His final book, De fato, seems more orthodox, for it is a defense of free will. He admits its incompatibility with divine foreknowledge and omniscience, but stands on his consciousness of free activity, and on the necessity of assuming some freedom of choice if there is to be any moral responsibility in man. In his treatise on immortality he had faced the question whether a moral code could succeed without supernatural punishments and rewards. He held, with stoic pride, that the sufficient reward of virtue is virtue itself, not any post-mortem paradise;51 but he confessed that most men can be induced to decency only by supernatural hopes and fears. Hence, he explained, great legislators have taught the belief in a future state as an economical substitute for ubiquitous police; and, like Plato, he justifies the inculcation of fables and myths if these can help to control the natural wickedness of men.52
Therefore they have posited, for the virtuous, eternal reward in another life, but, for the sinful, eternal punishments, which frighten them very greatly. And the greater part of men, if they do good, do it more from fear of eternal punishment than hope of eternal good, since the punishments are more known to us than those eternal goods. And since this last device can benefit all men, of whatever class they are, the legislator, seeing the proneness of men to evil, and intending the common good, has decreed that the soul is immortal, not caring for truth but only for righteousness, so that he may bring men to virtue.52a
Most men, he thinks, are so simple mentally and so brutish morally that they must be treated as children or invalids. It is not wise to teach them the doctrines of philosophy. “These things,” he says of his own speculations, “are not to be communicated to common people, for they are incapable of receiving these secrets. We must beware even of holding discourse concerning them with ignorant priests.”53 He divides mankind into philosophers and religious persons, and innocently believes that “philosophers alone are the gods of the earth, and differ as much from all other men, of whatever rank and condition, as genuine men differ from those painted on canvas.”54
In humbler moments he realized the narrow limits of human reason, and the honorable futility of metaphysics. He pictured himself in his later years as worn and haggard with thought about it and about, and likened the philosopher to Prometheus, who, because he wished to steal fire from heaven—i.e., snatch at divine knowledge—was condemned to be bound to a rock and to have his heart gnawed at by a vulture endlessly.55 “The thinker who inquires into the divine mysteries is like Proteus…. The Inquisition persecutes him as a heretic, the multitude mocks him as a fool.”56
The controversies in which he engaged wore him down and helped to ruin his health. He suffered from one illness after another, until finally he determined to die. He chose a hard form of suicide: he starved himself to death. Resisting every argument and every threat, and triumphing even over force, he refused either to eat or to speak. After seven days of this regimen he felt that he had won his battle for the right to die, and might now safely speak. “I depart gladly,” he said. Some one asked him, “Where are you going?” “Where all mortals go,” he answered. His friends made a final effort to persuade him to eat, but he preferred to die (1525).57 Cardinal Gonzaga, who had been his pupil, had the remains transported to Mantua and buried there, and, with typical Renaissance tolerance, raised a statue to his memory.
Pomponazzi had put into philosophic form a skepticism that had for two centuries been attacking the foundations of Christian belief. The failure of the Crusades; the influx of Moslem ideas through Crusades, trade, and Arab philosophy; the removal of the papacy to Avignon and its ridiculous division in the Schism; the revelation of a pagan Greco-Roman world full of wise men and great art and yet without the Bible or the Church; the spread of education, and its increasing escape from ecclesiastical control; the immorality and worldliness of the clergy, even of popes, suggesting their private disbelief in the publicly professed creed; their use of the idea of purgatory to raise funds for their purposes; the reaction of the rising mercantile and moneyed classes against ecclesiastical domination; the transformation of the Church from a religious organization into a secular political power: all these factors, and many more, combined to make the Italian middle and upper classes, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, “the most skeptical of European peoples.”58
It is clear from the poetry of Politian and Pulci, and the philosophy of Ficino, that the circle of Lorenzo had no actual belief in another life; and the sentiment of Ferrara appears in the fun that Ariosto makes of the inferno that to Dante had seemed so frightfully real. Almost half the literature of the Renaissance is anticlerical. Many of the condottieri were open atheists;59 the cortigiani or courtiers were far less religious than the cortigiane or courtesans; and a polite skepticism was the mark and requisite of a gentleman.60 Petrarch lamented the fact that in the minds of many scholars it was a sign of ignorance to prefer the Christian religion to pagan philosophy.61 In Venice, 1530, it was found that most of the upper ranks neglected their Easter duty—i.e., did not go to confession and communion even once a year.62 Luther claimed to have found a saying current among the educated classes in Italy on going to Mass: “Come, let us conform to the popular error.”63
As to the universities, a curious incident reveals the temper of professors and students. Shortly after Pomponazzi’s death his pupil Simone Porzio, invited to lecture at Pisa, chose as his text Aristotle’s Meteorology. The audience did not like the subject. Several cried out impatiently: Quid de anima?—“What about the soul?” Porzio had to set the Meteorology aside and take up Aristotle’s De anima; at once the audience was all attention.64 We do not know whether in that lecture Porzio expressed his belief that the human soul differs in no essential point from the soul of a lion or a plant; we do know that he so taught in his book De mente humana—On the Human Mind;65 and he seems to have escaped unharmed. Eugenio Tarralba, indicted by the Spanish Inquisition in 1528, related that as a youth he had studied in Rome under three teachers, all of whom taught that the soul was mortal.66 Erasmus was astonished to find that at Rome the fundamentals of the Christian faith were topics of skeptical discussion among the cardinals. One ecclesiastic undertook to explain to him the absurdity of belief in a future life; others smiled at Christ and the Apostles; many, he assures us, claimed to have heard papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass.67 The lower classes kept their faith, as we shall see; the thousands who heard Savonarola must have believed; and the example of Vittoria Colonna shows that piety could survive education. But the soul of the great creed had been pierced with the arrows of doubt; and the splendor of the medieval myth had been tarnished by its accumulated gold.