Abstract

In the controversy raised in 1516 by Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae, the Thomistic theologian Chrysostomus Javelli, regent of the Dominican Studium in Bologna, had the key task of helping Pomponazzi with the publication of the Defensorium, which the Bolognese Inquisition had censured because it did not comply with the requirements of the papal bull Apostolici regiminis (1513). In 1519, Javelli therefore wrote an appendix of Solutiones to the Defensorium in which he resolved, in the light of the Christian faith, all the arguments in favour of the mortality of the soul elaborated by Pomponazzi. Nevertheless, fourteen years later, Javelli again intervened in the debate and produced an autonomous treatise, which he however entitled Tractatus de indeficientia, not de immortalitate. This chapter reconstructs Javelli’s intellectual arc from the composition of his Solutiones (1519) up until the publication of his Tractatus de indeficientia (1536), shedding light on the reasons behind his unusual lexical choice in the title of the latter work.