Further Reading
Kamen, H. Historia de la Inquisitión en España y América.
Madrid, 1984. Lea, H. C. A History of the Inquisition of
Spain. 4 vols.
Henry Kamen
TORRE, ALFONSO DE LA (fl. mid-15th c.)
Theologian and writer in the vernacular active in the
mid-fi fteenth century, remembered nowadays as the
author of the Visión deleytable, a philosophical dialogue
and survey of the seven liberal arts, natural theology,
and ethics. The work is in large part a cento of older
texts, mostly unidentifi ed and at times heavily amplifi ed
and supplemented by the author, and bound together by
an allegorical dialogue. The Visión enjoyed a certain
currency in its own century and in the two following.
By the end of the seventeenth century it had undergone
eleven printings, had been translated into Catalan and
Italian and, unbelievably, back into Spanish.
What is most notable, indeed astonishing, about
Torre’s dialogue and the thought it expresses is the
fundamentally Averroist and rationalist direction of its
argument, especially of its theology. The main index
to this tendency is, of course, the author’s choice of
sources, in some instances unremarkable, in others quite
otherwise. Thus the passages on the liberal arts depend
largely on Isidore of Seville and Al-Ghaza ̄ li. The pages
on cosmology, on the infl uence of the spheres on the
sublunary world, are from a source Torre calls simply
“Hermes,” but which is in fact the Latin Asclepius, very
well known and infl uential in Western Christendom.
But the matter on natural theology comes not from a
Christian source, but from Maimonides’s Guide for
the Perplexed. This notable text brings to the Vision
unaltered the Maimonidean teaching about the nature
of God, eminently his existence, unity and incorporeity,
but also his power, omniscience, and Providence. One
should add that the passages in the Guide that express
views at odds with what we could call common Christian
theology—on providence, for example, or on the nature
of evil—are preserved in the Visión without embarrass-
ment. There is also in Torre’s text, as we should note in
fairness, a series of chapters that speak plain Christian
language. But the author makes absolutely no effort to
reconcile the sense of these pages with the rest of his
argument, and one might indeed reasonably guess that
this passage is a sop, a concession to the Christian reader,
who elsewhere in the work is induced to accept views
that at best are on the outer limits of orthodoxy.
The rationalist strain is sustained in the Visión in
passages entirely separate from those directly and exten-
sively dependent on the Guide. In a pair of lines early in
the work Torre alludes hastily to Maimonides’s theory
of prophecy, roughly the view that God speaks to his
prophets “mediante la lunbre yntelectual” (by means of
intellectual enlightenment). In a second short passage
he refers clearly to Maimonides’s notion that the Bible
speaks one language to the wise and learned and another
to the vulgar, or in Leo Strauss’s words, that Scripture “is
an esoteric text, and that its esoteric teaching is akin to
that of Aristotle.” More important, perhaps, the Visión’s
chapters on ethics make few signifi cant allusions to
Christianity, or indeed, even to the idea of rewards and
punishments in the other world.
Torre at one point says that the will of God can be
understood in two senses, as what he wills directly and as
what he wills virtually as he foresees the consequences
of his fi rst decision. Signifi cantly, this theme is not
Maimonidean; it savors of Christian scholasticism, and
is possibly of Scotist or nominalist tendency. In other
words, Torre’s rationalism is not an accident. When he
presents unmodifi ed Maimonidean teachings that are
at variance with those of Christian theology, the choice
of doctrine is not innocent; it is certainly not made in
ignorance. Torre was, as we have seen, a legitimate
theologian, a bachiller en teología, and the knowledge
of Christian divinity revealed in details of the course of
the Visión is fully professional. His choice of themes,
therefore, must have been fully deliberate. What, then,
are we to think of this strange book and its author? Was
Torre a crypto-Jew? Perhaps; the case is interesting.
One should note that the mixture in the Visión of Jew-
ish authorities and Christian is in no way alien to later
medieval Jewish Averroism; the conversion of Shlomo
Halevy/Pablo de Santa María was due in great part to
his early familiarity with Aquinas. Torre’s fi nal plea to
the Infante don Carlos not to show his book to a third
person is itself revealing. Maimonides himself lays it
down fi rmly that high doctrine should not be revealed
to the vulgar.
See also Averroës, Abu ‘L-Walı ̄ d Muhammad
B. Ahmad B. Rushd; Isidore of Seville, Saint;
MaimonidesFurther Reading
Strauss, L. How F a ̄ra ̄ b ̄ı Read Plato’s Laws. Damascus, 1957.
Torre, A. de la. Visión deleytable. 2 vols. Salamanca, 1991.
Charles FrakerTOSCANELLI, PAOLO DAL POZZO
(1397–May 1482)
Noted Florentine physician, mathematician, astronomer,
and leading cosmographer of his day. Born into a family
of rich Florentine merchants and bankers, Toscanelli
studied medicine (he is sometimes referred to as Paul
the Physician) at the University of Padua, the principal
seat of scientifi c learning in Italy. Here he acquired aTOSCANELLI, PAOLO DAL POZZO