Work · Renaissance & Humanism
On 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.
Introduction
Valla wrote the first version of “On Pleasure” around 1431; in it Leonardo Bruni speaks for the Stoics, Antonio Beccadelli, called Panormita, for the Epicureans and Niccolò Niccoli for Christianity. In later revisions, retitled “On the True and the False Good”, he replaced them with other humanists. The Stoic defends virtue, honestas, as the only good; the Epicurean replies that nature is good and that pleasure is what all beings seek, so that virtue has value only as a means to it. The Christian speaker rejects both pagan positions but keeps the word: the true good is the pleasure of eternal bliss, to which love of God leads. The dialogue is one of the first Renaissance texts to argue seriously for Epicurus. Whether Valla’s own sympathies lay with the Epicurean or with the Christian conclusion has long been disputed.
More works by Lorenzo Valla
Sources: Wikidata
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