Tra dialogo umanistico e teologia controversistica. Il De iustitia et libertate christiana di Girolamo Seripando

One of the most obvious consequences of the Protestant Reformation was the change in the nature of the dialogue on religious themes. In the Europe of the sixteenth century, religious dialogue is no longer a dialogue between different faiths through a common ratio (as it had always been in the Middle Ages). The Protestant crisis calls into question the very foundations of the Christian faith, for which it is useless to appeal to a dialogical reason. The treatise De iustitia et libertate christiana by the Neapolitan Augustinian friar Girolamo Seripando (1492-1563) is an important example of the crisis of the model of dialogue in the sixteenth century. The work, in which Seripando examines the Tractatus de libertate christiana by Luther, remained unfinished: it is half humanist dialogue (based on the model of Cicero’s dialogues), and half controversialist treatise. This paper aims to examine the reasons why the work remained incomplete and the distance between the Christian humanism of Seripando and the Lutheran theological setting.