Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
denied access to mysteries such as the Trinity, Ficino was careful to keep sight
of the fact that Plato was not a Christian and that he himself was one. 107
The revival of Platonism which Petrarch had wished for in the mid-fourteenth
century was brought to completion by Ficino at the end of the fifteenth. All the
dialogues were now available in reliable Latin translations, as were the major
works of the Neoplatonists. A systematic framework of interpretation, closely
linked to Christianity but clearly distinguishable from it, had also been
established. Platonism had been put on an entirely new and much surer footing.
But despite the efforts of its adherents, it had not displaced Aristotelianism,
which would continue to be at the centre of Italian Renaissance philosophy for
another century.
THE ARISTOTELIAN MAINSTREAM
During the fifteenth century the traditional separation of reason and faith had
begun to break down as philosophical arguments were increasingly used to
confirm religious doctrines, above all the immortality of the soul. Ficino, as we
have seen, had employed Platonism as a source of rational support for the
Christian belief that individual souls were immortal. Even scholastics like Paul
of Venice and Nicoletto Vernia had taken the view—in Vernia’s case under
pressure from the Church —that personal immortality was demonstrable in
philosophical terms. The culmination of this trend was the Fifth Lateran
Council’s decree of 1513, which compelled professors of philosophy to present
philosophical demonstrations of the Christian position on immortality. The
decree meant that it would no longer be permissible to have recourse to the
double-truth doctrine in order to discuss the issue on strictly philosophical
grounds, independent of theological criteria.
This deliberate attempt by the Council to restrict philosophy’s claims to
operate autonomously within its own intellectual sphere was soon challenged by
Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), a student of Vernia who succeeded him as the
leading natural philosopher at Padua, before transferring in 1512 to Bologna.
Throughout his career Pomponazzi lectured and wrote on Aristotelian texts in the
time-honoured scholastic fashion: addressing the standard questions, reviewing
the opinions of previous commentators and employing the philosophical
terminology established during the Middle Ages. Though he was in no sense a
humanist himself, he was nevertheless influenced, like Vernia, by the humanist
approach to Aristotelianism, particularly by the new availability of the Greek
commentators on Aristotle, whom he regarded not as replacements for medieval
authorities but rather as further reserves in the arsenal of Aristotelian
interpretations on which philosophers could freely draw. 108
In his early Paduan lectures on De anima, Pomponazzi rejected Alexander of
Aphrodisias’s materialist and mortalist view of the soul. According to Aristotle
(I.1), the crucial question in relation to immortality was whether the soul needed
the body for all its operations. Pomponazzi accepted the answer given by