A Hot Mess: Girolamo Cardano, the Inquisition, and the Soul

Abstract

Girolamo Cardano makes a number of surprising, even shocking, claims about the soul in his De subtilitate, one of the most widely read works of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century. When he was finally investigated by the Roman Inquisition and the Index, these claims did not go unnoticed. This study will narrow in on three passages marked as heretical by the first Holy-Office censor of De subtilitate. It will consider the Inquisition's priorities and ask about materialism, determinism, and conceptual inconsistency in Cardano's views on the soul. The study will give special attention to the claim made by Cardano that souls can be reduced to celestial heat. In addition to De subtilitate, several other of Cardano's works will be considered for added perspective, especially Contradicentium medicorum libri duodecim.Was there any position on life that could be construed as non-animist in the sixteenth century?One is reminded of Lucien Febvre's famous denial of any atheist community in Renaissance Europe: the necessary social and intellectual conditions did not exist to support it (Febvre 1947). I would consider sixteenth-century "non-animism" far more intellectually untenable than atheism. Hylomorphism was so dominant that there was perhaps no conceptual language to describe an active, organized body without recourse to form-the soul, of course, was that form. Yet if soul was omnipresent, it also became a complex and contested entity in the period, this due to a number of factors: the diffusion of Platonic and Neoplatonic translations, the reintroduction of Epicurean and Stoic philosophies, an expanded Hippocratic and Galenic corpus, new readings of Aristotle, the accessibility of Greek and Arabic commentary, and confessional sensitivities. The soul, and specifically the rational or intellective soul, was a medical-philosophical-theological pressure point (e.g., Kessler 1988; Des Chene 2000;* Acknowledgments: This paper owes its existence to a panel at the 2018 HOPOS congress in Groningen. I would like to thank all the participants of that panel, especially Charles Wolfe and Boris Demarest, who coorganized it with me. Much of this paper was written during a stay at Meiji University (Tokyo). I am grateful to my host, Kuni Sakamoto, and to Meiji University for that wonderful intellectual experience. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous referees and to HOPOS editor-in-chief Lydia Patton for all the hard work she has done to make this special issue a reality. Research presented here has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n. 893982.