Justified True Belief

(●) The scholar who proved that the charter behind the popes’ earthly kingdom had been written four centuries after the emperor who was supposed to have signed it. + Imagine a stranger knocks on your door with a yellowed deed and says the land your house stands on was signed over to his family by your great-grandfather. You cannot ask your great-grandfather. You cannot test the ink. But you can read the thing, and halfway down the second sheet you notice that it mentions a road that was not laid until 1962, and that it spells a family name the way the town spelled it two generations later. You have not touched the paper, and you already know. That is roughly what Lorenzo Valla did to the Donation of Constantine, a document in which the emperor Constantine was supposed to have handed the bishop of Rome the city of Rome, the whole of Italy, and the western half of the empire. He did it with philology, which is simply the close study of how words were actually used in a particular time and place: who said satrap and who did not, what a diadem was made of in the fourth century, when a certain city first had a bishop worth mentioning. Valla read the Donation the way a good ear reads a bad forgery of a letter, and he heard the eighth century speaking in it from beginning to end. For Christian readers he matters because the tools he sharpened are the ones we still reach for whenever a text has to be dated, weighed, or read in its own century. Valla also spent years setting the Latin Bible of his day beside Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and writing down, line by line, where the Latin had drifted. Those notes sat unread in an abbey library in Brabant for half a century until a Dutch scholar named Erasmus found them in 1504 and put them in print, and out of that came the printed Greek New Testament and everything that has been built on it since. One fact about him is worth keeping: the pope whose title deeds he had demolished, Nicholas V, brought him to Rome, put him on the payroll, and set him to translating Greek historians. His birth year is not settled; 1405, 1406 and 1407 all have defenders, 1407 is the conventional choice, and every age given for him is loose by a year or two.

(●) 1407 AD: Born in Rome, or perhaps a year or two earlier, a few streets from the papal offices where his family made its living. + The Vallas had come down to Rome from Piacenza in the north. Lorenzo’s father Luca was a lawyer who argued cases in the papal courts, and an uncle on his mother’s side, Melchiorre Scrivani, held a post in the papal secretariat, the office that drafted the letters by which the popes governed. This was a household where a career was made by writing better Latin than the next man, and the boy was given the best teachers in Italy for it. He learned his Latin from Leonardo Bruni, the Florentine chancellor and historian, and his Greek from Giovanni Aurispa, who had come back from Constantinople with more Greek manuscripts than any man in the West. At about twenty-four he applied for a place in the papal secretariat, hoping to step into his uncle’s shoes, and was turned down. He was told he was too young. Among those who kept him out was Poggio Bracciolini, the most celebrated Latinist in the curia, which is the name for the whole household of officials, judges and secretaries through which a pope actually governed, rather as a government is more than its prime minister. The two of them would still be tearing at each other twenty years later. As it happened, that refusal set the shape of his life. A man who had been given a comfortable desk in Rome at twenty-four might never have written a word that anyone remembered.

(●) 1431 AD: He took a chair of eloquence at Pavia and lost it by insulting the lawyers. + Pavia had one of the great law faculties of Europe, and Valla arrived to teach eloquence, which in a fifteenth-century university meant the art of writing and speaking Latin well. He was in his mid-twenties, newly ordained a priest, and entirely without the instinct that tells a young man to keep his opinions of his senior colleagues to himself. Here he wrote the first version of On Pleasure, a dialogue in which three speakers argue about what the highest good is. The first is a Stoic, holding the old Roman view that virtue is the only good and that the appetites are to be mastered and, where possible, silenced. The second is an Epicurean, holding that pleasure is the measure of a good life and that nature gave us our delights for a reason. The third is a Christian, and he wins the argument, but he wins it from the Epicurean’s side of the table: heaven, he says, is not the abolition of delight but its fulfilment. That was a daring thing to put in a young priest’s first book. In the fifteenth century, calling a man an Epicurean was not far from calling him a glutton who did not believe in the judgment, and the reputation stuck to Valla for the rest of his life. Then he wrote an open letter about Bartolus of Sassoferrato, the most revered jurist of the previous century, whose commentaries every student in the building was required to swallow whole. Valla’s charge was not that Bartolus reasoned badly. It was that Bartolus wrote wretched Latin, and that a man who cannot handle the language of the Roman law has no business telling anyone what the Roman law says. It is hard to overstate how this landed in a law faculty. Valla had to leave, and for a few years he moved between Milan and Genoa, tried Rome once more, and found no patron anywhere.

(●) 1435 AD: He went to work for a king who was at war with the pope. + Alfonso V of Aragon was fighting for the throne of Naples against a rival backed by Pope Eugenius IV, and he collected scholars the way other princes collected horses. Valla became his secretary and followed the court, sometimes literally following the army; one of his books was finished in a military camp. The sources give the year variously between 1433 and 1437, and 1435 is where modern scholarship settles. Those years in the south, better than a dozen of them, were the making of him. Almost everything he is remembered for was written in those years: the treatise on the Donation, the six books on Latin usage, the dialogue on free will, the first draft of the New Testament notes, and an attack on the logic of the schoolmen. Scholasticism was the way theology and philosophy were taught in the medieval universities: you defined your terms with Aristotle’s equipment, divided a question into its parts, put the objections in order, and answered them one at a time. It was rigorous, and at its best, in Thomas Aquinas, it was magnificent. Valla thought that by his own day it had become an industry of hair-splitting conducted in Latin no Roman would have recognised. He also acquired a court’s worth of enemies, and by his own admission the years at Naples were not his most disciplined. What he had, for the first time, was a protector powerful enough to let him write what he actually thought.

(●) 1440 AD: He took the Donation of Constantine apart, clause by clause. + The Donation was a document of about three thousand words, written as a decree of Constantine the Great. In it the emperor recounts how Pope Sylvester cured him of leprosy and baptized him; grants Sylvester and his successors authority over the other four patriarchates and over all the clergy of the world; hands over the Lateran palace, the imperial diadem, and the insignia of empire; gives the Roman clergy the rank of the Roman senate; and then, in the most theatrical touch of all, announces that he is moving his capital to Byzantium so that an earthly emperor will not crowd the pope in Rome. Notice how much work one word is doing in the second of those clauses. A patriarchate was one of the ancient mother churches of Christendom, each with a bishop of the first rank over a whole region: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, with Rome as the fifth. To be handed authority over the other four is to be handed the churches of the entire East in a single line of a decree. The document had been sitting in the collections of canon law, the church’s own body of law governing everything from a bishop’s election to a marriage case, since the ninth century. It was in Gratian’s Decretum, the textbook every canon lawyer in Europe worked from, and popes had been citing it since the eleventh century. Valla did not write a cautious monograph. He wrote a declamatio, a set-piece oration of the kind students practised in the rhetorical schools, and he wrote it hot. He impersonates Constantine’s sons begging their father not to give the empire away. He impersonates Sylvester refusing the gift on the ground that the keys are authority enough. He turns on the forger and calls him names. And running underneath the theatre is a piece of sober reasoning that had never been done so thoroughly before: the document cannot be dated to the century it claims, because nothing in that century knows about it and everything in its own language gives it away. He was not the first to doubt it. Nicholas of Cusa had argued in 1433 that the Donation was spurious, and Reginald Pecock in England reached the same conclusion on his own a few years after Valla. But it was Valla who made it stick, and he knew what he was doing to his own prospects. A treatise that ends by urging the Romans to take their city back, written by a secretary of a king at war with the pope, is not a career move.

(●) 1444 AD: Friars put him on trial for heresy, and the king closed the court. + The flashpoint was smaller than anyone expected. A Franciscan preacher in Naples, Antonio da Bitonto, told his congregation that the Apostles’ Creed had been composed by the twelve apostles, each of them contributing one of its twelve articles. Valla said in public that there was no evidence for this whatever and that the story was a pious legend. On its own that was a small enough remark, the sort of thing a scholar says at dinner. Coming from the man who had just proved the popes’ charter a fake, it sounded like the next instalment, and the sermons against him wrote themselves. An inquisitorial tribunal was convened: a panel with authority to examine him on his faith and to require a public retraction of whatever it found wanting. The scene as it comes down to us is very much in character, though it comes through later retellings rather than through any record of the hearing. Asked what he believed, Valla is said to have answered that he believed what holy mother church believed, adding that she herself understood nothing about it, but that he believed as she believed. Then he walked out, went to the king, and asked him to stop the proceedings, and Alfonso told the friars to leave his secretary alone. The matter was dropped. Valla afterwards wrote an Apologia addressed to Eugenius IV, part defence and part application for a job, since he had never given up wanting the Roman post he had been refused at twenty-four. On the point that started it he was simply right: no one now claims the twelve wrote the Creed between them.

(●) 1448 AD: The pope whose title deeds he had destroyed brought him to Rome and paid him to translate Greek. + Eugenius IV died in 1447, and his successor Nicholas V was a bookish man who had spent his own career hunting manuscripts and who founded the library that became the Vatican’s. He wanted the whole of Greek literature turned into Latin, and he wanted the best Greek in Italy to do it. He sent for Valla. No retraction was demanded and none was offered. Valla was made a scriptor, a copyist and drafter in the papal chancery, and later a papal secretary under Callixtus III, the office he had been denied a quarter of a century earlier. Callixtus also gave him a canonry at St John Lateran, a salaried place among the clergy of the pope’s own cathedral. He earned it. He began Thucydides in 1448 and finished in 1452, producing the first complete Latin version of the History of the Peloponnesian War, and then turned to the nine books of Herodotus. He also went on quarrelling. Poggio Bracciolini, the man who had helped keep him out of the secretariat at twenty-four and now a colleague in the same curia, attacked his Latin, and Valla answered with a series of pamphlets that are brilliant, filthy, and impossible to defend. Something good did come out of them. Forced in the middle of that exchange to justify his New Testament notes against the charge that he was laying hands on holy things, he wrote the one sentence from the whole squalid quarrel that people still quote (T4).

(●) 1457 AD: In March he stood in a Dominican church to praise Thomas Aquinas, and by August he was dead. + On 7 March 1457, the feast of Thomas Aquinas, Valla gave the commemorative oration at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Dominican headquarters in Rome. Asking the century’s loudest critic of scholastic theology to praise the greatest of the scholastics was a curious invitation, and the Dominicans seem to have known exactly what they were doing. What they got was praise and a warning in the same breath. Valla honoured the vastness of Thomas’s learning and the seriousness of the man, and then said that theology had gone wrong by building itself on Aristotle’s metaphysics, and that it should go back to Scripture and to the fathers who wrote closest to the apostles. He was not asking for less theology. He was asking for theology done out of the texts. He died in Rome on 1 August 1457, in his early fifties, and was buried in the Lateran beneath a great bronze tablet carrying the ancient Roman law that conferred power on the emperor Vespasian. It would be hard to invent a more fitting slab to lie under. That law is the Roman people handing an emperor his authority, which is precisely the point Valla had pressed against the Donation: what the senate and people gave, an emperor was not free to give away (T1). A German traveller recorded seeing the tomb and its epitaph in 1570, so tomb and epitaph were both still standing a hundred and thirteen years after the burial. They are gone now, destroyed in the very years when Valla’s books were being put on the Index, the list Rome drew up of books a Catholic was forbidden to read, and most likely in 1576, when Gregory XIII had the bronze carried off to the Capitol. A memorial in the Lateran marks him, but it is not his tombstone.

What He Taught

(T1) A charter that leaves no trace in its own century is not a charter. + Suppose a neighbour claims your garden on the strength of an agreement your grandfathers made. The first question is not whether his copy looks old. The first question is whether anything else in the world behaves as though that agreement happened: a fence moved, a payment recorded, a cousin who remembers the row. If the deed is the only witness to itself, something is wrong. Valla put that question to the Donation before he asked a single thing about its wording, and he put it at length. Here is what he found. - Nobody in the fourth century noticed. Constantine gave away the western empire, and not one historian of his own generation mentions it. Not one coin, not one inscription, not one imperial law refers to it. - Nobody afterwards behaved as if it were true. The emperors went on ruling Rome and Italy for centuries, appointing officials, collecting taxes, and nobody produced the document to stop them. The bishops of Rome went on being subjects. - The story it rests on is a legend. The Donation opens with Constantine’s leprosy and his baptism by Sylvester. The oldest and best sources say he was baptized at the end of his life, elsewhere, by someone else. - An emperor could not have done it anyway. An emperor holds the empire in trust; he is not a landowner disposing of a farm. The senate and people were not asked, and by Roman law they had to be. That last point is worth pausing on, because it shows the sort of argument Valla was willing to make to a pope’s face. He was saying that even if every word of the parchment were genuine, and every signature on it real, the gift would still be void, in the way that a handshake selling you a public park is void however sincere both parties were. Then he turned to the words.

(Q) "For during some centuries now, either they have not known that the Donation of Constantine is spurious and forged, or else they themselves forged it, and their successors walking in the same way of deceit as their elders have defended as true what they knew to be false." + Source: Lorenzo Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, the exordium, which is the name for the opening section of a formal oration (Christopher B. Coleman translation, 1922, p. 25). This is the charge itself, and it arrives only after several pages in which Valla steadies himself for the consequences of making it. He has just admitted that he is writing against the one man on earth who can excommunicate him, that is, cut him off from the sacraments and from the fellowship of the church, and that no king or governor could protect him if the pope chose to act.

(T2) A forged document convicts itself out of its own mouth. + A letter dated 1958 that mentions someone’s email address is finished, and no expert testimony is required. The giveaway has a name: an anachronism, a thing out of its own time. You might well think that a careful forger would simply avoid them, and a careful forger certainly tries. The trouble is that nobody can write in a language he has not heard. A man composing a decree of Constantine in the eighth century will reach, without noticing, for the words of the eighth century, because those are the words in his ear. This is Valla’s permanent contribution, and he worked it like a prosecutor taking a witness through his own statement. - Satraps in the Roman senate. The Donation has Constantine decree the gift "together with all our satraps and the whole Senate." Satrap is a Persian word for a provincial governor. It was never a Roman office, and it turns up in Latin documents at Rome only from the middle of the eighth century, which is where the Donation comes from. - A crown of purest gold. The forger hands Sylvester the imperial diadem and explains helpfully that a diadem is a crown, adding that it is of purest gold and precious gems. In Constantine’s day a diadem was a band of cloth. Only a man who had never seen one, living long after the thing itself had changed, would need to explain the word and then get it wrong. - A capital that did not exist yet. The document has Constantine name Constantinople among the great patriarchal sees at a moment when the city had not been founded, and it uses Constantinopolis in the same breath as promising to go and build it. - Latin that Rome did not speak. Page after page of the thing confuses words a fourth-century chancery would have kept apart, and reaches for terms belonging to the papal office of the 750s. Valla put all this together into a principle: a document is dated by its own language, whatever it says about itself. That is now the ordinary equipment of every historian, every textual critic, and every Christian who wants to know when a Gospel manuscript was copied.

(Q) "What! How do you want to have satraps come in here? Numskull, blockhead! Do the Caesars speak thus; are Roman decrees usually drafted thus? Whoever heard of satraps being mentioned in the councils of the Romans?" + Source: Lorenzo Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, on the opening clause of the Donation (Christopher B. Coleman translation, 1922, p. 85). Valla has just quoted the Donation’s first sentence and is now speaking directly to the forger, whom he has been calling Sinon after the Greek who talked Troy into opening its gates. The abuse is not decoration. It is how a declamatio was performed, and the accusation inside it is exact: one foreign word in one clause fixes the century (T2).

(T3) Latin is not a dead ornament, and wherever the Roman tongue lives Rome is still standing. + Anyone who has learned a language as an adult knows the difference between the rules in the textbook and the way people actually talk. You can be word-perfect and still say something no native speaker would say. Valla’s great book, the Elegantiae linguae Latinae, six books on the usage of the Latin language, was an attempt to close exactly that gap for a language whose native speakers had all been dead for a thousand years. The method was the interesting part. Where earlier teachers laid down rules, Valla went to the Roman writers themselves, gathered how Cicero and Quintilian and Livy had in fact used a word, and let the usage settle the rule. What came out of that patience was thousands of small observations arranged word by word: what this verb governs, how these two near-synonyms differ from each other, which construction belongs to Rome and which one crept in later. The book circulated in manuscript from the 1440s, was printed in 1471, and went through something close to sixty editions in the following sixty-five years. Erasmus, who was not lavish with praise, said that for Latin there was no better guide than Valla. Behind the drudgery sat a conviction that has more in it than it first appears. If a word means what a community of speakers used it to mean, then meaning is a historical fact, recoverable by evidence and not by cleverness. That is the same conviction that unmasked the Donation, and it is the conviction underneath every serious attempt to read an ancient text, the Scriptures included. Valla also thought the loss of good Latin was the loss of something Christian. The church’s fathers had written in it; its theology had been thought in it; a generation that could no longer hear the difference between Jerome and a thirteenth-century commentator had lost its access to its own past.

(Q) "For there is the Roman empire wherever the Roman tongue holds sway." + Source: Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiae linguae Latinae, preface to Book I (translated from the Latin: "Ibi namque Romanum imperium est, ubicumque Romana lingua dominatur"). The preface is a lament and a boast at once. The legions are gone, the provinces are gone, and what is left of Rome is a language that scholars, lawyers and priests from Poland to Portugal still think in. A few lines earlier Valla calls it a great sacrament, the Latin speech, which is startling language to use of a grammar book and tells you how seriously he meant it.

(T4) The Latin Bible is a translation, and correcting a translation is not correcting Scripture. + Two friends read the same novel, one in the original French and one in an English version made ninety years ago, and they argue about a scene because the old translator softened a word. Neither of them thinks the novelist wrote two different books. They think one of them is reading the author and the other is reading a translator. The Bible of the Latin West was the Vulgate, the version largely made by Jerome around the end of the fourth century, and by Valla’s day it had been copied by hand for a thousand years and was quoted in sermons, canon law and theology as though its Latin were the words God gave. Valla set four Latin copies beside four Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and worked through them, writing down what he found. Most of his notes are small: a tense rendered loosely, a Greek particle flattened, a copyist’s slip repeated for centuries. One note turned out not to be small. Where the Greek Gospels have John the Baptist and then Jesus preach metanoeite, a word that means change your mind, turn, think again, the Latin read paenitentiam agite, do penance. In Greek the command reaches into the man himself and asks him for a different mind. In Latin, by the fifteenth century, it named a sacrament with a procedure attached, the one a parishioner went through when he confessed his sins to a priest, received absolution, and was given something to do by way of satisfaction. Those are not the same instruction, and Valla noted the gap. Erasmus printed the note, then changed the Latin word in his own edition, and when Luther opened his ninety-five theses on that same verse in 1517 he was standing on ground Valla had cleared (Matthew 4:17). None of this made Valla a despiser of Jerome or of the Latin Bible. His point was smaller and harder to answer: a translation is a human work, it can be checked, and checking it is reverence rather than impiety. Christians had been told as much long before (Acts 17:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:21).

(Q) "If I am correcting anything, I am not correcting Sacred Scripture, but rather its translation." + Source: Lorenzo Valla, Antidotum primum in Pogium (c. 1452), translated from the Latin as printed in Ari Wesseling’s edition (Assen, 1978), p. 112. Poggio Bracciolini had accused him of laying hands on the word of God. Valla’s answer runs on: he is not being insolent toward Scripture but reverent, and he is doing nothing except rendering it better than the earlier translator did (T4).

(T5) God’s foreknowledge does not force a man’s hand, and why he chooses as he does is past finding out. + You know your friend will order the same coffee he has ordered every morning for six years. You are not making him do it. Your certainty rides along behind his choice; it does not push it. Foreknowledge, which simply means knowing beforehand, is knowledge, and knowledge of a thing is not the cause of it. Valla built a dialogue around that distinction, On Free Will, written about 1439, in which a friend named Antonio Glarea puts the old worry to him: if God knew a thousand years ago what I would do today, how is it mine? Valla answers with a story out of Roman legend. Sextus Tarquinius goes to Delphi and asks Apollo what his future holds, and Apollo tells him he will fall an exile and destitute, cut down by a city in a rage. Sextus protests that this is monstrous, that a god should not condemn a man before he has acted. Apollo answers that he is reading the future, not writing it: Sextus will be an adulterer, a traitor and a perjurer because that is what Sextus is going to choose, and the complaint belongs at another address. If Sextus wants to know why he was given the character he has, he must take it up with Jupiter. And that is where Valla stops, on purpose. Boethius, the Roman senator who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in a prison cell nine centuries earlier while waiting to be executed, had tried to go further and explain how God sees all times at once in a single present, so that what looks to us like foresight is really sight. Valla thought the attempt was honest and the answer beyond us. Why God has mercy on one man and hardens another he will not pretend to explain, and he quotes Paul rather than resolving him (Romans 9:18). The right response, he says, is worship rather than a diagram (Romans 11:33). Christians have divided over whether this is humility or a refusal to do the work, and the division is old and reasonable. Luther, who read the dialogue and admired it enormously, thought Valla had seen something most theologians dodged. Others have thought that a mystery you decline to examine is not yet a mystery, only an unopened question.

(Q) "Now, indeed, He brings no necessity, and His hardening one and showing another mercy does not deprive us of free will, since He does this most wisely and in full holiness." + Source: Lorenzo Valla, Dialogue on Free Will (Charles Trinkaus translation, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 1948), p. 177. The dialogue’s conclusion, and a fair summary of where Valla was willing to stand: no necessity is laid on the man who acts, and what God is doing in choosing is wise and holy whether or not we can follow it (T5).

(Q) "Nor is he to be esteemed a true orator who knows how to speak well, unless he also has the courage to speak." + Source: Lorenzo Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, the exordium (Christopher B. Coleman translation, 1922, p. 23). He has just finished listing everything that could be done to him and has decided to write anyway: with a brave soul, with utter fidelity, with good hope, the cause of truth must be defended, the cause of justice, the cause of God. Whatever else is true of Valla, and some of it is not flattering, that sentence was not idle. It cost him a professorship, put him in front of a heresy tribunal, and was still being read by men who needed the same nerve eighty years later.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Erasmus found his New Testament notes in an abbey library and put them into print. + In the summer of 1504, a Dutch scholar in his thirties was browsing the library of the Premonstratensian abbey of Parc, just outside the walls of Louvain, and came across a manuscript nobody had asked for in fifty years: Valla’s collation of the Latin New Testament against the Greek. A collation is exactly what the word sounds like, two texts laid side by side and every difference between them written down, the way you would check a photocopy against the original page by page. Erasmus knew at once what he was holding. He had it printed in Paris the next year, with a preface defending the whole enterprise against the objection that a grammarian has no business near the Bible. The line from that discovery is short and straight. Erasmus went on to publish his own Greek New Testament with a fresh Latin translation in 1516, the first to reach the public, and he never made a secret of what he owed to Valla. The scholars gathered at Alcalá around Cardinal Jiménez had their Greek New Testament in type two years before him, in the Complutensian Polyglot with Hebrew, Greek and Latin in parallel columns, though it was held back from sale until 1522; they were working by the same lights. Erasmus’s summary of the man is generous and accurate: Valla, he wrote, with so much energy, zeal and labour refuted the stupidities of the barbarians, saved half-buried letters from extinction, restored Italy to her ancient splendour of eloquence, and forced even the learned to express themselves henceforth with more circumspection.

(†) The Reformers made his philology a weapon, and Rome in the end conceded the point. + The treatise on the Donation stayed in manuscript for seventy-seven years. Then in 1517 Ulrich von Hutten, a German knight with a gift for publicity, put it through a press, and early in 1520 a copy reached Wittenberg. Writing to his friend Spalatin on 24 February, Luther said he had Hutten’s edition of Valla’s proof in front of him, and that it showed him what darkness and wickedness there was at Rome. He had already been arguing for two years about indulgences, the grants by which the church remitted the temporal punishment owed for sins already forgiven, and which in 1517 were being preached and sold for money at Jüterbog, just across the Saxon border from Wittenberg, since the elector Frederick had refused to let the sale into his own lands. What Valla gave him was the conviction that the papacy’s claim to rule kingdoms rested on a document that had been manufactured. An English version, made by William Marshall for Thomas Cromwell, was printed in London by Thomas Godfray in 1534, and in 1559 Valla’s works went onto the Roman Index of prohibited books. Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit controversialist, called him a forerunner of Luther, and did not mean it kindly. The end of the story is the part usually left out. When Cesare Baronius, the Oratorian who was writing the church’s own annals and would end his life as librarian of the Vatican, reached Constantine’s century, he examined the Donation and conceded that it was a forgery. After Baronius the defence of it effectively stopped. The argument that began as a piece of Neapolitan war propaganda was closed by Rome’s own historian, which is very nearly the best outcome an argument about evidence can have.

(†) The method outlived the quarrel, and the church kept the method. + Valla was not the first to doubt the Donation and did not claim to be. Nicholas of Cusa had got there seven years earlier in De concordantia catholica, The Catholic Concordance, and on some points had reasoned it out more carefully than Valla ever did. Reginald Pecock, bishop first of St Asaph and then of Chichester, reached the same verdict on his own a few years later. So why is it Valla’s name that stayed attached to the thing? Because he did the one thing neither of them did: he showed, at length and in public and with every step of the reasoning left on display, how a text is dated by the words inside it. He did it so vividly that the technique could not afterwards be unlearned. Everything downstream of that belongs to Christians as much as to anyone, and a good deal of it is going on at this moment in rooms nobody visits. Dating a papyrus of John by its handwriting and its spelling, weighing whether a verse belongs in the text of Mark, answering a claim that the Gospels were composed in the second century by asking what second-century Greek actually looks like: this is Valla’s trade, practised by people who mostly do not know his name. The tool that destroyed a forgery is the same tool that establishes what the apostles wrote, and a faith that rests on events in time has every reason to want it sharp (2 Corinthians 4:2). The most telling verdict was passed in Valla’s own lifetime, and by the institution he had embarrassed. Nicholas V read the treatise, or knew perfectly well what was in it, and hired the author.

(†) Where his own record fails him: a cruel pen, a paid quarrel, and a vow flattened. + Three things in Valla’s own writings are hard to defend, and they are his, not his readers’. - The pen. His exchanges with Poggio Bracciolini and Bartolomeo Facio start in scholarship and end in the gutter. He accused men of vices he could not have known about, invented humiliating scenes for them, and published the lot. A man whose whole case is that words should be handled with exactness had no excuse for handling them like that, and Paul’s standard for a Christian teacher is not obscure: speak the truth, and do it in love (Ephesians 4:15; 2 Timothy 2:24–25). - The paymaster. The treatise on the Donation was written by a royal secretary while his king was at war with the pope, and its last pages call on the Romans to throw off papal rule. The evidence in it stands on its own feet, and Valla would have been the first to say that where an argument came from has no bearing on whether it is sound. But a man who insists that every document be read in the light of the circumstances that produced it cannot complain when readers turn the lamp on his. - The vow. In On the Profession of the Religious he argued that a monk earns no more merit than an ordinary Christian. Merit is the standing or reward reckoned before God for a good act, and the medieval assumption was that the monk, having given up marriage, property and his own will, was piling up more of it than the baker in the next street. Valla’s reason for denying this was that an act performed under vow is less free than one performed spontaneously, and he accused the orders of arrogance for keeping the word religious to themselves. The second half of that has real force, and the abuses he had watched were real abuses. The first half proves too much, because if a promise kept makes an act less free, then so does every vow a husband keeps on an ordinary Tuesday. Scripture treats a vow kept as a good thing rather than a diminished one (Numbers 30:2; Ecclesiastes 5:4–5), and Paul commends the unmarried life as a gift some are given, not as a lower grade of discipleship (1 Corinthians 7:7; 1 Corinthians 7:38). One charge often laid against him is no fault at all. He was tried in 1444 in part for denying that the twelve apostles composed the Apostles’ Creed between them, one article each. He was right, the tribunal was wrong, and the fact that he was nearly condemned for saying something true about a legend is a mark against his accusers and in his favour.