Pomponazzi, Da Costa e il mito dell’immortalità dell’anima

In the Exame das tradiçoẽs phariseas (Examination of Pharisaic Traditions), published in 1624, Uriel da Costa conducted a sharp critique of two successful doctrines (successful from the point of view of the Dogmengeschichte) of both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, that is, the pre-existence of souls and creationism. Against the pre-existence view, Da Costa reformulated the Galenic conception of the soul as the harmony or mixture (temperamentum) of natural elements, emphasizing the extent to which the view of the soul as harmony was irreconcilable with the tenet of the soul’s pre-existence, as Plato had already noted in his Phaedo. Against the doctrine of creationism, Da Costa reiterated the anti-Thomist arguments developed by Pietro Pomponazzi in the Tractatus de immortalitate animae (1516). For Da Costa, however, the “creationist” view was not only a distorted and arbitrary interpretation of Aristotle’s texts. It also represented an unfounded attempt to deny the traducianist position underlying the Torah. Da Costa could therefore add the true intentio of the Torah’s texts to the true intentio of Aristotle’s text already unearthed by Pomponazzi