ON CHARITY

Dissertazione anti-Bolgeniana sopra la carità difesa dal suo autore l’abate Gioacchino Cortes contro il ch. Signor abate Gianvincenzo Bolgeni. 

Rome, Salomoni, 1793. 

8vo, pp. 250, [4 (index and errata)]; woodcut device to title; some spotting throughout, but otherwise largely clean; in contemporary Italian vellum over boards, spine lettered directly in gilt within decorative panel, edges speckled in red and green; slight wear to extremities, with small loss to vellum to fore-edge of lower board; contemporary ownership inscription ‘De Segovia’ to upper pastedown.

£450

Approximately:
US $553€518

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Dissertazione anti-Bolgeniana sopra la carità difesa dal suo autore l’abate Gioacchino Cortes contro il ch. Signor abate Gianvincenzo Bolgeni. 

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First edition of this response to and attempted refutation of Bolgeni’s Della carità o amor di Dio by the Spanish Jesuit Joachim Cortès.  Della carità was the best-known work of the Jesuit theologian and controversialist Gianvincenzo Bolgeni, in which he had argued, against the Dominican de Rubeis, that the theological virtue of charity was rooted in the love of God due to God’s goodness to us, rather than due to intrinsic and absolute goodness.  This approach unsurprisingly resulted in a series of responses, often from Bolgeni’s former Jesuit confrères, among them Cortès, who published his Anti-Bolgeniana de Amore Dei dissertatio in 1790.  Here, Cortès responds to Bolgeni’s reply, addressing Bolgeni’s work in detail, quoting chapter and verse, and responding to each of Bolgeni’s attacks on Cortès, in which the Italian had attempted to argue that Cortès was a defender of Jansenist doctrines. 

OCLC records copies at the National Libraries of France and Mexico, and at LMU Munich, with ICCU adding copies in Bologna, Spoleto, and Faenza, only the last of these with the errata leaf. 

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