THE SCHOOLMEN that Aristotle did not maintain individual immortality, and that such immortality could not be known by natural reason alone.23 Such was also the view of the cultured and erudite scholar who emerged as the head of the Paduan Aristotelians, Pietro Pomponazzi He was the author of a work, De Immortalitate Animae, which argued that if one took seriously the Aristotelian doctrine that the human soul was the form of the human body, it was impossible to believe that it could survive death.24 Pomponazzi considered himself a Christian, and was prepared to accept personal immortality as an article of faith: but he and his Paduan associates soon found themselves the object of ecclesiastical hostility In 1512 the warrior pope Julius II, battered in conXict and ailing in health, summoned a general council to meet at the Lateran, with a view to the emendation of a Church by now universally agreed to be in great need of reform Shortly after the summoning of the Council, Julius died and was replaced by the Medici pope Leo X Leo showed little enthusiasm for reformation, and the Council achieved almost nothing in practical terms apart from a useful decree declaring that those who ran pawnshops were not necessarily guilty of the sin of usury Some ecclesiastical abuses were prohibited, but the decrees remained a dead letter, until the issues were brought back by Luther to haunt the papacy In the meantime, Pope Leo found it helpful to turn the minds of the Council members to less embarrassing issues of philosophy, such as the Paduan teaching on immortality A bull issued in December 1513 lamented that the devil had recently sown a pernicious error in the Weld of the Lord, namely, the belief that the rational soul was either mortal or single in all men, and that some rash philosophers had asserted that this was true ‘at least in philosophy’ It proclaimed, on the contrary that the soul, by itself and essentially, was the form of the human body, that it was immortal, and that it was multiplied in proportion to the multitude of the bodies into which it was infused by God Moreover, since truth could not contradict truth, any assertion contrary to the revealed truth was damned as heretical 23 Cajetan was called to Rome in 1501, and became successively head of the Dominican order, cardinal, and papal legate to Germany, in which capacity he held a famous debate with Luther at Augsburg in 1518 24 Pomponazzi’s arguments are set out in greater detail in Ch below 112