This is an entry on a most
interesting personage of the era created by the overlapping of the two
seemingly incompatible entities: the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. First, as a
preamble, here is his short biography taken from one of my staple reference
sources: Webster’s Biographical
Dictionary.---
“Valla.
Lorenzo, Latin Laurentius. 1406-1457.
Italian humanist; protégé of Popes Nicholas V and Calixtus VI; papal secretary
(1455 ff.). Among his works are De
Elegantia Latinae Linguae (6 books, 1471), Latin translations of Homer,
Herodotus, and Thucydides, and critical and theological treatises.”
...The coming of the Renaissance
in Europe can be splendidly illustrated by the life and career of the Italian
priest, humanist, and one of the greatest linguistic scholars of the Latin
language in history, greatly admired by Erasmus himself, Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457).
His most memorable achievement, according to all biographies, was proving that
the infamous Donation of Constantine had
been a latter-day Christian forgery. It goes without saying that the Roman
Catholic Church could not be happy with this most unwelcome exposure of one of
its most important dirty tricks, yet Valla was never punished for the harm he
caused, but was actually rewarded by two Popes, not exactly for his
iconoclastic exploits, but rather in spite of them.
Regarding the said forgery, let
me quote this very instructive story in Bertrand Russell’s succinct retelling.
(In his History of Western Philosophy,
Book Two, Part II, Chapter vii.)
“In
order to give an air of antique to Pepin’s gift (seeking
his own Imperial legitimacy from the Church, the father of Charlemagne, King
Pepin, in addition to providing the essential military protection, donated to
the Pope large territories in Italy, which donation was not exactly legal in
the eyes of the Eastern Church, and in the eyes of all other secular rulers of
Europe), churchmen forged a document,
purporting to be a decree issued by the Emperor Constantine, by which, when he
founded the New Rome (that is, Constantinople in
the Eastern Roman Empire!), he bestowed upon
the Pope the Old Rome (remember the Russian
doctrine of the Three Romes: it was
not at all farfetched, but perfectly consistent with the Western own
designation of the first two Romes!!!) and all
its Western territories. This bequest, which was the basis of the Pope’s temporal
power, was accepted as genuine by the whole of the subsequent Middle Ages. It
was first rejected as a forgery, in the time of the Renaissance, by Lorenzo
Valla in 1439. He had written a book ‘on
the elegancies of the Latin language,’
which naturally were absent in the production of the eighth century. Oddly
enough, after he had published his book against the Donation of Constantine, as
well as a treatise in praise of Epicurus (here
is another amazing heresy on Vella’s part, stanchly tolerated by the Popes), he was made apostolic secretary by Pope Nicholas V, who
cared more for Latinity than for the Church…”
Interestingly, later on in his
book (History of Western Philosophy, Book
Three, Part I, Chapter i), Russell is adding the following toward his discussion
of the Valla phenomenon:
“…The
Italians were in earnest about culture, but not about morals and religion; even
in the minds of ecclesiastics, elegant latinity would cover a multitude of
sins. Nicholas V (1447-1455), the first humanist Pope, gave papal offices to
scholars whose learning he respected regardless of other considerations;
Lorenzo Valla, an Epicurean, and the man who proved the “Donation of Constantine” to be a forgery, who ridiculed the style
of the Vulgate (St. Jerome’s hallowed translation
of the Bible) and accused Saint Augustine of
heresy, was made apostolic secretary. This policy of encouraging humanism,
rather than piety or orthodoxy, continued until the sack of Rome in 1517.” (Not by accident, I am sure, Luther’s theological, and soon
thereafter political, rebellion happened around the same time!!!)
Well, all the more power to the
lucky Lorenzo Valla, to the humanist Popes, and to the Renaissance as such. I am
sure that my good reader has been able to appreciate the importance of this little-remembered
man, and of my decision to give him this separate entry, for the understanding
of that critical period in the history of our Western Civilization. As always,
this is not an in-depth essay about the man, and I expect the interested reader
to fill his or her own edificational blanks, which is the main purpose of such
entries...
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