Vanini, Giulio Cesare

Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_379-1
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
Vanini, Giulio Cesare

Born: Taurisano (1585)
Died: Toulouse (1619)
Francesco Paolo Raimondi*
Classical Lyceum, Lecce, Italy
Abstract
With his restless spirit, feeling himself vested with the civil task of a profound political and cultural
renewal of human beings and society, Vanini, at the dawn of the modern age, conducts a systematic
demolition of Medieval and Renaissance theological learning from the perspective of radical
rationalism, almost pre-Enlightenment, and paves the way for a refoundation of learning on the
basis of the autonomy of reason and nature, with often subversive outcomes of the ethical and
cultural values of the Christian tradition.
Biography
Born in Taurisano (Lecce) between January 19 and 20, 1585, of Giovan Battista and Beatrice Lopez
de Noguera, in 1603, Giulio Cesare Vanini took vows under the name of Gabriel in the Neapolitan
convent of Carmine Maggiore; a few years later, on June 1, 1606, he graduated in civil and canon
law at the College of Doctors, then joined to the Studium in Naples. After February 1610, he moved
to Padua in order to attend the academic courses in Theology or perhaps in Artibus. But on January
28, 1612, his expectations were rudely interrupted by a severe disciplinary measure from the General
of the Carmelite Order, Henry Silvio, which aimed at relegating him in a dark convent of Cilento. In
association with his brother Giovanni Maria Ginocchio, Vanini preferred to escape to England,
where perhaps he hoped to establish himself as a philosopher theologian, critic of the principles of
the Council of Trent. The escape route was carefully planned by the English Ambassador in Venice,
Dudley Carleton, who entrusted him to the care of his friend John Chamberlain and placed him
under the protection of the mighty Primate of England, George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury,
which gave him hospitality at Lambeth Palace after he arrived in London, on June 20, 1612. On July
8 of the same year, Vanini pronounced the abjuration of Catholicism in Mercers Chapel.
The difcult relation with Abbot induced Vanini to come into contact with the Catholic world
again by means of the Spanish ambassador in London, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acua, and the
Nuncio of France, Roberto Ubaldini. In March of 1613, he had sent a memorial to Paul V,
unfortunately lost, the contents of which are made known to us by a report from the Congregation
of the Holy Ofce (Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, S. O., Decrees, 1613,
ff. 166 and 168). We thus know that with his brother Ginocchio, he asked the Pope for absolution in
foro fori, to be released from the vows of the religion of Carmel and for the opportunity to wear
secular clothing or priestly cassock. His proposals were examined by the Holy Ofce in its sessions
on April 11 and August 22, 1613 (Decrees 1613 ff. 413414), in which the Pope granted them
*Email: frapraimondi@libero.it
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pardon on condition of their spontaneously appearing and of formally renouncing of the Anglican
religion.
Having become aware of his attempt to leave England, on February 2, 1614, Abbot placed Vanini
under arrest rst in Lambeth Palace and later (from February 14) in the Gatehouse. On February
15, 1614, he brought him to trial before the High Commission. From the minutes of the Second
examination (Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, Series A, XII, no. 23 ff. 4952), we learn
that he was suspected of having had contacts with a few Catholics imprisoned in Newgate, to have
charged with antitrinitarism and Arianism Calvinism and British Puritanism, and to be a miscreant
because he left in his cell the books by Machiavelli and Pietro Aretino super institutiones
(with obvious reference to the Prince in the case of the rst and to The reasoning of the courts in
the latter case).
Having escaped the Gatehouse with the support of the Spanish Ambassador and with the secret
consent from King James I of England, Vanini goes to Ubaldini, asking to publish with the
permission of the Congregation of the Holy Ofce the Apologia pro Concilio Tridentino, in
18 books, unfortunately lost. But the Church authorities show some interest, rather than in examining the text, in bringing the ex-apostate to Rome for trial before the court of the Holy Ofce. This
is, in fact, the hint of the Apostolic Nuncio (letter of July 31, 1614, to the Roman Inquisitor,
Giovanni Garzia Millini), and this is also the proposal of the Pope (decree of the Holy Ofce, dated
August 28, 1614, Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, SO, Decrees 1614,
ff. 420421). But Vanini is careful not to get to Rome and stops in Genoa, where he makes friends
with Scipione Doria, who entrusts him with the task of teaching philosophy to his son Giacomo. On
January 19, 1615, following the arrest of Ginocchio ordered by the Genoese inquisitor, he feels
targeted by the Holy Ofce. He hastens to leave the Republic and goes to Lyon, where he publishes
the Amphitheatrum.
After a further meeting with Ubaldini in July of 1615, he nally breaks the connection with the
Nuncio and seeks protection and success in the milieu of kingly courts and in the libertine circles
which proliferated in the French capital. Paris opens to him the doors of the coveted success and
offers the protection of leading personalities such as Arthur DEpinay de Saint-Luc, Franois de
Bassompierre, Nicolas Brlart, the Earl of Cramail, and lastly the Duke of Montmorency. Within this
cultural milieu, Vanini was able to breathe the atmosphere of intellectual freedom which led him to
editing the De admirandis reginae deaeque Mortalium arcanis, published by Adrien Perier on
September 1, 1616. The book had an immediate succs de scandale, but just one month after
publication, the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne intervened with a sentence (Archives
Nationales de France, Reg MM 251, 16081633, f. 68). Forced to seek a safer refuge, Vanini
moved in the strongly Catholic Toulouse under the protection of Cramail.
On February 9, 1619, by which time the normalization policy of Louis XIII could no longer
tolerate the extremes of Vaninis radicalism, Toulouse reserved him the tragic end of the stake.
Arrested by the Capitouls Paul Virazel and Jean dOlivier on August 2, 1618, and submitted to the
Cour de Parlement, he was sentenced under the guise of Pomponio Usciglio, perhaps because the
Court became convinced that the name Julius Caesar had been adopted by the philosopher in order to
rise as a new Caesar, conqueror of Gaul to the word of atheism. On that same day in the Place du
Salin, the executioner performed carefully the sentence: cut off the tongue of the condemned with
pincers, hung him from the gallows, burned him on the stake, and, nally, scattered his mortal ashes
to the wind.
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Vaninis Atheism Between Criticism of Tradition and Civil Engagement

The introductory pages of the Amphitheatrum and De admirandis lead us to suppose that the
philosopher developed his own thinking in close correlation with his own historical time. The
experience of living in London, in contact with the intransigence and the rigorism of the most
extreme wing of English Puritanism, and the Parisian stay, which occurred during the most tragic
years of the regency of the Queen Mother, who did not hesitate to unleash a bloody civil conict,
placed the Salentino face to face with the heavy moral, political, and religious crisis which gripped
Europe in the early seventeenth century.
He identies the roots of this European crisis in the cultural tradition of Christian theology of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance, which, subjected to critical investigation, appears to him interwoven
with lies and deceit, fraud and falsehoods, and imposture and superstitions. Unlike other spirits of
the time, who stick to the generic, deistic (e.g., the libertines), or irenistic formulas that remained, at
any rate, within that tradition, Vanini arrives at a theoretical atheism, understood as a liberating and
emancipatory philosophy, able to close a historical process and usher in a new set of values for the
modern age. So he presents himself as an innovator, the bearer of a new philosophy marking
discontinuity and a sharp break with the past. He is convinced that the battle for the liberation and
emancipation of humanity can assume only the anti-historical function of demolition of the
ideological-cultural heritage of the Christian West. In this attitude, which could be dened as
pre-Enlightenment, we nd the deepest motivation for that critical and destructive dimension of
his thinking, often mentioned by its interpreters. The legacy of medieval and humanist-Renaissance
ages crumbles shattered: he demolishes the myth of anthropocentrism; unhinges the principles of
Christianized Platonism; shakes the pillars of concordistic Aristotelianism; dismantles the construction of a compact, nite, harmonized universe, having at its summit God and the choir of angelic
Intelligences; crushes any form of teleology; discredits the myth of human supremacy among the
living beings; shatters the most established principles of Christian ethics; and unmasks the illusions
of magic and of astrology.
The dismantling of the cornerstones of Christianity is accompanied by a return to ancient times for
at least two reasons. The rst is that Vanini feels the need to reconnect modern atheism and the
ancient approach (Veteres philosophi [. . .] ut qui illorum praesidio innituntur moderni athei,
Amph., 1615, p. n.n. 17). It is no coincidence that he mentions in the album atheorum especially
thinkers such as Cicero, Protagoras, Diagoras, Diodorus of Sicily, Luciano, Pliny, and among the
moderns, Machiavelli and Cardano. The second reason is that the ancient philosophy is the ground
on which it is possible to recover the natural reason which Vanini identies with Aristotelian
pre-Christian ratio, not yet bridled by the chains of religious categories. It follows that his thinking
takes a rationalistic and radical shape because it does not detract from the critical scrutiny of natural
reason any domain or privileged object. Excluding any supernatural or metaphysical dimension,
modern atheism coincides, according to Vanini, with the construction of a new learning based on the
two pillars of the autonomy of reason and autonomy of nature. In this perspective, he assigns to
himself and to the emerging new century a subversive function of civil and intellectual emancipation. The introductory pages of the Amphitheatrum and of De admirandis insist on a drastic reversal
of values: the age of ideological conicts resulting from the proliferation of sectarianisms and
heresies, emerging from the crucible of the Reformation, is nally closed. The novelty that advances
is a secretior philosophia, which coincides with atheism, represented by the metaphor of a lush
vegetation that expands and invades the whole European world. The term secretior should not
mislead: it has nothing to do with theosophical, platonizing, or neoplatonizing mysticism. The
terminology of Platonic origin has in Vaninis texts a mere function of coverage. Atheism is for
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Vanini the antidote to mysticism. It is secretior because, in order to escape the watchful censorship of
the inquisitors, it disguises itself in the chiaroscuro of the technique of textual composition in which
ambiguity and irony alternate with the mimetic game of simulation and dissimulation. In any case,
Vaninis key for understanding the modern world is quite clear: the age of the ideological predominance of religion, in his view, is superseded by a radical secularization process of political and social
values. It is signicant that in the nuncupatoria to Bassompierre he presents his talent as a sapling
that, having grown up in the barren soil of traditional philosophy, was unlikely to produce signicant
results, but revived under the action of the turgid and vigorous seed (protuberante, turgenteque
semine) of atheism; this allowed him to go beyond the goals of ancient philosophers and to
overcome the difculties of modern ones (Veterum philosophorum metas transiliens et recentiorum
obstacula superans, De adm., 1616, p. nn 4).
But even more insightful are the pages of Dialogue I, where the new philosophy (i.e., atheism) is
presented as a sudden light that hurts the eyes of those who have long lived in darkness (Fit laesio
repentina, illata luce ijs, qui diu in tenebris commorati sunt, De adm., pp. 23). Even here the
terminology is inuenced by Platonic reminiscence, but in Vanini, it has connotations in the opposite
direction, because darkness is metaphorically traditional learning, and the theme of sudden enlightenment suggests the idea of a philosophical turn destined to fundamentally alter the sensitivity of
modern humanity. The metaphor of the light alludes to a Renovatio which nevertheless no longer has
colorings of a religious character but coincides with liberation from the lies and the frauds of the
Christian tradition (fraudes detegere, gmenta patefacere, De adm., pp. 369, 392, 442, 474). And
the historical, moral, and civil task of the philosopher is to transmit at least one drop (gutta) of his
own renewed learning to the younger generations (De adm., 1616, p. 3).
Vaninis atheism is thus outlined on the basis of a new conception of humanity and the world. His
universe is autonomous in its material composition and its constitutive principles of motion and rest.
Vanini has in mind a mechanistic model; the world is understood, according to Lucretius, as a
machina that has inside it and in the structure of its gears, not unlike those of a watch produced by
German craftsmen, reliable and stable laws referring to an internal principle of movement. Just as
materialistic and mechanistic is the model used to explain the functioning of living organisms,
including humans. The physical and mental life of humans is in a symbiotic relationship with the
natural and human environment. The psychological characteristics depend on the food, habits, social
customs, and transmission of the seed. The physical and mental life of humans is entirely internal to
nature and to society not only in the sense that it is their product, but also in the most radical sense
that nature and society are the only horizon within which human life develops and dissolves with the
exclusion of any other extranatural dimension. The reasons for concluding in favor of the mortality
of the soul are more consistent and stronger than those in support of immortality. The life of the mind
is rooted in the materiality of the body and in the mechanistic motion of vital and natural spirits. The
soul itself is nothing but spiritus which coincides with aer because spiritus springs from spirare,
which is the material act of breathing (De adm., p. 345).
The autonomy of reason and of nature is not real if it is not autonomy from the supernatural.
Vanini severs at the root of the relationship between God and nature: he not only denies the creative
act but also excludes the assistential, providentialistic, and teleological activity of a supernatural
intelligence. God is not the ultimate aim of the universal order. Being autonomous, the cosmos is
eternal and has no beginning and no end; it is not perfect, but it is, according to the famous paradox
of Empedocles, perfectible precisely because of its imperfection. The Amphitheatrum is the text in
which the most radical refutation of the idea of providence is conducted: in it all sorts of teleologism
is rejected; there are no extraordinary interventions by divinity in the world, the distribution of good
and evil is totally random, and miracles are either attributable to causae naturales or turn out to be
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frauds of priests and politicians; in the natural order, there is no trace of an intelligence or of an
organizing will, as evidenced by the deformity studied by teratology. All is reduced to living and to
vivifying matter, without hierarchies and degrees of reality, since the matter of which heavenly
bodies and earthly ones are made is only one, down to the humblest such as the scarab. Life is the
random effect of spontaneous generation. Human beings are no exception; strictly rooted in the
animal kingdom, they are also a random and spontaneous production of matter: their past is on all
fours and in their soul there is no trace of the divine imprint.
If God is not the ultimate aim, He is not even the rst cause, neither in the sense of a free and
contingent causality nor in the sense of a necessary causality. Vanini excludes, on the one side,
Scotian voluntarism and contingentism and, on the other, Thomistic necessitarism. If God were a
free cause, or an absolute will, or an innite might that has no limits or obstacles to His power, He
would compromise the order of nature, and vice versa if the natural order were preserved in its rigid
regularity, Gods free and absolute power would remain, in fact, inactive and without effect. On the
other hand, free causality coincides with contingent acting. But if God can act or not act, if He can be
determined now in one way or another, this means that He is from time to time, now indeterminated
and now determined and that in Him there is, as in us, the shift from indetermination to determination or the shift from one determination to another. But this implies imperfection and it is not
compatible with the immutable essence of God. Nor is it possible that God is necessary causality,
because otherwise the world would have been created from the time immemorial and would
necessarily be co-eternal with God with the further consequence that the necessary causality
would rule out human free will.
Vaninis next step is dismantling the traditional evidence of Gods existence, from the cosmological a posteriori to the ontological a priori. The refutation of the ontological proof is not directed only
against Anselmo, but also against Suarezian scholastic which had replaced the old question An sit
Deus? with quid sit Deus? Vanini closely links the two questions of the theologian and shows how
the response to the latter constitutes implicitly an answer to the former: dening the quid of divine
essence means to emphasize its inner contradiction and thus the impossibility of its existence. The
same fate obviously concerns cosmological evidence. Evidence ex motu or e pulchritudine universi
is null and void. They all clash with the impossibility that the eternal and immutable entity is
compatible with motion or with the novelty of Creation.
Of course, the atheisme de theorie does not fail to be accompanied by peaks of an irreverent nature
which turn Vaninis philosophy into a philosophy of unmasking: to expose the frauds and lies is its
most subversive feature. Its privileged targets are the religions that, having originated from fear
(Primos in orbe deos fecit timor, De adm., p. 366), belong to the world of the ction. And Vaninis
weapon is derision, to the points of sarcasm, subtle irony, and the intention to demystify and
desacralize everything. He does not save even the biblical text, equated to Aesops fables; indeed,
he points out, not without a mischievous satisfaction, that no one has ever found its original. The
Solomonic verses, far from being discoverers of divine wisdom, are lascivious, inelegant, devoid of
any rational value just full of popular proverbs. The narration of the creation of the world by Moses
is worthy of sponge and of coal; biblical resurrections are stories embellished fuco sanctitatis or are
related to apparent death phenomena.
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Human Knowledge and Divine Knowledge: The Antimetaphysical

Structure
Vaninis philosophical horizon is not only anti-theological, but it is also antimetaphysical. This
means that he not only excludes the existence of a free and intelligent will but also the complex array
of necessary and eternal essences of classical metaphysics. The test bench for the antimetaphysical
battle is that of gnosiology or better of the opposition between human and divine knowledge. The
instruments of human knowledge are ratio and experimentum, that is to say reason and sense.
Reason is, as already mentioned, the ratio naturalis which is autonomous, anti-dogmatic, and
critical; it is not of divine origin nor is it absolute and abstract; it is a exible and malleable tool,
able to capture the multiform variety of nature in its own becoming. Fitted entirely within the human
and mundane horizon, reason is no longer opposed to sensitivity and to animal appetites. Nothing is
more foreign to Vaninis thinking than a speculative and contemplative, pure and passionless,
activity. If the human mind were of divine origin he writes it should always think in terms of
divine or at least human truths (Si divina mens nostra est [. . .] divina semper vel humana saltem
vera cogitaret, De adm., p. 491). On the contrary, according to Vanini, human rationality is concrete
and follows the same procedures and techniques of argumentation and reasoning which in turn
require material tools (Materialia instrumenta ad ratiocinandum requiruntur. De adm., p. 382). In
order to avoid escaping towards metaphysics, Vanini states that rationality is inherent in the
materiality of the body and in continuity with the animal instinct. Overturning the Stoic philosophy,
which draws a sharp demarcation line between humans and animals, he brings back reason to
instinct. What in us is called reason he writes coincides in animals with what we call natural
instinct (Quod in nobis vocatur ratio, in brutis naturae instinctus a nobis dicitur, De adm., p. 343).
In other words, ratio belongs to the scope of natural and animal reality. Whereas instinct guides
animal life, reason guides human life. The only difference is that the former determines in brutes a
univocal and repetitive behavior, while the latter gives humans a wider range of choices. But in both
cases, these are behaviors which related solely to the environment, purely physical for animals and
physical and cultural for humans.
Being natural, human rationality belongs to the time, because it is part of natures becoming; the
eternal and absolute truths are precluded to it. Vanini rejects the Aristotelian concept of duality of the
intellect, active and passive. Human knowledge does not depend on an intellect that intuitively
grasps the intelligibles, but it depends on direct contact with the contingent order of nature. The
intellectual intuition of the eternal essences is rejected because it does not have any impact on
scientic knowledge. Scientic truths are for Vanini hard to conquer, because our theoretical
faculties are discoursive and marked by subjective components such as assensus or dissensus,
credulitas, des, and consuetudines. Consequently, the scientia Dei is rejected, which, on the one
hand, may not have access to the varietas of the natural world and, on the other, cannot be the cause
of things, because in either case, it is incompatible with natural becoming. If the divine mind knew
individual, changing, and contingent things, it would, like the human mind, be subject to change and
error, and vice versa, if it had no knowledge of them, divine wisdom and divine power would suffer a
restriction incompatible with the nature of divinity.
The logical principle, of Aristotelian derivation, from which Vanini moves, is that the nature of
science depends on that of known objects. The object of science he observes on the basis of
Aristotelian posterioristics cannot be of a different nature from that of the cognitive faculty. You
cannot have any certain knowledge of what is inherently uncertain. Vanini uses this principle to draw
a sort of demarcation line between the divine science and human science. Theology has done
nothing other than transferring into the divine mind the intelligible essences of Aristotelian origin.
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Divine science is certain because it relates to necessary and universal essences but has as its
counterpart the impossibility to incorporate as its own objects the individual and particular entities
that are subject to becoming and changing. Not surprisingly Aristotle had said that if God were
aware of those, He would be degraded. With a hint of radicalism, Vanini infers that God does not
have knowledge of all things; rather of the individuals. He does not even have the knowledge of
them which brutes have (Amph., p. 243).
Demolished theology, also the epistemic ideal of Aristotelianism that has its foundation in the
science of the universal collapses. What is the use Vanini notes of knowing that Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle are men if you ignore the specic individuality whereby each one differs from the
other? Essentialist metaphysics is inadequate to building scientic knowledge. The parameters of
science should be redened starting from the real conditions in which human knowledge is
produced. For Vanini our intellectual faculty is operational and is constantly moving and constantly
becoming something else, like all other natural beings. This means that his gnosiology is shaped in
the subjectivistic sense: our intellect is not concerned with eternal truths that precede experience;
we writes the philosopher are circumscribed within the limits of time and space; our knowledge
changes with the changing of things; it does not have the stability of divine knowledge but moves
from agreement to dissent, from truth to error or vice versa.
Vanini does not push his analysis to on the limits of phenomenalism or even worse of skepticism.
Unlike the libertines, he is condent in science. The human intellect is indeed caught within the
meshes of time, but it is also a conjectural and operational faculty, which, acting on the material
provided by the senses, increases its knowledge indenitely, just as in the process of indoctrination
(Amph., pp. 138, 253), which produces organic accumulations of knowledge. But the basic problem
is to determine what are the conditions for the certainty of human knowledge. And in this respect, he
has in mind a change in the epistemological model of science, no longer anchored to the needs of
universal essences, but to the necessity inherent in the causal relationship. The size of certainty in
human knowledge is not precluded because natural order coincides with the causal chain that links
events and things. The conjectural faculty is to predict the possible effects from present or past
causes. In short, the necessity inherent to causal connection is a guarantee of order and knowability
of the things and therefore also of the certainty of human knowledge (Amph., p. 131). In the light of
this change in perspective, the continued insistence of the Salentino on the natural causes that take
away from things or events the enamel of arcanum and of admirandum is explained. Removed from
divine nature, causality, as a necessary and intrinsic connection to things, is lowered into the physical
world; it is indeed a kind of its internal law or rule on which the certainty of human knowledge is
based. The natural world is no longer subject to the whim or to the will or to the power of an external
agent, but it is a self- sufcient order, governed by its own principles.
Unfortunately Vanini takes a step towards the foundation of modern science only in view of a
purely theoretical frame, from which mathematics is absent which, however, constitutes its main
tool. He is even less equipped at the level of experimental research, because his concept of
experience is mostly equivalent to mere empirical observation. It follows that he conducts the
identication of proximate causes with a good dose of approximation. This means that his scientic
research remains in many ways conjectural; most of his results are eeting and often, in the absence
of an accurate identication of proximate causes, he is lost in a farraginous jumble of assumptions
sometimes inadequate, sometimes even elementary and simplistic, sometimes perhaps excessively
inuenced by irreverent or subversive purposes. The exceptions are some brilliant insights in the
eld of biology which some scholars considered forerunners of Darwinism and which perhaps
would t more appropriately within the frame of a naive or primeval biological transformationism.
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Politics and the Unmasking of Power. Secularized Ethics

The common thread of Vaninis political thought is given by a Machiavellism widely contaminated
by the theory of imposture derived from Lucian and by a strong challenge of the power of the courts
of Aretinian origin. Therefore, in the hands of the Salentino, Machiavellianism is translated into a
kind of useful tool to unmask the connection between religious power and political power. The task
of the philosopher is to denounce the absolute arbitrariness of both; indeed, it is, more precisely, to
reveal the intimate intertwining whereby the former appears to be the ideological support of the
latter, both of which are based on a system of lies that affect civil and intellectual liberties which are
vital for the free expression of art and science.
This explains the subversive nature of Vaninis thought, who is obviously not interested in
safeguarding or preserving the political-social order, but rather in its demolition through the
demolition of the Leges. If the libertins erutits are aligned up on the ideological positions of the
conservative bourgeoisie and if the libertinism of the poets that move in the entourage of Thophile
de Viau feeds on the rebellion of the aristocratic classes and trespasses into forms of wickedness and
unbelief mostly gratuitous and without theoretical consistency, Vanini theorizes a law of nature,
which has a double meaning, ethical and political, and is alternative to religion and to historicalpositive law.
Everything that moves away from the law of nature is arbitrary and is a violence perpetrated on
men. The unmasking of power passes through a close confrontation between the divine government
and the human government that are mirror images of each other, and both arbitrary. The emphasis is
often on the theme of revenge. Both divine justice and human justice appear more like revenge than
as fairness. The God of the Sacred Code (note the substitution of religious with legal terminology) is
the avenger of crimes; the earthly judges are his ministers. Since he derives its power from a divine
origin, the sovereign legitimates his own power to administer justice. The punitive actions of the
earthly prince have immediate effect, those of divine justice postpone rewards and punishments to a
ctional future life so that political-religious deception is not easily exposed (ne fraus detegi
possit, De adm., p. 366) and helps perpetuate the status of slavery and psychological subjection
of the people (Amph., pp. 8283, 8586; De adm., p. 366).
Removing from the power of the prince the material and spiritual foundation means for Vanini
revealing its arbitrary nature. All power, whether divine or earthly, is arbitrary, not bound by any law,
because the law is nothing more than the will of God or of the earthly prince itself. This means that
any power, divine or human, everything is permissible: if God makes us all sinners, he does not act in
violation of any rule, simply because he acts in accordance with his will (Amph., p. 103). The same
applies to the earthly prince. But if power is arbitrary, it means that it is no longer of divine origin and
is therefore questionable. What prevents people from rebelling is not the fear of divine punishment,
but that of a violent and persecutory reaction from the prince. The philosophers themselves had to
bow their head and take refuge in silence, spurred by the fear of public power. The example of
Socrates was a warning to all. Aristotle left Athens to prevent a new crime against philosophy from
being committed. The free expression of ideas is always opposed by the religious power; the books
by Protagoras were burned in the public square, in a climate of intolerance not unlike that of the age
of the Counter-Reformation (De adm, 1616, p. 367; Amph., p. 90).
Political power as much as religious power is based on cunning, on ction, and on deception. Not
even Christianity is free from them. The gure of Christ is drawn by Vanini according to the
parameters of the fox-like cunning of Machiavellian mould: pretending to preserve or to complete
the Jewish religion, Christ subverts its foundations and establishes in its place the Christian religion.
Then, to protect it from the risk of inevitable corruption, he starts circulating the prophecy of the
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Antichrist. The new prophet, namely, behaves in the same way as a new prince: to consolidate his
power, which in the initial phase is weaker, he uses cunning or weapons. Christ chose to found the
Christian law, exposing and sacricing himself to an ignominious death, so that his example was not
attractive to other self-proclaimed Messiahs; Moses always carried weapons and sowed carnages
and blood in his path. The religions, Mosaic and Christian, had a long life because of their link with
the dominant power; Apollonius of Tyana founded a short-lived religion because he preached
poverty and came into conict with vested interests (De adm., pp. 357359, 454).
But it is not enough to denounce that religions are based from the outset on deception and lies. The
objective of Vanini is to emphasize that they also exert psychological tyranny. Deception he
notes in order to be lasting must affect basic human needs and must relate to hopes and fears: only
these exert a psychological, intellectual, and social tyranny over believers. This explains, therefore,
how the action of the prince or of the prophet on the people is one of seduction and plagiarism (De
adm, 1616, p. 453). The stratagem which they commonly use is to make people believe they have a
direct and privileged relationship with divinity, so that the opposition to their power is immediately
perceived as a violation of divine will. All acts of the prophet are intended to reinforce this belief.
Political domination and priestly power, to perpetuate themselves over time, are formed so as not to
be susceptible to challenge. To perpetuate the religion which he founded, the new prophet seeks to
exert a cultural domination that extends beyond his death. The stratagem of resurrection or
ascending to heaven is functional to this. Moses threw himself into an abyss so that the people
believed him resurrected. So did Empedocles and the prophet Elijah. And the implication, not even
so veiled, is that Christ did the same to consolidate the newly born Christian slavery (De adm,
1616, pp. 390, 361).
No positive religion, no historic civilization has an innite lifespan: Vanini has a strong sense of
the historicity of civil and religious institutions cities, kingdoms, and religions are subject to the
iron law of natural becoming. He tends to place strong emphasis on the natural law of generation and
corruption of all things: Omnia orta occidunt all that is born is bound to perish. Nothing lasts
forever values, customs, traditions, ways of thinking, beliefs, ethical rules, and civic and religious
organizations everything is swept away by the law of becoming. What was holier and more noble
than the name of Jupiter according to the faith of the Gentiles? And what is the meaner and more
execrable than this in the Christian faith? Kingdoms and religions are historical products: they are
born, they grow, they reach the peak of their vitality, but then they begin their inexorable process of
senescence and exhaustion. In the birth phase of the new religion, miracles abound, because the
prophet wants to appear as the son of God or as an envoy, and then decrease steadily until they
disappear altogether. Finally a religion replaces another. And since the world is eternal, rituals
periodically return: the ones currently in force have been activated thousands of times and will come
into force again, not according to the individual, but according to the species, i.e., not in the form of
their individuality, but in that of their specic essence (De adm., pp. 386389).
Radical and de-theologized is also Vaninis ethics, which has a strong naturalistic inclination
almost attened in a medical-scientic or physiological investigation of human passions and
affections, traced mostly to a mechanistic motion of the vital spirits. The most relevant data is that
it is ethics autonomous from the metaphysical considerations, either from theological assumptions
or religious evaluations. As in political thinking, the parameter of an ideal State is absent, in ethical
thinking are the dimensions of the absolute absent. Moral behavior is seen only from a relativistic
viewpoint in relation to the composite structure of the subject agent. Of course it is unprejudiced
ethics in the dual sense that it is free from conditioning prejudices and unrelated to morals, and it is
also an effort, a propensity, and a ght against any free prejudices that mortify natural human life.
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It is therefore primarily ethics liberated and emancipated from the connotation of sin, full of
epicurean traits, strongly aimed at the evaluation of the pleasure.
In Vaninis ethical reection, sexual pleasure plays a central role, not least because it is what
presides and ensures the perpetuation of the species. Life on earth would run the risk of becoming
extinct if nature had not endowed us of the coupling instinct. Therefore, sexuality is freed from any
negative connotation: sexual organs do not deserve the name pudenda, because they are authors and
masters of reproduction: procreationis magistrae [. . .] et opices (De adm., p. 311). The Dialogue
XLVIII is a full and radical reevaluation of sexual pleasure, proposed as a sixth sense and a very sweet
thing (res dulcissima) because it is a function of reproduction. Vaninis ethical hedonism is far
from taking spiritualistic veins: pleasure is not viewed as an affection of the soul, but of the
compound, i.e., of the synolon, understood in line with Aristotelianism as a union of soul and
body. Pleasure, therefore, cannot but have a bodily and material component.
This means that felicitas consists neither in the Averroistic copulation nor in a visioncontemplation of transcendent deity, it is rather an all-earthly felicitas which Vanini with caution
projects in the rareed celestial sphere of a Respublica in a sort of social-political, reversed utopia,
where the negative values of the existing social model are overturned: A Republic in which
participation is without envy. . . all men want others to partake in what is there. . . because he who
wants wants others to want the same things and makes sure that we also want what he wants
(Amph., p. 196).
And it is precisely on the subject of happiness or bliss, understood as the enjoyment of the highest
good, that the claims of an ethics of religious origin collapse. Vanini, in fact, insists on the
impossibility of a unication of nite and innite. Only the innite God can identify with himself
as the innite being. So only God can be blessed. Even more radical is the observation that the act
can have an aim provided that the aim does not exceed the power of the operator. In other words, the
purpose generally cannot exceed the material conditions of the actor. As the coach, which is the nal
term of the operation, does not exceed the potentialities of the carpenter, the aim of the will cannot
transcend its potentialities. The human will does not immediately want the highest good, because it
is taken with the desire of being. So if good is the being, our will desires the being, not because is
devoid of it, but because it possesses it. We do not desire the being which we already are, but we want
its preservation. Having embarked on this path, there is no supernatural nality. In fact, we do not
desire Gods being, because those who desire, desire their own perfection. If we wanted Gods being,
we would want our corruption and our destruction (Amph., pp. 189196).
References
Primary Literature
Works
Vanini GC (1615) Amphitheatrum aeternae providentiae divino-magicum, christiano-physicum, nec
non astrologo-catholicum. Adversus veteres Philosophos, Atheos, Epicureos, Peripateticos, et
Stoicos. Apud viduam Antonii de Harsy, Lugduni (rist. fotom.: Galatina 1979)
Vanini GC (1616) De Admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque Mortalium Arcanis Libri quatuor.
Apud Adrianum Perier, Lutetiae (rist. fotom.: Galatina 1985)
Critical Editions
Vanini GC (1990) In: Papuli G, Raimondi FP (eds) Opere. Galatina, Congedo, 1990
Vanini GC (2010) In: Raimondi FP (ed) Tutte le opere. Milano, Bompiani, 2010
Italian Translations
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DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_379-1
Vanini GC (1981) In: Raimondi FP, Crudo L (eds) Anteatro delleterna provvidenza. Introduction
by A. Corsano. Galatina, Congedo, 1981
Vanini GC (1990) In: Raimondi FP (ed) I meravigliosi segreti della natura, regina e dea dei mortali.
Galatina, Congedo, 1990
Secondary Literature
Biographical Essays
Raimondi FP (2005) Giulio Cesare Vanini nellEuropa del Seicento, Con una appendice
documentaria. Pisa-Roma
Essays on the Thought
Cavaill J-P (2002) Dis/simulation Jules-Csar Vanini, Franois La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naud,
Louis Machon et Torquato Accetto. Religion, morale et politique au XVIe sicle, Paris
Corsano A (1958) Per la storia del pensiero del tardo Rinascimento, II. G. C. Vanini. Giornale Critico
della Filosoa Italiana 37:201244
Marcialis MT (1992) Natura e uomo in Giulio Cesare Vanini. Giornale Critico della Filosoa
Italiana 71:227247
Namer (1970) LOeuvre de Jules-Csar Vanini (15851619): Une anthropologie philosophique.
In: Studi in onore di Antonio Corsano, Manduria, Lacaita, 1970, pp 465494
Nowicki A (1975) Centralne Kategorie lozoi Vaniniego. Warszawa (it. transl Le categorie centrali
della losoa di Vanini. In: Papuli G, Le interpretazioni di G.C. Vanini, Galatina, Congedo, 1975,
pp 153316)
Papuli G (1990) Introduzione a Vanini GC. In: Papuli G, Raimondi FP (eds) Opere. Galatina,
Congedo, 1990, pp 11156
Raimondi FP (2010) Monograa introduttiva. In: Vanini GC (ed) Tutte le opere, Milano, Bompiani,
2010, cit., pp 7313
Conference Proceedings
Raimondi FP (2000) Giulio Cesare Vanini e il libertinismo, Atti del Convegno di Studi 2830
ottobre 1999. Galatina
Raimondi FP (2002) Giulio Cesare Vanini: dal tardo Rinascimento al Libertinisme rudit, Atti del
Convegno di Studi Lecce-Taurisano 2426 ottobre 1985. Galatina
Raimondi FP (2011) Filoso del Rinascimento: Archivio Vanini. 4 novembre 2011. http://www.
iliesi.cnr.it
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Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy