Palmieri, Aurelio

PALMIERI, AURELIO. - Italian Orientalist, b. at Savona on 4 May 1870, d. at Rome on 18 Oct. 1926. He first belonged to the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine (1885), whence he passed in 1890 to the Congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption, from which he returned in 1902 to the Hermits. Intemperance of style and erroneous concepts, expressed in his works, and a conduct not always praiseworthy, procured for him grave difficulties, which ended by reducing him to the lay state. He spent the last years of his life in Rome, as director of the Institute for Eastern Europe.

The list of his publications comprises 15 works and about 270 articles in the DThC and in numerous Italian and foreign journals, principally in Bessarione, where as many as 130 of his articles appeared from 1896 to 1925. Among his works on the Christian East are to be remembered: Die Polemik des Islam (Salzburg 1902); Dositeo Patriarca greco di Gerusalemme (Florence 1908); La Chiesa russa (ibid. 1908); Il progresso dommatico nel concetto cattolico (ibid. 1910); Nomenclator litterarius theologiae orthodoxae Russicae et Graecae recentioris (2 vols., Prague 1910); Theologia dogmatica orthodoxa (Ecclesiae-Graeco-Russicae) ad lumen catholicae doctrinae examinata et discussa (I, Florence 1911; II, ibid. 1913). These last two works remained incomplete. His last books are devoted to contemporary Russia: La politica asiatica dei bolcevichi (Bologna 1924); La geografia politica della Russia sovietica (Rome 1926).

Maurizio Gordillo