BUONAIUTI, ERNESTO. – One of the best-known representatives of the modernist movement in Italy, b. in Rome on 25 June 1881, and d. there on 20 April 1946. Ordained a priest in 1903, he soon devoted himself to teaching.
A highly assimilative spirit, of encyclopedic learning, eloquent in speech and facile with the pen, and of an emotional temperament, incapable of doubting himself, he was still a young priest when the modernist movement found him with his mind open to the new positive religious studies; it promptly won over his intellect and led it astray.
He made his debut as a publisher by collaborating (1901) in the Rivista di Studi religiosi, and shortly thereafter by directing the Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche (placed on the Index in 1910). A broader forum for the expression of his historical-philosophical-religious thought was later provided by his journal Ricerche religiose (placed on the Index in 1925), which among other things published his notable studies on G. da Fiore.
A university professor of the history of Christianity from 1915 to 1931, he published: Il cristianesimo nell'Africa romana (Bari 1928), which develops the theme of his inaugural lecture for the chair (23 Nov. 1915); the Frammenti gnostici (Rome 1923), translated and annotated by him, which supplement his youthful work: Lo gnosticismo (ibid. 1907), a movement he opposed insofar as he considered it an adaptation and concession of the Christian message to the religious-cultural currents of the century, contrary to the fervent millenarian expectation toward which his sympathies had always been directed; the Saggi sul cristianesimo primitivo (Città di Castello 1923), which already show in B. a tendency to take greater interest in the history of Christianity than in that of the Church, and to concern himself more with the world of ideas than with liturgical practice and the institutional elements of the Church. A critique of the Church’s present situation is found in: La Chiesa romana, Milan 1933.
B. devoted much of his activity as a scholar and teacher to the Christian second century, without, however, outlining a general profile of it, not even in the synthetic work cited at the end of this list. The Storia dell'ascerismo cristiano (Pinerole 1928) nevertheless concerns this period; he regarded Christian asceticism as the safety valve offered by Christianity to avert the empire’s socioeconomic crisis during its decline. In the Saggio su Lutero e la riforma religiosa in Germania (Bologna 1926), he reproaches the German reformer for having subjected Christianity to the political requirements of the German princes, with the serious consequence that, in politics, he brought about the assertion of the omnipotence of the State and, consequently, of its ethical character; and, in philosophy, the triumph of idealism over the realism of Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy, by then traditional in the Church.
Opposed to his aversion to the German rebel was B.’s sympathy for Gioacchino da Fiore and his mystical movement: Prolegomeni alla storia di Gioacchino da Fiore (in Ricerche religiose, 4 [1928], pp. 385–419); and other studies published in the same periodical up to 1931, together with the critical editions of the two Joachimite writings, Tractatus super Quatuor Evangelia and De articulis fidei, with preface, introduction, and notes (ibid. 1936).
B. concluded his scholarly activity with La Storia del cristianesimo (3 vols., Milan 1942–43), a work uneven both in its proportions and in its conception.
B.’s skilful positions in thought and speech, and, on the other hand, the Church’s long-suffering, which showed extraordinary tolerance toward its prodigal son, enabled B. to combine, longer than others, a regular ecclesiastical status with a stubbornly equivocal and destructive activity. Struck, on 25 January 1926, after prolonged tergiversation, by the most solemn ecclesiastical censure, which placed him outside the fold, he, no longer restrained by barriers, continued his negative, bitterly passionate activity with freer movements. Without adhering to Protestantism, he entered freely into that world, where he reaped approval and sympathy; and, as sensitive to glory as he was tenacious in his ideas, he drew from those friendships, and from others as well, ample nourishment to persevere to the end in what he had one day, melancholically, called «il mio tragico andare». By decree of 17 June 1944, the Holy Office condemned Opera et scripta omnia by B., as it had already done in 1924 and 1925.