Annalisa Cappiello

On December 19th 1513, the papal bull Apostolici regiminis sanctioned the dogma of the immortality of the soul, imposing the defence of the Christian doctrine during the courses in philosophy. In their lectures, the Christian teachers had to contrast some unorthodox topics such as the mortality of the individual soul, the unity of the intellect and the eternity of the world. All of their arguments should be based on the principle of the unity of truth, according to which philosophical truths cannot deny or contradict truths of the faith. The paper aims to trace the history of the reception of the adagio verum vero minime contradicit, starting from the promulgation of the bull and the debate on the Aristotelian psychology up to the Age of Galileo and Scientific Revolution, showing the important role Benet Perera played in this debate.

In the controversy raised in 1516 by Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae, the Thomistic theologian Chrysostomus Javelli, regent of the Dominican Studium in Bologna, had the key task of helping Pomponazzi with the publication of the Defensorium, which the Bolognese Inquisition had censured because it did not comply with the requirements of the papal bull Apostolici regiminis (1513). In 1519, Javelli therefore wrote an appendix of Solutiones to the Defensorium in which he resolved, in the light of the Christian faith, all the arguments in favour of the mortality of the soul elaborated by Pomponazzi. Nevertheless, fourteen years later, Javelli again intervened in the debate and produced an autonomous treatise, which he however entitled Tractatus de indeficientia, not de immortalitate. This chapter reconstructs Javelli’s intellectual arc from the composition of his Solutiones (1519) up until the publication of his Tractatus de indeficientia (1536), shedding light on the reasons behind his unusual lexical choice in the title of the latter work.

A long historiographical tradition has claimed that the famous Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae had been inspired by Tommaso de Vio’s Commentary on De anima – whose basic thesis was that, according to the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, the human soul was mortal – even though Pomponazzi in his entire work never mentioned Caietanus as a model. Firstly, this article frames the status quaestionis focusing on affinities and divergences between the two books and on the possible relationship and exchange between the two authors, especially on the topic of the Aristotelian psychology. Secondly, the present study shows what emerges from a cross-reading of the sources which includes the collection of the Opuscula published in 1519 by the Dominican friar Bartolomeo Spina, who explicitly accused Caietanus of having paved the way for the scandalous and anti-Christian Pomponazzi’s position. The important gain of this collation of texts is the discovery of an unseen moment of debate with Caietanus inside Pomponazzi’s Tractatus.

The aim of this work is to focus on the most unusual application of the Lateran bull Apostolici regiminis, the founding document of the inquisitorial legislation which regulated the teaching activity of philosophy professors by forcing them to refute any heterodox theory and to teach the doctrine of faith. In 1519, the inquisitor of Bologna Giovanni de’ Torfanni censored the book Defensorium, in which the secular Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi developed against his colleague Agostino Nifo a long series of arguments in favor of the mortality of the human soul without match them with their respective Christian refutations, as prescribed by the papal bull. Nevertheless, as a result of a not well documented negotiation with the competent authorities, Pomponazzi was relieved of all obligations, provided that he submitted his book to the emendations of the Dominican theologian Crisostomo Javelli. Pomponazzi accepted the agreement and Javelli drew up a list of forty-two solutions to as many mortalistic arguments found in Defensorium. Javelli’s list – titled Solutiones rationum animi mortalitatem probantium quae in Defensorio contra Niphum excellentissimi Petri Pomponatii formantur – was then attached to Defensorium and in this way Pomponazzi gained permission to print and sell his book. After a short reconstruction of the key steps of this affair, the present work provides a critical edition of Javelli’s Solutiones, based upon both the sixteenth-century editions of the text, the first one contained in Defensorium, the other included in Pomponazzi’s Tractatus acutissimi, utillimi, et mere peripatetici.