Published: 1995-06-30

Mateusz Akwaariusz and His Dispute over the Immortality of the Human Soul

Marian Ciszewski
Seminare. Learned Investigations
Section: Articles
https://doi.org/10.21852/sem.1995.17

Abstract

For many decades in the interweaving of what „average“ and what „new“, of what „scholastic” and what „humanistic”, formed the beginnings of the modern and at the same time critical method historical-philological-philosophical. And with him they came to light inspired by Pope Nicholas V and the cardinal Bessarione a new intellectual current and an innovative "program" of moderate Aristotelianism Christian, who a century later was ideologized and transformed into a radical fundamentalism. The problem of the immortality of the human soul which was an indication of the bitter controversies of that time, is a key to understanding its progress, transformations and history current that has overshadowed the profile of the form of European Christian thought. In the philosophical activity of the Dominican Matteo Aquario (+ 1591) it can be seen in which way the stagnation of that current came. It was he who proposed that „only genre of the true Aristotelian philosophy” (vera philosophia ad mentem S. Thomae), in which it was deformed not only the doctrine of Aristotle, but also lost the original metaphysical intuition of St. Thomas of Aquinas. In this article, in the context of the controversies of the time, an analysis of the Additiones is made of Aquarius, in which Matthew takes into consideration the problem of immortality of the soul, examines all the important philosophical positions from the point of view of the Apostolic bull regimenis. In its assessment, Aquarius has formulated two "decalogues" which can be considered as an event in the history of philosophy and theology, prechè with them an integralist current was initiated within modern Aristotelianism. The first decalogue it is a set of ways-arguments (decem viae) that justify individual immortality of the soul on the path of philosophical motivations (but also pseudo-philosophical ones). In the according to the "decalogue" Aquarius lists ten "theses", in which - according to him - the Christian doctrine on the immortality of the soul converges with the interpretation of Aristotelianism proposed by Aquarius. It must also be emphasized that this species of Aristotelianism, of which the domination was very complicated to overcome, it has influenced the progress of the physical sciences in an unfavorable way and natural, on anthropology and theology, verbalising them and detaching them from practical life and essentialising them the metaphysics of Saint Thomas.

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Ciszewski, M. (1995). Mateusz Akwaariusz and His Dispute over the Immortality of the Human Soul. Seminare. Learned Investigations, 11, 255–282. https://doi.org/10.21852/sem.1995.17

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