Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 30

The Renaissance in general may be called the Middle Ages in dissolution. That the period was transitional in its chief aspects, has often already been insisted on. The ma.s.sive fabrics of feudalism and the Church were breaking up. The vast edifice of scholastic theology was being undermined by men who had the energy to free themselves from orthodox tradition, but scarcely force enough or opportunity to mold the thought of the new age. The Italians who occupied themselves with philosophical problems, from Petrarch to Campanella, hold an intermediate place between the schoolmen and the founders of modern metaphysics. They accomplish the transition from S.

Thomas and Occam to Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza. It is possible to mark three phases in this process of transition, each of which was necessary in the progress of the mind from theological ontology to science and free speculation. The thinkers of the first stage began by questioning the authority of dogma. Those of the second stage accepted the authority of the ancients. Those of the third appealed to Nature against ecclesiastical and cla.s.sical authority alike. Humanism was thus intermediate between scholasticism and what, for want of a more definite phrase, may be termed rationalism. Succeeding to the schoolmen, the scholars cleared the groundwork of philosophy of old enc.u.mbrances, and reappropriated antique systems of thought. After them, the schools of Lower Italy, including Telesio, Campanella and Bruno, prepared the path to be immediately followed; with what profit is apparent to the dullest intellect. Clearly, and beyond the possibility of question, they propounded the main problems which have agitated all the scientific schools of modern Europe. To them belongs the credit of having first speculated knowledge and reality from no external standpoint, but from the immediate consciousness. The _Interrogatio Naturae_ and the _Cogito, ergo sum_, which became the watchwords of modern empiricism and rationalism, are theirs. But, at the very moment when the Italians of the Revival had performed their pioneering task-work, all vital vigor in the nation was extinguished or suspended by the deadly influences of Spanish domination and Papal terrorism.[552] It was left for other races to enter on the promised land which they had conquered.

[Footnote 552: I cannot refrain from translating a paragraph in Spaventa's Essay upon Bruno, which, no less truly than pa.s.sionately, states the pith of this Italian tragedy. "The sixteenth century was the epoch, in which the human spirit burst the chains that up to then had bound it, and was free. There is no more glorious age for Italy.

The heroes of thought and freedom, who then fought for truth, were almost all her sons. They were persecuted and extinguished with sword and fire. Would that the liberty of thought, the autonomy of the reason, they gave to the other nations of Europe, had borne fruit in Italy! From that time forward we remained as though cut off from the universal life; it seemed as if the spirit which inspired the world and pushed it onward, had abandoned us" (_Saggi di Critica_, Napoli, 1867, p. 140).]

Upon its first appearance, it was clear that humanism would run counter to both currents of medieval thought, the orthodox and the heretical, the Thomistic and Averroistic. Dante designed his epic in accordance with the fixed outlines of Thomistic theology. The freethinkers of the Lombard universities expressed a not uncertain adhesion to the materialistic doctrines which pa.s.sed for Averroism.

But Petrarch, the hero of the coming age, p.r.o.nounced his contempt for scholastic quibbles, and at the same time waged war against the tenants of Averroes. He introduced a new spirit into philosophical discussion, a new style of treatment, literary rather than scientific, which tended to subst.i.tute humane culture for logical pedantry. The departure from medieval lines of thought, thus signalized by Petrarch, was followed by the students of the next two centuries. Questions which had agitated Europe since the days of Roscelin, now seemed to lose the interest of actuality. The distinctions of Nominalism and Realism retained no attraction for men who were engaged in discovering ma.n.u.scripts, learning to write correct Latin, acquiring Greek, and striving to penetrate the secret of antiquity. The very style of the schoolmen became a byword for inept.i.tude and barbarism. It required no little courage and a prestige as brilliant as Pico's to sustain the cause of Albertus Magnus or Johannes Scotus.[553] Scholars of the type of Poggio and Filelfo, Beccadelli and Poliziano, abhorred their ponderous metaphysics, as though they were grotesque chimeras generated by the indigestion of half-starved intellectual stomachs.

Orpheus had reappeared. He bade the world thenceforward move to music and melodious rhythms both of thought and language. The barbarians might harbor Mercury within their hearts, to quote Pico's apology; they might display wisdom in unvarnished plainness; but what were these claims worth in an age that required the lips rather than the soul to be eloquent, and when a decorated fiction found more favor than a naked truth? No more decided ant.i.thesis than that of scholastic philosophy to the new cla.s.sical ideal is conceivable.

[Footnote 553: _Epistolae Angeli Poliziani_, lib. ix. p. 269 (ed.

Gryphius, 1533).]

Thus the first movement of the Revival implied an uncompromising abandonment of medieval thought as worse than worthless. If men educated by the humanistic method were to speculate, they would do so upon lines different from those suggested by the schoolmen. Cicero and Seneca became their models; and the rhetorical treatment of moral topics pa.s.sed muster with them for philosophy. A garrulous colloquial skimming in fair Latin over the well-trodden ground of ethics supplanted the endeavor to think strictly upon difficult subjects.

Much of this literature--the dialogues of Alberti, for example, and Landino's Camaldolese Disputations--can still be read with profit. But regarded from the point of view of systematic thought, it has slight importance. We value it princ.i.p.ally for the light it casts upon contemporary manners and modes of opinion.

The study of Greek and Latin texts revealed a world to the Italians far wider than the regions where the medieval mind had moved in narrow limits. The immediate effect of this discovery was not, however, wholly salutary. The ancients began to exercise a kind of despotism; and a new authority, no less stringent than that of dogma, bound the scholars of the Revival beneath the tyranny of cla.s.sical names. It was impossible for the intellect to free itself from fetters at a single leap. This second servitude seemed destined to be even more pernicious than the first; for as yet there was no criticism, and the superinc.u.mbent ma.s.ses of antique literature, extending from the earliest dawn of Greek history to the latest commentators of Byzantium and Ravenna, underwent but little process of sifting. It was enough for the Italians of that epoch to a.s.similate. Nothing which bore the stamp of antiquity came amiss to their omnivorous appet.i.te.

Compilations from second or third sources were valued as equally precious with original texts. The testimony of hearsay reporters pa.s.sed for conclusive evidence in matters of history. Masters in philosophy were confounded with expositors, who flourished at the distance of some centuries. Athens and Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople, were indiscriminately regarded as a single Holy Land of wisdom.

While this fermentation of a.s.similative erudition was still at its height, Gemistos Plethon preached his Neo-platonic mysticism at Florence; and the first attempt at a new philosophy for Western Europe, independent of the schoolmen, uninfluenced by orthodoxy, proceeded from the Medicean academy. The Platonism of Ficino and Pico, we now know, was of a very mixed and ill-determined quality.

Uncontrolled by critical insight, and paralyzed by the prestige attaching to antiquity, the Florentine school produced little better than an unintelligent eclecticism. Their so-called philosophical writings were commonplace-books of citations, anthologies of ill-digested abstracts, in which Greek and Asiatic and Christian opinions issued in an incoherent theosophy. It must be reckoned a great misfortune for Italian thought that the Platonists were able to approach the masterpieces of their Attic teacher through a medium of Alexandrian and Byzantine enthusiasm. Had they been forced to attack the "Republic" without the intervention of Plotinus and Gemistos, they might have started on some fruitful line of speculation. They would at least have perceived that Plato's theology formed a background to his psychological, ethical, educational and political theories, instead of fastening upon those visionary systems which his later Greek expositors extracted from the least important portions of his works.

At the same time, this Neo-platonic mysticism was only too sympathetic to the feebler pietism of the middle ages for men who had discovered it, to doubt its inspiration.

What was finally accomplished for sound scholars.h.i.+p by Ficino, lay in the direction, not of metaphysics or of history, but of translation.

The enduring value of Pico's work is due, not to his Quixotic quest of an accord between Pagan, Hebrew and Christian traditions, but to the n.o.ble spirit of confidence and humane sympathy with all great movements of the mind, which penetrates it. If we cannot rate the positive achievements of the Florentines in philosophy at a high value, still the discussion of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines which their investigations originated, caused the text of the Greek philosophers to be accurately examined for the first time in Western Europe. Their theories, though devoid of originality and clogged at every point with slavish reverence for cla.s.sical authority, marked a momentous deviation from the traditional methods of medieval speculation.

Thus a vast and tolerably accurate acquaintance with the chief thinkers of antiquity, re-enforced by the translation of their princ.i.p.al works, was the main outcome of the Platonic revival at Florence. Uncritically, and with many a blundering divergence into the uncongenial provinces of Oriental thought, the Italian intellect appropriated Greek philosophy. A groundwork was laid down for the discussion of fundamental problems in the forms under which they had presented themselves to the ancient world. But while the Platonists were wrangling with the Aristotelians about the superiority of their respective masters; while the scholars were translating from the original languages; while the mystics were building castles in the air, composed of fragments from Neo-platonic and Neo-pythagorean systems, cementing them with the mortar of Christianity and adding quaint outbuildings of Cabbalistic and astrological delusions; the writers of ethical treatises pursued another line of inquiry, which was no less characteristic of the age and no less fruitful of results.

During the middle ages thought of every kind had been concentrated on the world beyond this life. The question of how to live here was answered with reference to eternal interests solely. Human existence had no meaning except as the prelude to heaven or h.e.l.l. But contact with antiquity introduced a new cla.s.s of problems. Men began once more to ask themselves how they ought to live in this world, not with the view of avoiding misery and securing happiness in the next, but with the aim of making their terrestrial home most comfortable and their sojourn in it most effective for themselves and their companions. The discussion of the fundamental question how to live to best advantage, without regard for the next world and unbiased by the belief in a rigid scheme of salvation, occupies an important place in the philosophical essays of the time. Landino, for example, in his Camaldolese Disputations, raises the question whether the contemplative or the practical life offers superior attractions to a man desirous of perfecting self-culture. Alberti touches the same topic in his minor dialogues, while he subjects the organism of the Family in all its relations to a searching a.n.a.lysis in his most important essay.

Valla, in the famous dialogue _De Voluptate_, attacks the problem of conduct from another point of view.[554] Contrasting the Stoical with the Epicurean ideals, asceticism with hedonism, he asks which of the two fulfills the true end of human life. His treatise on Pleasure is, indeed, a disputation between renascent paganism, naturalism, and humanism on the one side, and the medieval scheme of ethics on the other. Man according to nature contends with man according to grace; the soul, obeying the desires of the flesh, defends her cause against the spirit, whose life is hid with a crucified Christ in G.o.d. Thus the two points of view between which the Renaissance wavered, are placed in powerful contrast; and nowhere has their antagonism been more ably stated. For the champion of hedonism Valla appropriately chose the poet Beccadelli, while he committed the defense of asceticism to Niccol Niccoli. Though at the close of the argument he awarded the palm of victory to the latter,[555] it is clear that his sympathies lay with the former, and all the strength of his reasoning faculty is employed in the statement and support of Beccadelli's thesis. The first and far the longest part of the dialogue, where we detect a true note of sincerity, is a remorseless onslaught upon monasticism under the name of Stoicism, resulting in a no less uncompromising defense of physical appet.i.te. Some of the utterances upon s.e.xual morality are penetrated with the rancor of rebellion.[556] It is the revolt of the will against unnatural restrictions, the rea.s.sertion of natural liberty, emboldened by the study of cla.s.sical literature, imbittered by long centuries of ecclesiastical oppression. Underlying the extravagances of an argument which owes its crudity and coa.r.s.eness to the contradictions of the century, we find one central thought of permanent importance. Nature can do nothing wrong: and that must be wrong which violates nature.[557] It is man's duty, by interrogation of nature, to discover the laws of his own being and to obey those. In other words, Valla, though in no sense a man of science, proclaims the fundamental principle of science, and inaugurates a new criterion of ethics.

[Footnote 554: _Laurentius Valla: Opera omnia_, Basileae, 1465. The "De Voluptate" begins at p. 896 of this edition.]

[Footnote 555: "Uterque pro se de laudibus Voluptatis suavissime quidem quasi cantare visus est; sed Antonius hirundini, Nicolaus philomelae (quam lusciniam nominant) magis comparandus" (_ib._ lib.

iii. p. 697).]

[Footnote 556: "Mea quidem sententia odiosus est si quis in moechos, si rerum naturam intueri volumus, invehat" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 38).

"Quisquis virgines sanctimoniales primus invenit, abominandum atque in ultimas terras exterminandum morem in civitatem induxisse.... Melius merentur scorta et postribula quam sanctimoniales virgines ac continentes" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 43).]

[Footnote 557: "Quod natura finxit atque formavit id nisi sanctum laudabileque esse non posse" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 9).]

Three main points may be discriminated in the intellectual movement briefly surveyed in the preceding paragraphs. The first is an abrupt breach with scholasticism. The whole method of philosophy has been changed, and the canon of authority has altered. The second is the acquisition of cla.s.sical thought, and the endeavor, especially at Florence, among the Platonists to appropriate it and adapt it to Christianity. The third is the introduction of a new problem into philosophical discussion. How to make the best of human life, is subst.i.tuted for the question how to insure salvation in the world beyond the grave. It will be observed that each of these three points implies departure from the prescribed ground of medieval speculation, which always moved within the limits of theology. Theology, except in the mysticism of the Platonists, except in occasional and perfunctory allusions of the rhetoricians, has no place in this medley of scholars.h.i.+p, citation, superst.i.tion, and frank handling of practical ideals.

While the Florentine Platonists were evolving an eclectic mysticism from the materials furnished by their Greek and Oriental studies; while the Ciceronian humanists were discussing the fundamental principles which underlie the various forms of human life; the universities of Lombardy continued their exposition of Aristotle upon the lines laid down by Thomistic and Averroistic schoolmen. Padua and Bologna extended the methods of the middle ages into the Renaissance.

Their professors adhered to the formal definitions and distinctions of an earlier epoch, acc.u.mulating comment upon comment, and darkening the text of their originals with glosses. Yet the light shed by the Revival penetrated even to the lecture-rooms of men like Achillini.

Humanism had established the principle of basing erudition on the study of authentic doc.u.ments. The text of Aristotle in the Greek or in first-hand translations, had become the common property of theologians and philosophers. It was from these universities that the first dim light of veritable science was to issue. And here the part played by one man in the preparation of a new epoch for modern thought is so important that I may be allowed to introduce him with some prolixity of biographical details.[558]

[Footnote 558: For the following sketch of Pomponazzi's life, and for help in the study of his philosophy, I am indebted to Francesco Fiorentino's _Pietro Pomponazzi_, Firenze, Lemonnier, 1868, 1 vol. I may here take occasion to mention a work by the same author, _Bernardino Telesio_, _ibid._ 1872, 2 vols. Together, these two books form an important contribution to the history of Italian philosophy.]

Pietro Pomponazzi was born of n.o.ble lineage at Mantua in 1462. He completed his studies at Padua, where he graduated in 1487 as laureate of medicine. It may be remarked incidentally that teachers of philosophy at this era held the degree of physicians. This point is not unimportant, since it fixes our attention on the fact that philosophy, as distinguished from theology, had not yet won a recognized position. Logic formed a separate part of the educational curriculum. Rhetoric was cla.s.sed with humanistic literature.

Philosophy counted as a branch of Physics. At Florence, in the schools of the Platonists, metaphysical inquiries a.s.sumed a certain hue of mysticism. At Padua and Bologna, in the schools of the physicians, they a.s.similated something of materialism. During the middle ages they had always flourished in connection with theology. But that a.s.sociation had been broken; and as yet a proper place had not been a.s.signed to the science of the human mind. A new department of knowledge was in process of formation, distinct from theology, distinct from physics, distinct from literature. But at the epoch of which we are now treating, it had not been correctly marked off from either of these provinces, and in the schools of Lombardy it was confounded with physical science.

In 1488 Pomponazzi, soon after taking his degree as a physician, was appointed Professor Extraordinary of Philosophy at Padua. He taught in concurrence with the veteran Achillini, who was celebrated for his old-world erudition and his leaning toward the doctrines of Averroes.

Pomponazzi signalized his _debut_ in the professorial career, by adopting a new method of instruction. Less distinguished for learning than acuteness, he confined himself to brilliant elucidations of his author's text. For glosses, citations and hair-splitting distinctions, he subst.i.tuted lucid and precise a.n.a.lysis. It is probable that he was a poor Greek scholar. Paolo Giovio goes so far, indeed, as to a.s.sert that, of the two cla.s.sical languages, he only knew Latin; nor is there anything in his own writings to demonstrate that he had studied Greek philosophy in the original. But he proved himself a child of the new era by his style of exposition, no less than by a strict adherence to Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Greek commentator of Aristotle. What that divergence from the system of his rival, Achillini, who still adhered to the commentaries of Averroes, implied, I shall endeavor to make clear in the sequel. For the present, we must follow his career as a professor. Before the year 1495 he had been appointed to the ordinary chair of Natural Philosophy at Padua; and there he resided until 1509, when the schools of Padua were closed. He spent this period chiefly in lecturing on Aristotle's Physics, for the sake presumably of the medical students who crowded that university. Forced by circ.u.mstances to leave Padua, Pomponazzi found a home in Ferrara, where he began to expound Aristotle's treatise _De Anima_. Unlike Padua, the University of Ferrara had a literary bias; and we may therefore conclude that Pomponazzi availed himself of this first favorable opportunity to pursue the studies in Aristotelian psychology for which he had a decided personal preference. In 1512 he was invited to Bologna, where he remained until his death, in the capacity of Professor of Natural and Moral Philosophy. His stipend, increased gradually through a series of engagements, varied from a little over 200 to 600 golden ducats. Bologna, like Ferrara, was not distinguished for its school of medicine. Consequently, we find that from the date of his first settlement in that city, Pomponazzi devoted himself to psychological and ethical investigations. All the books on which his fame are founded were written at Bologna. In the autumn of 1516 he published his treatise _De Immortalitate Animae_. It was dedicated to Marcantonio Flavio Contarini; and, finding its way to Venice, it was immediately burned in public because of its heretical opinions. A long and fierce controversy followed this first publication. Contarini, Agostino Nifo, Ambrogio Fiandino, and Bartolommeo di Spina issued treatises, in which they strove to combat the Aristotelian materialism of Pomponazzi with arguments based on Thomistic theology or Averroistic mysticism. He replied with an _Apologia_ and a _Defensorium_, avowing his submission to the Church in all matters of faith, but stubbornly upholding a philosophical disagreement with the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. During this discussion Pomponazzi ran some risk of being held accountable for his opinions.

The friars and preachers of all colors were loud in their denunciations; and it is said that Bembo's intercession with Pope Leo in behalf of his old master was needed to secure Pomponazzi from ecclesiastical procedure. During the last years of his life the professor of Bologna completed two important treatises, _De Incantationibus_ and _De Fato_. They were finished in 1520 but not published until after his death, when they appeared in the Basle edition of his collected works. He died in 1525, and was buried at Mantua. Pomponazzi had been thrice married. He left behind him an unsullied reputation for virtuous conduct and sweet temper. He was, physically, a little man, and owed to this circ.u.mstance the _sobriquet_ of _Peretto_. We gain a glimpse of him in one of Bandello's novels. But, with this exception, the man is undiscernible through the mists of three intervening centuries. With the author the case is different. In his books Pomponazzi presents a powerful and unmistakable personality. What remains to be said about him and his influence over Italian thought must be derived from an examination of the three treatises already mentioned.

In order to make Pomponazzi's position intelligible, it will be needful to review the main outlines of Aristotelian thought, as it was transmitted through the middle ages to the men of the Renaissance.

Pomponazzi claimed to be no more than an expositor of Aristotle's system. If he diverged from the paths of orthodox philosophy, it was because he recognized a discrepancy upon vital points between Thomas of Aquino and the Peripatetic writings. If he rejected some fas.h.i.+onable theories of the freethinkers who preceded him, it was because he saw that Averroes had misinterpreted their common master.

He aimed at stating once again the precise doctrine of the Greek philosopher. He believed that if he could but grasp Aristotle's real opinion, he should by that mental act arrive at truth. The authority of the Stagirite in all matters of human knowledge lay for him beyond the possibility of question; or, what amounted to nearly the same thing, his interest in speculative questions was confined to making Aristotle's view intelligible. Thus, under the humble garb of a commentator, one of the boldest and in some respects the most original thinkers of his age stepped forth to wage war with superst.i.tion and ecclesiastical despotism. The Church, since the date of Thomas Aquinas, had so committed herself to Aristotle that proving a discrepancy between her dogma and the Aristotelian text upon any vital point, was much the same as attacking the dogma itself. This must be kept steadily in mind if we wish to appreciate Pomponazzi.[559] His att.i.tude cannot easily be understood at the present day, when science has discarded authority, and the _ipse dixit_ of a dead man carries no weight outside religious or quasi-religious circles. This renders the prefatory remarks I have to make necessary.

[Footnote 559: It will be remembered that in the controversy between Galileo and the Inquisition, the latter condemned Copernicus on the score that he contradicted Aristotle and S. Thomas of Aquino.]

In the Platonic system it was impossible to explain the connection between ideas, conceived as sole realities, and phenomena, regarded as distinct from that ideal world to which they owed their qualities of relative substantiality and cognizability. Aristotle attempted to solve Plato's problem by his theory of form and matter, activity and pa.s.sivity, energy and potentiality, inseparable in the reality of the individual. He represented the intelligible world as a scale of existences, beginning with form and matter coherent in the simplest object, and ending in G.o.d. G.o.d was the form of forms, the thought of thoughts, independent of matter, immovable and unchangeable, although the cause of movement and variety. The forms resumed in G.o.d, as species are included in the Summum Genus, were disseminated through the universe in a hierarchy of substances, from the most complex immediately below G.o.d, to the most simple immediately above the groundwork given by incognizable matter. In this hierarchy matter was conceived as the mere base; necessary, indeed, to every individual but G.o.d; an essential element of reality; but beyond the reach of knowledge. The form or universal alone was intelligible. It may already be perceived that in this system, if the individual, composed of form and matter, alone is substantial and concrete, while the universal alone is cognizable, Aristotle admitted a division between reality and truth. The former attribute belongs to the individual, the latter to the universal. The place of G.o.d, too, in the system is doubtful. Is He meant to be immanent in the universe, or separated from it? Aristotle uses language which supports each of these views.

Again, G.o.d is immaterial, universal, the highest form; and yet at the same time He is an individual substance; whereas, by the fundamental conception of the whole scheme, the coherence of form and matter in the individual is necessary to reality. It might seem possible to escape from these difficulties by regarding Aristotle's Deity as the Idea of the Universe, and each inferior form in the ascending series of existences as the material of its immediate superior, until the final and inclusive form is reached in G.o.d. But what, then, becomes of matter in itself, which, though recognized as unintelligible, is postulated as the necessary base of individual substances?

In Aristotle's theory of life there is a similar ascending scale. The soul ([Greek: psyche]) is defined as the form of the body. Its vegetative, motive, sensitive, appet.i.tive faculties ([Greek: psyche threptike, kinetike, aisthetike, orektike]), are subordinated to the active intellect ([Greek: nous pathetikos]), which receives their reports; and this in its turn is subordinated to the active intellect ([Greek: nous poietikos]), which possesses the content of the pa.s.sive intellect as thought. The intellect ([Greek: nous]) is man's peculiar property: and Aristotle in plain words a.s.serts that it is separate from the soul ([Greek: psyche]). But he has not explained whether it is separate as the highest series of an evolution may be called distinct from the lower, or as something alien and communicated from without is separate. The pa.s.sive intellect, being a receptacle for images and phantasms furnished by the senses, perishes with the soul, which, upon the dissolution of the body, whereof it is the form, ceases to exist. But the active intellect is immortal and eternal, being pure thought, and identifiable in the last resort with G.o.d. So much Aristotle seems to have laid down about the immortality of the intellect. It is tempting to infer that he maintained a theory of man's partic.i.p.ation in the divine Idea--that is to say, in the complex of the categories which render the universe intelligible and distinguish it as a cosmos. But, just as Aristotle failed to explain the connection of G.o.d with the world, so he failed to render his opinion regarding the relation of G.o.d to the human intellect, and of the immortal to the perishable part of the soul, manifest. It can, however, be safely a.s.serted that he laid himself open to a denial of the immortality of each individual person. This, at any rate, would follow from the a.s.sumption that he believed us to be persons by reason of physical existence, of the soul's faculties, and of that blending of the reason with the orectic soul which we call will. As the universe culminates in G.o.d, so man culminates in thought, which is the definition of G.o.d; and this thought is eternal, the same for all and for ever. It does not, however, follow that each man who has shared the divine thought, should survive the dissolution of his body. The person is a complex, and this complex perishes. The active intellect is imperishable, but it is impersonal. In like manner the whole hierarchy of substances between the ground of matter and the form of forms is in perpetual process of combination and dissolution. But the supreme Idea endures, in isolation from that flux and reflux of the individuals it causes. Whether we regard the ontological or the psychological series, only the world of pure thought, the Idea, is indissoluble, subject to no process of becoming, and superior to all change. The supreme place a.s.signed to Thought in either hierarchy is clear enough. But the nexus between (i) G.o.d and the Universe (ii) G.o.d and the active intellect (iii) the active intellect, or pure thought, and the inferior faculties of the soul, which supply it with material for thought, is unexplained.

Three distinct but interpenetrating problems were presented by the Aristotelian system. One concerns the theory of the Universal. Are universals or particulars prior? Do we collect the former from the latter; or do the latter owe their value as approximate realities to the former? The second concerns the theory of the Individual. a.s.suming that the Individual is a complex of form and matter, are we to regard the matter or the form as its essential substratum? The third concerns the theory of the human Soul. Is it perishable with the body, or immortal? If it is immortal, does the incorruptible quality perpetuate the person who has lived upon this globe; or is it the common property of all persons, surviving their decease, but not insuring the prolongation of each several consciousness? The first of these problems formed the battlefield of Nominalists, Realists and Conceptualists in the first period of medieval thought. It was waged upon the data supplied by Porphyry's abstract of the Aristotelian doctrine of the predicaments. The second problem occupied the encyclopaedic thinkers of the second period, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus and Thomas of Aquino. Their contest was fought out over the Metaphysics of Aristotle. The third problem arrested the attention of speculators in the age of the Renaissance. The text which they disputed was Aristotle's essay _De Anima_. This movement of medieval thought from point to point was not unnatural nor unnecessitated. In the first period Aristotle was unknown; but the creeds of Christianity supplied a very definite body of conceptions to be dealt with. About the personality of G.o.d, the immortality of the soul, and the concrete reality of the human individual, there was then no doubt. Theology was paramount; and the contention of the schoolmen at this epoch regarded the right interpretation of the Universal. Was it a simple conception of the mind, or an external and substantial reality? Was it a name or an ent.i.ty? The Nominalists, who adopted the former of these two alternatives, fell necessarily beneath the ban of ecclesiastical censure and suspicion; not because their philosophical conclusions were unwarranted, but because these ran counter to the prevailing spirit of the Christian belief. Their definitions sapped the basis of that transcendentalism on which the whole fabric of medieval thought reposed. Nevertheless, at the end of the battle, the Nominalists virtually gained the day. Abelard's Conceptualism was an attempt to harmonize antagonistic points of view by emphasizing the abstractive faculty of the human subject. In the course of this warfare the problem of the Individual had been neglected. The reciprocity of form and matter had not been expressly made a topic of dispute. Meanwhile a flood of new light was being cast upon philosophical questions by the introduction into Europe of Latin texts translated by Jewish scholars from the Arabic versions of Aristotle, as well as by the commentaries of Averroes. This rediscovery of Aristotle forced the schoolmen of the second period to consider the fundamental relation of matter to form. The master had postulated the conjunction of these two const.i.tuents in the individual. Thomas of Aquino and Duns Scotus advanced opposing theories to explain the ground and process of individualization. With regard to the elder problem of the Universal, S. Thomas declared himself for modified Conceptualism. With regard to the second problem, he p.r.o.nounced matter to be the substratum of individuals--matter stamped as with a seal by the form impressed upon it. Thus he adhered as closely as was possible for a theologian to the Peripatetic doctrines. For a student of philosophy to advance opinions without reckoning with Aristotle was now impossible. The great Dominican Doctor achieved the task of bringing Aristotle into satisfactory accord with Christian dogma. Nor was this so difficult as it appears. Aristotle, as we have seen, did not define his views about the soul and G.o.d. Moreover, he had written no treatise on theology proper. Whether he ascribed personality or conscious thought to G.o.d was more than doubtful. His G.o.d stood at the apex of the world's pyramid, inert, abstract, empty, and devoid of life. Christendom, meanwhile, was provided with a robust set of theological opinions, based on revelation and held as matters of faith. To transfer these to the account of the Aristotelian Deity, to fill out the vacuous and formal outline, and to theosophize the whole system was the work of S.

Thomas. To the fixed dogmas of the Latin Church he adjusted the more favorable of Aristotle's various definitions, and interpreted his dubious utterances by the light of ecclesiastical orthodoxy.

Up to this point the doctrine of personal immortality had been accepted by all Christians as requiring no investigation. Human life was only studied in relation to the world beyond the grave, where each man and woman was destined to endure for all eternity. To traverse this fundamental postulate, was to proclaim the grossest heresy; and though Epicureans, as Dante calls them, of that type were found, they had not formulated their opinions regarding the soul's corruptibility in any scientific theory, nor based them on the authority of Aristotle. S. Thomas viewed the soul as the essential form of the human body; he further affirmed its separate existence in each person, and its separate immortality. The soul, he thought, although defined as the form of a physical body, acquired a habit of existence in the body, which sufficed for its independent and perpetual survival. These determinations were clearly in accordance with the Christian faith.

But the time was approaching when the problem of the soul itself should be narrowly considered. Averroes had interpreted Aristotle to mean that the active intellect alone, which he regarded as common to all human beings, was immortal. This was tantamount to denying the immortality of the individual. Men live and die, but the species is eternal. The active intellect arrives continually at human consciousness in persons, who partic.i.p.ate in it and perish. Knowledge is indestructible for the race, transitory for each separate soul. At one end of the universal hierarchy is matter; at the other end is G.o.d.

Between G.o.d and man in the descending scale are the intelligences of the several spheres. From the lowest or lunar sphere humanity derives the active intellect. This active intellect is a substantial ent.i.ty, separate no less from G.o.d than from the human soul on which it rains the knowledge of a lifetime. It is not necessary to point out how much of mystical and Oriental material Averroes ingrafted on Aristotle's system. His doctrine, though vehemently repudiated by orthodox schoolmen, found wide acceptance; and there were other heretics who a.s.serted the perishable nature of the human soul, without distinction of its faculties. These heterodoxies gained ground so rapidly through the first two centuries of the Italian revival (1300-1500), that in December, 1513, it was judged needful to condemn them, and to rea.s.sert the Thomistic doctrine by a Council of the Lateran over which Leo X.

presided.[560]

[Footnote 560: These are the words: "Hoc sacro approbante Concilio d.a.m.namus et reprobamus omnes a.s.serentes _animam intellectivam mortalem esse_, aut _unicam in cunctis hominibus_, et haec in dubium vertentes, c.u.m illa non solum vere per se et essentialiter humani corporis forma existat ... verum et immortalis, et pro corporum quibus infunditur mult.i.tudine, singulariter multiplicabilis et multiplicata et multiplicanda sit."]

If we consider the intellectual conditions of the Renaissance, it becomes clear why the problem of Immortality acquired this importance, and why heretical opinions spread so widely as to necessitate a confirmation of the orthodox dogma. Medieval speculation had a perpetual tendency to transcend the sphere of this earth. The other world gave reality and meaning to human life. All eyes were fixed on the Beyond, at first with an immediate expectation of the Judgment, afterwards with a continued looking forward to Paradise or Punishment.

This att.i.tude toward eternity was an absorbing preoccupation. But with the dawn of the new age our life on earth acquired a deeper significance; and the question was not unnaturally posed--this soul, whose immortality has been postulated, on whose ultimate destiny so many antic.i.p.ations of weal and woe have been based, what is it? Are we justified in a.s.suming its existence as an incorruptible and everlasting self? What did Aristotle really think about it? The age inclined with overmastering bias toward a practical materialism. Men were eager to enjoy their lives and to indulge their appet.i.tes. They tired of the restrictions imposed upon their nature by the prospect of futurity. They found in their cherished cla.s.sics, whose authority had triumphed over Church and Council, but vague and visionary hints of immortality. Even in the highest ecclesiastical quarters it was fas.h.i.+onable to speak lightly of the fundamental dogmas of the Christian creed. Leo X., who presided over the Lateran Council of 1513, did not disguise his doubts concerning the very doctrine it had re-enforced. The time had come for a reconsideration _ab initio_ of a theory which the middle ages had accepted as an axiom. The battle was fought out on the ground of Aristotle's treatise on the soul.

Independent research had not yet a.s.serted its claims against authority; and the problem which now presented itself to the professors and students of Italy, was not: Is the soul immortal? but: Did Aristotle maintain the immortality of the soul? The philosopher of Stagira, having been treated on his first appearance as a foe of the faith and then accepted as its bulwark, was now to be used as an efficient battering-ram against the castles of orthodox opinion.

There were two ways of regarding Aristotle's doctrine of the active intellect. The one was to view the Nous as a development from the soul, which in its turn should be conceived as a development from the senses. The other was to recognize it as separate from the soul and imported from without. Each claimed substantial support in various dicta of the master. The latter found able exposition at the hands of his Arabic commentator Averroes. The former was maintained by the fullest and latest of the Greek peripatetics, Alexander of Aphrodisias. In the later middle ages free thought, combating the Thomistic system, inclined to Averroism. Pomponazzi, the chief Aristotelian of the Renaissance, declared for Alexander. His great work, _De Immortalitate Animae_, is little more than an attempt to reconstruct the doctrine of Aristotle by the help of Alexander.

Pomponazzi starts by laying down the double nature of the human soul.

It is both sensitive and intelligent. On this point philosophers are agreed; the questions at issue relate to the mode of connection between the two portions, and the prospect of immortality for both or either. He next proceeds to state the opinions of Averroes, the Platonists, and Thomas of Aquino, meeting their several arguments, and showing how and where they diverge from Aristotle, and endeavoring to prove the superiority of his master's doctrine. Pomponazzi agrees with S. Thomas as to the division of the soul and its relation to the body.

He differs with him on the point of immortality, declaring with sufficient clearness that no portion of the human soul can be other than perishable. If we admit that the soul in general is the act or form of the body, the intelligent portion of the soul is included in this definition. It cannot dispense with the body, at least as the object of its intelligent activity. But if it be thus intimately bound up with the body, it must suffer corruption with the body; or even should we suppose it to survive, it will have no images or phantasms furnished by the senses, which are the necessary pabulum of its thinking faculty.[561] The order of nature admits of no interruption.

It will not do to say that the soul thinks in one way during life on earth, and in another way after death. This contradicts the first principle of continuity. Man occupies a middle place between imperishable and perishable things.[562] He has a certain odor of immateriality, a mere shadow of intellect, because he stands upon the confine between these regions.[563] But his very conduct shows how vain and unsubstantial is his claim to pure reason. If we see a few men elevate themselves toward G.o.d, there are thousands who descend toward the brutes; and of those who spend their lives in clarifying their intelligence, none can boast of more than an obscure and cloudy vision.[564] In the hierarchy of souls we can broadly distinguish three grades; the pure intelligences of the astral spheres, who have no need of physical organs; the souls of brutes, immersed in matter, and no better than a mode of it; the souls of men, which occupy a middle place, requiring matter as the object of their thought, but rising by speculation above it. Even so within the mind of man we may discern a triple series--the factive, practical, and speculative intellects. The first subserves utility; man shares it with the brutes. The third enables him to lift himself toward G.o.d. The second is essentially human; he uses it in moral action, and performs his duty by obeying it. Both the sensitive soul and the intellect are material in the full sense of extension.[565] To conceive of them otherwise is contradictory to reason and to Aristotle. It is therefore impossible to hold that either soul or intellect, although the latter has certain affinities to imperishable intelligence, should survive the body. The senses supply the object of thought; the phantasms dealt with by the intellect depend upon the physical organs: abstract these, and where is the cogitative faculty? Having thus attempted to demonstrate the mortality of the human soul, Pomponazzi feels bound to attack the problem of the final end of human beings. Hitherto, throughout the ages of Christianity, men had lived on this world with eternity in view. That was their aim and goal. He has removed this object; and he antic.i.p.ates hostile argument by affirming that virtue itself is the proper end of man on earth. The practical intellect is the attribute of humanity as distinguished both from the brutes and from the separate intelligences of the spheres. To act in accordance with the nature of this specific quality--in other words, to follow virtue--is the end of man. Virtue is her own reward, as vice is its own punishment.[566] The question whether the soul be mortal or immortal, whether we have a right to expect future judgment or not, has really nothing to do with the matter.[567] With this ethical conclusion Pomponazzi terminates his argument. He is careful, however, to note that though he disbelieves in the immortality of the soul as a philosopher, he accepts it in the fullest sense as a Christian.[568]

It has been suggested that the orthodox doctrine of the resurrection of the body might have supplied Pomponazzi with a link between science and faith.[569] However, he did not avail himself of it; and his philosophy stands in abrupt and open conflict with his creed.

[Footnote 561: Cap. viii. "c.u.m et Aristoteles dicat, necesse esse intelligentem phantasma aliquod speculari." Again, _ibid._: "Ergo in omni suo intelligere indiget phantasia, sed si sic est, ipsa est materialis; ergo anima intellectiva est materialis." Again, _ibid._: "Huma.n.u.s intellectus corpus habet caduc.u.m, quare vel corrupto corpore ipse non esset, quod positioni repugnat, vel si esset, sine opere esset, c.u.m sine phantasmate per positionem intelligere non posset et sic otiaretur."]

[Footnote 562: Cap. ix. "Et sic medio modo huma.n.u.s intellectus inter materialia et immaterialia est actus corporis organici." Again, _ibid._: "Ipse igitur intellectus sic medius existens inter materialia et immaterialia." Again, _ibid._: "h.o.m.o est medius inter Deos et bestias, quare sicut pallidum comparatum nigro dicitur alb.u.m, sic h.o.m.o, comparatus bestiis, dici potest Deus et immortalis, sed non vere et simpliciter."]

[Footnote 563: Cap. viii. "Vixque sit umbra intellects." Again, cap.

ix.: "c.u.m ipsa sit materialium n.o.bilissima, in confinioque immaterialium, aliquid immaterialitatis odorat, sed non simpliciter."]

[Footnote 564: See (cap. viii.) the pa.s.sage which begins "Secund quia c.u.m in ista essentia."]

[Footnote 565: See the pa.s.sages quoted above; and compare _De Nutritione_, lib. i. cap. 11, which contains Pomponazzi's most mature opinion on the material extension of the soul, which he calls, in all its faculties, _realiter extensa_.]

[Footnote 566: _De Immortalitate_, cap. xiv. After demonstrating that the _intellectus practicus_, as distinguished from the _speculativus_ and the _factivus_, is the special property of man, and that consequently in Ethics we have the true science of humanity, he lays down and tries to demonstrate the two positions that (1) "praemium essentiale virtutis est ipsamet virtus quae hominem felicem facit;" (2) "poena vitiosi est ipsum vitium, quo nihil miserius, nihil infelicius esse potest."]