OLIVI (OLIEU), PIETRO DI GIOVANNI. - Franciscan friar, scholastic master, and leader of the Spiritual movement, born in Sérignan (Languedoc) c. 1248, died in Narbonne on 14 March 1298.
I. LIFE
A Franciscan friar of Béziers at the age of twelve, he was sent to study at the Order’s general house in Paris, where his teachers included Guglielmo della Mara, Giovanni Peckham, and Matteo d’Acquasparta. In 1277 he taught in Provence, where he soon became involved in the Spiritual movement, which sought reform of the Order and of the Church along the lines of rigorists and FIORE, IL (v.). From that time, superiors and masters of the conventual party opposed to the zealous friars sought to conflate into a single condemnation both his popular writings and his scholastic questions and theses on strict observance of the Franciscan Rule. The General Chapter of Strasbourg (1282) had his writings examined by seven doctors and bachelors from Paris, who, without allowing Olivi to clarify his thought, listed in the so-called Letter of the Seven Seals twenty-two propositions to which the accused was required to subscribe unreservedly. Moreover, in a *rotulus* they censured thirty-four theses drawn from his *Quaestiones scolasticae* and demanded that the reading of his writings be strictly prohibited. In the autumn of 1283, Olivi subscribed “according to sound understanding” to the twenty-two propositions of the Letter. He further justified himself in a *Nota* sent from Nîmes and in a Letter from Montpellier to Raimondo Gaufredi and other Spirituals (1285) regarding nineteen erroneous propositions attributed to the *advenarii*. Shortly before his death, Olivi made an important declaration in eight points on the Franciscan observance of poverty, followed by a magnificent profession of Catholic faith and unconditional obedience to the reigning pope, Boniface VIII, expressly named.II. WRITINGS AND DOCTRINE
Olivi’s writings fall into three categories:1. Scholastic writings
The foremost place belongs to the 118 *Quaestiones in secundum Librum Sententiarum* (ed. B. Jansen, 3 vols., Quaracchi 1922–26), which cover nearly the whole of speculative and moral philosophy. Vehement controversy arose over q. 51, where Olivi expounds his theory on the manner of the soul’s union with the body. According to this theory, only the principles of vegetative and sensitive life, distinct substantial forms, directly inform the human body and are formally united with it, while the principle of intellectual life does not directly and per se inform the human body but is united to it by substantial coherence through the principle of sensitive life. If the union of the intellectual form with the body were direct and formal, Olivi argues, the human body would thereby become spiritual and immortal, since the form not only communicates itself to matter but absorbs its entire being. This theory must be considered in relation to the thesis of the plurality of substantial forms of the soul and the existence of a spiritual matter in which their union is accomplished, a view held at the time by the Dominican Roberto Kilwardby (v.) and the Franciscan Riccardo da Mediavilla, and also in light of the five *Quodlibeta* (Venice 1509), in which Olivi extensively treats of the “colligantia potentiarum” intimately united with the “radicatio animae in substantia corporis” (B. Jansen, s.V. in LThK, VII, cols. 709–11).Olivi’s doctrine on the manner of the soul’s union with the body, already censured in the Letter of the Seven Seals (1283), was denounced to the Council of Vienne. The Council took account of mitigating circumstances, especially the passionate atmosphere in which the accusations against Olivi were presented, and spared his memory from formal condemnation. Without any personal allusion, in the decree *Fidei catholicae fundamento* (6 May 1312) it declared that for the future it must be held heretical to obstinately assert “that the rational or intellectual soul is not the form of the human body per se and essentially” (Denz.-U. no. 481), in opposition to two other so-called errors improperly attributed to Olivi: a) that St. John preserved the order of events “by narrating that, after Christ was already dead, a soldier opened His side with a lance” (ibid., no. 480; Olivi never taught the contrary but only considered the hypothesis that the lance-stroke was inflicted while Christ was still alive, as others had done before him without formally contradicting the Gospel); b) that the Council considers more probable the opinion according to which Baptism not only remits original sin to infants but also confers grace and habitual virtues “even if not at that time with regard to their use” (ibid., no. 483; Olivi had presented both opinions without pronouncing in favor of one to the exclusion of the other). Quaestiones 52 and 57 on the immortality of the soul and free will are true models of exposition. In the questions on knowledge (60–74), Olivi closely follows St. Augustine and St. Anselm. Augustinian, too, is his doctrine on the transmission of original sin, the culpability implicit in involuntary motions of concupiscence, and the gravity of venial sin (qq. 110, 118). The mere 118 questions in the *II Sent.* would suffice to secure Olivi an honored place among thirteenth-century scholastics. Also noteworthy are the brief treatises *De quantitate* and *De perlegendis philosophorum libris* (cf. F. Ehrle, art. cit. in bibl., pp. 479–81).