Apologia pro Jul. Caesare Vanino

presented to the people in sermons. Thus, the more certain some of his own people were about the salvation of Aristotle, * the more certain he himself was about his own salvation.

And now he had reached the flower of that age in which it is fitting to hunt for honors and to gather the fruits of completed labor, when by some fate, which is almost native to the students of secret learning, he began to be buffeted by adverse fortune. For not only did the name of his teacher Pomponazzi stir up great envy from the Clergy against him; but he also did not prove himself to them by shaking off the trifles of the Scholastics, the light structures of arguments, and the Chrysippean nets intricate logical traps named after the Stoic Chrysippus in arduous and abstruse difficulties. † There were some, however, who both respected him and fostered his clear-sighted genius and uncommon knowledge. Among these, Cardinal Robert Ubaldinus, Bishop of Montepulciano original: "Politianus" and Nuncio of the Apostolic See to the Most Christian King, gave him the faculty of reading all books, ‡ so that he might write a History of the Council of Trent. ⸸ This was an arduous and great work, which it was fitting to entrust only to a most eminent man.

WRITINGS.

Vanini, having found an opportunity to deserve well of the Clergy, wrote eighteen books for the Most Holy Ecumenical

• The Cologne Masters in Agrippa, On the Vanity of the Sciences, chapter 54. Fortunio Liceto, On the Piety of Aristotle, Udine 1645, in quarto.
  † Vanini, Dialogue 1, page 2 of On the Secrets of Nature.
  ‡ Vanini, Exercise 8 at the end of the Amphitheatre.
  ⸸ Vanini, Exercise 16, pages 105 and 109 of the Amphitheatre.