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Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532), cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church during the High Renaissance, was not merely a scholar influenced by the humanism and renewed Platonism of his day but a phil-Hellene according to various associations of Hellenism ranging from literary to political, ancient to modern. He embraced Hellenism in its many senses despite his belonging to the generation born after the fall of Constantinople. This is significant, for although Giles's interest in ancient Greek language and letters is generally acknowledged, insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to Giles's inclusive interest in Byzantine Hellenism and Orthodox Christian doctrine.
1 Perini, P. David Aurelius, Bibliographia augustiniana, Florence 1929, i. 181, s.v. Canisio.
2 Recent studies, editions and translations of Giles include Savarese, Gennaro, Un frate neoplatonico e il Rinascimento a Roma: studi su Egidio da Viterbo, Rome 2012; Giles of Viterbo: the commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, ed. Nodes, Daniel, Leiden–Boston, Ma 2010; Saak, Eric Leland, High way to heaven: the Augustinian platform between reform and Reformation, 1292–1524, Leiden–Boston, Ma 2002; Tateo, Francesco, Egidio da Viterbo, fra sant'Agostino e Giovanni Pontano (il Dialogo Aegidius), Rome 2000; De Caprio, Vincenzo and Ranieri, Concetta, Presenze eterodosse nel viterbese tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Rome 2000; Giles of Viterbo OSA: letters as Augustinian general, 1506–1517, trans. Clare O'Reilly, Rome 1992; Roth, Anna Maria Voci, Egidio da Viterbo: lettere familiari, Rome 1990; Aegidii Viterbiensis OSA: registrum generalatus, ed. Albericus de Meijer, Rome 1984; and Egidio da Viterbo, OSA, e il suo tempo, Rome 1983.
3 See especially Monfasani, John, Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy, Burlington, Vt 2004. See also Searby, Denis, ‘Thomists in Byzantium’, in Beskow, P., Borgehammar, S. and Jönsson, A. (eds), Förbistringar och Förklaringar: en festskrift till Anders Piltz, Lund 2007, 558–67.
4 Canone in Giuseppe vescovo di Methone in onore di San Tomasso d'Aquino, ed. Raffaele Cantarella, Rome 1934.
5 PG clvi.23–53. See Fenster, Erwin, Laudes constantinopolitanae, Munich 1968, 234, and Thorn-Wikkert, Lydia, Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350–1415), Frankfurt-am-Main 2006.
6 Vasoli, Cesare, ‘The mature stage of humanist theology in Italy’, in D'Onofrio, Giulio (ed.), History of theology, III: The Renaissance, trans. O'Connell, Matthew J., Collegeville, Mn 1998, 212.
7 Hall, Jonathan M., Hellenicity: between ethnicity and culture, Chicago 2002, 134.
8 Celenza, Christopher, ‘The revival of Platonic philosophy’, in Hankins, James (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Renaissance philosophy, Cambridge 2007, 80. See also Siniossoglou, Niketas, Radical platonism in Byzantium: illumination and utopia in Gemistos Plethon, Cambridge 2011, and ‘Hellenism in the Renaissance’, in George Boys-Stones and others (eds), The Oxford handbook of Hellenic studies, Oxford 2009, 156; cf. Woodhouse, C. M., George Gemistos Plethon: the last of the Hellenes, Cambridge 1986, and Gentile, S., ‘Giorgio Gemisto Pletone e la sua influenza sull'umanesimo fiorentino’, in Viti, P. (ed.), Firenze e il concilio di 1439, Florence 1994.
9 For Gemistos as ‘at heart a pagan’ see Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon, 144,165.
10 Ibid. 361–2.
11 See Monfasani, John, ‘Marsilio Ficino and the Plato-Aristotle controversy’, in Allen, M. J. B. and Rees, V. (eds), Marsilio Ficino: his theology, his philosophy, his legacy, Leiden 2002.
12 See Allen, M. J. B., ‘Marsilio Ficino on Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity’, RQ xxxi (1984), 555–84.
13 Thucydides, Historia belli Peloponnesiaci, trans. Lorenzo Valla, Treviso: Johannes Rubeus Vercellensis, c. 1483?, preface, 6. See Mohler, Ludwig, Kardinal Bessarion als Theologe, Humanist und Staatsmann, Aalen–Paderborn 1923–42, iii. 406, and Geanakoplos, Deno, Interaction of the sibling Byzantine and Western cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance, 330–1600, New Haven–London 1976, 217.
14 Geanakoplos, Deno, Byzantine East and Latin West: two worlds of Christendom in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Oxford 1966, 3.
15 Vasoli, ‘The mature stage of humanist theology’, 225.
16 Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon, 71, 84–5.
17 Martin, Francis X., Friar, reformer, and renaissance scholar: life and work of Giles of Viterbo, repr. Villanova, Pa 1992, 44. See also Martin, Francis X., The problem of Giles of Viterbo: a historiographical survey, Héverlé–Louvain 1960, 1959; O'Malley, John, ‘Fulfillment of the Christian golden age under Pope Julius ii: text of a discourse of Giles of Viterbo, 1507’, Traditio xxv (1969), 265–33; and Nodes, Daniel, ‘Restoring the golden age from Lactantius (ca. 240–ca. 325) to Egidio of Viterbo (1469–1532)’, Studi Umanistici Piceni xx (2000), 221–36.
18 Whittaker, John, ‘Greek manuscripts from the library of Giles of Viterbo at the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome’, Scriptorium xxxi (1977), 237–38 (for a listing of the manuscripts see pp. 218–20).
19 Ibid. 216.
20 Idem, ‘Giles of Viterbo as a classical scholar’, in Egidio da Viterbo, OSA, e il suo tempo, 98–105.
21 Monfasani, John, ‘The Augustinian Platonists’, in Gentile, Sebastiano and Toussaint, Stephan (eds), Marsilio Ficino: fonti, testi, fortuna: atti del convegno internazionale, Firenze, 1–3 ottobre 1999, Rome 2006, 319–37 at p. 333.
22 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary, 3.
23 See McNamara, Martin, Targum and Testament revisited, Grand Rapids, Mi 2010, 274–5.
24 For decades the standard catalogue of medieval Sentences commentaries was Stegmüller, F., Repertorium commentariorum in Sententias Petri Lombardi, Würzburg 1947. Its significant contribution has often been recognised, but so too have its shortcomings which have led to supplements. See, for example, Doucet, V., Commentaries sur les Sentences: supplément a répertoire de M. Frédéric Stegmueller, Florence 1954, and Van Dyk, J., ‘Thirty years since Stegmüller: a bibliographical guide to the study of medieval Sentence commentaries since the publication of Stegmüller's Repertorium’, Franciscan Studies xxxix (1979) 255–315. On recent work toward compiling a comprehensive database of Sentences commentary literature see Livesey, Steven J., ‘Lombardus electronicus: a bibliographical database of medieval commentators on Peter Lombard's Sentences’, in Evans, G. R. (ed.), Mediaeval commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: current research, i, Leiden–Boston 2002, 1–23. A useful lexical tool is Thesaurus librorum sententiarum Petri Lombardi, ed. J. Hamesse, Turnhout 1991.
25 See Russell L. Friedman, ‘The Sentences commentary, 1250–1320’, in Evans, Current research, i. 41–128.
26 Rosemann, Philipp W., ‘The tradition of the Sentences’, in Rosemann, Philipp W. (ed.), Mediaeval commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, ii, Leiden–Boston, Ma 2010, 495–523.
27 Ibid. ii. 513.
28 See Farris, Giovanni, Eloquenza e teologia nel ‘proemium in librum primum sententiarum’ di Paolo Cortese, Savona 1972; Celenza, Christopher, ‘End game: humanist Latin in the late fifteenth century’, in Maes, Y., Papy, J. and Verbaal, W. (eds), Latinitas perennis, II: Appropriation and Latin literature, Leiden 2009, 201–42; and Moss, A., Renaissance truth and the Latin language turn, Oxford 2003, 64–8.
29 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary xvii.52.
30 Augustine, Confessionum libri tredecim i.1.1, CCSL xxvii. 1; cf. xiii.37.52, CCSL xxvii.272.
31 Ficino, Marsilio, The Philebus commentary, ch. 37, ed. Allen, M. J. B., Berkeley 1975, 369–71, cited in CHRP at p. 352 n. 285.
32 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary xvii.53.
33 CHRP, 353.
34 See Rummel, Erika, The scholastic-humanist debate in the Renaissance and Reformation, Cambridge, Ma 1995, 112–18.
35 Rice, Eugene F., ‘The humanist idea of Christian antiquity and the impact of Greek patristic work on sixteenth-century thought’, in Bolgar, R. R. (ed.), Classical influences on European culture, A. D. 1500–1700, Cambridge 1976, 202. Giles himself presents the Hercules and the hydra in ch. lxxvii of his Commentary. See also Nodes, Daniel, ‘A hydra in the gardens of Adonis: literary allusion and the language of humanism in Egidio of Viterbo (1469–1532)’, RQ lvii (2004), 1–24.
36 See Celenza, Christopher, Angelo Poliziano's ‘Lamia’ in context, Leiden 2010. See also Jugie, M., ‘La Polémique de George Scholarios contre Pléthon’, Byzantion x (1935), 517–30.
37 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary lxxxviii.327.
38 Ibid. xliv.112.
39 O'Malley, Church and reform, 58.
40 See Martin, Francis X., ‘Giles of Viterbo as Scripture scholar’, in Egidio da Viterbo, OSA, e il suo tempo, 201.
41 See Joseph Lienhard, review of Hanson, R. P. C., The search for the Christian doctrine of God: the Arian controversy, 318–381, Theological Studies li (1990), 334–7.
42 ‘Dicunt quidem et illi ὑπόστασιν, sed nescio quid uolunt interesse inter οὐσίαν et ὑπόστασιν ita ut plerique nostri qui haec graeco tractant eloquio dicere consuerint μίαν οὐσίαν τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις, quod est latine, unam essentiam tres substantias. sed quia nostra loquendi consuetudo iam obtinuit ut hoc intellegatur cum dicimus essentiam quod intellegitur cum dicimus substantiam, non audemus dicere unam essentiam, tres substantias, sed unam essentiam uel substantiam. tres autem personas multi latini ista tractantes et digni auctoritate dixerunt cum alium modum aptiorem non inuenirent quo enuntiarent uerbis quod sine uerbis intellegebant’: Augustine, De Trinitate v.8.10–v.9, ed. W. J. Mountain, CCSL l, Turnhout 1968. All translations are by the present author unless otherwise noted.
43 ‘Tamen cum quaeritur quid tres, magna prorsus inopia humanum laborat eloquium. Dictum est tamen tres personae non ut illud diceretur sed ne taceretur’: ibid.
44 ‘Itaque loquendi causa de ineffabilibus ut fari aliquo modo possemus quod effari nullo modo possumus dictum est a nostris graecis una essentia, tres substantiae, a latinis autem una essentia uel substantia, tres personae quia sicut iam diximus non aliter in sermone nostro, id est latino, essentia quam substantia solet intellegi. Et dum intellegatur saltem in aenigmate quod dicitur placuit ita dici ut diceretur aliquid cum quaereretur quid tria sint, quae tria esse fides uera pronuntiat cum et patrem non dicit esse filium, et spiritum sanctum quod est donum dei nec patrem dicit esse nec filium’: ibid. vii.4.7.
45 ‘Sed ne nobis uideatur suffragari hoc quoque requiramus, quamquam et illi si uellent, sicut dicunt tres substantias, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις, possent dicere tres personas, τρία πρόσωπα. illud autem maluerunt quod forte secundum linguae suae consuetudinem aptius diceretur’: ibid.i.6.11.
46 ‘Longe vero illi signatius naturae rationabilis individuam subsistentiam ὑποστάσεως nomine vocaverunt, nos vero per inopiam significantium vocum translaticiam retinuimus nuncupationem, eam quam illi ὑπόστασιν dicunt personam vocantes; sed peritior Graecia sermonum ὑπόστασιν vocat individuam subsistentiam’: Boethius, Contra Eutychen iii, in Theological tractates and the Consolation of philosophy, ed. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand and S. J. Tester, London–Cambridge, Ma 1973, 72–128 at p. 86.
47 Summa theologiae i. 29, a. 2. See Hipp, Stephen, ‘Person’ in Christian tradition and in the conception of Saint Albert the Great: a systematic study of its concept as illuminated by the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, Muenster 2001, esp. pp. 93–6, 218–40.
48 Valla, Lorenzo, Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. Zippel, G., Padua 1982, ii. 404, cited in D'Onofrio, History of theology: Renaissance, iii.50.
49 D'Onofrio, History of theology: Renaissance, iii. 51.
50 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary lxxii.240.
51 John. xv.26. See lib. 1, d. 11, cap. 1.
52 Matthew x.20.
53 Jn xiv.26.
54 Jn xv.26.
55 Lib. 1, d. 11, ch. 1.
56 Woodhouse, Gemistos Plethon, 279.
57 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary civ.419.
58 See O'Malley, Church and reform, 31–2.
59 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary civ.422.
60 D'Onofrio, History of theology: Renaissance, iii. 199–200.
61 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary cxviii.510–11.
62 Bonaventure, In I Sent. d. 11, q. 1, conclusion, in Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi; in primum librum sententiarum, Florence 1882.
63 In I Sent. d. 11, a.1, q. 2 conclusio.
64 In I Sent. D. 11, a.1, q.1 conclusio. See Nodes, Daniel, ‘Conciliatory reflections on the procession of the Holy Spirit in Giles of Viterbo's Sentences commentary’, Scottish Journal of Theology lxiv (2011), 140–60.
65 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary cxviii.516.
66 Ibid. 515.
67 See Riga Wood, ‘Early Oxford theology, III: Understanding the third person of the Trinity’, in Rosemann, Mediaeval commentaries on the Sentences, ii. 308–9.
68 See Monfasani, John, ‘The pro-Latin apologetics of the Greek émigrés to quattrocento Italy’, in Rigo, Antonio (ed.), Byzantine theology and its philosophical background, Turnhout 2011, 160–86.
69 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary cxviii.515.
70 See, for example, Sabellico, Marcantonio, De linguae latinae reparatione, ed. Messina, Guglielmo Bottari, Messina 1999, 143–4.
71 Toynbee, Arnold, The Greeks and their heritages, Oxford 1981, 80.
72 Ibid.
73 Giles of Viterbo: the commentary cxviii.518.
74 ‘Uti est enim assumere aliquid in facultatem voluntatis; frui est autem uti cum gaudio, non adhuc spei, sed iam rei. Proinde omnis qui fruitur, utitur; assumit enim aliquid in facultatem voluntatis, cum fine delectationis. Non autem omnis qui utitur fruitur, si id quod in facultatem voluntatis assumit, non propter illud ipsum, sed propter aliud appetivit’: Augustine, De Trinitate x.11. Peter made this the keynote division for his First book of Sentences, and quotes the passage at bk i, d.1, ch. 3.
75 ‘Et quia ‘Deus caritas est’, et filius, qui ‘ex Deo’ est, ‘caritas’ est, sui simile aliquid requirit in nobis, ut per hanc caritatem, quae est in Christo Iesu, ‘Deo’, qui est ‘caritas’, velut cognata quadam per caritatis nomen affinitate sociemur’: Origen, Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, trans. Rufinus, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Leipzig 1925, 70.
76 Kaldellis, Anthony, Hellenism in Byzantium: the transformations of Greek identity and the reception of the classical tradition, Cambridge 2007, 317.
77 O'Malley, Church and reform, 187, and ‘Egidio da Viterbo and renaissance Rome’, in Egidio da Viterbo, OSA, e il suo tempo, 81.
78 Idem, Church and reform, 129, citing Giles at ms Évora, Portugal, 116/1–30, fo. 64v.
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