Today's entry in the Who's Who is Lorenzo Valla. While Valla's name may be less familiar to the reader, his life and work are actually pivotal in the history of the humanities, because, in many ways, his work represents the culmination of humanist methodology and thought and paradoxically sowed the seeds of its eventual wane.
Born in 1407, Valla came of age well after Petrarch, Boccacio, and some of the other humanists had established the educational program of the studia humanitatis. He studied Latin and Greek under Bruni, and became a priest in 1431. Like many humanists, he was itinerant, eventually earning favor from Alphonso V of Aragon, and entered the latter's service in 1435.
Valla is most famous for his dialogue De Voluptate, and for his painstaking study of classical Latin, De Elegante Latinae Linguae. The former models Socratic dialogue between the Stoics and the Epicureans, and concludes by endorsing the hedonic tenets of the latter. The novelty -- even the danger -- of such a position in the Late Middle Ages cannot be overestimated. This was a time in which man's appetites were seen at best as ambiguous, and one of the great tensions of the time was the internal conflict many felt between their wants and desires and a religious ethos which instructed that denial of those appetites was the path to salvation (perhaps the paragon of this ethos was Bernard of Clairvaux, a truly remarkable man and a towering figure of the High Middle Ages).
While the notion that the concept of the individual was "born" during the Renaissance is quite mistaken, it is nevertheless safe to suggest that a shift from collectivity and order to individual pursuits and individual satisfaction was taking place during the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Valla's dialogue is an important marker of this shift.
The Elegante is arguably more important inasmuch as in it the humanist program reaches its apogee and also begins to wane, all at once. The treatise constituted a sustained philology of classical Latin, as well as an argument that classical Latin was in every conceivable sense superior to medieval and church Latin. The work was and remains a tour de force, as well as a quintessentially humanist tract.
Recall that the humanists sought to apply classical learning to daily practices of the time, in the hopes of facilitating and encouraging virtue. Such learning could only be acquired and applied in the original Greek and Latin, and these languages were a core aspect of the studia humanitatis. As such, the Elegante is humanist work-product through and through: it was a thorough, detailed exposition on the superiority of classical Latin, and only a master linguist could have pulled off the feat.
If the Elegante in some ways represented a culmination of the humanist educational project, then why do I suggest that the treatise in some ways marks the beginning of a wane in humanism? Bouwsma explains that Valla's sustained analysis showed how different "true" classical Latin was from the Latin spoken during the Middle Ages, and made it appear for the first time as a dead language. This demonstrated a peculiarly Renaissance tension between the love for change and the respect for classical authority (Bouwsma, 2000). The humanist project centered on the value of communication and rhetoric, and yet Valla's work showed that truly authentic classical Latin was reflected only in the discourse of "a narrow elite, and, after Valla, could be used correctly, after prolonged study, only in accordance with ancient practice" (Ibid., 26).
Communication was central because the European political economy of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance needed a rhetoric and a mode of communicating across communities, cultures, regions, and political bodies. If Latin was truly confined to a narrow educational elite, it's use in diplomacy and the political economy was marginal. As such, Latin began to be replaced by the vernacular as the medium of diplomatic and cultural exchange in the Renaissance.
Children of European monarchs began to be educated with books that contained large proportions of the vernacular, and classical Latin began to take on an almost cult status, displaced in the marketplace of ideas and commerce by the vernacular. And it was Valla's work that was both the culmination of the humanist program and a reflection of its increasingly marginal utility. The transformation would be marked most notably with the publication of the King James Bible, written in the vernacular, which replaced the Latin Vulgate, in 1611.
What does any of this have to do with contemporary medical practice? Lots. First, it shows the unceasing importance of using erudition in the service of virtue. If academic though about medical and/or research practice is not perceived as relevant to participants' lived experiences, it departs from the humanist ethos, and runs the risk of becoming layers upon layers of abstractions. Second, the danger of privileging rhetoric is that the language itself -- the verba -- can become an end in itself, separate and apart from the matter under consideration -- the res. Of course, this is not to rely on any discredit dichotomy between language and content, but simply to note that the use of rhetoric is not in and of itself a guarantor of virtue.
Rhetoric is a powerful meaning-making tool, and like most such tools, it can be used for good or for ill by the subjects involved in the practices under consideration. One could apply Valla's example to biomedical research itself inasmuch as any given instance of a perfectly applied scientific method is not ipso facto proof of its relevance to people's daily lives, nor to the cultivation of virtue, as this memorable Onion article makes clear.
Clinicians and scientists truly interested in translational research could do much worse than to examine the humanist ideals and some of the dangers therein, as exemplified by Valla's work.
Comments