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.
An assimilative spirit, of encyclopedic culture, with an eloquent word and a facile pen, an emotional temperament, incapable of doubting himself, the course of modernism found him a young priest, a mind open to the new positive religious studies, and it promptly won over his intelligence and diverted it.
He made his debut as a writer 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 platform of broader scope for the manifestation of his historico-philosophico-religious thought was later his journal Ricerche religiose (placed on the Index in 1925), which welcomed among other things 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 commented on by him, which supplement the youthful work Lo gnosticismo (ibid. 1907), a movement he opposed insofar as he considered it an adaptation and a concession of the Christian message to the religio-cultural currents of the age, against the vibrant millenarian expectation to which his sympathies have always gone; the Saggi sul cristianesimo primitivo (Città di Castello 1923), which already show in B. the tendency to take more 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 current situation of the Church is found in La Chiesa romana, Milan 1933.
A great part of his activity as a scholar and teacher B. devoted to the Christian 2nd century, without however tracing a general profile of it, not even in the synthetic work cited at the end of this list. To this period, however, belongs the Storia dell'ascerismo cristiano (Pinerolo 1928), which he regards as the safety valve offered by Christianity to remedy the economic-social crisis of the empire in decline. In the Saggio su Lutero e la riforma religiosa in Germania (Bologna 1926) he reproaches the German reformer for having enslaved Christianity to the political demands of the German princes, with the grave harm of having provoked in politics the affirmation of the omnipotence of the State and, consequently, of its ethical character; and in philosophy the triumph of idealism against the realism of the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, by then traditional in the Church.
Against his aversion to the German rebel stands B.'s sympathy for Joachim of 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, and 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 activity as a scholar with the Storia del cristianesimo (3 vols., Milan 1942-43), a work uneven in both proportions and conception.
B.'s skilful attitudes of thought and speech, and on the other hand the long-suffering of the Church, which was of extraordinary tolerance with its prodigal son, allowed B. to combine, longer than others, a regular ecclesiastical situation with a stubbornly equivocal and demolishing activity. Struck, on 25 January 1926, after long tergiversation, by the most solemn ecclesiastical censure, which put him outside the fold, he, no longer held back by barriers, continued with freer movements his negative, bitterly passionate activity. Though without adhering to Protestantism, he entered, freely, into that world, where he reaped approval and sympathies; and, as sensitive to glory as he was tenacious in his ideas, he drew from those friendships, and from others, good nourishment to persevere to the last in what he had one day melancholically called «my tragic going». By decree of 17 June 1944 the Holy Office condemned Opera et scripta omnia of B., as it had already done in 1924 and 1925.
Bibliography4 works
Vincenzo Ceresi.