What are the relationships between Platonism and Aristotelianism in the philosophical and anthropological activity of the Renaissance period?
Through the Academy of Florence, under the leadership of Marsilio Ficino, Plato's ideas have a veritable renaissance of their own. Both Ficino and Pico, another outstanding figure of the Florentine Academy, were thinkers of profound erudition and original creative power. Their school soon became the centre of a new Platonic influence in Europe. In England, for instance, the Florentine Academy exerted an influence which is clearly visible in the so-called Cambridge School of British thinking and theology. Ernst Cassirer has given a very interesting study on this Italian influence on the rebirth of Platonism in modern England.[1]
To our mind, there is a tinge of actual sadness pervading the whole history of that movement towards a Platonic reawakening right in the core of Western Christianity. Probably any attempt to create harmony and wholeness where there is nothing but discord and disintegration in the fundamental make-up, is bound to have something tragic about it. The battle between faith and knowledge has been the fateful disturber of inward peace with Occidental man for a long time. From this new secularized culture there seem to be no paths leading back to a genuine Christian culture of the old type. True, the cultural spirit of antiquity, embraced by this Western World, as it is being ushered into the era of modern times, is not exactly the same as the paganism of old. It is a new paganism, but sometimes a paganism even more pagan than the old one. Its distance from Christianity has become greater, as it were. It is a paganism more titanic--wilfully and deliberately titanic--than that of antiquity had ever been. Today there is no more pia philosophia--anxious to give at least a certain illusion of a reconciliation. The days have passed when it was naively believed that the virtue-conscious and heaven-bound Plato could still be reconciled with Jesus Christ.
To be sure, some of the most enthusiastic idealists of the Florentine Academy may one have imagined that they had finally knit the knot of wonderful synthesis between Platonic and Plotinian Eros on the one hand, and the Christian Agape on the other. But men like Giordano Bruno were also eminently characteristic of the Renaissance. And such men seemed bent on proving to the world that the same Eros, whom pious souls had thought it possible to tame and Christianize, is forever indomitable, and pagan through and through. According to Giordano Bruno, love is "the strongest evidence of titanic power in man".
As time passes, more and more men will have to make the choice between Savonarola and Macchiavelli. The predominant trend of the times is to choose Macchiavelli rather than Savonarola.
The stranger thing, demanding an explanation, is perhaps this: How can some great personalities of the Renaissance imagine the possibility of a reconciliation between a most this-worldly ancient paganism and a Christianity which is bound to be mainly other-worldly, after all?
Here you might perhaps answer, "The Plato the Renaissance Platonists--or any Platonists--want to reconcile with Christ, is, himself, mainly otherworldly, of course."
No, that is not quite true, as far as the Florentine Plato is concerned. (And we might add, the same will seem to apply to the Cambridge Plato.) This Plato is obviously more this-worldly in essential respects than the Athenian one ever used to be. To Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola the outstanding element of Platonism is the Platonic (and Plotinian) doctrines of Eros and Beauty.
Here the very importance of the question of the Renaissance attitude towards the dualism of mind and body obliges us to make some retrospective movements: we recall Timaios's risk of inconsistency at the moment when he was to explain the strange fact that pure being has changed into becoming. The Platonists of the Renaissance could freely refer to Plotinus. In fact, he had elaborated considerably just on the idea of beauty in this material world. Right in the midst of his radical spiritualism Plotinus has indeed, made almost incredible allowances in favour of concern about quite temporal things, on the part of the Eternal Idea. In the Enncads this rather sensational condescension is justified as follows:
To communicate essence and perfection to the body is therefore, for the soul, not an unmixed evil; for the providential care granted to an inferior nature does not hinder him who grants it from himself remaining in a state of perfection. (Enn. III, Book I, Ch. 10)
According to Plotinus, the fact that the divine once fell in love with the non-divine, is only one further sign of the former's nobility, its endless superiority over the latter.
So it is not considered inconsistent with the divine nature of the soul, either, that she simply enters into a body. Her attitude is perfectly decent and laudable. "She descends here below by a voluntary inclination--for the purpose of developing her power, and to adorn what is below" (Enn. IV, Book VIII).
No wonder that Renaissance philosophers, so strongly concerned about the dignity of the human soul, as well as about the excellence of this-worldly beauty, paid close attention to an ancient message of this kind.
Of course we may say that the great power which Christianity, too, introduces, in order to account for the fact of creation, is just Love. Plotinus, such an explanation in terms of Eros, to account for the existence of a material and temporal world of things, has certainly not come from Christian sources. His situation is also very different from that of the Christian thinker. He is under the conscious pressure of a painful problem unknown to Christian thought: according to the general tenets of his philosophy the existence of that temporal and material world is just as glaringly inconsistent and inexplicable as it once had been to Plato. And to whom could he go with his problems, if not to Plato? We must assume that he did go to him. If so, did he find any consolation? We should not be so sure that he found nothing at all. Perhaps this was precisely where he found that queer idea of introducing Eros as the great solution.
In fact, the great master himself, in his Symposium, seems ta attribute, precisely to Love, the role as a sort of mediator between the divine and the human. In the Symposium we find this clear trend regarding the nature of Eros: he is neither completely god nor completely man--neither absolutely immortal nor absolutely mortal.
He is a great spirit (daimon), and, like all spirits, he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. (Symp. 202)
And what is his power, his allotted mission?
He interprets ... between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest... find their way. (Ibid.)
In Plato's own days any mention of so "this-worldly" things as "love" and "beauty" may have been neglected as comparatively inessential to the philosophy of the Idea. But the world was destined to come to a time when such matters would tend to be considered as really essential to the realms of the spirit. And the Renaissance is, in the highest degree, just such a time. No wonder, then, that idealist in the era of the Renaissance and Humanism pay quite particular attention to these items--also in direct connection with the very ideology of Platonic philosophy.
So, in the present case, we should think it more than natural that Eros would be grasped as simply the great mysterious trait d'union explaining the inexplicable; we mean that long-sought bridge between two entirely incommensurable worlds, the great enigma we saw in Timaios. Eros is the great medium. No wonder he is described as a "formidable enchanter" (203). He is the medium of "sacrifices and mysteries and charms and all prophecy and incantation".
Here is something most indicative of the endless distance between God and man, according to Platonic idealism: that is, the distance between the general, impersonal Idea and the particular human individual. Nothing less than a veritable "sorcerer", a "sophist", could be expected to bridge such a chasm.
For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits of intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love. (Ibid.)
Just in order to carry out this mysterious mission of mediation, Plato's Eros is bound to be a curious "in-between", something lower than God and higher than man. Of course, the Christian Love is something very different. It is a quality so essential to God Himself that He simply identifies Himself with it. Yet there is no limit to the degree in which man, too, can partake of it. Lowliness is here no hindrance at all. In fact, the more humble a person is, the more he has appropriated of Love. For the essence of Love is humility. "The greatest among you shall be the servant of all" (Matt. xx: 26).
We shall see, in our next book, how little that Eros of pagan thought actually has in common, by and large, with the Christian Agape. Here we must mainly limit our examination to the part he plays in the properly secular Beauty cult of both Grecian antiquity and Italian Renaissance.
Even to Plato "love is the love of beauty". And here the Renaissance worshipers of mundane beauty certainly did not tend to interpret him as meaning moral beauty only, or even principally. Admittedly the reader who peruses the following pages of that context in the Symposium may be inclined to assume that the thing Socrates (Plato's mouthpiece) there speaks about is rather the more intellectual and "celestial" aspects of love. On the other hand, he will also have to notice some striking features in the curious myth Diotima produces for the young philosopher's enlightenment, regarding the birth and subsequent deportment of that multifarius fellow, Eros. It would, indeed, be somewhat beside the rigid truth to maintain that everything here is suggestive of "Platonic love" exclusively. Eros is actually described as "always plotting against the fair and the good".
He is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources, a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father's nature. But that which is always flowing in, is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth. (203)
Such descriptions of that remarkable "daimon" leave a serious question in our mind: Is not Plato's Eros fairly identical with Giordano Bruno's Eros? We are thinking of a certain seething volcano of titanic forces in the explosive depth of human nature--above all, the irrepressible passion of infinitude, which refuses to halt at any conventional borders or barriers of the properly finite, man's appropriate domain. That is the titanism which we have seen as the extreme symptom of defiant Adulthood in the awakening of a new age. It is the consciously arising spirit of egocentricity in modern times, and in every possible respect a diametrical contrast to Agape; we are particularly referring to Agape as the essence of alterocentricity, Agape as the spirit of lowliness.
It may seem bold on our part to simply make Eros into a general symbol of that disruptive and desperate attempt in man to break the bounds of his nature as the finite one, reaching heedlessly and stubbornly out for the infinite; that is, the spirit of self-sufficiency in its most bitterly defiant mood. But in the light of our historical research, following the trend of spiritualism down from century to century in our Western World, we feel that we have ample evidence to justify a specification of our diagnosis in the following terms. In the inexorable craving for immortality, as this is seen to assert itself in the history of mankind (as far as we have had opportunity to observe this historical drama) there is exactly that same disruption and desperation. Pagan man's titanic and autarchic grasping out for "immortality"--even at the risk of landing on the barren shores of a vain nirvana or a totally meaningless universal automatism--well, this whole frenzy is "erotic" in the peculiarly Platonic sense: It is autarkes!
By the way, such bold coupling together of the idea of "Eros" and the idea of "Immortality" is not only one that seems fully justified to us by the trend which proud anthropocentric spiritualism and semireligious immortalsoulism have taken in post-Platonic times, particularly in these ultra-modern times. No, that coupling together of Eros on one hand, and a man-made (self-sufficient) sham-immortalism on the other, is expressly suggested by Plato himself in his Banquet. Just listen to Diotima inquiring into the secrets of Eros's nature:
What is the manner of the pursuit? What are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? And what is the object they have in view?
Her own answer follows promptly. And it is obviously meant to apply both to carnal, secular love and to love as "a desire for the everlasting possession of good" in the widest sense:
The object which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or of soul... There is a certain age in which human nature is desirous of procreation--a procreation which must be in beauty, and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful is harmonious. Beauty then is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth. (206)
Now you may have a very legitimate and very important question here: Is that human urge towards "birth in beauty", in its very essence, necessarily a pagan phenomenon? Your question is concerned with the urge as such, whether it appears in antiquity or in the Renaissance, or at any time. It is necessarily pagan to harbour in one's breast an ardent desire for some lasting creation? And notice, you may say, here it is even a question of realizing something outside oneself. It is a question of admiring the beautiful in a most tangible everyday world, perhaps even personally bearing it into that world, an active existential engagement in what the artist would call birth in beauty! Is this necessarily pagan? Is this human attempt at a certain "procreation", a certain self-transcendence, a certain eternalization of what is most valuable in man--is this absolutely objectionable from a Christian point of view?
By no means. All this may be consistent with the sternest Christianity. In fact, we would find it a lot more doubtful to answer in the affirmative if you asked the opposite question: Is this truly consistent with Platonic spiritualism, or neo-Platonic spiritualism? What right, in fact, could Plato or Plotinus actually have to praise the beauty of bodies or any this-worldly things? It is the ingenuous child, not the ingenious, sophisticated philosopher, who is consistent with himself when he reaches out to contact or create such things in the living context of his everyday human life. The consistent spiritualist philosopher has no logical right whatsoever to "bear" anything whatsoever of a truly beautiful and lasting nature. The consistent trend of Plato's celestial Eros would rather be to "bear" some sort of "beauty" in a stringently abstract sense, and to "create" some sort of "lastingness" of a correspondingly invisible fabric. And this is not what realistic men call birth; this they call abortion.
God forbid, however, that our reader should think lightly of this "scramble for nothingness", called "Eros" by Plato and Plotinus, and preferably "spiritualism" or "disruption" by us. It would be particularly fateful to let the impression prevail:
Those vain climbing maneuvers of self-sufficient pagan thinking are just laughable, nothing more.
Oh no, among naturally gullible and vain human beings, like you and me, children of the modern West, a cunningly deceptive device, like that of the spiritualist Eros, is a lethal danger.
But how, then, does this peculiar "erotic" trauma practically affect us?
Let us go back for a moment to the case of that frankly confessing "sentimental" Friedrich Schiller; he is, as we have pointed out (pp. 90-103), the typical representative of a modern Western culture. We remember that when the great German dramatist spoke about "der sentimentalische Dichter", he meant contemporary Western man. He meant himself. Had he known you and me, he might have meant particularly us. He meant any neo-idealist of a post-Platonic world. And now, what did he say about this "sentimentalist", this "super-idealist" of an unchanging world?
"For eternity only will he sow and plant."
That sounds awfully nice, doesn't it? It sounds "idealistic", even in a rather human--and one might say naively Christian--sense of "idealism". But be not deceived! Please remember the formidable goal that outspoken modern Occidental, Friedrich Schiller, had set for his own life. What pinnacles of glorious achievement was he reaching out for?
"The highest enjoyment a thinking spirit can realize: greatness in the world, immortality of the name." (sic!)
"Unsterblichkeit des Namens!" These last words of his statement are the ones we should like to dwell upon here in a particular way. "Immortality--of the name"--that is, indeed, what we would venture to call a rather "abstract" or "ideal" type of survival.
We want to be quite plain and deadly earnest in our inquiry: Could any "immortality" be more eligible for the negative epithet of sham immortality than this? Could any "eternity" be more correctly qualified as a pseudo-eternity?
The blunt accusation we feel in duty bound to bring up against Plato's Eros--as the dawn of modern times seem so eager to embrace him--is nothing more and nothing less than this: sheer vanity; that is: a deleterious vanity, not just emptiness as a neutral value, an innocuous trifle.
And what, now, is the uncontradictable testimony of history in this respect?
Just from the days of the Renaissance, there has been, in this culture of ours, a steadily increasing number of fame-craving intellectuals, just passionately climbing on and on, simply exchanging the stern realities of modest human lives, peace-enjoying lives, for the purest phantasms of an imaginary human glory.
What has this vain-glorious pride of a mental boundlessness, a fighting for the stars, really given in return to the new sentimental, walking so faithfully in Giordano Bruno's footsteps? Nothing, absolutely nothing--unless, indeed, that desperate state of inward disruption, the convulsive agony ringing like an infernal crescendo of idealist despair through Schiller's pathetic words about the "sentimental" modern man:
What he demands of himself is infinite, but everything he achieves is limited.
What could be more frustrating than this, or more disastrous to totality and meaningfulness in human life?
So here, then, appears--by way of contrast--the advantage falling to the lot of the realistic naive: he could sense quite intuitively, as it were: a definite limitation is the natural destiny of every human creature. Anything man possesses, in himself, is bound to be finite and mortal. And this is the hard law which disagreeably forces itself upon the attention of any creature--even the one who has opted for utter self-dependence. That option simply means throwing one's existence upon the merciless rocks of a purely secular, non-religious world. The one who makes this choice should at least be realistic enough to face his predicament: there is no palliative whatsoever to the naked necessity in which man as such finds himself. A mere longing for immortalization has never immortalized anyone.
If that longing for eternity turns into an irrational monomania, a conscious scramble for survival, survival at any price, only one thing can be achieved: the gulf between mortal man's endless desires and their actual fulfillment is rendered more painfully abysmal day by day. This bitter sense of miserable human short-coming--nay, of total failure--is just the tragic disruption which fate inevitably has in store for the relentlessly self-sufficient and irreconcilably schizothyme mind. It is the tragedy of Eros, in terms of the titanic spiritualist's Autarkeia; that is, the fundamental motif of pagan pride, as against Metanoia, Christianity's fundamental motif of humble subjection. A modern Christian author has a striking name for it: "unsanctified spiritual love", or "free-lovism" (8T292). How mysteriously the term "love", with some qualifying epithet, turns up in the records of human destiny! Perverted love is, indeed, a manifold phenomenon. In this case it is identical with self-indulgence, be it of an openly sensual or of a pseudo-spiritual nature; the two may blend confusingly together.
Briefly, there is a genuine infinitude, an absolute immortality towards which human hearts may aspire. There is a fulfillment for which they may long. But here Eros becomes nothing but a limited humanity's miserable makeshift realization of that infinitude, of that immortality and that fulfillment. In other words, there can be little more than a sigh of bitter resignation in the proclamation Plato makes:
To the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality... Therefore Love is of immortality. (Symp. 206)
As for Plato himself, it would seem particularly incredible to assume that the extremely spiritualizing idealist could really ever have found any true fulfillment and durable satisfaction--or even any consolation at all--in that biological makeshift immortality he mentions under the name of "Eros". In fact, it is only, as far as we can understand, through a curious caprice once more that this radically spiritualistic philosopher suddenly condescends to give particular attention to corporeal beauty at all. Frankly, this must be a logical salto of the most glaring inconsistency.
And now what about the reaction of the Renaissance men, those professedly this-worldly worshipers of natural beauty, when they dived into the Symposium, eagerly scrutinizing the old master's oracular statements on the topic of love and beauty? To be entirely frank, we are somewhat at a loss to understand what on earth those awakening realists of a new age could find of essential value to them in Platonic philosophy! They, of all men, with their growing appreciation of individual humanity and of any tangible beauty this wonderful world of the human senses may still have--they should have every possibility of taking a far more near-to-life attitude towards such living splendours than Plato did.
Indeed, let us confess our viewpoint once more: as realistic historians we must make a distinction between two elements of our Greek heritage: on one hand the ingenuous (the "naive"), on the other the ingenious (the "sentimental", the sophisticatedly adult). Now, from which of these have the Renaissance men inherited their new awakening sense of natural beauty and fragrantly enfolding humanity? We would say their heritage is not a heritage from the exceptional genius Plato. It is a heritage from the common Greek, the congenial naive whom Schiller speaks about.
Accordingly, the wonderland of the past to which they are making their historic pilgrimage is not Plato's land, either. It is the land of plain, average ancient Greeks, an erstwhile naive and near-to-earth people. No doubt, this congeniality applies to the great majority of the "pilgrims" concerned.
Of course that is not necessarily tantamount to saying that they thus avoid every contamination of paganism. Oh no, not by any means, for remember there is another source of paganism besides the spiritualistic one. There is a materialistic category of paganism. And that paganism was definitely better avoided by the medieval spirit than by the spirit of the forthcoming new era.
It is the Renaissance that initiates our world into an age of spirit-forsaken secularism.
But what, then, is the actual and essential difference between the Renaissance way of conceiving beauty--this-worldly beauty--and the medieval way?
The most enraged anti-clericalists in the Renaissance would probably have answered disdainfully: "The medieval "sense of beauty" is the pitiable one you Christians have made your constant sacred tradition: It is a sense mummified and mutilated by monastic asceticism; that is, a gloomy seclusion which never had the courage to be human!"
To us this seems to be a monstrous caricature of the true Christian way of conceiving natural beauty. It would also appear to be a rather unfair wholesale condemnation of the way medieval men related themselves to art, as opposed to the human freshness and generosity of the Renaissance conception. For even right in the midst of the medieval Church there was considerable appreciation of genuine artistic creation. In fact, the Middle Ages testify to the presence of a good number of sincere Christians who did not at all permit a narrow trend of gloominess and seclusion, in terms of contemporary monasticism, to blur their vision of natural beauty. On the contrary, their very ingenuity (which is a medieval quality more than a Renaissance one) caused them to enjoy artistic activities as something perfectly legitimate and actually God-given.
In fact, it would seem highly relevant to our topic to concern ourselves with a peculiarly Christian attitude towards beauty as compared to the attitude manifested by a rather secularized community. The pivotal point of our theory is still that nothing could be more congenial with totality in human life than a truly Christian attitude towards that life.
Now, the Christian conception of beauty is bound to be intimately and decisively connected with certain theological and cosmological assumptions which appear self-evident to the childlike faith of a Christian: the God of the Christian child is a God who has created even this material world with all its natural glories. He is also the God who has created the human senses with which those glories are perceived. He has ingeniously and deliberately fitted those two creations together in such a way that man may have pleasure--even downright sensuous pleasure.
These simple facts appear so clearly from the deepest spirit pervading the biblical records, that attentive Christians, even in an environment of the most lugubrious seclusion in medieval monasticism, could not lose sight of it. In spite of the severest injunctions, on the part of their pessimistic superiors, to consider as disreputable and sinful everything connected with human bodies or the natural beauties of a surrounding world, many sincere Christians could not be prevailed upon to let go their buoyant Christian optimism--that is, their invincible confidence in the goodness of God, and the meaningfulness of His creation.
The questions many a childishly realistic soul kept asking himself were of the following order: If every natural bodiliness is nothing but an occasion for sin and corruption, why then has God given me a body at all? Is the body there for no other reason than that it should be chastised, flagellated, killed? Does man's main duty consist of confining himself to the darkest dungeons, shunning every contact with the beauties of this world and with congenial human society? Is it, after all, Satan who has called into existence the fragrant charms of material nature, the sweet attractions of congenial human fellowship?
His own intelligent and orthodox answer was bound to be: No. The Scriptures themselves tell me that Satan has produced nothing but ugliness and evil. So he cannot be the origin of one single genuine pleasure. Take for instance the delightful taste of the fruit making my mouth water. Has Satan made it so wonderfully delicious? Or take that beautiful young companion of mine. Was it Satan who made her so beautiful? Did he create the forces of life in me that make her so particularly attractive to my senses? No, that would be absurd, simply contrary to the plain teachings of Holy Writ. God is the source of every good and pleasant thing in original nature.
Of course I know, as a Christian, the other side of the story too. The truth just mentioned has to be supplemented by another one in order to give the full picture: I cannot unrestrainedly give my life to a thoughtless indulgence in those material and sensual pleasures without exposing my life to the risks of a fateful one-sidedness and actual disintegration. Precisely the fact that God, my Father, has created all those things--and this quite intentionally, for my gratification--that makes it all-important and imperative that I do not disconnect them from the supreme reality in my life, the reality that He constitutes in it. The very moment when I make that mistake--that felony against the Source of my being--then my situation in the world will be radically and fatally changed. The sacred totality of my deepest life will then be broken.
What is this breach of totality in human life? Since we are speaking about man's relationship to God, and the part this plays even in his aesthetic pleasures, let us state the facts briefly as follows. Beauty enjoyed without thankfulness is a strangely reduced enjoyment. It is also a strangely short-lived enjoyment. The practical effect is exactly the same as if beauty herself were fatefully stunted. So we realize the importance of a sense of connectedness in the person who enjoys. He should be aware of the great Other One, to whom he owes the beauty he admires. Whether he knows it or not, whether he admits it or not, this sense of connectedness is indispensable for both depth and duration in the aesthetic experience. This applies to any individual enjoying himself, to any group of individuals enjoying themselves, and to any kind of enjoyment; particularly an open expression of one's thankfulness would enhance the experience and increase its joy a hundredfold. A simple word of praise to a personally engaged Benefactor, the Author of pleasant experiences, means a world of difference in the inmost quality of those very experiences. Instead of oceans of enjoyment, artistic and otherwise, man contents himself with scanty drops. The secret he has not detected is this: failing to be thankful for the pleasure one enjoys, in nature or anywhere else, simply means disconnecting them from their spiritual counterpart. It means denying their source and meaning.
And the latter attitude is that of the Modern Adult, as opposed to the Medieval Child. From the Renaissance onwards, men in this world became increasingly disturbed by a curious fear: they were haunted by the idea that the flowers man admires might lose a considerable portion, or some mysterious shade, of their peculiar fragrance at the crucial moment when he gives expression to the fact--or at least pays attention to the thought--that he is indebted for the pleasure of such perceptions to another being--perhaps even a Superior Being.
What an incredible notion, in view of the fact that the very opposite is the obvious truth! What a baleful notion, in view of the fact that all flashes of beauty are doomed to vanish like a flickering torch in the night, as soon as the Source of Life withdraws from the scene.
This is precisely where we discern the fundamentally illusive character of spiritualism, as well as of materialism. Both of them beguile their dupes into believing in a partial reality, a reality lamentably hanging in mid-air, so to speak. Words of profound and well-integrated appreciation of natural beauty must sound most fitting in the mouth of a Christian monist. But the same words in the mouth of a professed pagan dualist would seem strangely mal à propos. By way of example we shall quote a passage from Plotinus, a wonderful one, but, alas, how inconsistent and bizarre when we think of the general principles otherwise forming the basis of that author's thinking. In fact, what logical right does an inveterate spiritualist have to give such fullness of expression to both the broadest human or "this-worldly" sentiments and the deepest tones of religious meaningfulness.
One rises to the intelligible [or why not simply God, if our translation does not appear too naive] by seeing a shining image of beauty glowing in a human face. Heavy and senseless must be that mind which could contemplate all these visible beauties, this harmony, and this imposing arrangement, this grand panoramic view, furnished by the stars in spite of their distance--without being stirred to enthusiasm, and admiration of their splendour and magnificence. He who can fail to experience such feeling must have failed to observe sense-objects, or know even less the intelligible world [the world of the spirit, we have the boldness to translate interpretively once more]. (Enn. II, Book IX, Ch. 16. Parentheses ours)
In one way we are not surprised at all at the charming effect, of eloquent passages like this one, on the minds of the "neo-neo-Platonists" of the Renaissance. They were simply confused in their basic aesthetic thinking. A firm and realistic attachment to plain natural human beauty was suddenly imagined to be logically consistent with the coldest and most barren phantoms of Platonic idealism (pseudo-realism), after all.
This was a fatal confusion, fatal both to aesthetic theory and to the living forces of inward harmony in the Humanist movement as a whole. In fact, a tragic mistake of unfathomable consequences happened to the Renaissance men as they gradually tended to make a decision in favour of detaching their deepest personal experience of human values (including the value of plain this-worldly beauty) from the idea of a personal God, individually intervening in the affairs of men; that is, an idea transmitted to them by the still God-dependent and naively God-trusting men of the Middle Ages. In the same degree as a new generation of ostentatiously self-dependent (but inwardly increasingly insecure) men came to despise the best, together with the worst, in their predecessors" heritage, a baleful disruption was bound to take place in their deepest hearts. Proudly and radically they kept on severing their ties with medieval traditions. This was destined to include a more or less conscious emancipation from an age-old belief in a personal Creator; that is, a God generously planning and dispensing of every single one of those this-worldly values with which he insists on surrounding man in his daily life.
Anyway, a most ironic interlude happened in history: the men who were to become so famous for eagerly making their way to the very sources of things ("ad fontes"), happened to be the very ones who gradually lost sight of the Source par excellence, the Source of their most cherished beauties, of any pleasure ever coming to the life of any human being. Accordingly they lost sight of their essential connections. This, in turn, caused them to lose their very bearings in life, their orientation towards the things outside themselves, and greater than themselves. The primordial element of gratitude was left out of their life's final account, their main balance as artists and as men. From that point on, they had the sad fate of seeing their dearest values crumbling to pieces in their hands. This is simply the tragic story of waning totality in modern times. The one great salvationary force in human lives is seen to fight a losing battle in the Western World; that is a battle first and foremost against most subtle waves of spiritualist irrealism, waves rising again and again in the most incredible ways and in the most unexpected places.
So much for Platonism in the Renaissance. Is there any similar revival of Aristotelianism? Yes, indeed. Let us leave the Florentine Academy now for the Paduan school. Its wholehearted Aristotelians are eminently Renaissance-minded in several excellent respects. For instance, they too favour the famous principle contained in the resounding catchword, ad fontes. The Paduan scholars make a noteworthy and praiseworthy effort to go right back to the original Aristotle. That is, not the Aristotle of scholasticism, as Averroes for instance had interpreted him. What had characterized Averroistic philosophy was a marked impersonalism and typically collectivistic views. Of course these had not applied to all scholastic interpretations of Aristotle. We have already seen undeniably individualistic traits flourishing fairly well even in the Middle Ages, particularly in men strongly influenced by the Christian Gospel, such as Thomas Aquinas.
To expect any truly humanistic trends from the Averroists would be rather unreasonable, anyway. Their views had never distinguished themselves as particularly anthropocentric in any respect. The sad thing, however, is that this rule applies to medieval Aristotelianism by and large: the really outstanding "natural biologist", Aristotle, the great realistic "scientist" who had discovered man, the individual--this Aristotle had almost completely been lost sight of in the maze of other trends. Indeed, he had disappeared under a thick layer of dry abstraction, produced, the some extent, by the illustrious Latin translations that intended to make him accessible to medieval man. Now the competent Humanist philologues saw it as their special task to go right down to the underlying realities, the tangible, literal Aristotle, as the original texts might reveal him.
Thus Aristotle, the genuine realist and naturalist of antiquity, was fairly well rediscovered. There was one particularly outstanding Renaissance philosopher who had the gift for rediscovering Aristotle. That was Pietro Pomponazzi. He had a sufficient trend towards naturalism himself to catch hold of the very spirit of the long-forgotten ancient hero.
To our historical study of mind-body realism versus spiritualist splitness, this Italian scholar is particularly interesting, not only because he is bold enough to proclaim, in his oral teaching, that man is one, but particularly because he even published a startling book On the Immortality of the Soul, where, in reality, he writes about the mortality of the soul. That is almost too bold to be imagined. His book could not fail to arouse the greatest attention. Its strong reverberations in contemporary circles of ecclesiastical leaders obliged the author to follow up with an "Apology" which is not much less attention-stirring.
J.H. Randall, in his commentaries to a modern edition, qualifies Pomponazzi's treatise on the "immortality" of the soul as epoch-making. That is a strong word. We think it is indeed too strong. Of course Pomponazzi's publication was a most sensational one, as we shall soon see. But was it literally epoch-making? Did it create any really new epoch in the anthropology of the times?
Hardly. There was a crying need for something thoroughly epoch-making in the domain of anthropological views, after centuries of accumulated darkness regarding human nature and human destiny, in life and death. But, sad to say, that new epoch failed to dawn. Obviously two essential conditions were still unfavourable:
1) Contemporary humanity was too heavily under the spell of religious dogmas of immortalsoulism to receive any revolutionarily new outlook on human nature.
2) Pomponazzi himself was not revolutionary enough, or consistent enough. To be sure, he goes "ad fontes" with an ardour and an erudition which are, both of them, irreproachably Humanistic in the best sense of the term. Nevertheless, he does not go sufficiently "ad fontes" in all the fields that are relevant to his "revolution". Christianity was such a field. Or should we rather say: Christendom with its endless potential for historical change. How could any student of philosophical anthropology in the Western World neglect to take into account the tremendous impact of historical Christianity upon anthropological views? And here the strange thing happens: no sooner does the "presumptuous doubter" Pomponazzi sense the presence of an authoritative Christendom standing in front of him, than he is found lying prostrate at the feet of that many-headed oracle, issuing its infallible statutes, decisive for life and death. The roaring lion has been transformed into a tail-wagging lap dog.
In fact, there is something like an irony of fate in this spectacle: the virulently anticlerical Pomponazzi is piteously prevented from rendering his book on human mortality an epoch-making one. What has prevented him? His own obsequious attitude towards the clergy of his day!
One thing is certain: at the bottom of his heart, Pomponazzi was anticlerical. Worse than that, he was probably to some extent anti-Christian. And there is no reason to be astonished at this. In him, as in so many others of this "tougher" generation, a certain increasing irreligiousness has to be admitted; that is, a certain departure from the prevailing childlikeness of the Middle Ages, some would say a legitimate departure from the prevailing childishness of that superstitious era. It is difficult to agree on the terms sometimes. We shall try to discuss the topic at greater depth in our third book. Let us summarily say, so far, that any genuine Renaissance personality is obviously a representative of a world culture "coming of age". So how could he hope to escape entirely the symptomatic traits of adolescence, a certain harmony-disturbing introspection and egocentricity? This was the allotted part of the Renaissance. It was destined to be the Adolescent Era of the Western World, the age when our culture became "adult".
Almost in spite of themselves, we might be tempted to say, numerous pious men of sterling integrity and the most noble disposition, as far as human evaluations can measure these traits, now suddenly enter the turbulent currents of anticlericalism, or other types of an active rebellion against the established order of things.
To be sure, a willful enslavement of the weaker consciences, and an ugly hypocrisy holding sway in certain ecclesiastical circles, did not constitute the most favourable images to keep brandishing before the eyes of a new generation at this time of a general awakening. The people waking up here had an interior vision of a new dignity for individual human beings dawning upon their minds. And that vision did not at all agree with the prevailing background of dark, "medieval" conditions. Under such circumstances the breaking forth of something new, from the narrow limits of the old, was almost bound to have a tinge of iconoclasm about it. It took the form of a proud and feverish emancipation from the unworthy shackles of the past. Through a coincidence of unfortunate events, the ardent anthropocentricity of this turbulent age was somehow doomed to be at the same time--and with fateful consequences--just its furious egocentricity.
Anyway, this is the general setting, the undercurrent of a prevailing "spiritual" mood, we must keep in mind when we visualize Pomponazzi and his first major work entering upon the scene. That conscientious Aristotelian has arrived at a sensational conclusion--sensational from the viewpoint of the contemporary Church, that is: the human soul is essentially mortal. It is simply doomed to die with the body! That view--and only that view--is in strict accordance with the true Aristotle. It is also in accordance with all pure reason. Averroes, to be sure, has affirmed that the "intellective" soul is distinct in its existence ("realiter") from the corruptible soul. According to him, that so-called "intellective"--and allegedly "immortal"--soul is "one in number in all men"; in other words, entirely devoid of every element of the individual and the personal! But was not that just the element which the Christian teachers of the Middle Ages could never afford to give up and still remain Christian?
Now Pomponazzi seems to challenge the naive dreamers of a "Christian" philosophy dreadfully. They imagine that they can have stern classical philosophy and immortalsoulism at the same time. But the non-Christian thinkers speak very clearly and very unsentimentally about "the corruptible soul". This is the inescapable epithet of the "multiple soul" (de immortalitate animae, III).
And that "multiple" soul is the only one any genuine child of man would care about. It is also the soul any child of the Christian faith would care about. For it is the soul having one different consciousness for each individual person. And now the sad message finally comes through: the only human soul really worthwhile is the one that is doomed to die!
Manifestly that is also the soul which has Pomponazzi's full sympathy. He takes sides unreservedly with that soul. This is not at all astonishing, by the way. As a true son of the Renaissance he is a wholehearted individualist. And how, then, should he ever manage to feel really attracted by that cold and bodiless phantom of a "common" or "collective" intellect, adorning itself with the vain epithet of "immortal". In his realistic ears that sounds like utter emptiness. What use can he make of an immortality that is absolutely impersonal? To him, a solid personalism, even strictly limited to this life, is a thousand times better to have, and be sure about, than any impersonalism which "lives" forever!
Moreover, the decisive point to Pomponazzi, as an historian, is this: What did Aristotle teach? In that venerable old philosopher he does not find any convincing evidence whatsoever of a belief in any separable existence of two essentially different souls in man.
This is not only in itself most false; it is unintelligible and monstrous and quite foreign to Aristotle. (Ibid., IV)
But how, then, did Averroes and other Aristotelians come to be so convinced about the theory of the "two different" souls? Pomponazzi feels that too many unwarranted conclusions, indeed, have been drawn from Aristotle's famous statement in De anima, III, 30. Admittedly, the philosopher does say here, "If the intellect is taken by itself, it is nowise dependent on any phantasm." And this is "said very cleverly", Pomponazzi comments. Nevertheless, "it seems to profit nothing," he goes on, "because according to the common definition of the soul, the soul is the act of the body; that is, physical and organic, etc; therefore the intellective soul is the act of a physical and organic body. Since therefore the intellect, in its being, is the act of a physical and organic body, it will thus also depend, in all its functionings, on some organ, either as subject or as object. Hence it will never be released from some organ."
Now, what does he think, then, about the way Thomas manages to interpret Aristotle? That is bluntly stated: Thomas actually fails to build on reason in this case. Of course, his eager concern is to save the immortal-soul theory. And his understanding critic Pomponazzi does not find it unnatural at all, for a Christian, to be concerned about that. The fact is evident: Thomas has simply opted for a philosophy of immortality. The only sad thing however, is that he has not been consistent in his option. For what would the only logical follow-up have been where a theory of human immortality is assumed? Of course a consistent philosophical reasoning would have demanded that he also accept here, as a self-evident corollary of that immortality, the impersonalism which is bound to go along with it!
Now, admittedly, that impersonalism is fundamentally foreign to the spirit of Christianity. In other words, for the purpose of saving his Christian personalism, a Christian (here Thomas) is obviously constrained to take his refuge, not in philosophical reason, but rather in the religious miracle. He actually introduces a non-philosophical means of multiplying and individuating human intellect in the beyond: nothing less than a special act of individual creation is necessary. This, however, is neither Platonic spiritualism, nor Aristotelian naturalism. We may be quite sure of that.
But what is it then? It is the unique way of the Christian wonder, the only way found capable of realistically saving totality in human lives.
However, do not imagine that the humanist Pomponazzi opts for this theory of a divine creation, a miraculous recreation. That alternative of a naive Judeo-Christian spirituality would appear too God-dependent, indeed, for an increasingly self-dependent Renaissance spirit. The new contours gradually coming into focus, even in Pomponazzi's work "De immortalitate", are those of a certain "emancipated naturalism". We are not speaking about a radically materialistic emancipation. No, this is rather the typical emancipation of humanism. The emancipated humanist turns gradually, but systematically, away from theological dogmas towards more purely human trends of reasoning. At the same time he turns away from certain philosophical dogmas, towards more prevailingly scientific trends of reasoning.
These peculiar trends of a gradual disengagement from the traditional tracks of time-honoured authority imply potentials of both good and evil, considered from the viewpoint of spiritual totality. Let us take up a most relevant question here, namely the question of the immortality of the human soul. The movements of humanist emancipation do not provide any escape from the problem of immortality. On the contrary, a veritable crisis starts brewing up in the very heart of humanist thought and feeling relative to the question of human survival.
On one hand there is that irrepressible awaking of scientific realism. According to the basic principles of that realism, there is no room for any theory of a logically developing personal immortality.
On the other hand, the Renaissance means the forceful awakening of a profound interior anxiety, an increasing unrest in human minds. That is an awakening of the deepest conscience, an intense awareness of human dignity, a desperate craving for meaningfulness in human lives. How could the claims of that endless dignity and meaning be satisfied by anything less than a human personalism of an absolutely unbroken type? Man's life must be indestructible, interminable. Nothing short of eternity could ever satisfy the thirst for infinitude, inherent in the passionate minds of Renaissance men.
There was almost bound to be a violent clash, then, between outward facts and inward aspirations in the humanist's life, i.e. between his ever increasing realism and his ever increasing idealism. This is the very gist of the crisis of the Renaissance anthropologist, as we have come to look upon him. To have one's mind so mercilessly torn in two opposite directions, would seem to be a situation that predisposes for serious disruption.
Christianity, it is true, has its own peculiar remedy for any disruptive pointedness of the issues--a pointedness pushing them otherwise right onto the precipice of such a crisis. It has its unique means of reconciliation, which is a dependence, not on self, but on God, on an intervention from an outside Reality. But this "alterocentricity" is a Christian way out. It is spiritual in the sense of Christian totality! The Renaissance, however, is not spiritual in this sense. It is not properly religious in the sense of the Christian Child. If it is spiritual and religious at all, that must be in the sense of the Pagan Adult.
Anyway, the heroes of this increasingly secularized movement do not find the solution to their problem in the mystery for which the typical child keeps reaching out. They find it--or at least they look for it, with the turbulence of their adolescent hearts--in entirely different fields.
The would-be realists among them insist on seeking it right in the natural facts of this present pitiless world. Pomponazzi, for one, simply abandons the idealist's convulsive fight for immortality. To his mind comes the alternative "solution" of trying to establish, instead, a sort of modus vivendi with downright mortality! A startling paradox, you may rightly say, both in linguistic terms and in a deeper meaning: the only "way out" is to make life on this side as intensely alive as possible, as glowingly personal and as deeply meaningful as any man can ever make it.
Of course the whole stupefying trend of a Renaissance secularization is already present in the author's bold proclamation of this pagan self-sufficiency, in its materialistic form, as a principle of escape, or of "surmounting". We shall consider the second alternative, the spiritualistic one, in a little while.
But now first this would-be realistic attempt to overcome the problem: let us have a closer look at Pomponazzi's heroic endeavour to make the question a purely "this-worldly" one. Why was this no real solution? Why did it become part of the great disruption, rather than a realistic solution? Simply because it represented a blow in the face, a blunt negation of that most legitimate thirst for unbrokenness and infinitude inspiring the minds and the hearts of Renaissance men.
A genuine longing for eternity and perfection constituted part and parcel of that very dignity, of which intensely vibrating human minds in an awakening new age had become so disturbingly conscious. That longing, in itself, was not disruptive. What, then, was disruptive? The frustration that is always bound to follow when nothing but a potion of oblivion is offered to the longing soul, in place of the living water.
And any humanist should be truthful enough to face the sad facts about Pomponazzi's heroic endeavours in his "De immortalitate". It would be very far from the truth to affirm that he made a successful job of accepting death as the reality it actually constitutes. He rather makes the subterfuge of "accepting" it by minimizing its real significance. He exhausts his energies in trying to explain away its naked monstrosity, its total irreconcilability to the deepest aspirations of true humanism: meaningfulness in the destinies of human beings.
In fact, the formidable giant with whom Pomponazzi has to wrestle most desperately is just Finality. And here a cruel attack from outside comes to aggravate his torture, right in the midst of that nightmare battle he has to fight with his own conscience; that is, with the ideals of a meaningfulness and a beauty which any true Renaissance humanist is bound to harbour in his inmost heart.
The realistic Aristotelian simply could not avoid the shrill voices of his most furious adversaries, the Platonic idealists surrounding him like buzzing wasps: "How in the world," they argued sneeringly, "can such a hideous thing as simple mortality be compatible at all with the dignified position a humanist is bound to assume for any one so closely related to the eternal and the divine as is the Reasonable Soul, the kingly intellect of speculative men? How could this noble substance be supposed to die the ignominious death of miserable creatures entirely given to their quite animal, vegetative, and sordidly practical functions? How could death be an end worthy of truly intelligent, time-transcending minds?"
Pomponazzi hates this voice ringing so piercingly and so painfully in his ears. He does not realize to what extent this voice, too, is vain and pitiably impotent, in its turn, being nothing but the hollow echo of an inherently human intellectual pride. He feels the need of bracing himself against it. In his response he is tempted to adopt an attitude of similar intellectualism, although not perhaps exactly of similar pride. Striving convulsively, and with the courage of despair, to get on honourable terms with the finality argument--and still maintain the "reasonability" of death--he argues approximately as follows. It is true that each thing has an end, a meaningful goal. That end, however, is not necessarily what reaches the highest peak of perfection, or, in the author's own words, "what is good to a greater degree". No, it is sufficient that the end should be in accordance with "the thing's nature"!
Although it is better to sense than not to sense, it does not suit a stone to sense, nor would it be for the good of the stone; for then it would no longer be a stone. (XIV)
The same must be taken into consideration when an end is assigned to man. Not all men can participate perfectly in the theoretical intellect! (Obviously this was looked upon as the highest level of human dignity, even by the humanist Pomponazzi, just as it had unfailingly been by intellectuals in previous ages, for instance Plato and Aristotle in antiquity.) They cannot all be philosophers, mathematicians, etc. In fact, mankind would not long subsist if that were the case. There must be practical workers also. In this field all men reach a certain perfection; and they should reach it; the continued existence and well-being of mankind depend upon it. However, into this "lower" category of human proficiency Pomponazzi evidently also relegates--please note the remarkable point--moral virtue: all men can be, and ought to be, "of good character". To the preservation of the human race, as a collective unit, it is most important that the individuals should be morally virtuous!
And now we come to the salient point in Pomponazzi's argument. Immortality is not an absolute requirement, or an absolute good. The demands of finality in human life may be more properly met without it. In view of the practical conditions just mentioned, you see, even without an immortal soul--or precisely without it.
Man can have the end which suits man universally; the end that belongs to the most perfect part he can not have. (Ibid.)
What is that "most perfect part"? It is, obviously, the exquisite genius characterized by extreme intelligibility, absolute speculativeness, the perfect abstraction. But this is an ideal which man, as we commonly know him, cannot reach. It is a spiritualism so divine, a "purification" process so minute, cutting apart, as it were, a certain layer of "pure spirit" so thin and fine that it would, indeed, be presumptuous for quite ordinary human beings to entertain any hopes of managing it.
A mortal ought not to desire immortal happiness, since the immortal is not fitting for the mortal.
Immortality for man is not fitting! That is the capital point in Pomponazzi's conclusion. Why is it not fitting? Simply because it would, according to Pomponazzi, require of the individual human being something he does not possess; namely, some kind of perfect intellectuality; that is, something the author of "De immortalitate" obviously considers as the absolute prerequisite for, and the only title to, the eternal pleasures of the immortal gods.
And now what is the conception Pomponazzi has--or at least expounds in this philosophical work--about immortality and divinity? It is not at all a Christian conception. It is a pagan and traditionally philosophical conception. The divine can be nothing but "pure spirit". Incarnation is out of the question entirely. An immortality presupposing such perfect abstraction of the "spiritual" from the "corporeal", of the theoretical from the practical, would not only be impossible to realize, in an everyday human world like ours, but it would be downright detrimental to the "common good" of humanity; that is, "humanity" in terms of the vile plebeian crowd we all know. Only an elite of divine exquisiteness could ever profit from anything as ethereally pure as immortality. Such absolute perfection would be simply destructive to the essence of human creatures as a whole.
Here the humanist certainly goes back to a sense of moderation found in the original Greek, which we are tempted to describe as almost philistine; so sadly does it belie the boldest aspirations of the more heaven-bound type of humanism. Just listen to the Aristotelian Pomponazzi, systematically jacking man's immoderate longings down to a philistine level. Notice, however, that this "fitting level" to which Pomponazzi, in the following passage, is so anxious to have man, as a general species, safely "jacked down" to, is not necessarily "philistine" in a Judeo-Christian sense. No, it is "philistine" and "inferior" in the modern theorist's sense. The human being is deemed capable, already, of reaching considerable heights of moral excellence. But this is not seen as essential to maximum felicity. Oh no, truly felicitous is only the being endowed with quite other faculties, in addition to the moral ones. Perfection once more means "pure intellect". But it would be presumptuous and unwise for man to aim at such pinnacles of the immortal gods!
Not every limb can have the perfection of the heart or the eye. For then the animal would not subsist. Similarly, if every man were theoretical, the human community would not subsist ... Happiness does not consist in the theoretical power of demonstration as suitable for the whole human race, but as suiting its first principal part. And though the other parts cannot arrive at such happiness, they are still not wholly deprived of all happiness, since they can possess something of the theoretical, and something of the productive, and the practical perfectly. This power can make almost everyone blessed. For farmer or smith, destitute or rich, if his life be moral, can be called happy, and truly so called, and can depart contented with his lot. In addition, besides moral happiness, he can be called a happy farmer or a happy builder, if he operates successfully in agriculture or in house-building, although he is not, on this account, so properly called happy. For these things are not in human power, like the virtues and the vices. Hence the human race is not frustrated in its end, unless it make itself so. (Ibid.)
It is in fair accordance with the principle of finality after all, then, that man should have a less "divine" end. "He should have the end which suits man universally." We might as well say, the end that suits the collective mass, the general multitude.
As far as we can make out, the whole individualism, otherwise so fondly cherished by the humanist Pomponazzi, collapses lamentably here. And what is the reason? Obviously it is his servile adherence to the system of thought, and the conception of human values, peculiar to Greek philosophy. His intellectual allegiance to, and sentimental preference for, this typical paganism, simply bars his way towards a free unfolding of the deepest humanistic yearnings for a really gratifying personalism and a true meaningfulness in human destiny.
In other words, it is a fundamentally pagan intellectualism which forces the newly-awakened Renaissance spirit--with its boundless aspirations towards a perfect unfolding of the human values--back to the narrower circle of its pagan past. It simply prevents him from freely enjoying the beatific and harmony-creating solution to human problem complexes which Christian childlikeness had actually discovered centuries ago.
Christianity had taken up an unflinching battle precisely with the greatest enemies ever threatening the interests of the individual. Christianity had triumphantly vanquished the greatest problems ever known to true individualism: in fact, problems as gigantic as those of human death and human meaninglessness! And, now, how is this solution received by the Renaissance humanist?
About Pomponazzi, to be sure, we must admit one good thing: he scorns every absurd attempt to deny the main facts at issue. Unlike so many scholastic theologians and philosophers, he does not try for a moment to persuade his readers, and himself, into believing that Aristotle--or even Plato--taught a personal salvation of the human being across the abyss of death and destruction, in any terms that can have the remotest relationship to the Christian concept of salvation.
On the contrary, he makes it brilliantly clear that man must make a definite choice: either Christian faith or philosophical reason; either the irrational hope of Christian revelation or the hard testimony of scientific fact: man dies--full stop.
What Pomponazzi fails to realize is no doubt due to the credulous confidence with which he accepts, in spite of his anticlerical skepticism, the medieval tradition regarding "true Christian" anthropology, and "true Christian" eschatology. He naturally assumes that the theologians are right in claiming that the Gospel teaches the immortality of the human soul. So he deprives himself of the unique discovery and the truly sensational proclamation he might have made in his day, that the earliest documentary sources of Christian beliefs about human nature on one side, and the boldest claims of stern natural science on the same subject on the other, actually go harmoniously hand in hand.They simply coincide in their respective anthropologies not only up to the critical moment when a human organism ceases to function, but even a considerable stretch beyond that point: a total break happens to the lives of men! If Pomponazzi had gone to the sources, the original documents of Christian anthropology, he would have discovered that the earliest Church Fathers agreed strangely with Aristotle and himself, on essential points. According to true Judeo-Christian realism, there is no automatic survival of the soul, either personal or impersonal; death is not a deceptive illusion, it is a total interruption of all consciousness and all life--as long as it lasts! Not a moment longer, of course. For biblical revelation also sees a time in the future when the conjectures of science on one hand, and the plans of God on the other, are bound to go most radically apart. That is the historic event of a literal resurrection. Here, only, the natural death is triumphantly defied by the supernatural wonder of re-creation.
Pomponazzi's great merit as a hero of the Renaissance and even as "the first philosopher of modern enlightenment"--consists in the unflinching boldness with which he cuts aside the undergrowth of human tradition where he sees it. He has the rare temerity to admit realistically that man dies. His main fault consists in the not so realistic attempt to make it appear as if the fact of a human death actually does not matter so much as men are liable to imagine.
Probably that general tendency to reduce the actual extent of and the tremendous tragedy of human insufficiency, is the greatest fault and the saddest inconsistency of the humanist movement. Perhaps just Pomponazzi's quite special endeavour to minimize the actual implications of death as a tragic event, is the very endeavour Luther refers to in his writings on Genesis. (For an excellent English translation see the edition by Jaroslav Pelica, 1956, Vol. 13, p. 76):
Theologians of recent times argue almost the same way. For, following the example of pagan thinkers, they say in their funeral sermons that one should not grieve over death, as if it were an evil; for death--so they assert--is a kind of haven in which we are securely sheltered from the troubles and misfortunes to which the life of all men is subject. But this is the worst blindedness, and a further disaster--also a result of original sin--when we thus minimize sin and death, together with all other sorrows of the human race.
Of course Pomponazzi and his followers, way back at the dawn of modern times, are not far behind professed agnostics, like Feuerbach at a later period of Occidental radicalism, as regards their deepest attitude towards death: only at the moment when man fearlessly accepts its certainty, its inescapable reality, only then does life, life on this side of the grave, become filled with meaning and intrinsic value. In their opinion, Christian transcendentalism tends to strip this life of the values it possesses in itself, the only values of which we have a positive assurance.
Pomponazzi's sensational publication on the immortality of the human soul appeared in Bologna in 1516, several years after the author had lectured on the same topic at the University of Ferrara. The work is not at all concluded in terms of an open proclamation insisting that the immortality beliefs of the Church are contrary to demonstrable truth. The author rather contents himself with pointing out that such beliefs rest upon a foundation of religious faith exclusively. They cannot be philosophically demonstrated to be true.
But evidently this outspokenness was all that was needed in those days in order to call forth a veritable uproar on the part of philosophical opponents, maintaining the official views of the contemporary Church. In order to answer the many attacks made against him, Pomponazzi published an Apologia--in fact a new book on the same topic--in 1517. This work is of a really fiery polemical nature.
But even here we have to do with a fight against Platonic spiritualism, rather than a fight against the Christian religion. In fact, important parts of the book present themselves as a regular defence of the strictly orthodox teachings of the Christian Church on the subject of immortality. Immortality is shown to be not a natural endowment of the human soul but a supernatural act of grace and special intervention on the part of a heavenly Redeemer. It is called forth as an exceptional event of personal re-creation, involving nothing less than a literal resurrection of the body.
In a following work, De nutritione, at the instigation of his colleague Contarini, he commits himself fully and frankly to most unambiguous statements: the intellect, in its nature, is in no wise different from any other material form:
It is indissolubly united to the body in its existence, both as subject and as object; only in its functioning does it arise above the body, act independently, and receive universals. Thus a mortal soul can know immortal truths; it is in its function of knowing, not in any substantial character, that it is separable and impassive and unmixed. (John Herman Randall, Jr., et al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Selections in Translation, 1948, p. 276)
Note: