Pierre Garsias, adversaire de Jean Pic de la Mirandole, entre nominalisme et via communis

The study of the Determinationes magistrales, reply to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Apologia written by Pedro Garsias, allows to challenge the largely accepted view that the Italian humanist would have been the victim of the ‘ockhamistis’ and ‘nominalists’ who supposedly dominated in both the university of Paris and the Roman curia. As a matter of fact, Garsias, who played a prominent role during the process of 1487, openly criticises Ockham, has a liking for the via communis, and systematically draws from Thomas Aquinas’ works. The discovery that the section devoted to classify theological errors is a plagiarism of John of Torquemada Summa de ecclesia suggest that this condemnation, far from being the attack launched against a ‘conservative’ in theology by the adherents of the via moderna, should be interpreted as the application to a particular case of the rules for the detection of heresy formulated forty years before by a Tomist, sworn enemy of Ockham’s theology and ecclesiology.