Alexandrists

← Encyclopedia

The Alexandrists were a strand of Renaissance Aristotelian philosophy, strongest in the Italian universities of the early sixteenth century, that read Aristotle through his ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias and concluded that the human soul is mortal — that it perishes with the body and does not survive death. The name is a later label for a position rather than a membership; it marks where a thinker stood on one fiercely contested question, and no one of the men so called founded a society or signed a creed. To be an Alexandrist was to read a single difficult book of Aristotle one way rather than another, and to accept where that reading led.

Portrait bust of Aristotle, a Roman copy after a lost bronze by Lysippos; the Alexandrists were Renaissance readers of his De anima. Musee du Louvre — photograph by Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

The knot in the text

The book was the De anima, and the difficulty lay in its third book, where Aristotle treats the intellect — the nous by which the soul thinks. His account there is among the most compressed in the whole corpus, a few dense pages that generations of readers have found to point in opposite directions at once. The intellect, Aristotle says, is in some sense capable of becoming all things and in some sense capable of making all things, and the active or making intellect is described as separable, unmixed, impassive, and — in a phrase that would carry enormous weight — deathless and eternal. Yet he also insists that the soul is the form of a living body, the actuality of a thing that has life potentially, and that human thinking never proceeds without an image, a phantasma drawn up from the senses and the bodily imagination. A companion remark from the Generation of Animals, that intellect alone enters “from outside” (thurathen), only deepened the puzzle. Was the thinking soul a power of the perishable organism, rising and falling with it, or a separable and divine thing lodged in the body for a season? Aristotle had left the seam unsewn, and every later school of his readers tried, in its own way, to close it.

Alexander’s reading

Alexander of Aphrodisias, who held a chair of Aristotelian philosophy at Athens around the year 200 CE, was for the later tradition simply “the commentator” — the most authoritative of the ancient interpreters, the one against whom the Arabic and Latin readers measured themselves long before Averroes inherited that honorific. His own treatise On the Soul, modeled on Aristotle’s, drew the hardest naturalist conclusion the text would bear. The soul, for Alexander, is the form and perfection of the body, an organic power that arises from the particular mixture of the body’s elements and cannot be detached from it. What arises with the body dissolves with it. The intellect by which a human being thinks — the potential or material intellect (nous hylikos), a bare capacity for thought before it has thought anything — is mortal, because it belongs to the individual soul and shares the individual’s fate. Only one intellect escapes: the active or productive intellect (nous poiētikos), which Alexander did not locate inside the human being at all but identified with the divine, the First Cause and unmoved mover of the Metaphysics. That intellect is immortal because it is God; it is no part of any person, and it carries no one across death.

On this reading the deathless intellect of De anima III is saved by being handed wholesale to the divine, and the human knower keeps nothing of it. Each person thinks while the body lives and ceases to be a thinker when the body dies. Nothing personal endures. It is a coherent, even austere, account of Aristotle — and it left the soul, in the Renaissance phrase, mortal as a natural object, touching immortality without ever reaching it.

Against the Averroists

That conclusion stood opposed, inside the same Aristotelian world, to the great rival reading carried by Averroes, the twelfth-century Andalusian whose long commentary on the De anima dominated the Latin schools. Averroes too denied a personal immortality, but by the opposite route. Where Alexander made the material intellect a mortal power of the individual, Averroes made it a single, separate, eternal substance — one intellect for the whole of humanity, in which each person participates while alive without ever owning a share of it. On the Averroist account thought is immortal but impersonal; the intellect survives, but no individual does. The two positions are mirror images of a single Aristotelian embarrassment: both agree that nothing of this knower outlasts death, and they disagree only on whether the intellect that thinks in me is mine and mortal, or universal and undying. Against both stood the Christian Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen, who held that the rational soul is at once the form of the body and a thing that subsists in its own right — individual and immortal, Aristotle reconciled with the Church. The De anima, read by these three lights, yielded three incompatible souls.

Benozzo Gozzoli, The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1471), Aristotle and Plato at his sides and the vanquished Averroes prostrate below. Musee du Louvre, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

The Paduan ground

The dispute came to a head in the law-shielded universities of the Venetian mainland, above all at Padua, and at Bologna in the papal orbit — the most intensely Aristotelian schools in Europe, where the De anima was studied beside medicine and natural philosophy as a working science of the living thing rather than a department of theology. Through the later fifteenth century the ascendant reading there was Averroist: Nicoletto Vernia (c. 1420–1499) and his younger contemporary Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512) at Bologna both defended the unicity of the intellect, the single shared mind of all humankind. Yet the ground was already shifting. Vernia, late in life and under ecclesiastical pressure, turned against the doctrine he had taught and wrote a tract against the perverse opinion of Averroes on the soul; Agostino Nifo traveled the same distance, from an early Averroism to a sharp public refutation of the mortalist case. The Averroist consensus was breaking up, and into the gap stepped the Alexandrist reading, sharper and more dangerous because it lodged mortality not in a remote universal intellect but in the very soul of the person who dies.

Pomponazzi and the storm of 1516

The Alexandrist position found its hardest and clearest statement in Pietro Pomponazzi, who taught natural philosophy at Padua and, after the war of the League of Cambrai closed that university, at Bologna. His Tractatus de immortalitate animae — the Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, printed at Bologna in 1516 — pressed the Aristotelian premises to their conclusion with unusual rigor. If the soul is the form of the body, and if every act of human intellect depends on a phantasma furnished by the bodily senses, then the intellect cannot perform its proper work once the body and its organs are gone; and a power that cannot operate without the body cannot be shown to outlast it. On natural and philosophical grounds, Pomponazzi held, the soul must be reckoned mortal — the highest and least material of mortal forms, but mortal still. He met the standard objection, that without an afterlife of reward and punishment the moral life loses its point, by refusing the bargain: virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment, and an ethics that needs heaven and hell to function is an ethics of hirelings.

Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), whose 1516 Tractatus de immortalitate animae gave the Alexandrist case its sharpest statement. Engraved portrait, Trier portrait database, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

Then he declared that he accepted the soul’s immortality nonetheless, as an article of faith fixed by the Church, and held that the conclusion reached by natural reason left the contrary truth of revelation untouched. The maneuver was incendiary, and its timing made it more so. Three years earlier, on 19 December 1513, the eighth session of the Fifth Lateran Council had issued the decree Apostolici regiminis, which declared the immortality of the individual soul a matter of dogma and condemned together the two readings that denied it — the soul mortal, and one soul shared by all — along with the notion that a thing might be true in philosophy and false in faith. The decree went further than condemnation: it instructed teachers of philosophy, when they expounded doctrines at odds with the faith, to refute them and teach the Christian truth. Pomponazzi had done the opposite. He had stated the case for mortality with more force than anyone, declined to refute it on its own ground, and sent the reader to faith instead. The book was publicly burned in Venice. He was answered by theologians and philosophers across Italy, among them his own former student Gasparo Contarini; what kept him from the worst of the danger was protection, the support of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, who shielded him from prosecution at Rome.

Pomponazzi did not retreat. At the request of Pope Leo X the Aristotelian Agostino Nifo composed a formal rebuttal, the De immortalitate animae libellus of 1518, defending the Thomist soul and the dogma; Pomponazzi answered with two further works, each longer than the treatise it defended — the Apologia of 1518, which took up his critics and recounted the uproar at Venice, and the Defensorium adversus Augustinum Niphum of 1519, his reply to Nifo. In both he held and tightened his line: his book had only shown that Aristotle held the soul mortal and that natural reason could not prove otherwise, not that the soul is mortal, which faith denies. The later shorthand for that posture is “double truth,” but the phrase was not Pomponazzi’s, and the position he held was more careful than the slogan. He did not say that one thing can be true in philosophy and false in theology at once; he said that philosophy’s demonstrations and faith’s certainties belong to different orders and reach their conclusions by different means. The “double truth” tag had been hung on the Averroists by their enemies, and the Lateran decree had named it among the condemned errors; it was fastened onto Pomponazzi the same way, as an accusation rather than a self-description.

The unresolved question of his mind

Whether he believed what he argued is a question scholarship still divides over, and is likely never to settle, because Pomponazzi built the text to resist a verdict. Some read him as a sincere mortalist sheltering behind a formula of submission; others take the appeal to faith at face value, the move of a man drawing a firm line between what reason can prove and what only revelation can secure. The appeal to faith is either the device of a careful unbeliever or the conscience of a careful believer, and the same sentences support both readings. What is not in doubt is the shape of the dispute he forced into the open: the Alexandrists pressed the claim that Aristotle, read honestly, offered no warrant for a deathless soul, and they made the cost of that honesty unavoidable. The question of Pomponazzi’s interior conviction is a separate matter from the philosophical claim; the claim was about a reading of a text, not a metaphysical verdict on the soul’s fate, and it is as a reading that the Alexandrists are best understood.

The cool current and its afterlife

The Alexandrist reading belongs to the wider unsettling of the soul in Renaissance thought, where the Platonic revival was raising the soul toward the divine even as the Aristotelians were arguing it down into the body. While Marsilio Ficino and the Platonists of the Renaissance Neoplatonic revival were lifting the soul through the hierarchy of being and making its immortality the hinge of their whole Neoplatonism, the Alexandrists were tying it to the perishable organism. Both parties claimed the ancients; both fed the long argument over whether mind is something the body houses or something the body simply is. The Alexandrist current ran with the cooler, naturalizing temper of Paduan natural philosophy rather than the Hermetic and magical revival gathering in the same decades — a strand of Renaissance naturalism that sought the explanation of the living thing within nature and declined the supernatural supplement.

The position did not die with Pomponazzi. The chair of natural philosophy at Padua carried the reading forward through the century: Giacomo Zabarella (1533–1589), the foremost Aristotelian logician of the late Renaissance, held in his commentary on the De anima that Aristotle’s own doctrine made the soul mortal — a Counter-Reformation defense of Alexander’s exegesis, careful to separate what Aristotle taught from what the Christian must believe. Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), Zabarella’s successor in the Paduan chair and a colleague and friend of Galileo, taught the same Alexandrist thesis into the seventeenth century, lecturing repeatedly that on strict Aristotelian principles the soul cannot be shown to survive a body it cannot act apart from. Cremonini was the Aristotelian who, by report, would not put his eye to Galileo’s telescope, so sure was he that the heavens must answer to the text; Galileo repaid the rigidity by lending something of him to Simplicio, the stubborn schoolman of the Dialogue. By then the controversy had hardened into caricature on one side and secret freethinking on the other, and the great age of the Aristotelian university was closing. But the question the Alexandrists had pried open did not close with it. They had taken Aristotle’s compressed and divided account of the intellect, refused to soften it into consolation, and read it for exactly what it said — and in doing so they pushed the oldest question about the soul to its edge and declined to look away.

Galileo Galilei, painted by Justus Sustermans (1636); his Paduan colleague Cesare Cremonini, who taught the Alexandrist thesis into the seventeenth century, lent something of himself to Galileo’s Simplicio. Uffizi, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The textual root of the whole controversy is Aristotle’s De anima, especially its third book on the intellect, read alongside the disputed remark of the Generation of Animals that intellect alone enters “from outside.” Alexander of Aphrodisias’s own On the Soul (De anima) and the appended On the Intellect (De intellectu) carry his mortalist reading; they survive in the standard Supplementum Aristotelicum edition of Ivo Bruns (Berlin, 1887), with an English translation and commentary by Athanasios P. Fotinis, The De anima of Alexander of Aphrodisias (Washington, 1979). Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae (Bologna, 1516) is the position’s manifesto; its standard English version is W. H. Hay’s translation, lightly revised, in the influential anthology Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr. edited as The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1948). The Apologia (1518) and the Defensorium adversus Augustinum Niphum (1519) record the public quarrel, with Agostino Nifo’s De immortalitate animae libellus (1518) on the other side.

The modern reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism as a vital, technical, and internally divided enterprise — not a scholastic relic to be cleared away by the humanists — runs through Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 1964) and Charles B. Schmitt’s Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), which set the frame within which the Alexandrists are now read. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s survey of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance lays out the rival readings of the De anima and the place of the mortalist camp among them. The conciliar backdrop — the decree Apostolici regiminis of the Fifth Lateran Council, dogmatizing the individual soul’s immortality and condemning the mortalist, unicist, and double-truth positions together — and the storm that broke over Pomponazzi are reconstructed in detail in Leen Spruit’s study of the Pomponazzi affair. The reading’s long survival in the Paduan chair through the Counter-Reformation, where Giacomo Zabarella again defended Alexander’s mortalism as Aristotle’s true teaching, is the subject of recent specialist work on Zabarella on the mortality of the soul.

→ Related: Cartesianism · Psyche · Neoplatonism · Aristotle · Pietro Pomponazzi · Averroes · Marsilio Ficino · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Soul · Immortality · Scholasticism · The Renaissance · Renaissance Natural Philosophy · Platonism · Dualism · Naturalism · Renaissance Hermetism