574 INTELLECT AND FAITH. which carried him off, gratified in his last hours with a vision of the Virgin. Such a man was an easy victim ; the voluminous apology which he wrote to explain his errors availed him nothing, and he was compelled to make a full submission, which earned from Alexander VI., in 1493, not long before Pico's death, a bull declaring his orthodoxy and forbidding the Inquisition to trouble him.* In curious contrast to this exceptional rigor was the toleration manifested towards the Averrhoists. It is true that Leo X., in the Council of Lateran, December 21, 1513, procured the confirma- tion of a bull in which he deplored the spread of the doctrine of the mortality of the soul and of there being but one soul common to mankind. He also condemned the opinions which maintained the eternity of the earth and that the soul has not the form of the %J body, and in prohibiting their teaching in the schools he especially alluded to the ingenious device adopted by professors of arguing against them so equivocally as to lead to the conviction of their truth. In 1518, moreover, when commissioning Master Leonardo Crivelli as Inquisitor-general of Lombardy, he calls his appointee's special attention to those who seek to know more than it is well to know, and who think ill of the Holy See ; these he is to repress with the free use of torture, incarceration, and other penalties, and to pay over their confiscated propert} r to the papal camera, no matter of what condition or dignity they might be. Yet debates on points of Averrhoistic philosophy were the favorite amusement of the semi-pagan philosophers who gathered in Leo's court, and who deemed that all that was necessary to preserve them from the Inquisition was to present arguments on both sides, pronounce the questions insoluble to human reason, and conclude with a hypo- critical submission to the Church. Such was the device of Pom- ponazio (1473-1525), under whom Averrhoism became more popu- lar than ever, although he ridiculed Averrhoes and called himself an Alexandrian, from Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Aristotelian commentator, from whom Averrhoes had derived much. Pom- ponazio invented the dilemma, " If the three religions are false, all men are deceived: if only one is true, the majority of men are
- J. Pic. Mirand. Yita, Conclusiones, Apologia, Alexand. PP. VI. Bull. Omnium
Gaihollcor. (Opp. Basil. 1572). Cf. Cantii, 1. 185.
