Abstract

This chapter discusses Javelli’s concept of Christian philosophy (philosophia Christiana), a project that has been completely neglected by modern scholarship. In fact, Javelli should be credited as one of the few Renaissance thinkers who attempted to build a systematic and consistent project of Christian philosophy, encompassing all three traditional branches of practical philosophy: ethics, economics and politics. He develops this conception in three interrelated treatises entitled, respectively, Philosophia moralis Christiana, Oeconomica Christiana, and Philosophia civilis sive politica Christiana, all published together for the first time in Venice in 1540. In this chapter, I will focus in particular on the first, preliminary step of Javelli’s project, that is, the ‘dismantling’ of classical ethics, embodied first and foremost by Plato and Aristotle. By intermingling references to the Scriptures with discussions of the works by these two thinkers, Javelli offers a point-by-point refutation of the main tenets of classical ethics, concluding that both Platonism and Aristotelianism are equally useless for the development of a genuinely Christian philosophy. In his philosophically grounded confutation of classical ethics, not only does Javelli echo arguments and motives already presented by Erasmus in his writings, but he also makes use of well-known allegations derived from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comparationes of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.