BUONAUITI, ERNESTO. - One of the most prominent representatives of the Modernist movement in Italy, born in Rome on 25 June 1881, and died there on 20 April 1946. Ordained a priest in 1903, he soon devoted himself to teaching.
A man of assimilative spirit and encyclopedic learning, with an eloquent tongue and facile pen, an emotional temperament, and incapable of doubting himself, the Modernist controversy found him a young priest, an open mind to the new positive religious studies, and readily won his understanding and allegiance.
He began as a publicist, collaborating in 1901 in the *Rivista di Studi religiosi*, and shortly thereafter directing the *Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche* (placed on the Index in 1910). A broader platform for the expression of his historical-philosophical-religious thought later became his journal *Ricerche religiose* (placed on the Index in 1925), which among other things published his notable studies on Gioacchino da Fiore. Professor of the history of Christianity at the university from 1915 to 1931, he published: *Il cristianesimo nell’Africa romana* (Bari 1928), which developed the theme of his inaugural lecture to the chair (23 Nov. 1915); *Frammenti gnostici* (Rome 1923), which he translated and commented upon, supplementing his early work *Lo gnosticismo* (ibid. 1907)—a movement he opposed as an adaptation and concession of the Christian message to the religious-cultural currents of the age, in contrast to the vibrant millenarian expectation that always drew his sympathies; *Saggi sul cristianesimo primitivo* (Città di Castello 1923), which already reveal B.’s tendency to focus more on the history of Christianity than on 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 state of the Church appears in *La Chiesa romana* (Milan 1933).
Much of B.’s scholarly and teaching activity was devoted to the 4th Christian century, though without producing a general profile, not even in the synthetic work cited at the end of this list. However, to this period belongs *Storia dell’ascetismo cristiano* (Pinerolo 1928), which he regarded as the safety valve offered by Christianity to remedy the socio-economic crisis of the declining empire. In *Saggio su Lutero e la riforma religiosa in Germania* (Bologna 1926), he reproached the German reformer for having subordinated Christianity to the political exigencies of the German princes, thereby gravely damaging the affirmation of the autonomy of the State in politics and, consequently, its ethical character; and in philosophy, for the triumph of idealism over the realism of Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, which had long been traditional in the Church.
Against his aversion to the German rebel stands 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 journal until 1931, as well as the critical editions of two Gioachimite 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 unequal in both scope and conception.
B.’s skillful turns of thought and expression, and on the other hand the long-suffering of the Church—extraordinarily tolerant of her prodigal son—enabled him to combine, longer than others, a regular ecclesiastical status with an obstinately equivocal and subversive activity. Struck, on 25 January 1946, after long hesitation, by the most solemn ecclesiastical censure, which put him outside the fold, he, no longer restrained by barriers, pursued his negative, bitterly passionate activity with freer movements. Without adhering to Protestantism, he freely entered that world, where he found both consensus and sympathy; and, as sensitive to glory as he was tenacious in his ideas, he drew from those friendships, and from others, good sustenance to persevere until the end in what one day he had mournfully 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.
Vincenzo Ceresì*