Heavenly Animation as the Foundation for Fracastoro’s Homocentrism: Aristotelian-Platonic Eclecticism beyond the School of Padua

This essay deals with the ensouled cosmology propounded by the physician and philosopher Girolamo Fracastoro. His Homocentrica sive de stellis (1538), which propounded an astronomy of concentric spheres, was received and discussed by scholars who belonged to the cultural environment of the Padua School. Paduan Aristotelians generally explained heavenly motions in physical terms as the effect of heavenly souls and intelligences. Since the time of the polemics over the immortality of the human soul, which had famously opposed Pomponazzi to Nifo, all psychological discussions—including those about heavenly spheres’ souls—raised heated controversies. In the wake of these controversies, Fracastoro discussed the foundations of his homocentric planetary theory in a dialogue on the immortality of the soul entitled Fracastorius, sive de anima (1555). This work also included a cosmogonic myth which was, however, not published in early-modern editions of the dialogues in order to avoid theological censorship. Fracastoro had already discussed problems of celestial physics and the physical problems linked with mathematical modeling in relation to physical causation in an exchange with Gasparo Contarini which took place in 1531. In this exchange Contarini expressed his doubts over Fracastoro’s lack of consideration of the Aristotelian viewpoints on heavenly souls and intelligences. Fracastoro offered a full account of cosmic animation in his later dialogue ‘on the soul’ by taking a different path than his Paduan teachers and philosophical interlocutors. He picked up the Platonic idea of the world soul, which animates the whole, and freely connected it with Aristotelian views about the ensouled cosmos of concentric spheres. Thus, his cosmology resulted from an eclectic composition of Platonic, Aristotelian and Averroistic elements. He aimed to create a renewed mathematical astronomy that would explain planetary motions as the result of the movements of concentric spheres. Fracastoro grounded this renewed astronomy on an understanding of the cosmos as a living whole. Such an animated homocentric cosmos represented, at the same time, both a development based on Aristotelian premises and a step beyond this legacy.