Abstract

Even though he is often labelled as a Thomist for his role in the Pomponazzi affair, Chrystostomus Javelli is, above all, the author of several, monumental commentaries on the moral and political philosophy of Aristotle, Plato and the Scriptures, which have been almost entirely neglected by modern scholarship. The purpose of this chapter is to assess the importance of these works by focusing on Javelli’s epitomes of Plato’s ethics and political philosophy, which were completed in 1535 and printed in 1536 in Venice by the press of Aurelio Pinzi. These two Platonic commentaries constitute one of the first attempts to transform Plato’s ‘unsystematic’ dialogues into a Platonic system of philosophy, which can then be compared with Aristotelian philosophy and used to interpret the moral and political ideas contained in the Scriptures. In doing so Javelli deliberately moves away from the Neoplatonic and mystical tradition revived in the previous century by Marsilio Ficino and develops one of the first interpretations of ‘Plato through Plato’, in a way that echoes sixteenth-century philological interpretations of ‘Aristotle through Aristotle’. Finally, the essay explores how Javelli’s Platonic commentaries are part of a triptych that aims to show that Plato’s moral philosophy is to be preferred to Aristotle’s but is only a stepping stone to developing a truly Christian moral philosophy centred upon Scripture alone.