Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 35
Thomas Aquinas, who admitted that the body was necessary as the soul’s object
but not as its subject, thereby preserving the soul’s immateriality and
immortality. Alexander’s belief that the soul was the material form of the body
had the additional failing of being unable to account for the intellect’s capacity to
understand immaterial universals. The Averroist thesis, which in these years
Pomponazzi regarded as the authentic interpretation of Aristotle, was able to
explain the comprehension of universals, but at the unacceptable cost of severing
the essential unity of body and soul, since the single immortal intellect for all
mankind merely guided the activities of individual bodies rather than serving as
their substantial form. Pomponazzi never questioned the truth of the Christian
belief in personal immortality, but he remained undecided for many years as to
the correct position on purely philosophical grounds. 109
The breakthrough came during a series of lectures on De caelo which he gave
at Bologna in 1515–16. In discussing the eternity of the world (I.10), Aristotle
establishes an indissoluble link between generation and corruption. Pomponazzi
realized that, following this principle, if the soul was immortal it did not have a
beginning in time; and if it did have a beginning, it was not immortal. Following
Duns Scotus, Pomponazzi now recognized that since Aristotle believed the soul
to be generated, he could not have regarded it as immortal. 110 Consequently, it
was Alexander, not Averroes, who offered the most accurate interpretation of
Aristotle and the most satisfactory answer, in terms of philosophy, to the
question of immortality. More importantly, since neither this answer nor the
Averroist one bolstered the Christian position, as the Lateran decree demanded,
it was essential to defy the Council’s pronouncement, reasserting philosophy’s
right to treat philosophical issues philosophically, without theological constraints.
This is precisely what Pomponazzi did in De immortalitate animae (1516),
which is an attempt to resolve the problem of immortality, remaining entirely
within natural limits and leaving all religious considerations aside. Pomponazzi
now maintained, against Thomas, that the body was necessary for all the soul’s
operations, because thought, for Aristotle, always requires the images provided
by the imagination from the raw material of sense data. Therefore, based solely
on philosophical premises and Aristotelian principles, the probable conclusion
was that the soul was essentially mortal, although immortal in the limited sense
of participating in the immaterial realm through the comprehension of
universals. 111 Despite this, Pomponazzi claimed that his belief in the absolute
truth of the Christian doctrine of personal immortality remained unshaken, ‘since
the canonical Scripture, which must be preferred to any human reasoning and
experience whatever, as it was given by God, sanctions this position’. In ‘neutral
problems’ such as immortality and the eternity of the world, natural reasoning
could not go beyond probabilities; certainty in such matters lay only with God. 112
Nevertheless Pomponazzi’s treatise made the point that, however provisional
their conclusions, philosophers must be allowed to pursue them without external
interference—wherever they might lead.