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THE SCHOOLMEN The immortality of the soul had been Christian teaching for many centuries, and the religious teaching had already been combined with Aristotelian hylomorphism at the Council of Vienna in 1311 What is noteworthy about the Lateran Council’s declaration is its insistence on the relationship between revealed and philosophical truth, and its claim that the immortality of the soul is not only true, but provable by reason The Church, for the Wrst time, was laying down the law not just on religious truth, but also on religious epistemology This decree, like the reforming decrees, seems to have had little practical eVect A couple of years later Pomponazzi published his treatise on the soul: it was topped and tailed with professions of faith and submission to the Holy See, but the meat of the work consists of a battery of arguments against personal immortality It was while the Lateran Council was in session that Raphael painted in the Vatican, Wrst for Pope Julius and then for Pope Leo, the Stanza della Segnatura, on whose walls and ceilings are represented the disciplines of theology, law, philosophy, and poetry The fresco The School of Athens contains some of the most loving representations of philosophers and philosophical topics in the history of art Here the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle is given spatial and colourful form The two philosophers, side by side, preside over a resplendent court of thinkers, Greek and Islamic Plato, wearing the colours of the volatile elements air and Wre, points heavenwards; Aristotle, clothed in watery blue and earthly green, has his feet Wrmly on the ground The two are reconciled, in Raphael’s vision, by being assigned diVerent spheres of inXuence Aristotle, standing under the aegis of Minerva on the side of the fresco next to the law wall, dominates a group of ethical and natural philosophers Plato, under the patronage of Apollo, stands above a throng of mathematicians and metaphysicians Surprisingly, perhaps, he, who banished the poets from his Republic, is given his place next to the wall dedicated to poetry and dominated by Homer Facing, across the room, is The Disputation of the Sacrament, where sit the great Christian philosophers: Augustine, Bonaventure, and Aquinas The whole is a masterpiece of reconciling genius, bringing together the two truths which, so the Lateran fathers were proclaiming, no man should put asunder 114
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