Abstract

The debate concerning the eternity of movement and the causal efficiency of God on the world was raised by Thomas Aquinas in his De aeternitate mundi, where he observed that no certain solution could be found to this issue, thus resorting to Christian faith. The fifteenth-century Aristotelian school of Padua (Paul of Venice, Gaetano da Thiene, Agostino Nifo, Elijah del Medigo, Pietro Pomponazzi) provided a philosophical solution by observing that the action of God can be described as a ‘conservative cause’, since it operates on something which is uncreated and eternal. This solution, however, represented a theological heresy. In the sixteenth century Javelli devoted some of his Quaestiones super Physicam to this issue, and he observed that the recent commentators preferred to ‘glorify the arguments of the Philosopher’ (i.e., Aristotle) rather than to defend Aquinas’ theology and Christian truth. In this paper, I will consider Javelli’s own solutions to this long-standing debate, and place them in the context of the contemporary opposition to other professors of a Scotist or Averroist orientation.