Tabarelli, Riccardo

TABARELLI, RICCARDO. - Stigmatine theologian, b. at Cembra (Trentino) in 1859, d. at Rome on 9 Oct. 1909.

He taught philosophy and scholastic theology, first in the schools of his Congregation and then in Rome at the Apollinare and at the Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, of which he was an urban member. He took part in the neo-scholastic renewal, stimulated especially by the contacts he had in his youth with Fr. Kleutgen (v.), from whom he drew the solidity of principles and the sureness of judgment in identifying the new errors and in the use of positive theology, which was then taking its first steps. His direct knowledge of the tendencies of German philosophy and theology, his vast general culture and a particular effectiveness in framing problems gave his teaching such a lively tension that his surviving pupils, among them His Holiness Pius XII, still recall the sure and strong orientation he imparted. And Fr. T.'s school not only passed unharmed through the modernist crisis, but with its sound spirit of modernity contributed effectively to repelling it. He also fought Rosminianism (v. L'ottimismo del mondo, Parma 1887), positivism, rationalism and the anti-Thomism of Frohschammer in a series of essays published in the Bollettino dell'Accademia di S. Tommaso. Of his theological courses, the De Deo Uno (Rome 1906), which covers qq. 2-14 of the Sum. Theol., 1st part, and the De Gratia Christi (ibid. 1908), a vast commentary on qq. 109-11 of the 1st-2nd part, have been published. Fr. T., although he cleared Rosmini of the accusation of pantheism, saw in his conception of being a direct derivation from German philosophy, in particular from the pantheism of Krause (De Deo Uno, cit., p. 125). In the controversy over the efficacy of Grace, impressed especially by the terminology of certain 17th-century Thomists, which seemed to him damaging to human freedom, he inclined toward a form of mitigated congruism (De Gratia, cit., pp. 260 ff., 313 ff.) which, even if it cannot persuade on the ground of strict Thomism, testifies to a sincere effort of understanding (acknowledged also by the Dominican Revue d. sciences phil. et théol., 2 [1908], p. 804 ff.) to save the intrinsic efficacy of Grace and to render divine foreknowledge independent of any extrinsic object.

Cornelio Fabro