Pietro TAMBURINI. — Jansenist theologian, b. 10 Jan. 1739 in Brescia, d. 14 March 1827. He was the brain and soul of Italian Jansenism. The course of his life and the scope of his work (more than thirty publications) mark the curve described in Italy by the heresy of Jansenius.
While Scipione de’ Ricci (q.v.) played in that movement a role that was almost existential, territorial, political, and at the same time theatrical and propagandistic, Tamburini, with his university teaching, his varied literary activity, his role as a promoter at the Synod of Pistoia (q.v.), and his influence in the religious and political circles of the time, intellectually dominated the movement. He embodied both the virtues and defects, and the oscillations, of Jansenism in its Italian manifestation: an impetuous polemicist, an Enlightenment theologian, now a supporter of absolutist government, now a defender of republicanism. Yet he remained consistently faithful to his Gallican jurisdictional system and to Jansenist theories, thus enabling a coherent theological and jurisdictional criterion to be established amid so much discordant bibliography. If he touched upon politics, it was only incidentally, opportunistically, and unavoidably, which indicates the merely indirect influence he exerted on the Risorgimento and on 19th-century liberalism. A popularizer rather than an original thinker, in theology and canon law he drew upon the French and Dutch appellants and jurisdictionalists, adding only liturgical and practical observations derived from contingent controversies. He began his education in his native city under the Filippini, and after ordination to the priesthood in 1760, he went to Rome three years later, where he served as prefect of studies at the Irish College. In Rome he met several Jansenists, including de’ Ricci and the Count of Bellegarde. In 1778 he was professor at the University of Pavia, and in 1781 he became prefect of studies at the Austro-Hungarian College-Seminary, transferred from Rome to Pavia by Joseph II. He prepared, directed, and disseminated the Synod of Pistoia of 1786. During the French Revolution he first held the chair of moral philosophy and natural law at the University of Pavia, and later became a professor at the Liceo 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, “burdened with years and excommunications,” as he himself said. He appears to have died a good death with inward reconciliation, though no official and clear retraction of his errors is recorded. During his lifetime he began the publication of his Opera omnia, intended to comprise 41 volumes, but this remained incomplete. His principal work: *Ethica christiana* (4 vols., Pavia 1783).
In his theological doctrine of grace, Tamburini depended on Baius; in his concept of Catholic hierarchy on Sarpi, the French Gallicans, the Jansenist Van Espen, and the work of Van Hontheim. In his teaching and sacramental practice he codified his thought in the acts of the Synod of Pistoia, opposing attributionism, probabilist moral theology, and the limbo of unbaptized infants. On Church–State relations he followed Richer, Dupin, De Marca, and Febronius. In Italy he was among the first philosophers to renounce “scholastic thought” and to read and recommend Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, not indifferent to the sensism of Locke and Condillac or to the theories of Hobbes. Spiritually he adhered to the schismatic Church of Utrecht, an unscrupulous advocate of ecclesiastical tolerance against the alleged “intolerance” of the Holy See, a pugnacious anti-curialist. Yet one cannot ignore the significance of his teaching and the interest aroused by his publications, which marked the turning point in religious controversy and contributed to the revival of sacred studies—albeit in an overly Enlightenment spirit—without ever, before the French Revolution or in the orientation of early 19th-century liberalism, directly advancing the idea of national freedom and independence, but only indirectly, behind the old barriers of ecclesiastical and political absolutism.