Giulio Cesare Vanini

From Philosopedia

Vanini, Giulio Cesare (1585 – 9 February 1619)

Vanini was educated in philosophy and theology at Rome University and took the priesthood after studying the canon law in Padua about 1603. He traveled widely throughout Europe, espousing his rationalist viewpoint and supporting himself by giving lessons. A freethinking priest alleged to be a believer in witchcraft and denying the current views on immortality, he said he knew that the world could not have been created out of nothing and said Jesus was not divine. As a result, Lucilio - who gave himself the name Julius Caesar - was driven from one country to another, preaching such views in France, England, Holland, and Germany. In Paris, he reportedly had fifty thousand followers at one point. When he took refuge in England, he spent 49 days in the Tower of London. In southern France, he published a book critical of atheism in 1615, in an attempt to clear himself from charges of heresy. But the following year his second book was published and is credited with being closer to his real views, in which he advanced a naturalistic philosophy, calling the human soul mortal. The book was ordered burned by the Sorbonne, and Vanini was charged with atheism. Four of his books made the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

He was arrested in 1618 in Toulouse. After being found guilty, he was condemned, as an atheist, to have his tongue cut off, to be strangled at the stake, and to have his body burned to ashes. It is said he refused the ministration of a priest. An anti-Christian critic of scholasticism, he is credited with laying the foundation of modern philosophy. An attempt was made to force him to beg God, the king, and the judicial body for pardon, but he insisted he believed neither in God nor in the Devil. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Vanini as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. J. M. Robertson, however, wrote,

• He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philosophic theist to pantheism; and whatever he may have said to arouse priestly hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist than Spinoza or Bruno or John Scotus.

The Church brought him to trial, he was convicted at Toulouse by the voices of the majority. At the trial, he protested his belief in God and defended the existence of Deity with the flimsiest arguments, so flimsy, noted Foote, that one can easily suspect he was pouring irony on the judges. They found him guilty, ordered that his tongue be cut out, then that he burned alive. It is said that, afterwards, he confessed, took the communion, and declared himself ready to subscribe to the Church tenets.

However, the sentence was carried out on the same day, February 9, 1619. Drawn on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a placard on his shoulders inscribed “Atheist and Blasphemer of the name of God,” he cried out in Italian that he rejoiced to die like a philosopher. “Jesus facing death sweated with fear,” he said. “I die undaunted.” Or, as described by President Gramond, author of History of France Under Louis XIII,

• I saw him in the tumbril as they led him to execution, mocking the Cordelier who had been sent to exhort him to repentance, and insulting our Savior by these impious words, ‘He sweated with fear and weakness, and I die undaunted.’

Before burning him, his Christian benefactors did tear out his tongue by the roots, although he was said to have been so obstinate they had to use pincers. One Christian historian found humorous the victim’s long cry of agony. Vanini then was strangled, his body was burned in Toulouse, and the ashes of the thirty-four-year-old person described as the Antichrist, the disciple of Satan, were scattered to the wind.

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