasion of the centennial; La Critica (1903–1943), the Quaderni della “Critica” (1945–1951); F. Nicolini, “L’Editio ne varietur” delle Opere di Benedetto Croce (Naples, 1960); the two bibliographies of E. Cione, Bibliografia crociana (Milan, 1956); and the excellent work of S. Bosdari, L’ opera di Benedetto Croce (Naples, 1964). On the biography, see F. Nicolini, Benedetto Croce (Turin, 1962) and Il Croce minore (Milan-Naples, 1963). In 1964, Alfredo Parente began publishing a Rivista di studi crociani. There is not a bibliography that lists all the literature about Croce. And it is impossible to give here the principal indications. Important polemic works are gradually indicated in the text. We will limit ourselves to those writings in which there are also bibliographical informations. See foremost G. Castellano, Introduzione allo studio delle opere di Benedetto Croce. Note bibliografiche e ricerche (Bari, 1920); G. Castellano, Benedetto Croce. Il filosofo, Il critico, Lo storico (Bari, 1936), 2nd edition; L’opera filosofica, storica e letteraria di Benedetto Croce. Saggi di scrittori italiani e stranieri e bibliografia dal 1920 al 1941 (Bari, 1942). An integrated bibliography exists up to 1953 in “Bibliografia intorno alle opere di Benedetto Croce dal 1941 al 1953,” published in appendix to the miscellaneous volume Benedetto Croce, Edited by Francesco Flora (Milan, 1953), pp. 575–615. See also M. Corsi, Le origini del pensiero di Benedetto Croce (Florence, 1951); F. Chabod, “Croce storico,” in Rivista storica italiana, 64 (1952), pp. 473–530; C. Antoni, Commento a Croce (Venice, 1955); N. Bobbio, Politica e cultura (Turin, 1955); M. Abbate, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce e la crisi della società italiana (Turin, 1955) (and 1966); G. N. Giordano Orsini, Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic (Carbondale, 1961); E. Agazzi, II giovane Croce e il marxismo (Turin, 1962); N. Bobbio, “Benedetto Croce a dieci anni dalla morte,” Belfagor, 17 (1962), pp. 621–639; G. Sasso, “Filosofia e storiografia in Benedetto Croce. Premesse per un’interpretazione,” La Cultura, 1 (1963), pp. 571–606; 2 (1964), pp. 30–54; R. Franchini, Croce interprete di Hegel (Naples, 1964). Finally, consult the contributions gathered in De Homine, 11–12 (1964), and especially those of G. Fano, G. Calabro, T. de Mauro, and A. Guerra (Guerra, Vent’anni di studi sul Croce politico, 1944–1964, pp. 287–340, gives also rich bibliographical indications). Among the Croceans, Carlo Antoni deserves a special place; see his Dallo storicismo alla sociologia (Florence, 1940); La lotta contro la ragione (Florence, 1942); Considerazioni su Hegel e su Marx (Naples, 1946); Lo storicismo (Turin, 1957); Chiose all’estetica, with a profile of the author by Guido Calogero (Rome, 1960).

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The following authors, all in a different ways, contributed to the Crocean discussion: Adelchi Attisani, Raffaello Franchini, Alfredo Parente, Michele Biscione, Manlio Ciardo, and many more. If with the distance in time is growing also the detachment from the influence of Croce, nevertheless the discussion about him is still relevant, and we can become aware of it reading for this purpose Vittorio Stella, Il giudizio su Croce. Momenti per una storia delle interpretazioni (Pescara, 1971); remarkable are the documents in the two volumes of R. Colapietra, Benedetto Croce e la politica italiana (Bari, 1969– 1970). While the new partial editions of his correspondence are bringing new light on the development of his thought, the effort of retracing his particular theoretical vicissitudes can be observed in the impressive work of G. Sasso, Benedetto Croce. La ricerca della dialettica (Naples, 1975). It is a work rich with acute interventions on particular points and with some aspects of the Italian cultural life, like for instance, that of La Cultura nella storia della cultura italiana, now offered by La Cultura, 14 (1976), special issue for the seventieth birthday of G. Calogero (Florence, 1976), pp. 19–107. See also: M. Biscione, Interpreti di Croce (Naples, 1968) (about C. Antoni, pp. 95–190); D. Corradini, Croce e la ragione giuridica borghese (Bari, 1974). Important contribution exist in the miscellany edited by A. Bruno, Benedetto Croce (Catania, 1974) (with texts of Badaloni, Bruno, Corradini, Guerra, Lombardi, Mastroianni, Onofrio, Paci, Pezzino). From the text of the letter of 14 December 1899 that Croce sent to D’Ancona and that I cited at pp. 1291–1292 of the original Italian version of the history (and at p. 1023 of this English edition) I derived a significant locus in my other work (Intellettuali italiani). This is due to my friendship with Corrado Vivanti. It can be read in full in Carteggio D’Ancona-Croce, Edited by D. Conrieri, with introduction of M. Fubini (Pisa, 1977), pp. 189–190. Fortunately, Fubini, who did not know that the relevant parts (of this letter) had been already published, underlined its same passages and showed of preferring it over all the other letters in the collection: “… forse la piú importante del carteggio.” 11. Rebirth of Idealism The literature on the movements of the beginnings of the 20th century is very rich and it is impossible for us here to delay on it. However, we recommend the extensive collection of journals in La cultura italiana del ’900 attraverso le riviste (Turin, 1960– 1963) of which several volumes have appeared; vol. 1: Leonardo, Hermes, Il regno, Edited by D. Frigessi (Turin, 1960); vol. 2: La Voce (1908–1914), Edited by A. Romanò (Turin, 1960); vol. 3: Lacerba, La Voce (1914–1916), Edited by G. Scalia (Turin, 1961); vol. 4: L’Unità, La Voce politica, Edited by F. Golzio and A. Guerra (Turin, 1962); vol. 5: L’Ordine Nuovo (1919–1920), Edited by P. Spriano (Turin, 1963). Furthermore, see Le Riviste di Piero Gobetti, Edited by L. Basso and L. Anderlini (Milan, 1961); La Voce (1908–1916), Edited by G. Ferrata (San Giovanni ValdarnoRoma, 1961); E. Kühn Amendola, Vita con Giovanni Amendola (Milan, 1960). The literature about the journals of the beginning of the 20th century and about the cultural movements connected with them has much increased, especially in La Voce of Prezzolini, where the documents exposed by Prezzolini himself must be considered before any other thing. They contain important information on the “circulation of ideas.” Among the many publications see M. Inenghi, Giovanni Papini (Florence, 1972); E. Gentile, “La Voce” e l’età giolittiana (Milan, 1972); U. Carpi, “La Voce.” Letteratura e primato degli intellettuali (Bari, 1975); about Renato Serra see, besides the volume of Scritti in onore di Renato Serra per il cinquantenario della morte (Flor-

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ence, 1974), A. Acciani, Renato Serra. Contributo alla storia dell’intellettuale senza qualità (Bari, 1976); about Gobetti, a part from the reproduction of periodic literature, see “Mezzo secolo. Materiali di ricerca storica,” in Annali 1975, with various contributions, and the volume of C. Pogliano, Piero Gobetti e l’ideologia dell’assenza (Bari, 1976). 12. Pragmatism and Its Different Forms Concerning the Italian pragmatism, see A. Santucci, Il pragmatismo italiano (Bologna, 1963) that we recommend for all the bibliographical information. Of Vailati, besides the complete edition of Scritti (Leipzig-Florence, 1911), see I1 metodo della filosofia, Edited by F. Rossi Landi (Bari, 1957). About Vailati see the issue dedicated to him by Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 18 (1963), pp. 277–523; it contains the contributions of many authors and several unpublished texts. Of Calderoni see the edition of Scritti, edited by O. Campa (Florence, 1924). On futurism and some of its connections, see Christa Baumgarth, Geschichte des Futurismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1966). Of Vailati there is now the Epistolario. 1891–1909, Edited by G. Lanaro. Introduction of M. Dal Pra (Turin, 1971). Lanaro has also edited an anthology of Scritti filosofici (Naples, 1972). 13. Philosophy in the Universities We have hereby gathered together some essential information about thinkers often variously classified; in general they were teachers in universities who brought at time valuable contributions to the discipline. Leaving out those already mentioned in the text, the first philosophers we list were somewhat connected with the teachings of Ardigò: Giovanni Dandolo (1861–1908) researched psychology, gnoseology, and the great problems of science in La causa e la legge nell’interpretazione dell’universo (Padua, 1901); Cesare Ranzoli (1876–1926), had multiple interests and was a famous student of the fortune of Spencer in Italy (1904), lived through the crisis of positivism and the conflict with idealism, leaving a work worthy of attention, which was published posthumously, Il realismo puro (Rome, 1932). About Ranzoli see G. Costa, Il pensiero di C. Ranzoli (Padua, 1930), with a list of works. Of Troiano must be remembered Ricerche sistematiche per una filosofia del costume (Naples, 1900) and Le basi dell’umanesimo (Turin, 1907); of Giovanni Cesca (1859–1908), La filosofia della vita (Messina, 1903) and Filosofia dell’azione (Palermo, 1908). The greater part of the works of Erminio Juvalta was edited and published by Ludovico Geymonat in I limiti del razionalismo etico (Turin, 1945). About Juvalta see A. Guzzo, “Vita e scritti di Erminio Juvalta,” in GCFI, 17 (1936), pp. 75–95, 138–162, 281–291. See of Ludovico Limentani, La previsione dei fatti sociali (Turin, 1907); I presupposti formali dell’indagine etica (Geneva, 1903); La morale della simpatia (Geneva, 1914); Moralità e normalità (Ferrara, 1920); “La giustizia” in appendix to Riflessioni sulla giustizia of Alessandro Levi (Lodi, 1943). A bibliography is found in Garin, Ludovico Limentani (Florence, 1941). Of Adolfo Levi, historian of philosophy, sceptic, see Sceptica (Turin, 1921). Of Cosmo Guastella truly important are the Saggi sulla teoria della conoscenza (Palermo, 1912) and Le ragioni del fenomenismo (Palermo, 1921–1923), 3 vols. About Guastella see F. Albeggiani, Il sistema filosofico di C. Guastella (Florence, 1927). With the tradition of neo-criticism are connected Alessandro Chiappelli (1857– 1931), a prolific historian of philosophy; Guido Villa (1867–1949), a student of Carlo Cantoni, L’idealismo moderno (Turin, 1905); La psicologia contemporanea (Turin,

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1899 and 1911); Filippo Masci (1844–1922), a disciple of Spaventa, Pensiero e conoscenza (Turin, 1922); about Masci see F. De Sarlo, L’opera filosofica di Filippo Masci (L’Aquila, 1926); Mariano Maresca (1884–1948). Special attention should be given to Francesco De Sarlo (1864–1937) for his interests for the sciences of life, for psychology, for the most alive contemporary currents of thought outside Italy. Of De Sarlo see I dati dell’esperienza psichica (Florence, 1903); Psicologia e filosofia (Florence, 1918), 2 vols.; Introduzione alla filosofia (Milan, 1928); L’uomo nella vita sociale (Bari, 1931); Vita e psiche. Saggio di filosofia della biologia (Florence, 1935). In 1907, he founded La cultura filosofica that continued until 1917, and had valuable importance as the instrument of information on the tendencies of non-Italian thought. De Sarlo was polemic about Croce, and then in conflict with idealism in general: Gentile e Croce. Lettere filosofiche di un “superego” (Florence, 1925). About De Sarlo see G. Ponzano, L’opera filosofica di F. De Sarlo (Naples, 1940). In 1972 part of the series “I filosofi siciliani,” has appeared with the first volume of the Opera omnia of Cosmo Guastella. It contains the first of the essays on the theory of knowledge and is edited by C. Dollo. 14–15. Philosophical Debates and Religious Restlessness About Varisco (1850–1933)—of whom Il pensiero vissuto, Edited by Enrico Castelli, his disciple (Rome, 1940) should be read—see G. Alliney, Varisco (Milan, 1942); G. Calogero, La filosofia di Bernardino Varisco (Messina-Florence, 1950). With Varisco was connected Pantaleo Carabellese (1877–1948) who later almost turned upside down in an insistent criticism the philosophy of actualism: L’essere e il problema religioso. A proposito del “Conosci te stesso” di Bernardino Varisco (Bari, 1914); Critica del concreto (Pistoia, 1921 and Rome, 1940); II problema teologico come filosofia (Rome, 1931); L’idealismo italiano (Naples, 1938 and Rome, 1946). Nicola Abbagnano has written with precision on the thought of Varisco: it is “capovolgimento simmetrico dell’idealismo attualistico del Gentile. I caratteri che questo attualismo attribuisce al soggetto sono dal Carabellese riferiti all’oggetto: non 1’io ma 1’oggetto è pura attività, è unico, è universale.” For a discussion of the thought of Carabellese see G. Semerari, Storicismo e ontologismo critico (Manduria, 1960), 2nd ed.; Giornate di studi carabellesiani (Geneva, 1965). Of Carabellese, the university courses on Kant of the years 1941–1943 have been published in 1969 in Bari, edited, and introduced by G. Semerari: La filosofia dell’esistenza in Kant (Bari, 1969). Of Martinetti (1871–1943), besides the cited texts, see also Saggi e discorsi (Turin, 1926); Ragione e fede, Saggi religiosi (Turin, 1942); and the new edition of La Libertà, Edited by G. Zanga (Turin, 1965). About Martinetti see the Giornata martinettiana, 16 novembre 1963 (Turin, 1963). A growing interest for Piero Martinetti is manifest and many of his works have been reprinted, and some unedited material has appeared. Among the reprints and the new editions see Gesú Cristo e il cristianesimo, edited by G. Zanga (Milan, 1964); Ragione e fede. Saggi religiosi (Naples, 1972), with an introduction of L. Pareyson; Saggi filosofici e religiosi, with preface and bibliography of L. Pareyson; Scritti di metafisica e di filosofia della religione (Turin, 1977). About him, besides the beautiful remembrance of A. Pellegrini, Memorie per un nuovo giorno, reprinted in 1972, see C. Terzi, P. Martinetti: la vita e il pensiero originale (Bergamo, 1966).

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Tied to Martinetti, Giovanni Emanuele Bariè (1894–1956) developed a form of transcendental idealism: Oltre la critica (Milan, 1929); L’io trascendentale (Milan, 1948). Though he was educated at the School of Milan, Antonio Banfi (1886–1957) came to form himself quite independently. See P. Rossi, Hegelismo e socialismo nel giovane Banfi, as an introduction to the volume of essays of Banfi, Incontri con Hegel (Urbino, 1965), in which he strongly feels the influence of the School of Marpurg, of Simmel and Dilthey and, then, of Husserl. See the Principi di una teoria della ragione (Milan, 1926). On Banfi’s total activity there is the exhaustive volume of F. Papi, Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi (Florence, 1961). Of Banfi almost all the writings have been reprinted and the entire series of the issues of Studi filosofici have been duplicated in an anastatic edition with the introduction of E. Garin (Bologna, 1972); for the many contributions with an optimal bibliography the miscellany Antonio Banfi e il pensiero contemporaneo. Atti del convegno di studi banfiani, Reggio Emilia, 13–14 maggio 1967 (Florence, 1969) has to be consulted together with the cited Intellettuali italiani del xx secolo, pp. 215–264. Concerning the modernism, of which we spoke in the text, see the research of Pietro Scoppola, Crisi modernista e rinnovamento cattolico in Italia (Bologna, 1961), and Michele Ranchetti, Cultura e riforma religiosa nella storia del modernismo (Turin, 1963). 16. Origin of Actualism The complete edition of the works of Gentile (1875–1944) exists through the Editrice Sansoni. Very useful is Vito A. Bellezza, Bibliografia degli scritti di Giovanni Gentile (Florence, 1950). Relevant material for studying and monographic researching can be found in the volumes published by “Fondazione Gentile” with the title Giovanni Gentile. La vita e l’opera (Florence, 1948). Among the best all-comprehensive works are E. Chiocchetti, La filosofia di Giovanni Gentile (Milan, 1922 and 1925); U. Spirito, Il nuovo idealismo italiano (Rome, 1923) (and a 2nd enlarged ed. in Florence in 1930), which constitutes a good panorama of the discussions on actualism); V. La Via, L’idealismo attuale di G. Gentile (Trani, 1925); L. Russo, La critica letteraria contemporanea, with a second volume titled Dal Gentile agli ultimi romantici (Bari, 1942); H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana, 1960). Keep in mind also the yearly volumes of the Biblioteca Filosofica of Palermo (1912–1914) with writings of Gentile, “L’atto del pensare come atto puro,” in vol. 1, pp. 27–4); of Fazio, “La formazione del problema kantiano,” in vol. 1, pp. 43–90; of LombardoRadice, “Idealismo e pedagogia,” in vol. 1, pp. 113–144; of Guastella, “L’infinito,” in vol. 2, pp. 3–172); again of Fazio, “Saggi di filosofia dell’educazione,” in vol. 2, pp. 173–228; of De Ruggiero, “La scienza come esperienza assoluta, “in vol. 2, pp. 229– 329; of Croce, “Genesi e dissoluzione della Filosofia della storia,” in vol. 2, pp. 389– 404; of Adolfo Omodeo, “Res gestae e historia rerum,” in vol. 3, pp. 1–28; of Maggiore, “Pazzia ed errore,” in vol. 3, pp. 29–58; again of Gentile, “Idealismo e misticismo,” in vol. 3, pp. 97–120; and of Fazio, “Arte e filosofia,” in vol. 3, pp. 121–146. Still see the first two series of Giornale critico della filosofia italiana. About the followers of Gentile we will discuss later, but it is convenient to mention at this point the two most devoted disciples: Vito Fazio Allmayer (of whom especially we are citing the essays of the volume Il problema morale come problema della costituzione del soggetto, e altri saggi (Florence, 1942), and Giuseppe Saitta, who radicalized to the maximum the theses of actualism in Le origini del neotomismo in Italia nel sec. xix, with a preface of Gentile (Bari, 1912); Lo spirito come eticità (Bologna, 1921); La libertà umana e l’esistenza (Florence, 1940).

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The publication of the Opera omnia of Gentile has continued; but of particular interest remains the correspondence, especially that with Jaja in two vols. (Florence, 1969), with D’Ancona e Crivellucci (Florence, 1973), with Omodeo (Florence, 1975), with Croce (or, better, the letters to Croce in three vols. covering from 1896 to 1909 (Florence, 1972–1976). An effort to an organic presentation is La filosofia di Marx, Edited by V. Bellezza (Florence, 1974); see also Storia della filosofia italiana, 2 vols. (Florence, 1969), edited by E. Garin. About Gentile the following are particularly valuable for the wealth of information: A. Lo Schiavo, Introduzione a Gentile (Bari, 1974); Antimo Negri, Giovanni Gentile (Firenze, 1975). For the biography see M. Di Lalla, Vita di Giovanni Gentile (Florence, 1975); on his formation: C. Bonomo, La prima formazione del pensiero filosofico di G. Gentile (Florence, 1972); M. Cicalese, La formazione del pensiero politico di Giovanni Gentile (1896–1919) (Milan, 1972). Consult again A. Lo Schiavo, La filosofia politica di Giovanni Gentile (Rome, 1971); U. Spirito, Giovanni Gentile (Florence, 1969), and Dall’attualismo al problematicismo (Florence, 1976). See at last, part of the interventions at the week dedicated to the study of Gentile in Rome from 26 to 31 May 1975, in GCFI, 54 (1975), pp. 319–407. Worthy of attention because of the attitude of Gentile in the face of modernism is the study of M. L. Barbera Veracini, “Gentile e Croce di fronte al Modernismo,” in GCFI, 48 (1969), pp. 528–547 (and the series of studies, all to be examined, of Fondazione Gentile: Giovanni Gentile. La vita e il pensiero, 13 (1971), pp. 191–212; in the same volume read also A. Del Noce, “Gentile e la poligonia giobertiana,” pp. 101– 166. In general, on the intervention of the intellectuals see S. Zeppi, I1 pensiero politico dell’idealismo italiano e il nationalfascismo (Florence, 1973) (with interventions of Croce, Gentile, De Ruggiero, Lornbardo-Radice, Omodeo); D. Faucci, La filosofia politica di Croce e Gentile (Florence, 1974) (but see now the two volumes concerning Il pensiero di Giovanni Gentile (Rome, 1977) published by the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia. The books constitute the proceedings of the conference of 1975, and offer a good and comprehensive bibliography. 17. Contrasts and Diffusion of Idealism About Aliotta, born in 1881, see the volume by different authors presented by M. F. Sciacca, Lo sperimentalismo di Antonio Aliotta (Naples, 1951). Many are the Italian scholars who were educated in his school or were in other ways influenced by him, though they thereafter followed their own autonomous paths: from Nicola Abbagnano to Cleto Carbonara, from Michele Federico Sciacca to Stefanini, to many other younger scholars who moved between religious instances and idealistic influences. Abbagnano through the experience of a positive existentialism reached more interesting and open positions of Italian philosophy. He wrote Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero (Naples, 1923); La struttura dell’esistenza (Turin, 1939); Introduzione all’esistenzialismo (Milan, 1942); Esistenzialismo positivo (Turin, 1948). Cleto Carbonara, about whom see the miscellaneous volume La filosofia dell’esperienza di Cleto Carbonara (Naples, 1965), with bibliography. Sciacca felt strongly the influence of actualism in his revival of Rosminianism; about him see M. Schiavone, L’idealismo di M. F. Sciacca come sviluppo del rosminianismo (Domodossola-Milan, 1957), with an accurate bibliography. Stefanini audited the lectures of Aliotta in Padua and then developed his own form of an Augustinian “personalism” open to many influences. The vicissitudes of Rensi, even the external ones, are very significant and it would be convenient to reconsider all of them, from the years spent in Lugano and from the

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period of redacting the Coenobium, to the confusing and sometimes equivocal period around 1920s to the opposition to fascism to extreme final positions. See La filosofia dell’autorità (Palermo, 1920), and P. Nonis, La scepsi etica di Giuseppe Rensi (Rome, 1957), with an exhaustive bibliography. A particular discussion concerning the Kantism of several Italian Marxists, starting with Alfredo Poggi and ending with Adelchi Baratono with his extreme positions would have been very convenient. See Baratono, Le due facce di Carlo Marx. Economismo e romanticismo (Geneva, 1946), a course on Marxist criticism. Baratono, however, is of interest for the Italian philosophical vicissitude also for his researches of aesthetics, his expositions of Hume and of the third critique of Kant. Concerning the work of N. Abbagnano see B. Maiorca, Bibliografia degli scritti di e su Nicola Abbagnano (1923–1973) (Turin, 1974); and especially N. Bobbio, “Discorso su Nicola Abbagnano,” in N. Abbagnano, Scritti scelti, Edited by G. De Crescenzo and P. Laveglia (Turin, 1967), pp. 9–38. For Sciacca see Bibliografia di M. F. Sciacca (dal 1931 al 1968), Edited by P. P. Ottonello (Milan, 1969). About Rensi see Giuseppe Rensi. Atti della “Giornata rensiana” (30 aprile 1966), edited by M. F. Sciacca (Milan, 1967) (bibliography at pp. 191–273). A complete bibliography of Mondolfo is provided at the end of the volume Omaggio a Mondolfo, published by the municipality of Senigallia (Urbino, 1963); on the work of Mondolfo see Djacir Menezes, Mondolfo e as interrogações do nosso tempo (Rio de Janeiro, 1963); Luciano Vernetti, Rodolfo Mondolfo e la filosofia della prassi (Naples, 1966). The volume of E. Santarelli, La revisione del marxismo in Italia (Milan, 1964) for its many aspects should be constantly kept in mind, since in many instances it refers to Mondolfo. On Rodolfo Mondolfo there is a new awakening: see especially G. Marramao, Marxismo e revisionismo in Italia dalla “Critica sociale” al dibattito sul leninismo (Bari, 1971); of the same author is the voice in Dizionario biografico del movimento operaio italiano, 3 (1977), pp. 523–533; important is the introduction of N. Bobbio to the volume of Mondolfo, Umanesimo di Marx (Turin, 1969). The second volume of the monograph of Diego F. Pro, Rodolfo Mondolfo (Buenos Aires, 1967–1968) includes with many bibliographical notices also an anthology of criticism. About Baratono as a philosopher see the voice of V. Mathieu in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1963), pp. 785–787; as politician that of T. Detti in Dizionario biografico del movimento operaio italiano (1975), vol. 1, pp. 156–160. 18–19.The Crisis of Idealism. Philosophy between Wars About the most bitter moments of the polemic concerning the idealism of the years around 1930, the following list of works should be considered: A. Tilgher, Storia e antistoria (Rieti, 1928); G. Calogero and D. Petrini, Studi crociani (Rieti, 1930); B. Croce, Punti di orientamento della filosofia moderna. Antistoricismo (Bari, 1931); again Tilgher, Lo spaccio del bestione trionfante. Stroncatura di Giovanni Gentile. Un libro per filosofi e non filosofi (Turin, 1925); on the divisions within the Italian culture see Emilio R. Papa, Storia di due manifesti. Il fascismo e la cultura (Milan, 1958). About Guido De Ruggiero must be seen the extensive introduction of Renzo De Felice to the edition of De Ruggiero’s Scritti politici, 1912–1926 (Bologna, 1963), pp. 7–76, in which also the most recent works on De Ruggiero are indicated. Armando Carlini would require a long discussion, from the time of his friendship with Renato Serra to that of his writing on Bovio, from the time of La Voce to the

Bibliographical Notes

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discovery of the philosophy of Mussolini; from the defense and vulgarizing of idealism to the elegant discussions with Olgiati, to the ulterior developments of his thought. See in that order Carlini’s works: Fra Michelino e la sua eresia (Bologna, 1914); La mente di G. Bovio (Bari, 1914); Filosofia e religione nel pensiero di Mussolini (Rome, 1934); La vita dello spirito (Florence, 1921 and 1940); Neo-scolastica, idealismo e spiritualismo (Milan, 1933); La religiosità dell’arte e della filosofia (Florence, 1934); Il mito del realismo (Florence, 1936); Saggio sul pensiero religioso e filosofico del fascismo (Milan, 1942); Principi metafisici del mondo storico. Con un’appendice sull’esistenzialismo (Urbino, 1942). About Carlini’s existentialism and the positions of some idealists see L. Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo (Florence, 1950). Of Ugo Spirito, we will mention here the most characteristic works that deeply intervened in the dissolution of idealism: Scienza e filosofia (Florence, 1933 and 1950); La vita come ricerca (Florence, 1937 and 1948); La vita come arte (Florence, 1941 and 1948); Il problematicismo (Florence, 1948). Of Calogero as well must be seen “Gentile maestro,” in Civiltà Moderna, 1 (1929), pp. 3–11; La conclusione della filosofia del conoscere (Florence, 1938 and 1960); La scuola dell’uomo (Florence, 1939 and 1956); Saggi di etica e di teoria del diritto (Bari, 1947); Logo e dialogo (Turin, 1950); Filosofia del dialogo (Turin, 1962), besides the three volumes of Lezioni di Filosofia (Turin, 1946–1948). About Calogero see E. Pera Genzone, Guido Calogero (Turin, 1961); R. Raggiunti, Logica e linguistica nel pensiero di Guido Calogero (Florence, 1963). About Augusto Guzzo, who under many aspects constitutes within the scene of contemporary Italian thought an isolated case, though very open to philosophical currents, and in general to the movements of the culture of his own time, see the volume with a systematic bibliography by various authors, Augusto Guzzo (Turin, 1963), 2nd edition. The works of Carlo Michelstaedter have appeared in a complete edition edited by G. Chiavacci (Florence, 1958). Of Chiavacci see Illusione e realtà (Florence, 1932); Saggio sulla natura dell’uomo (Florence, 1936); La ragione poetica (Florence, 1947). About Ruiz see the miscellaneous volume Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz (Turin, 1960), with bibliography. As to the Neo-Scholastics, it is interesting to notice their attempt to an integration of the acceptable part of idealism into the traditional metaphysics. To this end, see the works of Chiocchetti, La filosofia di B. Croce (Milan, 1920) and La filosofia di G. Gentile (Milan, 1922). Of Francesco Olgiati besides the many historical works the discussions with Carlini and Orestano must be considered: Il realismo (Milan, 1937) and Benedetto Croce e lo storicismo (Milan, 1953). The characteristic representative of the dialogue of the Italian Neo-Scholastics with the idealists was Gustavo Bontadini, of which see the Studi sull’idealismo (Milan, 1938); Dall’attualismo al problema-ticismo (Brescia, 1946); Dal problematicismo alla metafisica (Milan, 1952). Of the works of Francesco Orestano (1873–1945) see the complete edition by Carmelo Ottaviano (Catania, 1956) and of Ottaviano see the Critica dell’idealismo (Naples, 1936 and Padua, 1956). In the text there is an allusion to the work of F. Lombardi, of whom see L’esperienza e l’uomo (Florence, 1935); Il mondo degli uomini (Florence, 1935); L. Feuerbach (Florence, 1935); S. Kierkegaard (Florence, 1936); La libertà del volere e l’individuo (Milan, 1941) and for his production after the II World War see especially Nascita del mondo moderno (Asti, 1953); Dopo lo storicismo (Asti, 1955); Ricostruzione filosofica (Asti, 1956); La posizione dell’uomo nell’universo (Florence, 1963).

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For a description of the existentialist experience in Italy see Cesare Luporini, Situazione e libertà nell’esistenza umana (Florence, 1942 and 1945); N. Bobbio, La filosofia del decadentismo (Turin, 1944); E. Pad, Esistenzialismo e storicismo (Milan, 1950); A. Santucci, Esistenzialismo e filosofia italiana (Bologna, 1959). Of a particular importance in the philosophical debate between 1940 and 1950 was the journal of Antonio Banfi, Studi filosofici, to which actively collaborated some disciples of Banfi: R. Cantoni, E. Paci, G. Preti, G. M. Bertin (but also G. Della Volpe), whose major work will appear after the crisis of the idealism. Within this period should be placed also the last phase of the thought of Banfi, the production of the major works of scholars like Ludovico Geymonat, and a conspicuous part of the work of N. Abbagnano and his school. Concerning the complex vicissitudes of the polemic on “Actualism,” on its threading with existentialist themes, on its rapports with Catholic spiritualism and with the various religious positions, see first of all the new edition of the book of A. Santucci, Esistenzialismo e filosofia in Italia (Bologna, 1967) that in reality offers a complete panorama of the Italian philosophical discussion between the wars and after the war. Of Spirito the Storia della mia ricerca (Florence, 1971) should be kept in mind, as well as the other book born in collaboration with Calogero and other interventions: Ideale del dialogo o ideale della scienza (Rome, 1966); of Guzzo see the twelve volumes printed in Padua between 1973 and 1976 of the Storia della filosofia e della civiltà per saggi, in which the various points of view in rapport with the contemporary theoretical debate are defined. S. Campailla with the purpose of illustrating the work of Carlo Michelstaedter and of collecting for publication his complete production has published an essay on Pensiero e poesia di Carlo Michelstaedter (Bologna, 1973), but, as an indication of growing interest, see also M. A. Raschini, Carlo Michelstaedter (Milan, 1965); M. Cerruti, Carlo Michelstaedter (Milan, 1967); A. Piromalli, Michelstaedter (Florence, 1968); A. Verri, Michelstaedter e il suo tempo (Ravenna, 1969). Capable of projecting some light on certain neoscholastic positions are the two volumes of G. Bontadini, Conversazioni di metafisica (Milano, 1971), but also the two volumes of Studi di filosofia in onore di Gustavo Bontadini (Milan, 1975). About Orestano consult C. Dollo, I1 pensiero filosofico di F. Orestano (Padua, 1968). Concerning positions that have remained unexplored and that in time have manifested possibilities and fecundity, see of various authors, La filosofia dell’esperienza comune di G. Capograssi (Naples, 1976) and about P. Piovani, who begins the volume with his writing, see F. Tessitore, Tra esistenzialismo e storicismo: la filosofia morale di Pietro Piovani (Naples, 1974). See also L. Scaravelli, Opere, edited by M. Corsi (Florence, 1968), 2 vols. On the results of the research of Luporini see Dialettica e materialismo (Rome, 1974). Of the group that gathered around Banfi, G. Preti and E. Paci have expressed in an original form the empiricist and the phenomenological instances. Of Preti see the edition of Saggi filosofici (Florence, 1976), splendidly presented by M. Dal Pra (with a bio-bibliography of Preti’s writings); about him see also in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia of 1974 the interventions of F. Alessio, M. Dal Pra, and E. Garin. Of Enzo Paci it is possible to follow the developments in the journal Aut Aut, which he founded in 1951, directed and inspired until his death. About him see the commemoration of G. Semerari, “L’opera e il pensiero di Enzo Paci,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 32 (1977), pp. 79–95.

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20. Toward a New Problematic Concerning the permanence of the Italian idealism see in De Homine, 11–12 (1964), pp. 1–352, the debate promoted and organized by Franco Lombardi on the precise question, La cultura italiana è ancora idealistica? Moreover, the volume must be seen of Augusto Guzzo, Cinquant’anni di esperienza idealistica in Italia (Padua, 1964). About Gramsci, besides the Opere in the Einaudi edition, see 2000 pagine, Edited by Giansiro Ferrata e Niccolò Gallo (Milan, 1964). About Gramsci see also Studi Gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–13 gennaio 1958 (Rome, 1958); La città futura, Saggi sulla figura e il pensiero di Antonio Gramsci (Milan, 1959); G. Tamburrano, Antonio Gramsci. La vita, Il pensiero, L’azione (Manduria, 1963); G. Fiori, Vita di Antonio Gramsci (Bari, 1966). Of Gramsci’s works are now available in a critical edition the Quaderni del carcere, Edited by V. Gerratana (Turin, 1975), 4 vols. A guide through the present imposing literature on Gramsci is M. Biondi, Guida bibliografica a Gramsci (Cesena, 1977); a profile and an essential guide is also the voice of E. Garin in Dizionario biografico del movimento operaio italiano (Rome, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 536–565. Consult also of various authors, Studi Gramsciani, Proceedings of the Conference of 1958 (Rome, 1958); La città futura, saggi sulla figura e il pensiero di A. Gramsci (Milan, 1959); various authors, Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, Proceedings Conference of 1967 (Rome, 1969–1970); Politica e storia in Gramsci, Proceedings Conference of 1977 (Rome, 1977), 2 vols. See also: L. Paggi, Gramsci e il moderno principe (Rome, 1970); G. Nardone, I1 pensiero di Gramsci (Bari, 1971); N. Badaloni, I1 marxismo di Gramsci. Dal mito alla ricomposizione politica (Turin, 1975); L. Valiani, Questioni di storia del socialismo (Turin, 1975) (important for its comprehensive vision); L. Colletti, Intervista politico-filosofica (Bari, 1975); Chr. Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci et l’État (Paris, 1975); P. Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti. Introduzione alla vita e alle opere (Turin, 1977); G. Bergami, Il giovane Gramsci e il marxismo (1911–1918) (Milan, 1977) (remarkable for the rapport between idealism and Gramsci). Concerning the Italian debate: G. Vacca, Politica e teoria nel marxismo italiano. 1959-1969. Antologia critica (Bari, 1972); F. Cassano, Marxismo e filosofia in Italia. 1958–1971 (Bari, 1973). Of the philosophical works of G. Della Volpe an ample collection in six volumes exists (Rome, 1972–1973); about him see G. Vacca, Scienza, Stato e critica di classe. G. Della Volpe e il marxismo (Bari, 1970); B. Acciarino, Galvano Della Volpe. Scienza positiva e teoria della Storia (Bari, 1977). Consult also. N. Badaloni, I1 marxismo italiano degli anni Sessanta (Rome, 1971); A. Zanardo, Marxismo e filosofia (Rome, 1974). For an attempt at a historical organic exposition see E. Botto, Il neomarxismo (Rome, 1976), 2 vols. About L. Geymonat, see M. Quaranta and Bruno Maiorca, L’arma della critica di Ludovico Geymonat (Milan, 1977), with a complete bibliography. For a singular experience of the rapport Communism-Christianity see F. Balbo, Opere 1945–1964 (Turin, 1966).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eugenio Garin (9 May 1909–29 December 2004) was born in Rieti in the region of Lazio from a family, Savoyard in origin, which moved to Florence after the Unification of Italy. In Florence, Eugenio studied and graduated with a degree in moral philosophy in 1929. From his first teaching experiences in various public schools, he passed to the University of Cagliari for a short period and return to Florence in 1949 as professor of history of philosophy, in which function he continued until 1974. Before retiring in 1984, he taught at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. Garin’s output of books and articles was prodigious and much of it is still in print. Works translated into English include Italian Humanism, Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance (1965), Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance (1969), Portraits from the Quattrocento (1972), and Astrology in the Renaissance (1983). Garin’s fame as scholar was both national and international and brought him many honors that included the Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 and, in 2003, the National Award of the President of the Italian Republic awarded by the Academy of Lincei, to which he had been elected in 1965. He was also a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, whose “Serena medal” he was awarded in 1975, and of the Royal Historical Society. On 30 December 2004, all major Italian news dailies honored Garin: “The humanist of the 20th century.… One of the greatest scholars of the century” (Vittorio Mathieu, Il Giornale); “He reinvented Humanism. The one Italian intellectual most known in Europe” (Armando Torno, Il Corriere della Sera); “Famous in the whole world for his studies on Italian Renaissance” (L’Avvenire); “One of the greatest scholars of Italian thought” (Il Mattino); “The innovator of historiographic methodology” (Gianni Vattimo, La Stampa).

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR Giorgio Pinton earned his B.A. in philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy of Gallarate, Italy, 1955, and his Ph.D. in Renaissance and Reformation Studies from the Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1972. With the late Richard E. Weingart, he prepared The Logic of Divine Love: A Critical Analysis of the Soteriology of Peter Abailard (1970). He taught at Laconia State School in New Hampshire, then philosophy at the University of Hartford in Connecticut from 1969 to 1976. Thereafter, having obtained a Master in Secondary Education from the University of Hartford, he taught within the State Correctional School District until his retirement in 1992. With Arthur W. Shippee, Pinton translated Giambattista Vico’s inaugural orations published in 1993 with the title On Humanistic Education and Vico’s Institutiones Oratoriae, published by Rodopi Editions in 1996 as The Art of Rhetoric. In 1998, with Pierre Wolff, he translated The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, A New Translation from the Authorized Latin Text. With Margaret Diehl, he translated Vico’s Diritto Universale that Rodopi Editions published in 2000 with the title Universal Right. Then he translated Vico’s Le Gesta di Antonio Carafa (De Rebus Gestis Antonj Caraphaei) that was published in 2004 with the title, Statecraft: The Deeds of Antonio Carafa.

INDEX [This index lists personal and geographical names, titles of books, and articles mentioned by Garin in the text. It also includes many references of the Bibliographical Notes. The following abbreviations are used: d. for died; b. for born; fl. for floruit, when a person was most active or eminent. For clarity, CE for current era and BCE for before the current era are used] A Abarbanel, Jehudah (see Leone Ebreo) Abbagnano, Nicola (1901–1990), xxxvi, 1064, 1075, 1076, 1085, 1091, 1094, 1108, 1114, 1211, 1216, 1221, 1249, 1291, 1293, 1294, 1296 Abel (in Bible), 751 Abelard, Peter (1709–1142), 20, 21 Abenragel, Haly (astrologer, d. 1037), 580 Abraham (in Bible), 160, 399 Abraham Bar Hiyya (Abraham Judaeus), (1070–1136), 34, 90, 91 Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167), 89, 90, 563, 1149 abstractism, 432, 515 Abu’l Wefa (940–998), 36 Abumaron, Babilonian (Abu Marwan Ibn Zuhr), (1109–1162), 305, 1207 Abu Ma’shar, Gia‘far ibn Muhammad al-Balkhi (see Albumasar) Academy of Cimento, 616, 619, 622, 627, 636, 1235, 1236 Academy of the Crusca, 738, 1150 Academy of Infuriati, 679 Academy of Investiganti, 627, 632, 634, 1238 Academy of Italic Philosophy, xli, xliii, xlvii, 805, 934, 937, 938, 955 Academy degli Oziosi, 683 Academy of Science, 943 Accademia di Filosofia Italica, 1276 Accademia d’Italia, 1264 Accademia di Medinacoeli, 1238, 1243 Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1271 Accademia dei Pugni, 737

Accademia Romana di S. Tommaso, 959, 1170 Accetto, Torquato (1590–1641), 536, 544, 545, 546, 1229 Acciaiuoli, Agnolo (d. after 1467), 170, 204, 1172, 1229 Acciaiuoli, Donato (1429–1478), 185, 200, 219, 227, 270, 276 Acciaiuoli, Zanobi (1461–1519), 232 Accolti, Benedetto (1415–1466), 164, 173, 184 Accoramboni, Felice (fl. 1590), 366, 1201 Accordino, Giuseppe (1777–1830), 806 Achar (a cleric), 7 Acheruntinos, Olpio (Magati Andrea), (1659–1738), 665 Achilles (in Homer), 548, 706, 773 Achillini, Alessandro (1463–1512), 287, 288, 331, 332, 334, 340, 360, 366, 1186, 1187, 1198 Aconcio, Giacomo (1492–1566), 510, 519, 1199 Acquadia, Felice (1635–1695), 680 Acri, Francesco (1834–1913), 951, 952, 953, 955, 1052, 1277, 1278 Acrotismus Camoeracensis (Bruno), 455, 465 Actaeon (myth), 481 Acta Eruditorum (of Leipzig), 686 Actio in pontifices romanos (Paleario), 507 Acts of the Apostles, 4 actualism, l, 1012, 1013, 1030, 1044, 1045, 1048, 1056, 1057, 1060, 1072, 1077, 1086, 1097, 1285, 1291, 1292, 1293, 1296

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Adam (in Bible), 77, 131, 133, 205, 325, 331, 399, 507, 644, 645, 693, 712, 907 Adami, Anton Filippo (d. 1770), 752, 756, 1240, 1241, 1251 Adami, Tobia (17th c.), 568 Adelando the Arabic, 305 Adelard of Bath (12th c.), 68 Adorno, Theodor (1903–1969), 1102 Adramitteno, Manuele, 298 Adriano of Corneto (Adriano Castellesi), (1458–1521), 385, 389 Aegidius of Lessines (see Giles of L.) Aeneid (Virgil), 7, 503 Aeschines (Greek orator), (4th c. BCE), 172 aesthetics, 535, 548, 703, 741, 807, 956, 1020, 1023, 1047, 1095, 1101, 1106, 1224, 1225, 1231, 1255, 1265, 1294 Aesthetics (Croce), 1023 Aeterni Patris (Leo XIII), 959 Aetna (volcano), 194 Affetti di un disperato (Vico), 681 Agamben, Giorgio (b. 1942), 1088 Agapitus I, Pope (d. 536 CE), 4 Agazzi, Evandro (b. 1934), 1099, 1288 Agenoria (Pandolfi Collenuccio), 229 Aggiunte fatte alla Ragion di Stato (Botero), 553, 554 Aglaophemus (disciple of Orpheus, myth), 233, 239, 244, 484 Agnesi, Maria Gaetana (1718–1799), 1256 Agostino of Ancona, Trionfo, (1243–1328), 121, 122 Agrippa, Camillo, 1213 Agrippa, Cornelius of Nettesheim, (1486–1535), 462 Ahmed ibn Sirim (9th c. CE), 34 Ailly, Pierre d’ (see Pierre d’Ailly) Ajax (in Homer), 548, 772 Ajello, Giambattista (fl. 1800–1850), 961, 962 Alabanti, Antonio (fl. 1477–1483), 281 Alain de Lille (1115–1203), 48 Alasco (Polish Prince), (1499–1560), 454 Albà, Andrea, 806 Albéri, Girolamo, 806

Alberic of Monte Cassino (1080–1147), 9 Albert of Brescia (d. 1314), 87 Albert the Great, St. (1193–1280), liv, 41, 58, 84, 85, 114, 305, 1147, 1175, 1197 Albert of Jagellon (fl. 1492–1501), 200 Albertano of Brescia (1195–1251), 40 Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–1472) 174, 216, 217, 218, 276, 277, 279, 1067, 1173, 1174 Albizzeschi, Bernardino (see St. Bernardino of Siena) Albizzi, Rinaldo (1370–1442), 187 Albizzini, Giovanni Andrea (fl. 1161), 619, 1235 Alboini, Pietro (Petrus Albus), (fl. 1165), 288 Albumasar (787–886 CE), 36, 85, 90, 268, 269, 281, 412 Albus, Petrus (character in a dialogue of the 15th c.), 288 Alcibiades (427–347 BCE), 301, 330 Alcinous (in Virgil), 235 Alderotti, Taddeo (1223–1295), 91 Aldobrandini, Pietro (1572–1621), 384 Aldovrandi, Ulisse, 1213, 1229 Alemanno, Jochanan (1435–1504), 306, 308, 309, 312 Alembert, Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’, (1717–1783) 718, 739, 828 Alessandro de’ Pazzi (1483–1530), 383, 516 Alessandro di Borgo (1431–1503), 628 Aletino, Benedetto (see De Benedictis) Alexander III, Pope (1159–1181), 20, 21 Alexander IV, Pope (1254–1261), 30 Alexander VI, Pope (1492–1503), 311 Alexander Calcidonius, 357 Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), 173 Alexander of Alexandria (1268–1314), 1144 Alexander of Aphrodisias (3rd c. CE), 35, 37, 42, 241, 248, 249, 261, 293, 296, 305, 332, 334, 336, 348, 354, 355, 367, 403, 422 Alexander of Hales (1170–1245), 42, 48, 68, 79, 1142

Index Alexandrine(s), xlii, 240, 378 Alfanus (Archbishop of Salerno), (1058–1085), 6, 34, 1137, 1138 Alfarabi (870–950), 35, 36, 85, 305, 580 Al-Farghani (805–880 CE), 35, 91 Alfeo, Quinto Lucio (see Grandi, Guido) Alfieri, Vittorio (1749–1803), l, 741, 742, 743, 852, 1257 Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori, St. (1696–1787), 640, 822, 835 Algarotti, Francesco (1712–1764), 716, 717, 719, 722, 723, 770, 1253 Al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), 36, 64, 85, 225, 386, 760 Aliotta, Antonio (1881–1964), 1052, 1287 alipia, 187f., 1167 Al-Kindi or Alkindi (d. 872 CE) 35, 90, 281, 318, 564 Allghemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Betti), 1092 Allievo, Giuseppe (1830–1913), 951, 952, 953, 1277 Allmayer (see Fazio-Allmayer) Almagest (Ptolemy), 34, 35 Aloisianum (journal), 959 Alpago, Andrea, 1178 Alpes Caesae (Ochslein), 422 Alpetragius, al-Bitrugi, (d. 1204), 35 Alphons of Aragon V (1396–1458), 203, 204, 205 Althann, Viceroy of Naples (1682–1734), 641 Althusser, Louis (1918–1990), 1102 Altieri, Lorenzo (1671–1741), 753 Alvernia (Mount), 24, 43, 151 Amabile, Luigi (1828–1892), xlvii, 561 Amalriciani (Amalrician heretics, disciples of Amalricus of Bena), 249 Amalteo, Girolamo (1507–1558), 441 Amato, Giovanni Roderico (16th c.), 391 Amato Lusitano (see Amato Giovanni Roderico) Ambrose, St. (340–397 A.D.), 20, 141 Ambrosini, Giulio, 1230 Ambrosini, Luigi (1882–1929), 1028 Amendola, Giovanni (1886–1926), 1033, 1045, 1060

1305

Amerio, Franco, 1230, 1232, 1233, 1249, 1284 Ammonius of Hermias (5th c. CE), 305 Amoroso, Leonardo (b. 1952), 1106 Amphitrite (myth), 481 Anacharsis (6th c. BCE), 165, 702 Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE), xlii, 421, 583, 626 Anaximander (610–546 BCE), 618 Anaximenes of Lampsacus (380–320 BCE), 462 Andrew of Vercelli, St. (12th c.), 40 Andrioli, Michelangelo, 1231 Andromache (in Homer), 300 An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 666, 753, 760, 792, 820 angel(s), 11, 22, 23, 52, 53, 70, 74, 75, 76, 84, 91, 114, 118, 120, 153, 179, 193, 206, 210, 244, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 263, 264, 265, 266, 272, 304, 316, 323, 324, 353, 381, 395, 439, 558, 572, 590, 591, 595, 644 Angeli, Gherardo degli (1705–1788), 763 Angelo D’Arezzo (14th c.), 94, 1150 Angelo of Cingoli (see Clarenus, Angelo) Angelo of Fossombrone (see Clarenus, Angelo) Angelo of Monte Vulcano, 131 Angiulli, Andrea (1837–1890), 979, 980, 981, 996, 1001 Animae humanae natura ab Augustino detecta (Fardella), 648 Annali Universali di Statistica, 799 Ape Italiana (journal), 799 Ansaldi, Casto Innocente (1710 –1780), 721, 1260 Anselm of Aosta, St. (1020–1109), xxxvii, xlii, xliv, 8, 13–19, 20, 42, 43, 68, 69, 71, 464, 1129, 1130 Anselm of Besate (the Peripatetic), 8, 1128 Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), 19 Anselmi, Massimiliano, 959 Anti-Emile (Gerdil), 755 Antinous (in Homer), 773

1306

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

antiperistasis, 616 Antiquitates (Muratori), xl Antiseri, Dario (b. 1940), 1099 Antonelli, Giuseppe (see Zanotti, Francesco Maria) Antoni, Carlo, 1288, 1289 Antonino, St. (1389–1459), Archbishop of Florence, 87, 229, 232 Antonio of Faenza (see Cittadini, Antonio) Antonio of Urbino (1490–1570), 283 Antropologia in servizio della scienza morale (Rosmini), 849 Antropologia soprannaturale (Rosmini), 849 Apel, Karl Otto (b. 1922), 1102 Apocalypse, 29, 30 A Political History of Postwar Italy (Kogan), 1086 Apologia (Maioragio), 1224 Apologia (Marta), 362 Apologia (Pico), 307, 592 Apologia (Pomponazzi), 343, 348, 349 Apologia (Zabarella), 438 Apologia contra imposturas jesuiticas (Magni), 652 Apologia del genere umano accusato d’essere stato una volta bestia (Finetti), 767 Apologia del Gesuita Moderno (Gioberti), 895 Apologia dell’ateismo (Rensi), 1053 Apologia pro Galileo (Campanella), 575, 581, 608 Apollo (myth), 246, 271, 476, 482 Apollonius of Perga (262–190 BCE), 35 Apostoli, Michele (15th c.), 225 Apuleius (Greek rhetorician), (123–180 CE), 6, 13, 132, 145, 223, 235, 301 Aquino, Barbara d’ (1770–1840), 821 Aquino, General d’ (Barbara’s brother), 821 Arab(ic)(s), lvi, 5, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 50, 65, 75, 85, 89, 90, 91, 220, 224, 237, 248, 263, 266, 273, 282, 296, 297, 301, 305, 310, 369, 386, 401, 563, 564, 565 Araldi, Michele, 1259

Arangio-Ruiz, Vladimiro (1887–1952), 1064, 1295 Arator (6th c., poet), 4 Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu Christi (Ubertino of Casale), 30 Arcangelo of Borgonuovo, 1207, 1208 Archimedes (287–212 BCE), xl, xlvii, 35, 37, 290, 614, 929, 958 Ardigò, Roberto (1828–1920), xxxv, xlvii, xlviii, xlix, 975, 977, 981, 982, 983, 984, 985, 986, 987, 988, 989, 991, 995, 998, 999, 1000, 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, 1005, 1037, 1038, 1052, 1053, 1277, 1283, 1284 Arduino, Oliviero (15th–16th c.), 272 Areopagite (see Pseudo-Dionysius) Arezzo (city), 37, 39, 87, 94, 288, 303, 384 Argyropoulos, Johannes (1410–1492), xxx, 200, 219, 224, 226, 227, 230, 277, 308, 1175 Ariani, Agostino, 1238 Arimasps (one-eye goat-man), 149 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533), 456, 1067, 1068, 1226 Aristippus of Cirene (435–360 BCE), 199, 201, 1137 Aristippus, Henricus (fl. 1155–1160), 34 Aristotelian(s)(ism), xxvi, xxxii, lvi, lvii, 3, 10, 36, 39, 41, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 68, 71, 80, 85, 89, 91, 95, 96, 97, 101, 103, 104, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 122, 123, 124, 136, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 189, 194, 197, 215, 217, 224, 225, 227, 230, 231, 236, 237, 239, 240, 248, 249, 250, 254, 263, 271, 273, 276, 281, 283, 285, 286, 287, 293, 294, 297, 298, 299, 300, 304, 308, 309, 311, 320, 325, 329, 330, 331, 332, 334, 337, 339, 342, 347, 348, 350, 351, 352, 357, 361, 362, 363, 366, 367, 369, 370, 371, 374, 375, 377, 379, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386, 388, 389, 398, 401, 402, 403, 404, 407, 419, 420, 423, 424, 426, 428, 431, 432, 433, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 449, 450, 451, 455,

Index 462, 465, 466, 467, 472, 478, 513, 516, 519, 520, 521, 522, 527, 534, 547, 549, 550, 555, 556, 557, 562, 563, 566, 592, 605, 606, 614, 617 619, 623, 624, 625, 626, 628, 637, 639, 641, 652, 680, 692, 749, 753, 773, 775, 799, 945, 1143, 1165, 1184, 1202 Aristotle (384–322 BCE), xxii, xxv, xxxii, xxxix, xliii,liii, liv, 3, 7, 11, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 67, 68, 73, 77, 84, 85, 87, 91, 98, 104, 108, 109, 113, 123, 124, 146, 147, 148, 161, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 187, 188, 194, 195, 203, 204, 216, 217, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 235, 237, 240, 241, 245, 248, 252, 262, 270, 273, 281, 285, 292, 293, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 303, 308, 310, 312, 318, 332, 333, 334, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 342, 343, 344, 348, 350, 352, 356, 357, 360, 361, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 371, 373, 374, 376, 378, 380, 383, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 393, 401, 402, 403, 404, 421, 428, 431, 432, 433, 434, 436, 437, 438, 440, 441, 442, 443, 445, 450, 454, 455, 462, 466, 474, 477, 491, 513, 514, 516, 517, 519, 520, 521, 522, 524, 525, 535, 563, 566, 581, 588, 605, 606, 612, 613, 614, 619, 623, 624, 625, 626, 630, 635, 638, 639, 640, 641, 646, 647, 658, 669, 674, 689, 692, 720, 727, 749, 750, 769, 773, 774, 776, 777, 816, 857, 858, 859, 860, 863, 891, 914, 956, 957, 962, 1162 Armenian(s), 400 Arnauld, Antoine III (1612–1694), 640, 642, 666, 754 Arnobius of Sicca (d. 330 CE), 27 Arnold de Bost, 299 Arnold of Brescia (11th c.), 21–22, 1132, 1133 Arnold of Villanova (1240–1312), 131 Arrigo of Settimello (12th c.), 3, 131 Artificium perorandi (Bruno), 462 Art of War (Machiavelli), 490

1307

Arte della perfezione cristiana (Pallavicino), 533, 550 ascetism, 132, 183, 510, 675, 774 Asclepius (Pseudo–Apuleius), 132, 233, 324, 443 Asdente, Benvenuto (13th c.), 24 aseitas (aseity), 52, 57, 864 Asolani (Bembo), 395, 396, 1208, 1209 Assiacus (Plato), 171 Assisi (city), 26, 31, 40, 144, 734 Assunto primo della scienza del diritto naturale (Romagnosi), 798 Astorini, Elia (1651–1702), 1242, 1243 Astrologica (Campanella), 574, 602 astrological, a. blue book, 269 a. books, 564 a. causality, 321 a. conceptions, 481 a. configurations, 322, 323 a. conjunctions, 298 a. correspondences, 393 a. credence, 11, 217, 487 a. determinism, 157, 204, 353 a. disputations, 351 a. fables, 267, 393 a. hypotheses, 267 a. images, 38, 269 a. initiation, 564 a. interest, 267 a. investigations, 290 a. issues, 295 a. literature, 450 a. medicine, 91, 179 a. motive, 182 a. opinions, 375 a. polemic, 178 a. previsions, 419 a. problem, 320 a. question, 267 a. sciences, 602 a. superstitions, 89, 267 a. sympathies, 320 a. themes, 446 a. theses, 38 a. treatises, 294 a. works, 37 a. writings, 89, 267

1308

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

astrology, ix, xix, xxxii, xxxiii, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38, 89, 91, 266, 267, 268, 287, 316, 321, 352, 375, 388, 419, 446, 561, 564, 565, 566, 570, 575, 580, 596, 601, 602, 635, 979 Astronomica (Manilius), 6 A Study of the Italian Situation (Gramsci), 1082 Asturaro, Alfonso (1854–1921), 990 Athenagoras (a rhetorician), (2nd c. CE), 235 atheism, 422, 488, 543, 570, 574, 627, 628, 646, 660, 716, 923 Atheismus triumphatus (Campanella), 574 Athens (city), 6, 205, 240, 653, 1067 Atlantis (myth), 779 atomism, 61, 622, 624, 628, 637, 638, 639, 648, 695, 990 Attendolo, Dario (16th c.), 506, 1222 Attilius Regulus, Marcus (fl. 330 BCE), 186 Attone (Bishop of Vercelli), (fl. 925– 950), 11 Augustine, Saint (354–430 CE), xxvi, xxxvii, xli, xlii, 3. 23, 42, 44, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 68, 71, 86, 117, 122, 142, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151, 204, 226, 232, 235, 244, 246, 249, 387, 521, 549, 589, 614, 621, 629, 639, 640, 644, 648, 651, 712, 819, 884 Augustinian(s)(ism), xxxi, xxxiv, liv, 3, 18, 19, 20, 41, 42, 45, 48, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 79, 85, 86, 87, 89, 95, 113, 117, 124, 140, 142, 144, 147, 148, 155, 165, 167, 178, 246, 248, 249, 272, 282, 286, 329, 347, 349, 449, 450, 507, 592, 596, 629, 644, 648, 651, 652, 660, 662, 674, 687, 692, 715, 754, 884, 906, 1091, 1143 Aulisio, Domenico (1639–1717), 682 Aura (Calandra), 397 Aureoli, Pietro (Pierre d’Auriole), (d. 1322), 124 Aurispa, Giovanni (1369–1459), 186, 196 Austin, John (1790–1859), 1099

Aut Aut (journal), 1275, 1288, 1296 Autobiography (Vico), 638, 643, 655, 659, 679, 681, 682, 684, 686, 687, 693, 696, 712, 767 Auxilius of Naples (fl. 900 CE), 6 Avempace, Ibn Baggia (d. 1138), 68, 305 Averani, Niccolò, 635 Averroès (1126–1198), xxv, xxvi, lvi, 35, 39, 61, 64, 65, 77, 89, 93, 167, 174, 224, 230, 235, 241, 248, 249, 250, 261, 262, 263, 273, 281, 282, 285, 290, 291, 292, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 303, 305, 311, 317, 318, 332, 334, 335, 337, 338, 339, 340, 343, 348, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 366, 386, 409, 422, 450, 454, 487, 580, 667 Averro(ism)(ist), xxxix, 37, 38, 39, 55, 57, 64, 79, 80, 82, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 108, 109, 112, 113, 126, 134, 137, 145, 240, 248, 249, 262, 281, 282, 285, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 297, 298, 299, 300, 304, 312, 332, 334, 335, 336, 337, 339, 343, 344, 348, 349, 350, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 364, 365, 367, 375, 377, 388, 422, 425, 439, 449, 535, 1139, 1149, 1150, 1181, 1188 Aversa (city), 6 Avicebron, ibn-Gabirol (1021–1058), 59, 60, 78, 79, 86, 235, 250 Avicenna (980–1037), xxv, lvi, 35, 36, 59, 63, 75, 78, 85, 86, 120, 134, 168, 240, 246, 248, 281, 283, 287, 291, 303, 305, 348, 386, 580, 1178 Avicennian(ism), 68, 97, 244, 248, 283, 1178 Avogadro, Gustavo (1817–1847), 850 Axiochus (Plato), 235 Azimonti, Luigi (dearest friend of Romagnosi), (fl. 1835–1850), 799 B Babylonian(s), 400, 484 Bacilieri, Tiberio, 360 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 651, 667, 684, 685, 707, 715, 725, 737, 739, 761, 762, 780, 800, 801, 812, 828,

Index 845, 859, 1097 Bacon, Roger (1214–1294), 33, 86, 90, 131, 136, 159, 318, 412, 564, 712 Badaloni, Nicola (1854–1945), 1168, 1172, 1174, 1185, 1214, 1221, 1228, 1232, 1236, 1237, 1239, 1240, 1243, 1244, 1246, 1247, 1249, 1251, 1260, 1264, 1286, 1289, 1297 Badoer, Sebastiano (15th c.), 357 Bagolino, Girolamo (16th c.), 292, 366, 1201 Baillet, Adrien (1649–1706), 641, 656 Balbi, Giovanni (d. 1298), 87, 1148 Balbo, Cesare (1779–1853), 849 Balbo, Felice (1913–1964), 1073 Baldi, Bernardino (1553–1617), 524, 1227 Baldinotti, Cesare (1747–1821), 736, 761, 815, 845, 846, 1255, 1256 Balduino, Girolamo (16th c.). 449, 450, 1199 Ballanche, Pierre-Simon (1776–1847), 962 Balmes, Jaime Lucian (1810–1848), 958 Bambolognus of Bologna (12th c.), 86, 1148 Bandello, Matteo (1480–1562), 338 Bandinelli, Roland (see Alexander III) Bandinus, Magister, 21, 1131 Banfi, Antonio (1886–1957), 1060, 1064, 1065, 1072, 1076, 1096, 1097, 1286, 1292, 1296 Barabbas (in Gospel), 27 Baracco, Giovanni (1863–1937), 850 Barbadigo, Girolamo (16th c.), 770 Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora (fl. 1731), 641 Barbaro, Daniele, 1202 Barbaro, Ermolao (1454–1490), xxvi, xxvii, 134, 137, 161, 242, 243, 290, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302, 306, 331, 334, 338, 341, 513, 534, 535, 1175, 1199 Barbaro, Francesco (1390–1454), 161, 225, 1163 Barbarossa (see Frederick I) Barbi, Michele (1867–1941), 102 Barbieri, Ludovico, 1241 Barbo, Paolo (1416–1462), 289

1309

Baretti, Giuseppe (1719–1789), 751 Bariè, Giovanni Emanuele (1894–1956), 1292 Barlaam the Calabrian (1290–1348), 144, 145, 146, 1162 Barone, Francesco (1923–2001), 1099 Barone, Paolo, 869 Baroni of Cavalcabò, Clemente (1726–1796), 721 Barozzi, Pietro (Bishop, 15th c.), 289, 291, 293, 335, 357, 358 Barraclough, Geoffrey (1943–1973), xxii, xxvi, xxxvii Bartholomew of Messina (fl. 1260), 36, 1139 Bartholomew of Parma (fl. 1297), 38, 91, 1150 Bartholomew of Pisa (d. 1347), 29 Bartoli, Cosimo, 1228 Bartoli, Daniello (1608–1685), 531, 532, 546 Bartolomeo di Capua (fl. 1260), 86 Bartolomeo della Fonte (1446–1513), 270 Bartolomeo di Spina (1474–1546) (see Spina, Bartolomeo) Bartolomeo of Urbino (Bartolomeo Carusi), (fl. 1350–1370), 122 Bartolomeo of Venice (fl. 1400), 282 Baruffaldi, Antonio (b. 1724), 161 Barzellotti, Giacomo (1844–1917), 953, 957, 990, 1052, 1056, 1277, 1279 Barzizza, Gasparino (1359–1431), 171, 185, 187 Barzizza, Guiniforte (1400–1460), 161 Basil the Great, St. (324–379 CE), 34, 175 Basso, Lelio (1903–1978), 1071 Bauer, Bruno (1809–1882), 934 Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706), 422, 711, 934, 1213, 1235, 1240, 1251, 1256 Beatrice (in Dante), 102, 105, 106, 107, 113 Bec (Abbey & town in Normandy), 8, 13, 1130 Beccadelli, Antonio (see Panormita) Beccaria, Cesare (1738–1794), 732, 736, 737, 738, 739, 740, 787, 794, 1257

1310

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

Becchi, Fruttuoso, 1265 Becelli, Giulio Cesare (1686–1750), 718 Bechi, Gugliemo (Bishop of Fiesole), (16th c.), 294 Bedeschi, Giuseppe (b. 1939), 1100 Belfagor (journal), 1121, 1236, 1263, 1274, 1275, 1288 Belgrado, J., 1258 Bellanti, Lucio (d. 1499), 385 Bellarmino, Roberto, St. (1541–1621), 460, 536, 605, 606, 607, 609, 624 Bellini, Lorenzo (1643–1704), 619, 621, 1236 Belmonti, Pietro of Rimini, 1228 Bembo, Bernardo (1433–1519), 265 Bembo, Dardi, 1211 Bembo, Pietro (1479–1547), 360, 389, 395, 396, 448, 1192, 1208, 1209 Benci, Amerigo (fl. 1474–1482), 233 Benci, Tommaso (1427–1470), 234 Benedict, St. (480–547), 4, 5, 1127 Benevento (city), 5, 34, 37, 85, 662 Beni, Paolo (1552–1625), 404, 516, 556, 1210 Benivieni, Antonio (1533–1598), 294, 295 Benivieni, Girolamo (1453–1542), 304, 306, 308, 309, 325 Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), 1102 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), 788, 789, 790, 791 Benvenuto of Imola (1330–1387), 38, 89 Benzi, Ugo (1370–1439), 200, 224, 283, 284, 1182 Berengar of Tours (999–1080), 8–9, 1129 Bergamo (city), 34, 36, 293, 348, 351, 784 Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941), 995, 1007, 1031, 1033, 1036, 1037, 1038, 1042, 1045, 1089, 1090 Bérigard, Claude Guillermet (1578–1663), 622, 625, 626, 627, 1236 Berigard of Pisa (see Bérigard, Claude Guillermet) Berkeley, George (1685–1753), xxii, lvii, 646, 648, 728, 813, 816, 817, 880, 1034, 1244

Berlinguer, Luigi (b. 1932), 1111 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. (1091–1153), 21, 22, 61, 113 Bernardi, Giambattista (1507–1570), 404, 1210 Bernardi della Mirandola, Antonio (1502–1565), 360, 506, 1191, 1198 Bernardini, Carlo (b. 1930), 1098 Bernardino, Pietro (1475–1502), 386, 1207 Bernardino of Siena, St. (1380–1444), 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 204, 1135, 1140, 1166 Bernardino Telesio (Fiorentino), 592, 1216 Bernardo of Ser Pistorio (14th c.), 162 Berni, Francesco (1497–1535), 758 Berthé de Besaucèle, Louis (1850–1940), 629, 636, 1237 Berti, Bellincion (in Dante, 13th c.), xl Berti, Domenico (1820–1897), 882, 897 Berti, Enrico (b. 1935), 1102, 1108, 1111 Bertini, Giovanni Maria (1818–1876), 851, 853, 933, 934, 937, 940, 942, 943, 944, 945, 946, 947, 951, 953, 954, 1072 Bertola, Aurelio dei Giorgi (1753–1798), 789, 1255 Bertolli, Giuseppe (fl. 1877–1882), 806 Bessarion (1403–1472), 199, 219, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 235, 249, 1176 Betti, Claudio of Modena, 1199 Betti, Emilio (1890–1969), 1092, 1093, 1095 Bettinelli, Saverio (1718–1808), xl Betussi, Giuseppe (1512–1573), 395, 397 Bianchelli, Domenico Mengo (Blanchellus Mengus), (1440–1520), 288 Bianchetti, Giuseppe (1795–1872), 933 Bianchi, Isidoro (1731–1808), 719, 721, 760, 1252, 1259, 1260 Biblioteca Italiana (journal) 794, 799, 847 Bini, G. Clemente (see Lami Giovanni) Bini, Vincenzo (19th c.), 806 Biondo, Flavio (1392–1463), 225 Biran, Maine de (1766–1824), 826, 875

Index Bitinia (country), 291 Bizzoni, Pietro (19th c.), 814 Blado, Antonio (1516–1593), 391, 427 Blanch, Luigi (1784–1872), 839, 1267 Blanchet, Léon (19th c.), 590 Bloch, Ernst (1885–1977), 1102 Blondel, Maurice (1861–1949), 1031, 1046 Bobba, Romualdo (1828–1905), 749, 1258, 1259 Bobbio, Norberto (1909–2004), 3, 1039, 1040, 1072, 1094, 1286 Bocados de Oro (Golden Sayings), 36, 1137, 1138 Bocalosi, Girolamo, 1258 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375), 109, 141, 146, 147, 173, 286, 1138 Boccadiferro, Ludovico (1482–1545), 360, 371, 1192, 1198, 1202 Boccalini, Traiano (1556–1613), 550, 551, 552 Bochènski, Józef Maria (1902–1995), 284, 285 Bodei, Remo (b. 1938), 1102, 1108 Bodin, Jean (1530–1596), 360, 551 Boethius (480–549 A.D.), xl, xli, 3–5, 8, 27, 34, 58, 72, 98, 99, 108, 130,192, 193, 195, 196, 196,235, 279, 354, 438, 1123, 1126 Boiardo, Giulia (d. 1501), 295 Boine, Giovanni (1887–1917), 1045, 1060 Bologna, 11, 19, 20, 21, 35, 36, 37, 55, 85, 86, 89, 91, 93, 94, 120, 122, 123, 126, 145, 168, 232, 281, 282, 287, 295, 331, 332, 333, 342, 356, 360, 363, 364, 389, 401, 403, 509, 566, 567, 717, 719, 753, 947, 956, 1053, 1054, 1097, 1108 Bombyx (Lazzarelli), 274 Bonacosa, Jacob (16th c.), 36 Bonald, Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise (1754–1840), 846, 893, 957, 959, 962 Bonaparte, Napoleon (see Napoleon I) Bonatelli, Francesco (1830–1911), 937, 938, 947, 948, 949, 950, 951, 953, 995, 1270, 1277

1311

Bonatti, Guido (13th c.), 37, 38, 89, 91, 1149 Bonaventura, Federico (b. 1555), 555 Bonaventure, St. (1221–1274), xxv, xxvi, xxxv, xlii, xliv, lv, lvi, 17, 30, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 68, 75, 79, 86, 95, 96, 97, 101, 107, 114, 134, 136, 150, 240, 245, 246, 249, 263, 265, 312, 652, 858, 860, 863, 898, 906, 907, 1135, 1139, 1140, 1141, 1142 Bonavino, Cristoforo (see Franchi, Ausonio) Boncompagni, Baldassarre (1821–1894), 934 Boncompagno of Signa (1170–1240), 38, 91 Bonelli, Luigi (1865–1947), 855 Bonetus, Nicholaus (Doctor Pacificus, Doctor Proficuus), (d. 1343.), 289 Bonfadini, Jacopo (1771–1835), 815, 846, 1264 Bonghi, Ruggero (1826–1895), 882, 934 Bongo, Pietro, 1207 Bonincontri, Lorenzo (1410–1491), 266, 270, 1178, 1179 Bonnet, Charles (1720–1793), 755, 786, 792, 793, 800, 814, 816, 929, 959 Bonnetty, Augustin (1798–1879), 959 Bonomi, Andrea (b. 1940), 1099 Bonsembiante Badoario (1327–1369), 125, 147 Bontadini, Gustavo (1903–1990), 1100, 1101, 1295, 1296 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso (1608–1679), 619, 622, 624, 627, 628, 631, 636, 637, 646, 648, 1235 Borgia, Cesare (1475–1507), 489 Born, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724–1803), 785, 814, 824, 1266 Borradori, Giovanna (b. 1963), 1087, 1088, 1089, 1091, 1093 Borrelli, Pasquale (Pirro Lallesbasque), (1782–1849), xlix, 811, 812, 813, 814, 817 Borri, Girolamo (d. 1523), 384, 1206 Boscovich, Ruggero G. (1711–1787), 719, 723, 724, 1240, 1242, 1243, 1253

1312

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

Bossi, Matteo (15th c.), 308 Botero, Giovanni (1544–1617), 550, 553, 554, 555, 1231 Boursier, Laurent-François (1679–1749), 898 Boutroux, Etienne Emile-Marie (1845–1921), 1007, 1046 Bozzelli, Francesco Paolo (1786–1864), 817 Bracciolini, Poggio (1380–1459), xxxi, 130, 164, 165, 167, 173, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 209, 1167 Bradwardine, Thomas (1290–1349), 233 Braunschweig, Ernst Duque of (b.1546), 484 Bravi, Giuseppe (1784–1865), 806 Breccia di Porta Pia (in 1870), 1004 Brehier, Emile (1876–1952), 1136 Breme, Ludovico Arborio Gattinara di, (1780–1820), 737, 891 Brentano, Franz (1838–1917), 947, 1037 Breviario spirituale (Martinetti), 1039 Breviloquium (Bonaventure,) 41, 49 Bridget, St. 566 Briganti, Filippo Maria (1725–1804), 732, 1254 Brocardo, Antonio (d. 1531), 356 Brofferio, Angelo (1846–1894), 990 Brown, John (1800–1859), 811 Brucioli, Antonio (1497–1566), 383, 519, 1222 Brucker, Johann Jakob (1696–1770), xl, 751 Brunacci, Nicola (13th c.), 85, 1147 Brunelleschi, Filippo (1377–1446), 206, 1067, 1150, 1172 Brunetière, Ferdinand-Vincent de (1849–1906), 1028 Brunetto Latini (see Latini, Brunetto) Bruni, Leonardo (1369–1444), xxxi, xxxix, lvii, 96, 129, 130, 147, 152, 153, 154, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 175, 177, 181, 184, 187, 189, 196, 197, 204, 208, 224, 276, 286, 465, 474, 633, 896, 897, 956, 1165, 1166 Bruno d’Asti (d. 1123), 10

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), xxiv, xxv, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xli, xliv, xlv, xlvi, xlvii, xlix, l, liv, lvii, 10, 97, 217, 243, 246, 266, 325, 330, 331, 334, 371, 404, 414, 427, 435, 438, 442, 443, 444, 445, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 469, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 492, 511, 537, 538, 565, 569, 597, 603, 605, 606, 607, 624, 633, 637, 638, 659, 745, 892, 896, 897, 898, 934, 955, 956, 966, 967, 968, 970, 971, 972, 986, 1004, 1046, 1095, 1097, 1121, 1122, 1129, 1149, 1153, 1154, 1168, 1182, 1189, 1192, 1197, 1198, 1199, 1204, 1205, 1215, 1218, 1219, 1220, 1239, 1280, 1282, 1289, 1297 Bruno oder über das Natürliche und Göttliche Prinzip der Dinge (Schelling), 956 Bruschelli, Domenico (19th c.), 806 Bucolica (Benivieni), 295 Buddhism, xxxvi, 1028, 1031 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707–1788), 739 Buhle, Johann Gottlieb Gerhard (1763–1821), 824, 1266 Buonaccorsi, Filippo (Callimachus), (1437–1496), 199, 200, 1169, 1170, 1185 Buonafede, Appiano (1716–1793), xl, 627, 718, 751, 752, 1251 Buonaiuti, Ernesto (1881–1946), 1053 Buonamici, Francesco (d. 1603), 377, 1206, 1226, 1229 Buonamici, Lazzaro (1471–1552), 441 Buonarroti, Michelangelo (1475–1564), 516, 548 Buragna, Carlo (1632–1679), 631, 634, 682, 1239, 1240 Burana, Gian Francesco (1494–1567), 366, 1201 Buratelli, Gabriello (d. 1571), 404, 1210 Burckhardt, Jacob (1818–1897), 133, 1158

Index Burdach, Konrad (1859–1936), 130, 131, 132, 133, 1158, 1160 Burgundio of Pisa (1110–1193), 19, 34, 1131, 1132, 1138, 1174, 1175 Buridano, Giovanni, (1300–1358), lvi Burke, Edmund (1728–1797). 781 Buser (see Heystesbury, William) Butler, Joseph (1692–1752), xxv, 715, 722 Büttermeyer, Wilhelm, 1283 Buttura, Pietro (19th c.), 806 Buzzetti, Vincenzo Benedetto (1777–1824), 959 Byzantine(s), 5, 33, 129, 146, 219, 220, 1136, 1137 Byzantium, 147, 170, 1174 C Cabal(a)(ism)(ist), xxv, xxxi, 272, 273, 274, 289, 303, 304, 305, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 316, 317, 318, 319, 323, 324, 325, 360, 384, 385, 390, 391, 395, 405, 461, 462, 463, 482, 484, 485, 509, 521 Cabala del cavallo Pegasèo con l’aggiunta dell’asino ellenico (Bruno), 482 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges (1757–1808), 783, 811, 812, 1265 Cacchio, Giuseppe (1569–1592), 427 Cacciari, Massimo (b. 1944), 1088, 1094, 1100, 1101, 1102, 1103, 1104 Cacciatore, Giuseppe (b. 1945), 1249, 1280 Caesar, Gaius Iulius, 173, 588 Cain (in Bible), 751 Cajetan (see Da Vio, Tommaso) Calabria, 24, 26, 145, 146, 147, 562, 563, 567, 568, 572, 574, 736 Calabro, Pietro (Vitali, Pietro), 199, 200, 224 Calamandrei, Piero (1889–1956), 1086 Calandra, Gian Giacomo (16th c.), 397 Calanna, Pietro (1531–1606), 402 Calcaterra, Carlo (1884–1952), 761, 1099 Calcidius (4th c.), 13, 146, 235 Calcidonius, Alexander, 357

1313

Calcondila, Demetrio (1424–1511), 272 Calculationes suisethicae (Suiseth), 134, 286, 290, 341 Calculationum liber (Suiseth), 1182 Calculator (see Swineshead, Richard) Calderoni, Mario (1879–1914), 1033, 1034, 1035, 1036, 1037, 1290 Callimaco Esperiente (see Buonaccorsi, Filippo) Callisto, Andronico, 225 Calò, Giovanni (1882–1970), 896, 1052 Calogero, Guido (b. 1904), xxxvi, 1058, 1059, 1063, 1076, 1278, 1288, 1289, 1291, 1294, 1295, 1296 Caloprese, Gregorio (1650–1715), 641, 642, 643, 656, 658, 681, 682, 1243 Calvello, Giambattista, 961 Calvin, Jean (1509–1564), 329, 355, 399, 454, 455, 507, 534, 537, 538, 539, 540, 567, 712, 767 Calvin(ism)(ist), 355, 399, 454, 455, 507, 538, 539, 540, 567, 767 Camaldoli, 151, 185 Camillo, Renato (1500–1575), 509 Camillus, Marcus Furius, 173 Campailla, Tommaso (1668–1740), 641, 644, 646, 647, 653, 758, 1242, 1244 Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639), xxiv, xxv, xxviii, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvi, xli, xliv, xlv, xlvi, xlvii, xlii, xlix, l, liv, lvii, 91, 325, 404, 414, 437, 453, 492, 500, 511, 512, 516, 529, 535, 536, 537, 542, 545, 550, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 598, 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 608, 626, 627, 629, 630, 632, 633, 634, 635, 636, 637, 647, 688, 690, 871, 875, 967, 968, 970, 1122, 1177, 1185, 1211, 1231, 1233, 1238, 1280 Campano, Giovan Antonio (1429–1477), 161, 225 Campano of Novara, 37 Canali, Angelo Maria (18th c.), 749 Candelaio (Bruno), 454, 471

1314

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

Can Grande (see Cangrande I Della Scala) Canigiani, Antonio (15th c.), 231, 276 Canisio, Antonio (15th c.), 231 Canisio, Enrico (15th c.), 680 Cannocchiale aristotelico (Tesauro), 557 Cantani, Arnaldo (1837–1893), 978 Cantelmo, Giacomo (1640–1702), 628 Canti (Leopardi), 745 Cantico del gallo Silvestre (Leopardi), 747 Cantimori, Delio (1904–1966), 510, 1117, 1157, 1158, 1164, 1205, 1221, 1223, 1230. 1250, 1257, 1264, 1265, 1286 Canto alle rondini (Palmieri), 207 Cantoni, Carlo (1840–1906), xlvii, 937, 953, 954, 955, 1277, 1278, 1290, 1291 Cantoni, Remo (1914–1978), 1072, 1296 Cantú, Cesare (1804–1895), 798, 850, 1257, 1264 Cantus Circaeus, (Bruno), 454, 465 Capasso, Giovanni Battista (1683–1736), 749, 751, 1258, 1259 Capasso, Niccoló, 1238 Capece, Scipione (1485–1551), 444, 449 Capella (see Martianus Capella) Capialbi, Vito (1790–1853), 968 Capocasale, Giuseppe (1754–1828), 955, 1255, 1256, 1268 Capocci, Jacopo (see Giacomo Capocci of Viterbo) Capograssi, G., 1296 Capone-Braga, Gaetano (1889–1956), xlix, 806, 1235, 1250, 1255 Capone, Gaspare (1767–1849), 818 Caponsacchi, Piero (Petrus de Pantaneto Caponsacchius, 16th c.), 230 Cappellari, Mauro (see Gregorio XVI, Pope) Capponi, Gino (1792–1876), 716, 805, 852, 880, 883, 884, 885, 886, 888, 953, 961, 964, 1271 Capriano, Giovanni Pietro, 516–517 Carabellese, Pantaleo (1877–1948), liii, 991, 1058, 1270, 1291 Caracciolo, Domenico (1715–1789), 732, 1254

Caracciolo, Landolfo (Bishop of Amalfi) (d. 1351), 126 Carafa, Adriano (b. 1696), 684 Carafa, Antonio (1642–1693), 684 Caravita, Nicola (1647–1717), 655, 682, 684, 687, 688 Carboneria, 791 Carchia, Gianni (b. 1947), 1088, 1106 Cardano, Girolamo (1501–1576), 356, 360, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 487, 488, 492, 535, 605, 1213 Cardoso, Isaac, 1242 Carducci, Giosuè (1835–1907), 1045, 1235, 1255 Careggi, 233, 242, 270 Carlini, Armando (b. 1878), 1045, 1063, 1294, 1295 Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), 1099 Carpzov, Benedikt (18th c.), 740 Cartario, Gian Ludovico, 1215 Cartesian(ism)(ist)(s), xxv, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlix, liv, lvi, lvii, 66, 68, 535, 596, 622, 628, 629, 630, 632, 633, 634, 636, 637, 638, 639, 640, 641, 642, 643, 644, 646, 647, 648, 649, 651, 653, 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 668, 670, 671, 672, 676, 681, 682, 683, 684, 687, 688, 690, 692, 693, 694, 695, 696, 701, 722, 726, 728, 745, 749, 750, 758, 819, 823, 824, 826, 827, 828, 831, 841, 905, 906, 907, 930, 944, 945, 957, 968, 970, 972, 1237, 1238, 1240, 1242, 1247 Casanova, Giacomo (1725–1798), 716, 1252 Casari, Ettore (b. 1933), 1099 Casoni, Guido (1561–1642), 419 Cassarino, Antonio (1379–1447), 170 Cassigoli, Renzo (b. 1938), 1067–1068, 1106, 1114 Cassina, Ubaldo (1736–1824), 741, 1258 Cassiodorus (490–585 CE), 3, 4, 5, 1123, 1126 Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945), 142, 1158 Castellani, Guido (1528–1586), 360, 364, 365, 366, 1200 Castellani, Pier Niccolò, 363, 443

Index Castellesi, Adriano (Adriano of Corneto) (1458–1521), 385, 389 Castelli, Benedetto (1577–1643), 606, 619, 636 Castellion, Sebastian (1515–1563), 351 Castelnau, Michel de (1520–1592), 455 Castelvetro, Ludovico (1505–1571), 517, 518, 557 Castiglione, Baldassarre (1478–1529), 395, 397, 526 Castone, Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico (1742–1796), 1256 Catanzaro (city in Calabria), 680, 955 Catara Lettieri, Antonio, xliv, 1267 Cathar(ism)(s), 22, 85, 236, 519, 1133 Catholic(s)(ism), xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxv, xli, xlii, xliv, lviii, 17, 87, 95, 117, 123, 199, 205, 225, 270, 356, 358, 359, 443, 452, 453, 454, 455, 457, 458, 459, 461, 510, 511, 535, 536, 538, 539, 541, 561, 567, 574, 644, 722, 734, 764, 768, 786, 847, 852, 853, 892, 894, 895, 897, 898, 899, 934, 940, 952, 953, 959, 1004, 1007, 1039, 1044, 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1073, 1094, 1100, 1102, 1108, 1115 Catholicon (Balbi), 87 Cato, M. Portius Uticensis, 140, 144, 154, 173 Cattaneo, Carlo (1836–1972), 666, 667, 716, 793, 796, 798, 852, 923, 928, 929, 930, 931, 932, 933, 934, 977, 998, 1005, 1079, 1275, 1276, 1286, 1287 Cattaneo, Tommaso (18th c.), 666–667, 1247 Cattani of Diacceto, Francesco di Zanobi (see Diacceto) Cavalcanti, Bartolomeo, 1211 Cavalcanti, Giovanni (16th c.), 516 Cavalcanti, Guido (1255–1300), 109, 246, 397, 1153, 1226 Cavalieri, Bonaventura (1598–1647), 619, 632, 1236 cavillator(es), 287–288 Cavour, Gustavo Benso, Marquis of (1810–1861), 849, 882, 963

1315

Cavour e libera chiesa in libero stato (Vera), 963 Cecco d’Ascoli (Stabili, Francesco) (1269–1327), 91–93, 157, 352, 1150 Cellucci, Carlo (b. 1946), 1099 Cencio de’ Rustici (15th c.), 171 Cennini, Cennino (14th c.), 129 Cento, Niccolò (1719–1780), 648, 758 Centofanti, Silvestro (1794–1880), 805, 883, 888, 889, 933, 968, 1271 Centro di Studi Vichiani, 1112 Centro de investigaciones sobre Vico, 1112 Ceretti, Pietro (1823–1884), 974, 975, 1281 Cesa, Claudio (b. 1928), 1102 Cesalpino, Andrea (1519–1603), 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 970, 1214, 1215 Cesare d’Evoli (1532–1598), 1208 Cesare degli Orazi (see Degli Orazi) Cesarotti, Melchiorre (1730–1808), 741, 1252, 1257 Cesca, Giovanni (1859–1908), 1290 Cestari, Giuseppe (18th c.), 806 Ceva, Tommaso (1648–1737), 624, 637, 665, 666, 1241 Chaldaic, 304, 320 Chaldean Oracles, 220, 222, 224, 701 Chaldean(s), 220, 222, 224, 269, 305, 400, 701, 702 Champier, Symphorien (1472–1559), 325, 402 Charles I of Anjou (King of Sicily), 37 Charles III, King of Spain (1716–1788), 821 Charles V, H.R.E., (1500–1558), 427 Charles VIII, King of France (1470–1498), 307, 311 Charlemagne (742–814 CE), 5 Charpentier, Jacques Marie (1766–1834), 863 Charron, Pierre (1541–1603), 721, 1252 Che cosa è la mente sana (Romagnosi), 799 Chiappelli, Alessandro (1857–1931), 1052, 1290 Chiarizia, Ottavio (1729–1824), 1256–

1316

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

Chiavacci, Gaetano (1880–1950), 1064, 1295 Chiavacci, Vincenzo, 756 Chieregato, Lionello (Bishop of Concordia), (15th c.), 307 Chiocchetti, Emilio (1880–1951), 1058 Chiron (Centaur, in myth), 222, 481, 496 Chremes (in Terence), 942 Christ, xxxiii, 9, 10,21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 38, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 63, 107, 112, 131, 133, 137, 144, 148, 160, 167, 193, 199, 200, 223, 225, 226, 236, 238, 239, 244, 245, 270, 299, 309, 317, 319, 320, 324, 329, 332, 354, 387, 438, 452, 457, 480, 509, 510, 561, 564, 565, 569 571, 572, 575, 576, 588, 603, 640, 652, 673, 718, 730, 731, 892, 897, 900, 924, 926, 935, 952, 981 Christianity, xxxiii, li, 12, 57, 90, 113, 126, 136, 142, 146, 175, 178, 198, 224, 226, 227, 233, 244, 268, 270, 307, 308, 311, 312, 329, 354, 355, 380, 384, 387, 389, 443, 452, 506, 538, 539, 568, 572, 573, 580, 640, 675, 707, 712, 716, 719, 720, 721, 730, 731, 734, 767, 846, 892, 899, 900, 924, 945, 963, 1028, 1060, 1087, 1104, 1109, 1115 Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), 636 Christine of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 606 Church Fathers, xlii, 3, 9, 11, 13, 19, 20, 77, 90, 161, 184, 609, 675, 719, 725, 819, 896 Chrysoloras, Manuel (1368–1415), xxxi, 154, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 187, 1165 Ciampoli, G., 1232 Ciani, Gioacchino (14th c.), 141 Ciccio d’Andrea (see D’Andrea, Francesco) Cicero (106–43 BCE), xxxi, xli, liv, 5, 7, 13, 40, 98, 99, 108, 109, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 162, 167, 173, 185, 190, 207, 208, 226, 275, 301, 515, 605, 687, 688, 896, 1128, 1162 Ciceronian(ism)(s), 8, 151, 164, 301,

511, 513, 687 Cicognara, Leopoldo (1767–1834), 741 Ciliberto, Michele (b. 1945), 1113 Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (Croce), 1044 Circe (myth), 168, 526 Circuli Pisani (Berigard of Pisa), 625 Città del Sole (Campanella), 566, 568, 569, 570, 571, 573, 576 Cittadini, Antonio (d. 1518), 310, 315, 347 Cittadini, Celso (1553–1627), 325, 1209 Civiltà Cattolica, 958, 959, 1073 Civitas solis (see Città del Sole) Clarenus, Angelo (1247–1337), 29, 30, 287, 288, 1135 Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729), 716, 944 Clarus, Iulius (1525–1575), 740 Clavis universalis (P. Rossi), 1210, 1211 Clement VII, Pope (1523–1534), 363, 1194 Clement VIII, Pope (1592–1605), 420 Clement XII, Pope (1730–1740), 686 Clericus de Venetia, Jacobus (see Jacobus Veneticus Graecus) Codignola, Ernesto (1885–1965), 715, 1176, 1250, 1284, 1286 Coelestis physiognomia (Della Porta), 418 Cola di Rienzo (1312–1354), xxvi, 22, 26, 131, 132, 133, 1159 Colangelo, Francesco (1769–1836), 768 Coldelmero, Glaucho (fl. 1545), 199 Colecchi, Ottavio (1773–1847), 830, 836, 837, 840, 961, 962, 1268, 1269 Colletti, Lucio (1924–2001), 1108 Collationes in Hexaëmeron (Bonaventure) 41 Colle, Giovan Vincenzo, of Sarno (see Sarnese) Collegio Alberoni, 736, 789, 792 Collenuccio, Pandolfo (1444–1504), 229. 295 Colli, Giorgio (1917–1979), 1094 Collizi, Johann Andreas (1741–1808), 856 Cologne (city), 58, 669 Colombus (1446–1506), 588, 589, 779, 780

Index Colonna, Camillo (d. 1558), 142, 629, 630, 1237, 1238 Colonna, Giovanni (Cardinal in 1193), xxvi, 86, 117 Colonna, Pietro (d. 1539), 1208 Colucci, Benedetto (1438–1515), 270, 272, 286, 1179 Colzade, Vincenzo (16th c.), 349 Comandi, Comando (15th c.), 229 Comandi, Simone (15th c.), 229 Comi, Giovanni Antonio (of Pavia, 18th c.), 792, 793 Commentari (Ghiberti), 129 Commentarius in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (Bonaventure), 42, 49, 56 Commento alla canzone d’amore, (Benivieni), 304, 313 Commento sopra a più sue canzoni dello amore e bellezza divina (Girolamo Benivieni), 309 Comolli, Giampiero (b. 1950), 1106 Compagnoni, Giuseppe (1754–1833), 783, 784, 785, 786, 816, 1264 Comparationes philosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis (Trebizond), 224, 225 Compendio della metafisica (Contarini), 347, 440 Compendio di storia della filosofia (Soave), 784 Compendium de rerum natura (Campanella), 568 compotency, 803 Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), 995, 996, 998, 999, 1000 Conciliazione, 943 Concina, Nicola, 764 concordia, 29, 242, 302, 303, 312, 383, 384, 392, 398, 401, 402, 433, 442, 469, 480, 570, 673, 744, 812, 895, 930 Concublet, Andrea (d. 1675), 627 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot (1714–1780), 736, 737, 740, 762, 783, 784, 785, 786, 793, 800, 805, 806, 811, 813, 814, 816, 819, 823, 824, 825, 826, 827, 828, 838, 845, 846, 857, 896,

1317

908, 929, 933, 959, 1121, 1256, 1258, 1259, 1260, 1265 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas (1743–1794), 734, 735 Confessioni di un metafisico (Mamiani), 938 Confessions (Augustine), 44, 246 Conforti, Francesco (1743–1799), 819 Confutazione intorno al Nuovo Saggio … in difesa delle dottrine di Locke e del Condillac (Costa), 806 Con Gramsci (Garin), 1083, 1084 Conosci te stesso (Varisco), 1038 Considerazioni filosofiche sull’idealismo transcendentale e sul razionalismo assoluto (Galluppi), 820, 824, 842 Considerazioni sopra la fisica d’Isacco Newton (Campanella), 646 Considerazioni sopra le dottrine religiose di Vittorio Cousin (Gioberti), 894 Consiglio contro la pestilenza (Ficino), 242 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), 3, 4, 57, 99 Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Henri, (1767–1830), 852 Constantine Donation (Valla), 198, 294 Constantinople, xxxix, 3, 5, 33, 34, 221, 740 Contarenus Zacharias (16th c.), 150 Contarini, Gaspare (1483–1542), 334, 335, 336, 347, 348, 349, 356, 1194 Contarini, G. B. (17th c.), 536, 1215 Contarini, M. Antonio Flavio (15th c.), 292, 293, 342 Contarini, Niccolò (16th c.), 536, 1211 Conti, Antonio (1677–1749), 651, 666, 667, 668, 686, 716, 720, 729, 764, 1245, 1247 Conti, Augusto (1822–1905), 939, 951, 953, 957, 977, 1007, 1021, 1274, 1278 contingentism, 355 Contra hypocritas (Bracciolini), 184 Contraddizioni di Vincenzo Gioberti (Macchi), 934 Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Croce), 1020, 1022

1318

HISTORY OF ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

Contro li Astrologhi giudiciarii (Cremonini), 375 Convivia mediolanensia (Filelfo), 187, 1168 Convivio (Dante), 75, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 1152 Copernican(ism), 402, 466, 474, 575, 606, 607, 633 Copernicus, Nicholaus (1473–1543), xxix, xlii, 451, 466, 467, 606, 769, 1113, 1156 Corbinelli, Antonio (d. 1425), 170 Cordier, Jean (judge, 16th c.), 307 Corleo, Simone (1823–1891), 988, 989, 990, 1284 Cornelio, Tommaso (1614–1686), 627, 628, 631, 632, 633, 634, 642, 643, 682, 1238, 1239 Cornoldi, Giovanni Maria (1822–1893), 957, 959 Corpus platonicum (Ficino), 235 Corsano, Antonio (1899–1989), 309, 450, 463, 681, 687 corsi and ricorsi, 707, 710, 719, 780 Corsi, Giovanni (16th c.), 241, 242, 383 Corsini, Lorenzo (see Clement XII) Corsini, Odoardo (1702–1765), 717, 749, 751, 753, 1258 Corso elementare di lezioni logicometafisico-morale (Bini), 806 Corte, Pietro Antonio (1806–1880), 762, 851, 880, 933 Cortegiano (Castiglione), 396, 526, 527 Cortese, A., 1237, 1262, 1273 Cortese, Paolo (16th c.), 170, 325 Corvaglia, Luigi (b. 1936), 487 Cosa è libertà (Romagnosi), 795 Cosa è uguaglianza (Romagnosi), 795 Cosenza (city), 427, 563, 582, 592, 631 Costa, Filippo, 1106 Costa, Paolo, 805, 806, 811, 813, 815, 816, 856, 882, 1264 Coste, Pierre (1668–1747), 718 Cotin, Charles (1604–1682), 450, 453 Cottunio, Giovanni (d. 1658), 366, 1201 Council(s) of Florence and Ferrara (1438), 131,

200, 219, 223 Lateran c., 26, 293, 389, 1135 c. of Lyons (1245), 58 c. of Nicea (326 CE), 227, 319 c. of Trent (1545–1563), 536, 537, 538, 539, 540, 1200 c. of Vienna (1311–1312), 117 Counter Reformation, liv, 519, 529, 531, 535, 561, 716, 855 Cousin, Victor (1792–1867), xliii, 805, 817, 823, 836, 837, 838, 839, 840, 856, 894, 898, 940, 955, 1014, 1140, 1266, 1267, 1268, 1269 Cozzando, Lionardo (1620–1702), 751 Crater Hermetis (Lazzarelli), 274 Cratylus (Plato), 684, 696 creation(ism), xxxv, xlii, xliii, xliv, 3, 9, 12, 17, 28, 50, 51, 52, 53, 57, 63, 68, 72, 86, 93, 106, 118, 119, 120, 189, 202, 205, 206, 210, 221, 227, 297, 304, 310, 324, 389, 393, 399, 405, 408, 445, 447, 518, 525, 546, 558, 569, 581, 613, 626, 627, 704, 717, 803, 876, 877, 879, 902, 904, 906, 907, 908, 910, 911, 912, 914, 918, 946, 947, 971, 975, 976, 987, 1002, 1008, 1034, 1047, 1083, 1084 Credaro, Luigi (1860–1939), 981, 1265 Cremonini, Cesare (1550–1631), 329, 330, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 53