Abstract

This paper analyzes the reception of some Aristotelian ideas in a thinker of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, James of Viterbo. The purpose is to determine how much of the autonomy of nature, thought by Aristotle in the form of the second causes, can be preserved in an ecclesiology built around the fullness of pontifical power, thus evoking a theology of the miracle that justifies the dominium of the institutional religion over the world. Therefore Revelation represents that limit to nature and its autonomy, in the sense that the dimension of the phýsis would not find in Gracia its greater fulfillment, but an always possible obstacle to the efficacy proper to the second causes.