John Baptist Tolomei

Giovanni Battista Tolomei, S.J., (3 December 1653 – 19 January 1726) was an Italian Jesuit priest, theologian and cardinal.

Tolomei was born of noble parentage at the ancestral castle of the Counts of Capraia (Latin: Camberaia) in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, located between Pistoia and Florence. At the age of fifteen, after an early schooling at Florence, he studied law at the University of Pisa. On 18 February 1673 he entered the Society of Jesus at Rome, and was ordained a priest in 1684. Although later made a cardinal, he was never raised to the rank of bishop.

Tolomei was master of eleven languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Illyrian, as well as his native Italian. He began his public career at Rome by expounding the Sacred Scriptures on Sunday evenings in the Church of the Gesù.

At the age of thirty Tolomei was elected in the General Congregation of the Society as its Procurator General, an office he held for the next five years, relinquishing it to take the Chair of Philosophy at the Roman College, (now the Gregorian University). Here his lecture-room was thronged. His lectures were printed in Rome in 1696 under the title of Philosophia mentis et sensuum, and demonstrated that, while loyal to the principles and method of Aristotle, he welcomed every discovery of his time in the natural sciences and wove these into his course. The lectures were reprinted in 1698 in Germany and evoked praise from the noted philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

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