Tamburini, Pietro

TAMBURINI, PIETRO. - Jansenist theologian, b. January 1, 1739 in Brescia, d. March 14, 1827. He was the brain and soul of Italian Jansenism. The terms of his life and the scope of his work (more than thirty publications) mark the curve described in Italy by the heresy of Jansenius.

If Scipione de' Ricci (v.) had in that movement an importance that was almost existential, territorial, political and at the same time choreographic and propagandistic, T. with his university teaching, his varied literary activity, with his participation as promoter at the Synod of Pistoia (v.) and the influence he exercised in the religious and political circles of the time, dominates it intellectually, uniting in himself the merits and defects and oscillations of the heresy in its geographical Italian appearance: an impetuous polemicist, an Enlightenment theologian, now a supporter of absolutist government, now a defender of republican government. Yet he was always consistent with his Gallican jurisdictional system and with Jansenist theories, thus making it possible to establish, in a bibliography so discordant, as the discriminating criterion of Italian Jansenism, a theological and jurisdictional constant. If he touched upon politics it was through an inevitable connection of existence, through opportunism and marginally, and this indicates the influence that he exercised only indirectly in the national Risorgimento and in the liberalism of the 19th century. A popularizer, not an original thinker: in theology and in canon law referring to the appellants and to the French and Dutch jurisdictionalists, adding to them only liturgical and practical observations deriving from incidental controversies. He began his education in his native city, studying with the Filippini, until, ordained a priest in 1760, three years later he went to Rome where he was prefect of studies at the Irish College. In Rome he met several Jansenists, among them de' Ricci and the count of Bellegarde. In 1778 he was a professor at the University of Pavia and in 1781 prefect of studies at the Austro-Hungarian College-seminary, transferred by Joseph II from Rome to Pavia. He prepared, directed and publicized the Synod of Pistoia of 1786, and during the French Revolution he was first holder of the chair of moral philosophy and natural law at the University of Pavia and then professor at the Lyceum of Brescia. After the French Revolution he was elected director of the Faculty of Law at the University of Pavia, where he remained until his death, laden with years and excommunications, as he himself said. He seems to have made a good death with an intimate reconciliation, even if no official and clear retraction of errors is on record. During his lifetime he began the publication of the Opera omnia, which was to consist of 41 volumes, but which remained interrupted. His principal work: Ethica christiana (4 vols., Pavia 1783). In the theological doctrine of Grace, T. depends on Baius, in the concept of Catholic hierarchy on Sarpi, on the French Gallicans, on the Jansenist Van Espen and on the work of Van Hontheim; in teaching and in sacramental practice he codified his thought in the acts of the Pistoian Synod, revealing himself against attrictionism, the probabilist moral system and the limbo for children who died without Baptism; concerning the relations between State and Church he repeats Richer, Dupin, De Marca, Febronius. In Italy he was among the first philosophers to renounce the wretched system of Scholasticism and to read and recommend the reading of Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, not indifferent to the sensualism of Locke and Condillac and to the theories of Hobbes. He adhered spiritually to the schismatic Church of Utrecht, an unprejudiced assertor of ecclesiastical tolerance against the presumed intolerance of the Holy See, a pugnacious anti-Curialist. But one cannot ignore the weak side of his teaching, the interest that his publications aroused to the point of marking the point of contradiction of the religious polemic, the contribution to the reawakening of sacred studies even if in a manner too Enlightenment-inspired, without however ever arriving, first in the French Revolution and then in the orientation of early nineteenth-century liberalism, directly at an idea of liberty and national independence, but only indirectly behind the old barriers of ecclesiastical and political absolutism.

Benvenuto Matteucci