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 Animæ, 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 God, 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 God. 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 anticipates 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.
The treatise De Incantatione presents the same antithesis between Peripatetic science and Christian faith. Pomponazzi composed it at the instance of a physician, his friend, who begged him to offer an explanation of some apparently supernatural phenomena. It is, in fact, an essay upon demons and miracles. As a philosopher, Pomponazzi stoutly rejects both. The order of nature cannot be interrupted. Angels and devils only exist in the popular imagination. Miracles are but imperfectly comprehended manifestations of natural forces, which the vulgar ascribe to the intervention of God or spirits.[570] Each religion has its own miracles and its own saints, to whom the common folk attribute supernatural power.[571] But Moses, Mahomet and Christ stand upon the same level; the thaumaturgists of every creed are equally unable to alter the universal order.[572] Credulity and ignorance ascribe to all of them faculties they cannot possess. Having, as a philosopher, expressed these revolutionary ideas, as a Christian, he briefly and summarily states his belief in all that he has just denied.[573]
Basing his argument upon the ground of reason, which, for him, was no other than the Aristotelian doctrine of the Cosmos, Pomponazzi recognizes no agency that interrupts the sequence of cause and effect in nature. But the astral intelligences are realities, and their operation has been as clearly ascertained as that of any other natural force. Therefore Pomponazzi refers to the planets many extraordinary exhibitions of apparently abnormal power, conceding upon this point as much as could have been desired by the most superstitious of his contemporaries. Not only are the lives of men subject to planetary influence; but all human institutions rise, flourish and decay in obedience to the same superior laws. Even religions have their day of inevitable decline, and Christianity is no exception to the general rule. At the present moment, says Pomponazzi, we may discern signs of approaching dissolution in the fabric of our creed.[574] He is careful to add, as usual, that he holds this doctrine as a philosopher; but that, as a Christian, he believes in the permanence of revealed religion. Faith and reason could not be brought into more glaring antagonism, nor is it possible to affirm contradictory propositions with less attempt at reconciliation. Pomponazzi seems determined to act out by anticipation Pascal's axiom, Il faut être Pyrrhonniste accompli et Chrétien soumis. What the real state of his mind was, and whether the antithesis which seems to us so untenable, did not present itself to him as an anomaly, hardly admits of explanation. A similar unresolved discord may be traced in nearly all the thinkers of this epoch.
It remains to mention one more treatise of Pomponazzi, the Book on Fate. Here he raises the question of human freedom face to face with God and the unbroken order of the Universe. The conclusions at which he arrives are vacillating and unsatisfactory; nor is there much in his method of handling this ancient problem to arrest attention. The essay, however, contains one sentence which deserves to be recorded. "A very Prometheus," he says, "is the philosopher. Seeking to penetrate the secret things of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares and cogitations; he forgets to thirst, to hunger, to eat, to sleep, to spit; he is derided of all men, and held for a fool and sacrilegious person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes a gazing-stock to the common folk. These, then, are the gains of the philosophers; these are their guerdons."[575] Not only were these words spoken from the man's own heart, smarting under the attacks to which his treatise on the soul had exposed him; but they were in a profound sense prophetic. While reading them, we think of Campanella's lifelong imprisonment and sevenfold tortures; of Bruno's death by fire, and Vanini's tongue torn out before his execution; of Galileo's recantation and disgrace; of Carnesecchi, Paleario and Montalcino burned or strangled. A whole procession of Italian martyrs to free thought and bold avowal of opinion passes before our eyes.
Reviewing Pomponazzi's work, we find that, though he occupied for the most part the modest place of a commentator and expositor, he valiantly asserted the rights of reason face to face with ecclesiastical authority. Under the ægis of the formula salvâ fide, he attacked the popular belief, disputed the fiats of Church Councils, denied miracles, rejected supernatural causes, and proclaimed that science must be based upon the axiom of an unalterable permanence in the order of the universe. The controversy which his treatise on immortality inflamed in Italy, popularized the two conceptions of God's immanence in nature and of the evolution of the human soul from corporeal organs. In other words it struck a powerful blow at transcendental, extra-mundane speculation, and prepared the way for sounder physical investigations. The positive spirit appeared in Pomponazzi, never thenceforward to be set at rest until the cycle of modern scientific illumination shall be accomplished.
The deep impression produced by this controversy on the mind of the Italians, may be illustrated by a little story. Pomponazzi's disciple, Simone Porzio, when invited to lecture at Pisa, opened Aristotle's meteorological treatises at the commencement of his course. The assembly, composed of students and people of the town, who had assembled, as was then the custom, to gaze upon the new professor and to judge his manner,[576] cried in a loud voice: "Quid de animâ? Speak to us about the soul!" He had to close his book, and take up the De Animâ. This Porzio frankly professed his belief that the human soul differed in no essential point from the soul of a lion or a plant, and that those who thought otherwise, were prompted by a generous pity for our mean estate.[577] Materialism of the purest water became fashionable and expressed itself in pithy sentences, which, though devoid of historical accuracy, sufficiently paint the temper of the folk who gave them currency. Of this type is the apocryphal epitaph of Cesare Cremonini, one of the latest of the Italian peripateticians. He died in 1631, and on his grave was said to have been written at his own request Hic jacet Cremoninus totus. To the same Cremonini is ascribed the Jesuitical motto Foris ut moris, intus ut libet, which may be regarded as a cynical version of Pomponazzi's oft-repeated protestation of belief in dogmas he had demonstrated contrary to reason.[578] Had it been possible for the Church to continue her tolerance of Leo's age, or had the Counter-Reformation taken a direction less inimical to free inquiry, the studied hypocrisy of this epigram, so painfully characteristic of the age that gave it birth, might have been avoided. The men who uttered it and acted by it, were the same of whom Milton spoke in Areopagitica: "I have sat among their learned men (for that honor I had), and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been written now these many years but flattery and fustian."
Central and Northern Italy performed the first two stages of Renaissance thought. Florence, true to the destiny which made her artful and form-giving, attempted to restore Platonic philosophy in accordance with the conditions determined by the middle ages. Bologna, gifted with a personality no less substantial, adhered to scholastic traditions, but accommodated their rigid subject-matter to the spirit breathed upon them by more liberal scholarship. It remained for the South of Italy to complete the work, and to supply the fulcrum needed for the first true effort of modern science. Hitherto, whether at Florence or Bologna, philosophy had recognized authority. Discarding the yoke of the Church, both Platonists and Aristotelians recognized masters, whose words they were contented to interpret. Reason dared not declare herself, except beneath the mask of some great teacher—Plato or Plotinus, Aristotle or Alexander or Averroes. The school of Cosenza cut itself adrift from authority, ecclesiastical or classical. This is the import of the first sonnet in Campanella's series, preserved for us by the fortunate mediation of his disciple, the German with the Italianized patronymic, Tobia Adami:[579]
Campanella calls the students of truth back to Nature from the "secondary schools" of the philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas of Aquino, or Averroes; who imposed upon their reason by the word "authority." In his fifth sonnet he enforces the same theme:[580]
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The world's the book where the eternal sense Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where, Painting his very self, with figures fair He filled the whole immense circumference. Here then should each man read, and gazing find Both how to live and govern, and beware Of godlessness; and, seeing God all-where, Be bold to grasp the universal mind. But we tied down to books and temples dead, Copied with countless errors from the life,— These nobler than that school sublime we call. O may our senseless souls at length be led, To truth by pain, grief, anguish, trouble, strife! Turn we to read the one original! |