Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

philosophical foundation of Christian theology. In its place he wanted to
substitute the pious philosophy set out in his Nova de universis philosophia
(1591), which was entirely consonant with Catholicism and which was capable
of providing such strong rational proofs of dogmatic beliefs that not only Jews
and Muslims but even Lutherans would be won over. 161
What Patrizi offered the Pope was a Ficinian amalgam of Platonism,
Neoplatonism and Christianity, with particular emphasis given to the ancient
theology. By the late sixteenth century the genuineness of texts like the Hermetic
corpus was beginning to be doubted. But Patrizi, who had read his Steuco, clung
to a belief in them as documents of a primitive, divinely inspired wisdom, which
had prefigured Christianity and formed the core of Platonism before being
crushed by the weight of Aristotelian rationalism. 162 In only one treatise had
Aristotle incorporated material from this ancient tradition: the Theology (actually
a ninth-century Arabic reworking of Plotinus’s Enneads that had come to be
attributed to Aristotle) which, according to Patrizi, was a record of his notes on
Plato’s lectures concerning Egyptian religion. For Patrizi, as for Steuco, it was
pseudonymous works such as this, containing uncharacteristic affirmations of
divine providence and immortality, which represented the acceptable face of
Aristotelianism. 163 The Theology was therefore included, along with the works
of Hermes, Zoroaster, Plato and the Neoplatonists, in the new canon of godly
philosophy which Patrizi hoped would replace the ungodly Aristotelian one. 164
The Roman Inquisitors, evidently unconvinced by Patrizi’s claims, placed the
Nova philosophia on the Index—a fate which had earlier befallen Giorgi’s De
harmonia mundi. 165 These authors, attempting to protect Christianity from the
impieties of Aristotelianism, discovered that the Church was not prepared to
abandon its long alliance with Peripatetic philosophy.
Patrizi’s ‘new philosophy’, aiming to be as comprehensive as the Aristotelian
system it was designed to supplant, was basically Neoplatonic. The cosmos
consisted of a hierarchical series of nine levels of being, all emanating ultimately
from the One. Patrizi’s One was not, like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the final
cause of motion, but rather the efficient cause of light, which he regarded as one
of the four fundamental principles of the physical world, the others being heat,
space and fluid or flux (fluor). 166 In substituting these building-blocks for those
of Aristotle (fire, air, water and earth), Patrizi was working along similar lines to
another anti-Aristotelian philosopher, Bernardino Telesio (1509–88). In his De
rerum natura iuxta propria principia (1565–86), a treatise which Patrizi knew
well, Telesio too postulated heat as one of the principles of nature, although the
other elements in his tripartite scheme were cold and matter. 167 Telesio’s
philosophy was also presented as an alternative to Aristotelianism—and also
ended up on the Index. But he rejected Platonic as well as Aristotelian
metaphysics, grounding his system on an extreme form of empiricism, which
maintained that nature could only be understood through sensation and
observation—a manifesto which would earn him the qualified praise of Francis
Bacon. 168 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 43