Aonio Paleario

Aonio Paleario or Aonius Palearius (c. 1500 – July 3, 1570) was an Italian Christian termed a reformer.

Life

He was born about 1500 at Veroli, in the Roman Campagna. Other forms of his name are Antonio Della Paglia, A. Degli Pagliaricci.

In 1520 he went to Rome, where he entered the brilliant literary circle of Leo X. When Charles of Bourbon stormed Rome in 1527, Paleario went first to Perugia and then to Siena, where he settled as a teacher of Greek and Hebrew.

In 1536 his didactic poem in Latin hexameters, De immortalitate animarum, was published at Lyon. It is divided into three books, the first containing his proofs of the divine existence, and the remaining two the theological and philosophical arguments for immortality based on that postulate. The whole concludes with a rhetorical description of the occurrences of the Second Advent.

In 1542 the Inquisition made his tract Della Pienezza, sufficienza, et satisfazione della passione di Christo, or Libellus de morte Christi (The Benefit of Christ's Death), the basis of a charge of heresy, from which, however, he successfully defended himself. In Siena he wrote his Actio in pontifices romanos et eorum asseclas, a vigorous indictment, in twenty testimonia, against what he now believed to be the fundamental error of the Roman Church in subordinating Scripture to tradition, as well as against various particular doctrines, such as that of purgatory; it was not, however, printed until after his death (Leipzig, 1606).