3. Italian universities, arts masters and interpreting Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae

John Marenbon

This study of Pietro Pomponazzi in relation to the institutions which shaped his work is intended to contribute to the wider discussion of the historiography of institutions and individuals in medieval scholasticism opened up by the editors in their substantial, thought-provoking introduction. It concentrates on the most famous and interpretatively controversial feature of Pomponazzi’s thought, the position he takes on the immortality of the human soul in his De immortalitate animae. The first section gives a neutral summary of the argument of Pomponazzi’s treatise and the different interpretations which have been proposed. The second section looks at how considering Pomponazzi’s institutional background as an arts master in the north Italian universities helps to solve the interpretative problem. However, Pomponazzi was far from a simple representative of a type: the third section will consider some of the ways in which he defied institutional norms and how they relate to interpreting his views about the soul.¹

De immortalitate animae: the argument and its interpretation

De immortalitate sets out to answer two questions put to Pomponazzi by his one-time pupil, the Dominican Girolamo Natale of Ragusa.² What does Pomponazzi think about the immortality of the human soul ‘putting all revelation and miracles aside, and without going beyond the boundaries of nature [pure infra naturales limites]’; and what does he think about Aristotle’s view of this matter? Starting (chapter 1) from the generally accepted view that the nature of human beings is ambiguous (anceps), in between mortality and immortality, and from the logical truth that nothing can be mortal and immortal at the same time, Pomponazzi spells out (chapter 2) six possibilities. Either (A) humans have two different natures, by one of which they are mortal, by the other of which they are immortal; or (B) they are at once mortal and immortal by one and the same nature. In the first case, either (Ai) each human has his/her own mortal and his/her own immortal nature; or (Aii) there is one immortal nature for all humans, but each has his/her own mortal natures; or (Aiii) vice versa, there is one mortal nature for all, but an immortal nature for each. In the second case, since it would be contradictory for anything to be mortal without qualification and immortal without qualification, the one nature by which each human is both mortal and immortal must be either (Bi) immortal without qualification (simpliciter) and mortal with qualification (secundum quid); or (Bii) mortal without qualification and immortal with qualification; or (Biii) both mortal and immortal with qualification. (Aiii) and (Biii) are both merely theoretically possible positions, held by no one. The four remaining positions, however, correspond to the main views held in Pomponazzi’s day about the immortality of the human soul.

(Ai) is the Platonic view, as expounded by Ficino (not mentioned by name, but clearly in Pomponazzi’s mind). It is recounted and dismissed briefly (chapters 5–6). (Aii) is the view of Averroes, who held that there is one immortal, incorporeal intellect shared by all humans, whose individual souls are themselves mortal. Many of Pomponazzi’s contemporaries in the Italian universities subscribed to this interpretation as the correct reading of Aristotle.³ Here, however, he begins by declaring (chapter 4) that he has nothing himself to add to Aquinas’s exposition of the falsity of this opinion which ‘leaves nothing intact, nor any reply that might be made on Averroes’s behalf unrefuted’.⁴ Pomponazzi confines himself, therefore, to an extended discussion of how Averroes is not merely wrong, but unfaithful to Aristotle’s text.

(Bi) is Aquinas’s view. It is expounded in chapter 7; and Pomponazzi begins chapter 8 by declaring he has no doubt about the truth of this position ‘since Holy Scripture, which should be preferred to any human reasoning or experience, since it has been given by God, endorses this position’.⁵ However, he continues, reiterating his description in the preface of the scope of his discussion, he does think that it is questionable whether the position, as Aquinas thought, is in accordance with Aristotle’s texts and whether it can be rationally established or, rather, makes presuppositions based on revelation or belief. There follows a long sequence of arguments against both the fidelity to Aristotle and the rational coherence of Aquinas’s view. (Bii) is Pomponazzi’s own view: it can be called ‘mortalism’ because according to it the human soul is unqualifiedly mortal and immortal only with qualification. Since this view is the mirror-opposite of Aquinas’s, it is not surprising that Pomponazzi’s arguments against Aquinas and his defence of his own position against possible objections follow the same lines.

Despite the intricacy of this discussion, Pomponazzi’s central point, to which he returns again and again, is straightforward. For Aristotle, intellection itself is an incorporeal action and Pomponazzi follows him and the whole medieval tradition in regarding it as such. However, in De anima Aristotle adds that the human soul does not engage in intellection without having imaginative images (phantasmata).⁶ In Aristotelian psychology, imaginative images belong to the corporeal sensible soul: to its inner senses, which are situated in specific parts of the brain. Aristotle himself, in a phrase often quoted by Pomponazzi, comments that ‘if intellection [intelligere] either is imagination [phantasia] or is not without imagination, then it cannot be separated’ (that is, from the body).⁷ Pomponazzi puts the position in terms of subject and object. The human intellect does not require the body as a subject: that is to say, it does not need anything bodily in order to function as such; but it does require something bodily as an object, because it cannot in fact function without forming some corporeal image (idolum).⁸ As a result the human soul is without qualification inseparable and so mortal, even though – because it participates in the incorporeal action of intellection – it is immortal with qualification.

After four chapters (9–12) setting out this position and defending it from counter-arguments, Pomponazzi moves, in chapter 13, to objections of a different sort. These objections are not based on attacking the coherence of Pomponazzi’s theory of the soul, or its fidelity to Aristotle, but on the unacceptability of mortalism in general and its consequences. They include, among others, the arguments that, if humans are mortal, then self-sacrifice for a friend or the common good will be irrational; that, since the good and evil are frequently not fittingly rewarded or punished in their earthly lives, God either does not govern the universe or is wicked; and that all the religious laws (leges) say the soul is immortal and those who have denied its immortality were impious and wicked. Pomponazzi’s replies (chapter 14) are even bolder than his earlier arguments. The essential reward for virtuous actions, he contends, is simply that of being virtuous; and the prospect of other ‘accidental’ rewards, even heavenly ones, reduces the essential reward gained by acting well. From this perspective, not only are God’s goodness and justice vindicated simply by virtuous people being virtuous – the implication is also that the pagan mortalist is able to be more virtuous than any Christian. Pomponazzi is able to assemble a list of great and worthy figures who, it seems, were mortalists, among them Homer, Simonides, Galen, Hippocrates, Pliny, Seneca, al-Farabi and Ibn Gabirol.⁹ As for the point that all the laws support human immortality, Pomponazzi remarks that ‘since there are just three laws – that of Christ, or Moses and of Mohammed – either they are all false, and so everyone is mistaken, or at least two of them are false, and so the greater part of the world is mistaken’.¹⁰ He then goes on to suggest that, in any case, many of those who have taught there is an afterlife have done so not because they thought it was true, but so as to produce good conduct. Only a very few people, he argues, will act well for the sake of virtue alone; and for most the threat of punishment in an afterlife is the only way to restrain their wickedness.¹¹

Yet, in the final chapter, Pomponazzi declares that the immortality of the soul is ‘a neutral problem’, like that of the eternity of the world. Problems were considered to be neutral when no proof could be found for either of their contradictory sides. This was exactly how Aquinas thought about the eternity of the world, but not, of course, about the immortality of the soul. Pomponazzi goes to say both that on such a question, on which many are in doubt, only God can be certain; and yet that we cannot afford not to be certain about such a matter, since this uncertainty means we do not know our end or goal and so cannot decide how to act: ‘If the soul is immortal we should despise earthly things and seek eternal ones; but if it is mortal, we should follow the opposite path’.¹²

However, we need not remain in doubt. The question is resolved, Pomponazzi declares, by the statements of revelation in the Old and New Testaments; and there are overwhelming reasons, because of the way in which the revelation has been made, to accept its truth. Pomponazzi does not go into these reasons himself, but he refers readers to the expositions by both Aquinas and Scotus.¹³ The immortality of the soul is, indeed, an article of faith and, as such, it should be proved through arguments proper to matters of faith, that is to say, through revelation and the Bible.¹⁴

Clearly, the De immortalitate poses an interpretative problem. Given the length and power of the arguments for mortalism, to which no replies are developed, and the absence of arguments left unrefuted for immortalism, it is hard to see how the preceding chapters bear out the view, announced in chapter 15, that the immortality of the soul is a neutral problem. Some interpreters, therefore, hold that Pomponazzi really thought that the soul was mortal; and that chapter 15 and the other places where he professes his personal adherence to the Church’s teaching are dissimulations, included in order to allow the book to be published and save its author from trial as a heretic. Others accept the sincerity of these professions.

These differences over how to interpret Pomponazzi arose from the very beginning.¹⁵ Some of his opponents, such as Ambrogio Fiandino and Bartolomeo Spina, treated him as unqualifiedly denying the immortality of the soul or as writing in such a way as to undermine people’s faith.¹⁶ In Venice Pomponazzi was declared a heretic and it was ordered that copies of De immortalitate should be burned;¹⁷ and in Rome the master of the apostolic palace, Silvestro Mazzolini, applauded this decision, considering that Pomponazzi’s book weakened and destroyed the faith in the minds of the young.¹⁸ However, his most considered opponents, Gasparo Contarini, a one-time pupil, Venetian diplomat and future cardinal, and Agostino Nifo, a colleague and rival, accepted that Pomponazzi was discussing just what could be established by arguments based on natural reason, although they differed from his conclusions; while the Dominican Chrysostom Javelli publicly affirmed Pomponazzi’s religious sincerity.¹⁹ Pietro Bembo appears to have stopped a papal call for a retraction in its tracks and declared he found nothing heretical in the treatise.²⁰

Later reactions are similarly divided. In the seventeenth century De immortalitate was frequently cited, though rarely directly, by ‘atheists’ – those who questioned aspects of Christian doctrine, including post-mortem survival.²¹ However, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique Bayle fully accepted that Pomponazzi wished simply to say that rational proof of the soul’s immortality is impossible; and Bayle’s discussion was influential in many circles.²² Recent scholars, too, are split. Giovanni di Napoli and, more stridently, Martin Pine and Burkhard Mojsisch see Pomponazzi as dissimulating a disbelief in personal immortality.²³ However, the opposite view, put polemically by Kristeller half a century ago, is shared, with more nuance, by most of the leading scholars today.²⁴ All, however, would agree that the problem is not, as some earlier historians thought, one of deciding whether or not Pomponazzi is a herald of modernity; but rather one of reconstructing the framework within which he worked and thought so that the elusive, and probably complex, intention behind his text can be identified. How far does investigating Pomponazzi’s institutional background help towards this aim?

Pomponazzi the institutional insider

Pomponazzi is more clearly and closely tied to a particular sort of institution than most thinkers. No philosopher of the long middle ages was more a creature of the university system, a true academic insider. Born in Mantua in 1462, he studied at Padua university, one of the two most prestigious in Italy. When his studies were finished in 1487, he became a teacher there, staying – except for a three-year break at the court in Ferrara at the very end of the century – until 1509, when the university was closed due to Padua’s rebellion and the Venetian reconquest. Then, from 1511 until his death in 1525, Pomponazzi taught at Bologna, the other leading Italian university.²⁵ Pomponazzi did not merely work within the system: he used the celebrity he gained to play the system to his own advantage, in a way that some of today’s academic superstars would be happy if they could emulate. When the temporary closure of the universities at Padua and then Ferrara left Pomponazzi without a job, Bologna took the opportunity to poach him. At first he had to take a cut in salary, though he was still paid more than twice as much as the professorial average, but then, in the face of counter-bids from Pisa, by 1518 the university had to pay him three times the original sum in order to retain him.²⁶

Pomponazzi’s writings are mostly closely linked to his university teaching. Many of them are, indeed, not properly speaking his writings at all, but reportationes of his lectures on exactly the texts which a professor of arts would have been expected to teach – especially Aristotle’s physical works, with a particular concentration on the De anima.²⁷ These reports can represent only a fraction of his teaching activity over more than thirty years. The works he printed in his lifetime were almost all gathered together in the Tractatus acutissimi, utillimi et mere peripatetici, published in the year of his death.²⁸ They include treatises on the interpretation of Aristotelian physics by the fourteenth-century Oxford thinkers so influential in the Italian universities; and one on Nutrition and Growth, closely linked to Aristotle’s discussions of these themes; along with the De immortalitate animae and the treatises – the Apologia and the Defensorium – which Pomponazzi wrote in response to its critics. These three texts are almost as closely linked with Pomponazzi’s teaching as the rest of the volume, since De immortalitate, first published in 1516, is based on the lectures he had been giving on De anima from the turn of the century. There are, finally, two further important works, which Pomponazzi wrote in his last years and circulated in manuscript but chose not to have printed in his lifetime: De incantationibus and De fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione.

The institution to which Pomponazzi belonged so thoroughly was part of a very special sort of medieval university: the arts faculty in its particular, fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Italian variant, as illustrated by its two outstanding examples, Padua and Bologna.²⁹ Both universities were outstanding centres for medicine and law. Arts were considered part of the preparation for the doctorate in medicine, although it was possible to take a doctorate just in arts, or in arts as well as medicine; and a very few students, including Pomponazzi himself, took a degree in arts and then, some years later, in medicine. However, Pomponazzi never taught medicine: he remained throughout his career an arts professor.

The arts course he and others taught diverged in some important ways from that of the northern universities. Like theirs, it was built around Aristotle’s texts, but the arts masters did not usually lecture on either the Ethics or the Metaphysics, two of the central texts of the arts curriculum in Oxford, Paris and elsewhere. Ethics was given little attention and was usually taught in a limited number of lectures by specialists who carried little prestige. Metaphysics was usually taught, if at all, by the theologians.

It is in regard to the theologians and their position that there is the most striking difference of all between the Italian university model and that found north of the Alps. It was not until the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that theology faculties began to be established in the Italian universities: for instance, at Padua in 1363 and Bologna the next year. However, theology (and metaphysics, which was considered to be tied to it) was only very partially integrated into the university’s own curriculum. The teaching was generally done in the existing studia of the various mendicant and monastic orders, but there were a few university posts. By Pomponazzi’s time there were at Padua a professor of Thomist theology and one of Scotist theology; and similarly two professors of metaphysics, one in via S. Thomae and one in via Scoti. As these job-titles indicate, metaphysics was closely tied to theology and completely apart from the courses followed by medical students. Bologna, however, was among the Italian universities which did little to bring theology and metaphysics into its ambit and for most of Pomponazzi’s period there was just one post, in metaphysics.³⁰

The shape of medieval Latin thinking from the thirteenth century onwards was determined in its outlines by the institutional structure of the universities, especially the division into arts and higher faculties, just as that structure, and that division, were moulded by the thinking of the time. In Paris and Oxford the existence of an arts faculty fostered a form of thinking based on reason and developed through a line-by-line reading of the works of the man who was judged its best exponent, the ancient pagan, Aristotle. However, the prestige of the theology faculties there, and the close ecclesiastical supervision of the universities, placed limits on how far the arts masters were able to develop their own lines of thought when they threatened to go against Christian doctrine. The situation of the arts faculties in Italy might be expected to foster the same form of thinking, but in a version biased towards naturalistic explanation (because of the students’ usual intended career and the absence of ethics and metaphysics) and far less restricted by doctrinal scruples (because of the light Church and heavy civic supervision and the absence of influential theologians).

So, indeed, it happened – but with a twist which is of great importance for understanding Pomponazzi’s position and the aims behind De immortalitate. Arts masters in the thirteenth-century university of Paris did indeed conceive themselves as dedicated expositors of Aristotelian philosophy, which they believed to provide the best understanding of the world based on natural reason. Their wish to work untrammelled within this sphere of rational, Aristotle-based enquiry, expressed most vividly in the work of Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, had received two rebuffs in the 1270s. Most famously, there were the 1277 Condemnations, in which 219 propositions, some of them linked to the positions of Siger, Boethius or their colleagues, were condemned; and in which, in his preface, Bishop Étienne Tempier criticized those who said that some things ‘are true according to philosophy, but not according to faith, as if there were two contrary truths’.³¹ Earlier, in 1272, a statute, perhaps written at their request, had forbidden the Paris arts masters from making purely theological questions the subject of their disputations and required them to refute any views they discussed which might seem to negate Christian doctrine.³² This statute formed the basis of the oath for arts masters instituted in Paris in 1279, but the requirement about statements contrary to Christianity was both widened and qualified, since arts masters had to swear that, if they had to determine any question touching on ‘faith and philosophy’, they would determine it ‘on behalf of faith’ (pro fide) and refute the arguments against the faith ‘in so far as it seems to you they should be refuted’ (secundum quod vobis dissolvende videbuntur).³³

Although some historians underline the constraining effect of these measures, especially the 1277 Condemnations, on intellectual freedom, it was usually possible for arts masters to follow through their interpretations of Aristotelian texts, even when they went directly against Christian doctrine, simply by declaring that such philosophical doctrines were false and mentioning, however briefly, the teaching of the faith. They adopted, in effect, a type of limited relativism, accepting that the doctrine of the faith was true, but vigorously pursuing their own philosophical discussions and drawing their conclusions, sometimes opposed to Christian doctrine.³⁴ They were content to keep the two spheres apart in practice and not to press enquiry into their relations. Indeed, the success of this pragmatically relativist approach depended on its not being theorized. The freedom it offered was particularly evident in Italy, for the reasons already mentioned, and in the later fifteenth century the standard interpretation by arts masters there of Aristotle’s views on the soul was, as mentioned above, that of Averroes: a clearly anti-Christian position, since it did not allow for individual immortality.

However, such liberty provoked a counter-reaction, which provides the immediate context for De immortalitate. First, in 1489, the bishop of Padua banned public disputations on the unity of the intellect, even if the disputants condemned Averroes’ wickedness. He did not, however, forbid masters from following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s teaching on the intellect in their lectures.³⁵ Then, in 1513, the Fifth Lateran Council went further.³⁶ The bull Apostolici regiminis ordered all engaged in philosophy, in universities or otherwise teaching publicly, when lecturing on ‘the principles or conclusions of the philosophers, where they are known to have deviated from the right faith’ to use all their efforts ‘to make clear to their hearers the truth of the Christian religion, and teach it by persuading so far as they can, and with the greatest care to rule out and to reject these sorts of the arguments of the philosophers with all their ability, since they all can be refuted’.³⁷ The view that the soul is mortal, or not individually immortal, is explicitly mentioned as an example of such arguments.³⁸ The bull’s injunction to refute anti-Christian arguments seems to be modelled on the 1279 arts masters’ oath, which had been adopted in the later middle ages in, for example, Heidelberg and Vienna, though not, it seems, in Italy.³⁹ Underlying it is a return to Aquinas, a powerful influence at this time. Aquinas holds that reason and Christian doctrine, both gifts from God, must be in harmony. Since human reason is limited, there may be questions in which neither side can be proven by it and on these neutral questions faith will give the answer; but reason can never prove what is contrary to Christian doctrine. The Lateran Council wished to insist on Aquinas’s anti-relativist position to put aside the untheorized, de facto relativism of the arts masters. Since reason is unitary, their philosophical accounts must be mistaken when they contradict Christian doctrine and so, the bull insists, the arts masters themselves should explain how.

Apostolici regiminis posed a direct challenge to the intellectual freedom arts masters had enjoyed until then, especially in Italy. By publishing, just three years later, De immortalitate, a work which apparently directly contravenes Apostolici regiminis, Pomponazzi launched a counter-challenge on their behalf. Of all those colleagues who shared a similar institutional position, he was best placed to take such a bold step because he had powerful ex-pupils, such as the papal secretary Pietro Bembo, who could, and did, defend him.

De immortalitate, then, can be seen – at least in one aspect – as a defence of the traditional intellectual freedom of the arts masters to develop their philosophical ideas, so long as they also acknowledge the truth of Christian doctrine. This reading throws light on the purpose of the passages, such as chapter 15, in which, according to some interpreters, Pomponazzi is dissimulating. Hence far from being sops to orthodoxy, included to avoid censorship or persecution, they are central to Pomponazzi’s strategy in opposing the new restrictions imposed by the Lateran Council. The apparatus of contrasting the conclusions of philosophical reasoning with Christian doctrine, which is accepted as the truth, was the essential framework for the arts masters’ qualified, pragmatic relativism, which gave them intellectual freedom and was now under threat.

Pomponazzi had to find a very delicate balance in which he simultaneously went against the spirit of Apostolici regiminis, so as to reassert the arts masters’ traditional independence, but respected the letter of the new regulations sufficiently to avoid having his text condemned. A special difficulty was posed for him by the new requirement to provide refutations of the arguments for the position contrary to Christian doctrine, since the body of the treatise suggests he thought that, within natural reason, it is the view that the soul is mortal which emerges triumphant. Pomponazzi does not provide these refutations. Even when, for the publication of the Defensorium, his reply to Nifo’s criticisms, the Church authorities insisted on there being refutations of his arguments for mortalism, Pomponazzi satisfied them by having the Dominican theologian Chrysostomus Javelli supply these counter-arguments in his place.⁴⁰ Pomponazzi did, however, make a concession to this new demand by declaring that the immortality of the soul is a ‘neutral’ problem, since the normal implication of this description is that the arguments on both sides are not conclusive and so, in principle, the arguments he makes for mortality could be refuted. Given the way he has argued for mortalism, this remark, at least, may appear to be dissimulation, but a closer look at the whole passage (see the next section) suggests that in fact he may have been able to make it in good faith.

In any case, Pomponazzi seems to have done enough to convince the Church authorities that he was not openly opposing them. He was not punished; and his career flourished even more after 1516 than before, even though in his works replying to the critics of De immortalitate he did not significantly alter his position about mortalism. Historians disagree about the general effects of Apostolici regiminis over the coming decades, but it is clear that to a large extent arts masters in Italy continued as before to develop their arguments without stopping to show why they were wrong when they contradicted the faith.⁴¹ They were most probably beneficiaries of Pomponazzi’s stand, which helped to qualify or even neutralize the bull from the very start.

Pomponazzi the individual

The picture of Pomponazzi as a figure moulded by his institution and fighting for the values associated with it and his position there, and of De immortalitate as countering a threat to these values, captures an important aspect of the truth. However, it is not the whole truth. There are many elements in the treatise not explained by it, just as this description covers only one aspect of Pomponazzi. Pomponazzi was far too powerful, complex and enigmatic a thinker to be a mere product and representative of his institution. Although he was an eminently successful academic insider, Pomponazzi’s career had some unusual features: for instance, he chose to lecture, shortly after his arrival at Bologna, on book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a text usually left to the theologians (who would be friars or monks); and to add, between 1514 and 1521, to his prestigious, well-paid lectureship there a part-time, very poorly paid post in moral philosophy – he clearly had a strong interest in this subject, side-lined in the universities where he worked.⁴²

Arts courses were based on Aristotle, usually studied with the help of the commentator, that is to say Averroes, whose interpretations had statutory authority in the universities where Pomponazzi worked. Although, in fact, arts masters often arrived at novel positions, they rarely did so in explicit contradiction of their authorities. Pomponazzi, by contrast, was willing to reject, often contemptuously, the views of any authority. Even at the start of his career, when he believed that Averroes’ theory of one intellect for all humans was the correct interpretation of Aristotle, he rejected it entirely – and, clearly, his opposition had nothing to do with ecclesiastical pressure, given the alternative views he developed.⁴³ Even in the case of the newly available translations of Greek works, he was quick to turn against their doctrines. Michael of Ephesus’s commentary is introduced with considerable fanfare in the lectures on De partibus, but soon Pomponazzi marks his disagreement with it and then stops using it. Even Aristotle was not spared. In lectures on the Meteora given late in his life, he remarked: ‘I should prefer to be in the state of Socrates, who reached the position which he expressed by saying, “I know one thing: that I know nothing”, than that of Aristotle who, I believe, pretended that he knew many things of which he was in fact ignorant’.⁴⁴

Although up to the time of De immortalitate, and to an extent in that work too, Pomponazzi’s writings were closely linked to his university teaching, in the years from its publication in 1516 to his death in 1525 much of his work was independent of the university curriculum, since he was specially occupied in producing his two long defences against critics of his views on immortality; and two treatises in which he developed his own interests quite independently of the curriculum, De incantationibus, on miracles, and his work on fate and predestination. This treatise, the longest of all Pomponazzi’s writings, is a most unusual work to have been produced by an arts master. It was the very raison d’être of arts masters’ profession, in Italy as everywhere, that they were not theologians: their questions and their authorities were philosophical, not theological. Nonetheless, in books 3–5 of De fato (200 pages in the modern edition) he devotes himself completely to discussing human freedom and predestination from the point of view of Christian doctrine.

These details about Pomponazzi’s interests and other writings cast aspects of De immortalitate in a new light. The lengthy discussion on ethics is clearly not there just to reinforce a point about the freedom of arts masters, but to contribute to an area of thought Pomponazzi considered centrally important.⁴⁵ Perhaps, too, as both his interest in theology and his scepticism about the certainty of Aristotelian science indicate, his methodological stance embraced, but went beyond, the traditional independence of the arts masters.

To follow up this suggestion, the central paragraph in chapter 15 on the immortality of the soul as a neutral problem needs to be examined carefully. After saying that, in the light of what he has said, the immortality of the soul seems to be a neutral problem (neutrum problema), Pomponazzi goes on:

According to the widely used and only complete English translation, this means:

The line of thought, as expressed in the translation, is puzzling. The first statement does, indeed, fit with the idea of immortality of the soul as a neutral problem by declaring that there are no proofs based on natural reason on either side, although the remark that none can be found for the soul’s mortality directly contradicts pages of argument in the preceding chapters. If the remark which follows is attached to what immediately precedes it, as would be expected, then it seems rather pointless, since it says that many scholars who hold that the soul is immortal believe there are no proofs that it is mortal. The next sentence deepens the puzzle. What is ‘the other side’, since the previous sentence has mentioned both sides (that the soul is immortal; that it is mortal)? Since the sentence begins with ‘Wherefore’ (Quare), it is supposed to follow on as a consequence, explained by the preceding remark, but it is not clear how it does; and the translator goes on to explain it, rather, by the following remark: that others, such as Aquinas, have given answers. The final two sentences state there is uncertainty over the immortality of the soul, but this was already established by saying it is a neutral problem: it is not clear what argumentative purpose the previous sentences have served or why the disagreement of ‘famous men’ has been brought into the discussion.

The passage becomes less problematic if the first sentence is translated in the most obvious way for the Latin, although it produces a meaning which is unexpected. The phrase minusque probantes animam esse mortalem, as Perrone Compagni, alone among translators, has pointed out, should in the context be rendered ‘and showing that it is less arguable that the soul is mortal’ or ‘showing that there is no proof for the soul’s mortality’.⁴⁸ Pomponazzi does not, then, give a straightforward gloss on what it means for a problem to be neutral. Rather, completely in line with the preceding chapters, he insists on the mortalist position and says that, within natural reasoning, there are neither good arguments for the immortality of the soul, nor good arguments against its mortality.

Pomponazzi’s comment about ‘very many scholars who hold it immortal’ now becomes far from a bland truism: he is pointing out that many thinkers, such as Scotus, who hold that in truth the soul is immortal, agree with him that natural reason cannot establish its immortality, either positively or negatively, by disproving the arguments for its mortality.⁴⁹ Understood in this way, the sentence does indeed offer a reason, as the word quare indicates, why Pomponazzi has not given replies to refute the arguments for ‘the other side’, that is, the view that the soul is mortal: he cannot find any. In the clause which follows, cum cannot have the sense of ‘because’ since the reason Pomponazzi has not chosen to reply to these arguments has already been given; rather, it must mean ‘although’. On the one hand, many learned people, Pomponazzi himself among them, cannot find any arguments based on natural reason either for the soul’s immortality or against its mortality. On the other hand, others, chiefly Aquinas – whose arguments for immortality had already been presented in chapter 7 – propose many arguments against its mortality; and Aquinas’s are lucid, full and weighty (note that Pomponazzi does not say they are cogent). Pomponazzi has, therefore, established that many, including ‘famous men’ such as Aquinas and Scotus, disagree over whether the soul’s immortality can be shown by natural reason; and that, he contends, is a reason for mere humans to suspend judgement. By implication he seems also to give this disagreement as his reason for holding that the problem of immortality is neutral, although he himself thinks that there is no rational case for immortality.

In the remaining paragraphs of chapter 15, and at much greater length in his Apologia, Pomponazzi defends the view that the immortality of the soul is a position which, although contrary to all the principles used in natural reasoning, can be vindicated by arguing on the basis of the articles of faith, which are not known through natural reason but are believed as a result of revelation.⁵⁰ Within the sphere of natural reasoning, arguments for the soul’s immortality must be rejected and those for its mortality are cogent. Nonetheless, there is an overall doubt about the reliability of the results of natural reasoning which permits Pomponazzi rationally to juxtapose its mortalist conclusion with the immortalist conclusion reached by the different sort of argument which uses revealed premises; and then to choose to accept as true this conclusion, reached using revelation and endorsed by the Church.

There is every reason, in the light of his work as a whole, to take this as his own genuine, considered position. It is not a concession, made for the sake of appearance so as to avoid censorship and persecution, but a bold stance and an unusual one, shared neither by the Church leaders, under the sway of Thomism, nor his fellow arts masters, whose cause it nevertheless sustained, nor even by his favoured authority, Duns Scotus. As explained above, the arts masters had countered Aquinas’s anti-relativism, which the Lateran Council would reaffirm, by ignoring it in practice and not engaging with it theoretically. By contrast, Pomponazzi rejected it explicitly. The best natural reasoning, he holds, can and does come to conclusions contrary to Christian doctrine, such as that the human soul is mortal. Duns Scotus would have agreed that, at least in some cases, even the wisest philosophers cannot but be misled by their reasons.⁵¹ However, these philosophers were, for him, the pagan thinkers of antiquity, such as Aristotle: Scotus himself worked as a theologian, pursuing truth by using, where appropriate, premises from revelation. Except in the last three books of De fato, Pomponazzi worked always in the capacity of an arts master, not a theologian. He was content to argue within the sphere of natural reason, which he held to have its own coherence. He defended, as an arts master, what he thought to be the best conclusions of reason, even if they contradicted Christian doctrine, and would not accept that they could, even in principle, be rationally refuted. Yet he also accepted that this whole system of reasoning, considered from the outside, was not beyond question. He could, therefore, happily accept that there is another sphere of argument, sustained by the articles of faith, where certainty is to be found.

Conclusion

The view just suggested about Pomponazzi’s underlying aims and beliefs needs much more careful exploration than can be offered here, in the light not only of the methodological statements in the Apologia, but also of the comments and procedures in De incantationibus and De fato. However, it is very clear from the discussion above that explanations based on Pomponazzi’s institutional character, as the university insider, go only part of the way towards solving the interpretative puzzle posed by De immortalitate. Such a judgement might seem disappointing in relation to the aims of this collection as a whole – a return to the sort of old-fashioned history based on outstanding individuals and great minds, to which the focus on institutional contexts is supposed to provide an alternative. A more careful look, however, at the way the argument about Pomponazzi has unfolded here suggests a different, less negative conclusion.

Reference to institutional norms plays as large a part in the third section of this essay, on Pomponazzi as an individual, as it does in the second, on Pomponazzi as the institutional insider. Pomponazzi’s unusual traits and novel views emerge only in the light of institutional practice. However, ‘institutional’ needs to be taken in a wide sense, for while the tangible institutions of the universities of Padua and Bologna are of some importance, the main explanatory roles are played by the virtual institutions of being-an-arts-master (in early sixteenth-century Italy, but with the weight of a history stretching back to thirteenth-century Paris) and, more widely, of Abrahamic Aristotelianism – the set of texts, aims, assumptions, methods and practices, both shared and disputed by Muslims, Jews and Christians, within which alone the complex argument of De immortalitate set out in part 1, and the interpretative choices explored in parts 2 and 3, can be understood. It is above all this and other such chronologically long and geographically broad virtual institutions which must be studied, both to reach a historically plausible, contextualized understanding of individual thinkers and their work; and, more ambitiously, to ensure a social history of philosophy is one day written.

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¹ The very inclusion in a book about medieval scholasticism of Pomponazzi, who did his most important work in the early 16th century, points to an interesting problem. The methods and practices characteristic of medieval scholasticism flourished from c.1050 to c.1700, a period which only partially coincides with what most historians identify as the middle ages. Related problems of chronology and the relation between ‘medieval’ and ‘renaissance’ philosophy are discussed in J. Marenbon, ‘When was medieval philosophy?’ (inaugural lecture, University of Cambridge, 2011) <https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/240658?show=full> [accessed 24 Oct. 2019]; ‘Latin philosophy, 1350–1550’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy, ed. J. Marenbon (Oxford and New York, 2012), pp. 222–44; ‘When did medieval philosophy begin?’, in Ingenio facilis. Per Giovanni Orlandi (1938–2007), ed. P. Chiesa, A. M. Fagnoni and R. E. Gugliemetti (Florence, 2017), pp. 149–62.

² P. Pomponazzi, Traité de l’immortalitate de l’âme/ Tractatus de immortalitate animae, ed. T. Gontier (Paris, 2012), p. 5 (Proem 5). Gontier’s long introduction is one of the best recent studies of the treatise, as is that in Pietro Pomponazzi. Trattato sull’immortalità dell’anima, trans. V. Perrone Compagni (Florence, 1999).

³ See G. di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1963), pp. 179–226.

⁴ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 21 (4.24).

⁵ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 57 (8.94).

⁶ Aristotle, De anima, III, 431a16–17; 432a8–9.

⁷ Aristotle, De anima, I, 403a8–10.

⁸ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, pp. 89–91 (9.150).

⁹ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, pp. 203–5 (14.308).

¹⁰ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 185 (14.279).

¹¹ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, pp. 185–7 (14.280–1).

¹² Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 211 (15.317).

¹³ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 213 (15.318). He refers to Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, Prologue, p. 6; and to Scotus’s Ordinatio, Prologue, pt. 2, q. unica (a very long and detailed discussion).

¹⁴ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 213 (15.319).

¹⁵ On the controversy provoked by De immortalitate, which produced many books and lasted beyond Pomponazzi’s own life, see E. Gilson, ‘Autour de Pomponazzi. Problématique de l’immortalité de l’âme en Italie au début du XVIe siècle’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, xxxvi (1961), 163–279, at pp. 196–277; di Napoli, L’Immortalità dell’anima, pp. 277–338; and M. L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua, 1986), pp. 124–234.

¹⁶ On Ambrogio, see Gilson, ‘Autour de Pomponazzi’, pp. 230–6; di Napoli, L’Immortalità dell’anima, pp. 300–1; Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 133–4 (and in the following, synthetic, discussion); on Spina, see Gilson, ‘Autour de Pomponazzi’, pp. 196–206; di Napoli, L’Immortalità dell’anima, pp. 302–9; Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 134–5 (and in the following, synthetic, discussion).

¹⁷ See P. Pomponazzi, Apologia, in Pietro Pomponazzi. Tutti i trattati peripatetici, ed. F. P. Raimondi and J. M. García Valverde (Milan, 2013), pp. 1107–537, at pp. 1492–4 (III, 2). References to the Apologia are to this edition.

¹⁸ See Pietro Pomponazzi. Apologia, trans. V. Perrone Compagni (Florence, 2011), p. 254, n. 17, quoting from Mazzolini’s own De strigmagarum demonumque mirandis (1521). Pomponazzi himself gives a completely different account, in which Mazzolini laughs and says he approves of the book (Apologia, p. 1494 (III, 2)).

¹⁹ See Gilson, ‘Autour de Pomponazzi’, p. 265; on Javelli, see below, p. 100.

²⁰ Pomponazzi, Apologia, p. 1494 (III, 2); cf. B. Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence, 1965), pp. 25–7.

²¹ See Gontier’s comments in De immortalitate, introduction, pp. lxi–lxii.

²² See P. Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (4 vols, Amsterdam, 1740), iii. 777–83; cf. M. Longo, ‘L’immagine di Pomponazzi nella “prima Aufklärung”’, in Pietro Pomponazzi. Tradizione e dissenso, ed. M. Sgarbi (Florence, 2010), pp. 407–34.

²³ di Napoli, L’Immortalità dell’anima, pp. 274–5; Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, passim; Pietro Pomponazzi. Abhandlung über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, trans. B. Mojsisch (Philosophische Bibliothek, ccccxxxiv, Hamburg, 1990), pp. ix–xiv.

²⁴ P. O. Kristeller, ‘The myth of renaissance atheism and the French tradition of free thought’, Jour. Hist. Philosophy, vi (1968), 233–43; cf. the introduction to Gontier’s edition of De immortalitate and, though her view does not fit neatly into either alternative, Perrone Compagni, Trattato, pp. lxxxv–xcvi.

²⁵ There is a good account of Pomponazzi’s career in Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 39–52.

²⁶ See P. F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, Md., 2002), pp. 15–16.

²⁷ These are listed in Gontier’s edition of De immortalitate, pp. lxxvii–lxxviii.

²⁸ P. Pomponazzi, Tractatus acutissimi, utillimi et mere peripatetici (Venice, 1525). The works in this collection have been republished, closely based on the text here, but collated with the first editions, with Italian translation, notes and introductions in Raimondi and García, Pietro Pomponazzi.

²⁹ On Padua, Bologna and other Italian universities, see Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance.

³⁰ Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, p. 382.

³¹ Section 5 of the prefatory letter, in La condemnation Parisienne de 1277. Nouvelle edition du texte Latin, ed. D. Piché (Paris, 1999), p. 74. A brief account of the condemnations and recent controversy among historians over them is given in J. Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers: the Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, N.J., 2015), pp. 149–54.

³² Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Chatelain (4 vols, Paris, 1889–99), i. 499–500 (no. 441); cf. F.-X. Putallaz and R. Imbach, Profession: Philosophe. Siger de Brabant (Paris, 1997), pp. 128–34; L. Bianchi, Censure et liberté intellectuelle a l’université de Paris (XIIIe–XIVe siècles) (Paris, 1999), pp. 165–201; L. Bianchi, Pour une histoire de la ‘double vérité’ (Paris, 2008), pp. 98–100.

³³ Denifle and Chatelain, Chartularium, i. 587 (no. 501); cf. Bianchi, Histoire de la ‘double vérité’, pp. 101–2.

³⁴ See Marenbon, Pagans, pp. 153–5; and, for an emphasis on the constraining effects of the condemnations, Bianchi, Histoire de la ‘double vérité’.

³⁵ See di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima, pp. 185–6; Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 283–5.

³⁶ The bull is printed in J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (54 vols in 59, Graz 1960–1, repr. of 1902–27 edn), xxxii. 842–3. On its interpretation, see E. Constant, ‘A reinterpretation of the Fifth Lateran Council decree Apostolici regiminis (1513)’, Sixteenth Century Jour., xxxiii (2002), 353–79.

³⁷ ‘mandamus, ut cum philosophorum principia aut conclusiones, in quibus a recta fide deviare noscuntur, auditoribus suis legerint, seu explanaverint, quale hoc de animae mortalitate aut unitate, et mundi aeternitate, ac alia huiusmodi, teneantur eisdem veritatem religionis christianae omni conatu manifestam facere, et persuadendo pro posse docere, ac omni studio huiusmodi philosophorum argumenta, cum omnia solubilia existant, pro viribus excludere atque resolvere’ (Mansi, Collectio, xxxii. 842DE).

³⁸ Earlier the bull also inveighs against those who hold that the soul ‘is mortal or one for all humans’ is true ‘at least according to philosophy’ (Mansi, Collectio, xxxii. 842B).

³⁹ See Bianchi, Histoire de la ‘double vérité’, pp. 111–12, 118–20, 125–7.

⁴⁰ A. Cappiello, ‘Le Solutiones di Crisostomo Javelli al Defensorium di Pietro Pomponazzi. Edizione critica del testo latino’, Noctua, iii (2016), 74–149; cf. A. Cappiello, ‘Una verità senza stonature. Le Solutiones di Crisostomo Javelli al Defensorium di Pietro Pomponazzi’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, xxix (n.s. xxvi) (2015), 151–80. Javelli does not, in effect, attempt to refute Pomponazzi’s arguments from within the sphere of natural reasoning.

⁴¹ Grendler stresses the arts masters’ freedom (Universities of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 293–7); Bianchi qualifies this impression (Histoire de la ‘double vérité’, pp. 134–44).

⁴² Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 398–402.

⁴³ See A. Poppi, Saggi sul pensiero inedito di Pietro Pomponazzi (Rome, 1970), pp. 27–92.

⁴⁴ Quoted in Pietro Pomponazzi. Expositio super primo et secundo De partibus animalium, ed. S. Perfetto (Istituto nazionale di studi sul rinascimento. Studi e testi, xliii, Florence, 2004), p. xlii, n. 74.

⁴⁵ See J. Marenbon, ‘Pomponazzi’s ethics and the philosophical tradition’, in Regards sur les traditions philosophiques (XIIe – XVIe siècles), ed. Z. Kaluza and D. Calma (Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, series 1, lvi, Leuven, 2017), pp. 309–22.

⁴⁶ Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, p. 211 (15.316).

⁴⁷ Translation by W. H. Hay II, rev. by J. H. Randall, Jnr, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. E. Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller and J. H. Randall (Chicago, Ill., 1948), pp. 280–381, at p. 377.

⁴⁸ Perrone, Pomponazzi. Trattato, p. lxxxviii, n. 174. As well as Hay, and the other translators she mentions, Gontier (De immortalitate, p. 210) and Raimondi (Pomponazzi. Tutti I trattati, p. 1099) favour the usual version; only di Napoli, L’Immortalità dell’anima, p. 256, gives the same, convincing rendering as she does.

⁴⁹ See Scotus, In IV librum Sententiarum, I, q. 46, a. 2, resp. (as indicated in P. Compagni’s translation, Pomponazzi. Trattato, p. 114); cf. A. Poppi, ‘Consenso e dissenso del Pomponazzi con il ‘subtilissimus et religosissimus Ioannes Scotus’, in Sgarbi, Pietro Pomponazzi. Tradizione e dissenso, pp. 3–39, esp. pp. 11–21.

⁵⁰ Pomponazzi, Apologia, pp. 1504–22 (III.iii.8–25).

⁵¹ Scotus thought that the philosophers could not but have been misled about the nature of God, whom they thought to cause necessarily, not contingently ( Ordinatio I, Prologue, q. unica; cf. Marenbon, Pagans, pp. 155–7). With regard to the immortality of the soul, he merely thought that it could not be proved by natural reason.