Lorenzo Valla

Works

• 1431On Pleasure

  A dialogue in which a Stoic, an Epicurean and a Christian speaker debate the highest good; the Epicurean defends pleasure as natural, and the Christian speaker presents eternal bliss as the true pleasure.

• c. 1439Reworking of Dialectic and Philosophy

  A critique of scholastic logic and metaphysics that reduces Aristotle’s ten categories to three and measures philosophical terms against the usage of classical Latin.

• 1440On the Donation of Constantine

  Shows by historical and linguistic arguments that the document in which Emperor Constantine supposedly gave the Pope rule over the West is a later forgery.

Position

Valla is on the map as the humanist who made philology a method of criticism. His starting point is language: words have their meaning in the usage of good speakers and authors, and much of scholastic philosophy, he argued, consists of terms without such usage. In the “Repastinatio” he reduced Aristotle’s ten categories to three and the transcendentals to “res”. In the dialogue “On Free Will” he took up Boethius’ problem: God’s foreknowledge does not compel what it foresees, but why God’s will saves some and hardens others remains a mystery beyond philosophy. Applied to history, the same method exposed the Donation of Constantine; applied to the Bible, it compared the Latin Vulgate with the Greek New Testament. Erasmus edited these notes in 1505 and built on them, and Leibniz continued the dialogue on free will in the “Theodicy” (1710). The dialogue on pleasure made Valla an early witness of the Renaissance rehabilitation of Epicurus, though how far he shared the Epicurean speaker’s view is disputed. Contemporaries such as Poggio Bracciolini attacked him in bitter polemics; modern scholars such as Lodi Nauta ask whether his common-sense critique always did justice to the scholastic arguments it targeted.

Life & context

Lorenzo Valla was born in Rome in 1407 (some sources give 1406), the son of Luca della Valle, a lawyer from Piacenza who worked at the papal curia. He learned Latin and Greek in Rome, among others from the humanists Giovanni Aurispa and Rinuccio Aretino. After failing to obtain a post as papal secretary, he taught rhetoric at the University of Pavia from 1431 and left in 1433 after a polemic against the jurist Bartolus. From 1435 he served King Alfonso V of Aragon, from 1442 also King of Naples, as secretary; in these years he wrote most of his major works, among them the declamation against the Donation of Constantine (1440). In 1444 an inquisitorial tribunal in Naples proceeded against him, among other things because he denied that the apostles had composed the Apostles’ Creed; the king’s protection ended the case. In 1448 he returned to Rome, where Pope Nicholas V employed him as apostolic scribe and as translator of Thucydides and Herodotus; he also taught rhetoric at the university of Rome. Calixtus III made him a papal secretary in 1455. He died in Rome on 1 August 1457 and was buried in the Lateran basilica.

Further main works

• On Free Will (De libero arbitrio, c. 1439)
• The Elegances of the Latin Language (Elegantiae linguae Latinae, printed 1471)
• Annotations on the New Testament (Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum, ed. Erasmus 1505)