1 (1) Pythagoras of Samos instructed the region of Italy once called ...

LORENZO VALLA
THE REPAIR OF THE WHOLE OF DIALECTIC
ALONG WITH THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY IN GENERAL
BOOK I
PROEM
(1) Pythagoras of Samos instructed the region of Italy once called Magna Graecia in the
finest morals and the best teachings. 1 When he was asked what he professed to be, he
answered that he was not a ‘wise man,’ as his predecessors had claimed, but a ‘lover of
wisdom.’ And this was not because he considered himself no match for those who were
called wise, for Pythagoras certainly knew that he was the very essence of ability and that
his glorious genius indisputably surpassed all others who devoted themselves to wisdom.
No, it was because he thought that neither they nor he nor any human can attain wisdom
any more than success or happiness. “I am a philosopher,” he said. 2
(2) Oh modesty – how great and wondrous is its praise! By regulating a single word
Pythagoras won more fame and glory than from his whole career and amazing
discoveries. This was the word that names the tribe of philosophers, of course, naming
them with just one expression, though philosophers are divided into many schools.
Pythagoras was superb in his restraint, but no less praiseworthy are philosophers who
have followed his restrained good breeding, taking their name from him but not fearing to
disagree on some topics with the one who in a sense originated the breed. (3) The point
is not that Pythagoras called himself a ‘philosopher’ but that he and they were right to
call themselves ‘philosophers.’ It was not a person they followed but truth and virtue,
which was their immediate aim wherever they found it, without regard to authority.
Consequently, no one after Pythagoras was called a ‘sage,’ and philosophers have always
had great freedom to say what they think, not only against leaders of other groups but
also against their own, which is even truer of those not committed to a group. 3
(4) Not to be endured, then, are the modern Peripatetics who forbid me, a person
belonging to no group, the liberty of disagreeing with Aristotle, as if he were the sage,
and not they, and as if no one had achieved this before. This is unknown to them: that
when the Peripatetic sect was invented, not only were earlier groups thriving, those of
Pythagoras and Democritus, but also others were emerging, the Stoic and the Epicurean
(which Luke mentions in the Acts of the Apostles as thriving in Athens, the home of
philosophy 4 ), and before the Peripatetic sect Platonists were famous and Academics too,
who came from the same source. They all disagree with Aristotle.
1 From Valla’s Latin perspective, Pythagoras was more Italian than Greek. Born on the Greek island of
Samos, he migrated around 530 BCE to Croton in the far south of the peninsula; Croton was one of the
colonies founded between the eighth and fifth centuries and known as ‘Great Greece.’
2 Val. Max. 8.7, ext. 2; Cic. Tusc. 5.7-10.
3 Cic. Tusc. 5.8.
4 Acts 17:18.
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(5) Should I mention others? Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor, usually disagrees with
his teacher and is not shy about it, is he? 5 So much for the Greeks, not to mention that
they always admired Homer, Plato and Demosthenes more than Aristotle. What about
the Latins? Did they ever regard Aristotle as a sage? No, nor as the greatest philosopher
either. Was Varro an Aristotelian? Hardly, but he kept his path (if we want to believe
Lactantius) straight between the two – Plato and Aristotle both. 6 Cicero was an
Academic and a follower of Plato who always awarded Plato first place in philosophy, as
almost everyone has done. 7
Plancus was part Stoic, part Epicurean, but Brutus and Seneca were Stoics, the group that
Jerome thinks most like the Christian religion. 8 Passing its teachings along as if he too
were a Stoic, Ambrose followed Panaetius and Cicero. 9 The same pair lined up like
colleagues with Hilary and Augustine, whose professed view is that Plato is the prince of
philosophers. 10 Apuleius wanted to be a Platonist and to be known as one. Macrobius
also pays much more deference to Plato, and this is no different than the view of Boethius
– last of the scholars but, so it seems to me, more Platonist than Aristotelian even while
he is completely Aristotelian. Somewhere he promised that he would show that there is
little distance between those authorities – following Porphyry, I suppose, who holds the
Platonic and Aristotelian sects to be the same, with Plato as master and Aristotle as
pupil. 11
5
Theophrastus of Eresus (c. 372-c. 286 BCE) became head of Aristotle’s school in Athens when his teacher
had to leave town after Alexander died in 323. Theophrastus continued Aristotle’s work, but some
authorities believe that he also criticized it by innovating in logic and other fields.
6
Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE), already legendary as a polymath in Cicero’s time, was more
interested in erudition and literature than in philosophy, though his encyclopedic work On the Latin
Language deals with philosophical problems of language. as much from a Stoic point of view as from any
other. Lact. ???; Zippel’s citation seems wrong: De falsa relig. 1.6.
7
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was an eclectic in philosophy, having studied with Stoics and
Epicureans as well as Academics. While Cicero revered Plato, he also honored Aristotle, and the
‘Academy’ that he knew had changed greatly since Plato’s day, having become the home of sceptics who
attacked Stoics and Epicureans as dogmatists. While Valla was no doctrinaire Ciceronian on issues of
Latinity, he was powerfully affected by Cicero’s new celebrity, which had been advertised by Petrarch in
the fourteenth century and then later by numerous humanists, including Poggio Bracciolini, Valla’s
nemesis. Although Cicero was well known in the Middle Ages, Petrarch and others recovered some works
that had fallen into oblivion, thus finding powerful new authority for cultural changes that they wished to
promote.
8
Hier. Comm. in Is. 4.11: Marcus Iunius Brutus led the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar in 44 BCE.
During the subsequent triumvirate, Lucius Munatius Plancus was consul in 42. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.
4 BCE-65 CE) wrote important plays as well as prose works and letters, until Nero forced him to kill
himself. Most of his prose, whose style and content greatly influenced the first Christians who wrote in
Latin, deals with moral philosophy in the Stoic tradition; Brutus as Stoic ??? Plutarch ???
9
Although Ambrose (c. 333-97 CE) modeled a work On the Duties of Ministers on Cicero’s De officiis, he
was also strongly influenced by Neoplatonism. Likewise eclectic was the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes (185-
09 BCE), whose treatise On Duty Cicero used for his famous work.
10
Both Hilary of Poitiers (d. c. 368 CE) and the great Augustine of Hippo (354-430) had studied the
Neoplatonists before converting to Christinity.
11
Apuleius of Madaurus (c. 125-c. 170) called himself a Platonist, wrote works on Socrates and Plato and
was certainly a pagan. It is unclear, however, whether Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius was a Christian.
Born in the fourth century, Macrobius produced a Neoplatonic reading of Cicero in his Commentary on the
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(8) But other Latins consider other philosophers lacking in wisdom. Aristotle alone they
include under both ‘wise’ and ‘wisest.’ Since he is the only philosopher they know, why
not? The assumption is that knowing is habitually reading not one’s own language but a
foreign one, not to say a dishonest one, not only because many translations of Aristotle’s
works are corrupt but also because much that is said nicely in Greek is not said nicely in
Latin. This fact has led to many mistakes of the greatest importance, and to splendid
ingenuities as well.
(9) Add ignorance of our own language on top. For of those who came after Boethius,
how many deserve to be called Latin and not barbarian? Avicenna and Averroes were
barbarians, obviously, completely ignorant of our language, with perhaps barely a tint of
Greek. 12 Even if they were great men, how much authority should they have when the
meaning of words is in question, as in most problems of philosophy? (10) No authority
to speak of since they are like people brought up inland who dispute the fine points of
navigation without ever seeing the ocean or boarding ship. These people I should
respect? Them I should take seriously and say nothing against Aristotle? Them alone I
should permit to have what was not allowed in Athens itself nor by any of the
philosophers nor through all time?
(11) Besides, Aristotle’s genius does not seem so great to me that he should be treated
like Achilles or Hercules among heroes or the moon among heavenly bodies – much less
the sun. For he paid no attention to the main things by which men are recognized as
outstanding – not political debate, either in public or before the legislature, nor governing
provinces or leading an army or arguing in court or practicing medicine or administering
justice or interpreting decrees or writing histories or composing poems. 13 (12) These
things demand much attention from people and also make them visible, and some of the
Latins worked at most of them.
Dream of Scipio. A major influence on his Commentary was another commentary on Plato’s Timaeus by
Porphyry (234-305), a pagan Neoplatonist who wrote in Greek. In early Latin versions, Porphyry’s studies
of Aristotle’s logical works had enormous influence. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480-524),
whose Christianity has also been questioned, wrote the immortal Consolation of Philosophy when his
career in government came to a bad end. Boethius was one of the last masters of Greek learning in Italy
before the late fourteenth century. He believed that Plato and Aristotle were often in agreement, and he
planned to translate all of their works into Latin. Although the project failed, Boethius finished a few
logical works by Aristotle and Porphyry and also commented on Cicero’s Topics.
12
Avicenna (Ibn Sina, ???) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, ???), the two greatest Moslem authorities of the
middle ages on philosophy, medicine and other topics, wrote in Arabic, but in the thirteenth century their
works began to be Latinized and long remained influential in the West. So much was Averroes respected
for expertise on Aristotle that he was known simply as ‘the commentator,’ as Aristotle was called ‘the
philosopher.’ However, Averroist interpretations of Aristotle were notoriously contentious in Christian
philosophical theology, particularly on the sensitive doctrine of the immortality of the individual human
soul.
13
Valla is thinking, more or less, of the cursus honorum or ‘course of honors,’ the ideal career of ascent
through public offices, political and military, pursued by successful Romans – like Caesar or Cicero. The
practice of medicine, however, was no part of the Roman path that Valla criticizes Aristotle for not
following.
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Yet, in the end, they did not give much attention to learning foreign languages, in some
cases not even their own, especially since Greek at that time was nearly one and the same
for common people and for the learned. Likewise with the ancient Romans, whose
language was sometimes called ‘Roman’ (as the Greeks always called it) and sometimes
‘Latin.’ 14 (13) In our time, these two languages are harder to master than any number of
the liberal arts. For while many steer easily through all those arts, as if sailing over
ponds, Greek puts them in deep water indeed, where the same tide keeps dragging them
back. In Latin, on the other hand, they dare not go far from land, as if the language were
the open sea.
(14) “But Aristotle actually wrote more works than the others.” I suppose those works
are also more important? For all I know, what Hippocrates or Euclid or various others
did may be more important since they proposed firm and unquestionable principles for
some of the arts. I hesitate to say how remarkable it is to give impertinent advice at one
moment on matters of which you have no experience (such as politics or rhetoric, which I
call ‘oratory’ in my book) and at the next to claim familiarity with things that cannot be
known (such as why the peacock that changes its colors is distinguished in this way). 15
(15) “He wrote more works than the others,” but he also stole more. You admit his
dishonesty in this, but a person who does not ascribe what he steals to those from whom
he took it, claiming it for his own instead and opining that his very victims have
committed blunders everywhere, such a person can sooner hold a burning brand in his
mouth than not name a name. “He wrote more works than the others.” So be it. These
works are all better than the others, then? For my part, I find in him nothing thoroughly
worked out, neither its arrangement nor its expression. Did he say it so well that others
can say nothing better? Was it so godlike that he must be treated as a god? And yet he
was not the best man, this person who had a poor understanding of the true God and did
not dare condemn the false gods of the people since he dreaded finding fault with
anything non-literary.
(16) It is disgraceful to report the custom that some have of initiating disciples and
making them swear never to oppose Aristotle, a foolish and superstitious race of people
that serves itself badly by cheating itself of the capacity to discover the truth. If we can
rightly find fault with them for imposing this rule on themselves, then how harshly
should we reprimand them if they transfer this rule to others? Having rejected these
people, then, and disregarding them, if there are things anywhere in Aristotle that he
might have said better, I myself shall do my best to say them better, not to blame the
person, which I hope to avoid, but to honor the truth, which one must honor (as Plato
says) rather than the man. 16
14 Zippel cites Valla, In Pogium; whether the Latin of the uneducated was like that of the learned who wrote
books and made speeches was a contentious issue; see ???
15 Peacock’s tail; Aristotle, Pliny ???
16 Zippel cites Plat. Rep. 595C
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(17) For this there are various reasons, but it is really to prevent modern theologians
soaked in Aristotelian teachings from jeering and mocking at the ancients, armed as they
are with Aristotelian doctrine like the strong against the weak, the armed against the
unarmed, the wealthy against the destitute because they know metaphysics, logic and the
modes of signification. 17 It is they instead that deserve jeers and mockery both for
treating Master Aristotle as a god and for being ignorant, as even Aristotelians are, if they
have no skill at reading Greek, and for being incapable of making any doctrine clear, if
they have not enough skill in their own language – in Latin, that is. (18) To recall them
from error, as much as I can, and lead their successors back to correct theologizing, I
shall refute Aristotle and the Aristotelians. I shall do this for dialectic but also for the rest
of philosophy, which requires a deeper review of the elements of the former subject.
This will be the content of my first book, along with many problems of natural and moral
philosophy; the second book deals with the interpretation of words; the third with the
structure of argument.
(19) Although these books have found their way into various hands, still, after several
years of making greater progress in Greek, I have revised, polished and almost rehashed
them, and especially the first, which, after invoking the name of the Trinity – Father, Son
and Holy Spirit – let us now begin. 18
1 PREDICAMENTS AND TRANSCENDENTALS, WHAT AND HOW MANY?
(1) What I have called ‘elements’ I see being doubled. (2) One of them, named
‘categories,’ is a term that certain Latins use as if there were no Latin word corresponding
to it, and one of those is a person whose work is falsely ascribed to Aurelius Augustine,
though it is somewhat older. 19 Boethius, unless there was someone earlier, translates it as
‘statements,’ not a common term nor, I believe, an appropriate one. 20 But I, lest someone
think me too fussy about words, at least those that present no risk, shall treat the term as
if it were common and appropriate. Boethius, however, seems to translate ‘katêgôria’ as
if it were ‘prosêgôria,’ which is ‘designation.’ 21 For some writers of our language – of
comedy especially – use ‘state’ for ‘say,’ while others mean ‘say openly’ or ‘in public.’ 22
17
‘Modes of signification’ is a technical term in medieval philosophy of language and logic.
18
Refer to the introduction for Valla’s troubles and the several versions of his work.
19
Zippel cites Anonymi paraphrasis themistiana (Pseudo-Augustini Categoriae decem), in Aristoteles
latinus, I.1-5; Categoriae vel praedicamenta, ed. L. Minio-Paluello, pp. 133-75.
20
Zippel cites Categoriae Aristotelis: Editio composita (vel vulgata), in Aristoteles latinus, I.1-5, pp. 49-79.
21
In fact, one of many problems in interpreting the Categories is that it it deals more with ways of naming
(prosêgôria) than with ways of predicating (katêgôria); Rist, Aristotle, p. 95.
22
The Latin comedies written by Titus Maccius Plautus (fl. 205-184 BCE) and Publius Terentius Afer (c.
160) put spoken Latin into the mouths of characters from all levels of society; the eighteen plays by Plautus
are the earliest Latin texts that survive in complete form. Only eight were read in the Middle Ages,
however, when Terence was better known. Both playwrights often use ‘praedicare’ in the way that Valla
describes: e.g., Ter. Andr. 46, 205, 465, 793, 875-6; Plaut. Mil. 471, 633, 651, 777, 931, 968, 1224; for
‘praedicare’ as ‘announce,’ see Cic. Fam. 5.12.8, Quinct. 50.
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‘Statements’ or ‘predicaments’ will then be close to certain ‘sayings’ or ‘designations’
which govern meaning.
(3) There are said to be ten of them, however, laying claim to a number larger than
needed, if we wish to believe what the same Boethius says in his Arithmetic: “Hence also
in the Aristotelian account of the ten predicaments, as earlier in Archytas, the ten-fold
Pythagorean number is plainly to be found, seeing that Plato, a great student of
Pythagoras, divided his argument accordingly, and Archytas the Pythagorean established
these ten predicaments before Aristotle, although some find this doubtful.” 23 From these
words of Boethius it seems that Archytas established the ten predicaments more from
loving the Pythagorean number than from reasoning about the topic.
(4) And I would add much to object that Aristotle, not Archytas, was their inventor
except that Boethius himself objects, stating in his work On the Book of Predicaments:
“Hence some later critics have suspected that Aristotle was not the inventor of this
division but that Archytas the Pythagorean listed the same ones. (5) In claiming this the
philosopher Iamblichus is not to be despised, though Themistius disagrees. He does not
accept that it was Archytas, a Pythagorean from Tarentum who lived a little while with
Plato, but some Peripatetic Archytas, who found authority for a new work on the basis of
an ancient name.” 24 Thus it must be acknowledged that Aristotle, not Archytas, is the
inventor of the predicaments.
(6) Among these shifting terms whom should I follow other than Quintilian? For he says
that “Aristotle first established the ten elements on which the whole question seems to
turn: ‘ousia,’ which Flavius calls ‘essence’ (and clearly there is no other Latin word for
it) but wonders whether it is; ‘quality,’ whose meaning is clear; ‘quantity,’ later divided
into two kinds, how much and how many; ‘to something,’ from which movement and
relation are derived; next in order, ‘where’ and ‘when’; then ‘action,’ ‘passion,’ and
‘habit,’ which is like ‘being equipped’ or ‘being clothed’; and last of all ‘sunkeisthai,’
which is ‘being arranged’ in some way, like being hot, lying, standing or being angry.
But the first four of these apply to status, the others to various places in arguments.” 25
(7) This is Quintilian’s view, who thus called them ‘elements’ because the meanings of
other terms are referred to them as if to elements and first principles. And for this reason
23
Zippel cites Boethius, Inst. arith. 2.41 (PL 63.1146-7). The Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum (fl. 400-
350 BCE) was associated with Plato, but he did not write the lost work on the categories mentioned here by
Boethius, who follows Simplicius, Comm. in Arist. Cat., 8.2.15-25.
24
Zippel cites Boethius, In Cat. Arist. 1 (PL 64.159-63).
25
‘Status’ and ‘place’ are technical terms in classical rhetoric. The words used here by Quintilian (3.6.23)
for the categories reflect the difficulty faced by Cicero and others in constructing a Latin vocabulary for
Greek philosophy. The scholastics whom Valla criticized used ‘substantia,’ not ‘essentia,’ for ‘ousia,’ the
first of Aristotle’s ten categories, which in current English are ‘substance, quantity, quality, relation, place,
time, position, state, action and being acted on.’ Neither ‘substantia’ nor ‘essentia,’ occurs in Cicero,
however, who died more than a century before Quintilian wrote. Yet Seneca (Ep. 58.6.3) claims that
Cicero coined ‘essentia,’ which Quintilian (2.14.2, 3.6.23, 8.3.33) ascribes to a philosopher named Plautus
(not the playwright) or to Verginius Flavus, a rhetorician. This Flavus, then, would be the ‘Flavius’ that
Valla found in Quintilian, where modern editions have ‘Plautus.’
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they are called ‘genera’ because their progeny are other meanings, and none is higher
than another nor a genus of another. They are the ‘head genera’ and (if one can say this)
the ‘headmost,’ but they are not, as some say, the ‘most general,’ which is like saying
‘most typical types’ – an incorrect word, of course, since one does not say ‘general
genus’ and ‘typical type’ any more than ‘substantial substance,’ ‘material matter,’
‘formal form,’ ‘bodily body’ and so on. 26 If such words are absurd in the positive degree,
they are completely absurd in the superlative, and obviously so
(8) The other ‘beginnings’ or ‘principles’ are those that these people call
‘transcendentals’ because they transcend those highest genera and are not themselves
genera but beyond the level and capacity of all genera. Whether this is true we will see
later. (9) They are said to be six in number: ‘being,’ ‘something,’ ‘thing,’ ‘one,’ ‘true,’
‘good.’ 27 Since these principles are the higher ones – princes of princes, as it were, and
even (as it seems to these people) emperors and kings – because each of the predicaments
is ‘being,’ is ‘something,’ is a ‘thing,’ is ‘one’, is ‘true’ and is ‘good,’ one must deal with
them first and in that order.
26
Zippel cites Boethius, In Isag. Porph. 3.1 (PL 64.102); Peter of Spain, Summulae, Tract. 2; Paul of
Venice, Super universalia Porphyrii, 2.1-2; Logica magna 1.2; Summulae, 1.3, 4.
27
If the ten categories are kinds of terms that can be predicated of being, the transcendentals are higherorder
terms, called ‘transcendental’ because they transcend any of those ten kinds. Thus, since a
proposition is said ‘to be convertible’ (antistrephei) if it remains true after its subject and predicate trade
places, the transcendentals are said to be convertible with uncategorized being, being itself, because when
‘being is the one’ is converted to ‘the one is being,’ truth is preserved, and so on for the other
transcendentals. The list of such terms that Valla gives is close to Aquinas, ST 1.6.11.16, though
sometimes there are six – thing, something, one, true, good and beautiful – counted as convertible with
being. When transcendentals first ???
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2 THE MEANING OF THE SIX TERMS CALLED ‘TRANSCENDENTALS,’ AND PROOF
THAT ‘THING’ HAS FIRST PLACE AMONG THEM, WHILE THE REST ARE NOT
TRANSCENDENTAL.
(1) First of all, it is intrinsically obvious that there should not be several emperors or
kings but only one, as Homer’s Ulysses says:
To be many-mastered is no good: let there be one master
And one king given by the son of Kronos, crooked in counsel. 28
Therefore let us ask which of these is the term, or what is the meaning of the term, which
is emperor and king of them all – which meaning can contain more than any – as God,
the Son of God, gave it to us. (2) Given a choice, I suppose the Peripatetics would
bestow this honor on the term they nominate first, for they are always talking about it, as
if it were a piece in a game of dice for them to play with and use its many sides. 29
According to me, however, of the six terms that now seem to be claiming the kingdom,
none will be king except ‘thing,’ just as Darius, son of Hystaspes, was the only one who
would become king out of the six Persians who rose up to seek the kingdom. 30
(3) While ‘being’ is the one among them that presents the strongest appearance of
securing the kingdom, the hidden defect that it suffers from is the greatest. While
describing this term at greater length, let me speak very briefly about the others since
inquiry leaves no doubt about them. Does ‘something’ not mean ‘some thing’? Does
‘one’ not mean ‘one thing’; ‘true’ a ‘true thing’ or a ‘truth,’ which is also a thing; ‘good’
a ‘good thing’ or ‘goodness’ or ‘righteousness,’ which itself is a thing as well?
Accordingly, ‘being’ means ‘that thing which is.’ (4) In order to show this more
explicitly, I shall argue precisely and carefully.
By its nature, ‘being’ is a participle of any gender, but when it becomes a noun it is
neuter only. In Greek, however, it is variable, with three words for three genders – ôn,
ousa, on – and when the neuter word becomes a noun it takes the article to, which is not
applied to the participle, and this is the ‘being’ that Aristotle talks about. (5) But its
meaning will be clear from its participle. Every participle has the force of a relative
pronoun with a verb: a ‘person walking, running or reading,’ for example, is someone
‘who walks, who runs, who reads,’ as a ‘person being rich’ is someone ‘who is rich.’
Although all the Greeks use this participle with great frequency, hardly any of the Latins
used or uses it, (6) as Priscian confirms, saying: “The Greeks use the participle as a
substantive, which by analogy we can use also, except that frequent employment of the
28
Hom. Il. 2.204-5.
29
The term is ‘being’ (ens); Zippel cites Arist. Meta. 2.7; Peter of Spain, Summulae 2.2; Paul of Venice,
Liber metaphysicus 1.
30
Darius became king of Persia in 522 BCE, but he was actually the last of seven conspirators, according to
Herodotus (3.68-79); Valla, who was the first to translate Herodotus into Latin, continues this analogy,
where Darius as king corresponds to ‘thing’ (res) as the real ruler among the six trancendentals.
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participle loses strength, and yet Caesar was not inconsistent to derive ‘being’ from the
verb ‘I am, you are’ just as ‘being able’ derives from the verb ‘I am able, you are able.’” 31
(7) That Priscian himself used this participle I would not venture to say since shortly
before this, also in book 18, he says: “But this occurs when through omission of a
substantive verb or participle in such cases – the nominative, that is – the construction is
usually presented indirectly, as in ‘Achilles, son of Peleus, killed many Trojans.’ For the
participle of the substantive verb ‘being,’ which is not our usage, is understood.” 32 (8)
Priscian mentioned this participle but did not use it. The ignorant usually use
‘appearing,’ not knowing what this verb means. 33 Moreover, I make no allowance for
those who employ the participle in question (as no skilled interpreter has done), either in
translating Aristotle or in other books, though I do allow it when they translate a noun
which was already constructed from a participle.
(9) What will be meant by ‘being’? An antecedent with a relative pronoun and a verb, of
course, as in various other instances, such as someone ‘loving’ a wife or ‘loving’ a
husband, such as ‘being contingent or accidental or consequent or antecedent.’ One is a
man, the other is a woman, and both are lovers, and likewise with ‘that which is
contingent, accidental, consequent or antecedent.’ ‘Being,’ then, is ‘that which is’
because the pronoun must still be understood even if it is unexpressed. ‘I see what you
…’ obviously means ‘I see that which you….’ (10) Moreover, the pronoun takes its
force not so much from being an adjective as from being a substantive, like its relatives
(if I may say so). For when I say ‘look at this marble, such timber, that meadow, the sea,’
it is as if I were saying ‘look at the beautiful marble, the grand timber, the delightful
meadow, the troubled sea.’ (11) But when I say ‘look at this’ or ‘such’ or ‘that’ or ‘the,’
what is meant is surely ‘this thing, such a thing, that thing, the thing.’ The same with
other terms, since ‘something’ (as I said above) is ‘some thing’; ‘another’ is ‘another
thing’; ‘the same’ is ‘the same thing’; and ‘nothing’ is ‘no thing.’ Thus, if ‘being’ is
analyzed as ‘that which is,’ and ‘that’ is analyzed as ‘that thing,’ ‘being’ will then be
analyzed as ‘that thing which is.’
(12) Hence it is obvious that the meaning of ‘being’ is not entirely natural but, I would
say, begged and borrowed. I add this too, that a garment got by begging does not befit
this term, just as the peacock’s tail in Horace did not befit the ‘poor little crow.’ 34 For
‘being’ is a word encumbered, as it were, unable to walk because its burden is too heavy.
31
Zippel cites Priscian, Gram. 18.8.75 (Keil 3, 239).
32
Zippel cites Priscian, Gram. 18.1.6.
33
The primary sense of the classical Latin verb ‘existere’ or ‘exsistere’ is ‘come into view,’ ‘appear,’ or ‘be
shown,’ as suggested by its etymology, from the preposition ‘ex’ (‘from’ or ‘out of’) and the verb ‘sistere’
(‘cause to stand,’ ‘cause to appear,’ ‘place,’ ‘fix’), which in turn comes from ‘stare’ (‘stand’). Although
‘existere’ can mean ‘come into being,’ in the way that a condition ‘arises’ or ‘emerges,’ it lacks the
philosophical range of the English ‘exist,’ which the Latin word acquired from the very medieval uses that
Valla criticizes. Zippel cites Aquinas ST 1.12.1.3; Paul of Venice, Lib. met. 1.
34
An allusion to Hor. Ep. 1.3.1820, not a quotation.
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(13) For what is the point of this word in ‘the stone is a being,’ which is ‘that thing which
is’? What do the words ‘that which is’ represent since ‘the stone is a thing’ is more
explicit, unencumbered and to be preferred? When I have silver, I no longer want slag. I
do not want the trace of grain that exists in a heap, especially since this expression seems
absurd: namely, ‘the stone is that thing which is’ or ‘the stone is a thing which is,’ as if,
strictly speaking, there were nothing but the stone by itself, or whatever there would be of
which we might say that it is ‘a thing which is,’ an expression belonging to God alone.
(14) On this basis, the Apocalypse says ‘the Lord God who is,’ ho ôn, in the masculine
gender, and ho ôn is used in Genesis as well, ‘He who is sent me,’ the reason being that
only God is in the strict sense, whereas other things compared to God are not, truly and
strictly speaking. 35
In the neuter gender the expression is also used properly of God: ‘God is being,’ meaning
‘that …’ or ‘that thing which is.’ For all theologians acknowledge that God too is a
thing, which the Greeks were right to describe as ‘ontôs,’ ‘really’ or ‘unqualifiedly,’ and
as ‘tô onti,’ ‘in fact’ or ‘actually.’ Therefore, when a thing other than God is said to be a
‘being,’ the statement is absurd. Nor is it without reason or point that the greatest Latin
authors rejected this term, (15) which Aristotle makes more absurd by adding to it, saying
‘to on hê on,’ ‘being as being,’ as if what is were able not to be. 36 This second ‘being’ is
actually a participle, and here too is a common mistake when some say ‘the stone is’ or
‘the person is’ and therefore ‘being is.’ ‘Being’ here is not a noun but a participle, if only
these people would admit that a verb may be analyzed into its participle and a substantive
verb, as the next book will argue.
(16) Let us put an end to this question, then, and cause no further delay for the many
peoples and nations eagerly awaiting their king (as I have already noted). And as the
power of planning and God’s will rather than a servant’s cunning caused the horse of our
Darius to whinny, 37 let there be no more debate about the kingdom. Like the five
Persians, let the other five terms – ‘something,’ ‘being,’ ‘one,’ ‘true,’ ‘good’ – climb
down from their horses. Let them fall down and worship ‘thing,’ which is the only true
king among the six, as the five Persians worshipped Darius once they had understood that
he was their king. (17) This is why Ulpian says that “the praetor chose ‘thing’ because it
is a comprehensive word.” 38 He did not say ‘being’ or ‘true’ or ‘good’ or even
‘something,’ whose meaning is nearly the same as ‘thing,’ as I have said. Accordingly,
we also use this word in a comprehensive sense wherever we like, as in ‘things’ about
marriage or farming or navies or armies, and as in ‘I come to the thing.’ And for a
comprehensive interrogative, which I will deal with later, we have ‘what?’ or ‘what
thing?’ But ‘what thing’ applies to all the predicaments because each of them is a thing.
35
Rev. 1:8; cf. 4:8; Exod. 3:14 (Vulg.) – not Genesis, as Zippel points out.
36
Arist. Meta. 1003a21, 1005a3, 13, 28.
37
Herodotus (3.86) tells the story of an omen that clinched the choice of a Darius as king. His servant had
arranged things so that his stallion would whinny impressively when brought near a particular mare.
38
Valla, an expert on law, cites Ulpian, a great authority on ancient Roman law, from a famous passage in
the Digest of Justinian (12.1.1) where the topic is contracts. In formulating the law in question, the praetor
(a Roman magistrate) wanted to use the most comprehsensive term available.
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(18) But we note that this word does not always have a comprehensive meaning. For
sometimes it means a state or condition, as when ‘things’ are called ‘public’ or ‘private’
or ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ At other times it is distinct from the ‘personal,’ as when places in
arguments derive either ‘from things’ or ‘from persons.’ 39 Or again, it is distinct from
words, as Horace writes:
Supply the thing, and words willingly follow. 40
The same for orators because any oration needs to contain a thing and words both,
because it consists of what is meant and what means, things and words. 41 Hence, words
are called ‘tokens of things,’ and some call them ‘signs,’ claiming that everything
consists of words and signs (whence comes the word ‘signify’ and then ‘signification’). 42
(19) Sometimes other distinctions are made, as by Cicero’s “Our hope is praiseworthy,
not the thing,” and likewise it is the ‘thing’ that physicians treat, not so much the cause,
when there is illness. 43 Also Quintilian: “It is as if one were asking what ‘God’ is. For
someone who denies that God is pure spirit throughout does not claim that this is a false
designation for that divine character; this is the case with Epicurus, who gave God human
form and a place in the world. Both use the same name, whatever they suppose about the
thing” – and here Quintilian means something like ‘real thing.’ 44
(20) Sometimes ‘thing’ is taken to indicate a conflict or an exchange, as ‘there is a thing
between me and an angry man’; sometimes deeds, as in ‘many of the Caesars wrote about
things’; sometimes a cause, producing ‘from that thing’ or ‘because of that thing’;
sometimes intercourse, out of modesty, as when Thais in Terence talks about
a soldier with whom I was having a thing,
and ‘to have had a thing with some woman’ is a common expression. 45 Sometimes it is
taken for property or resources, as Terence’s Thais, in the same text, also mentions
her brother being a bit greedy for things,
and Horace:
you’ll never make a thing that way. 46
39
Above, n. 1.
40
Hor. AP 311.
41
Zippel cites Cic. De or. 3.37, 149; Quint. Inst. 3.3.1, 5.1.
42
Cic. Top. 35; Fin. 5.74; Div. 2.102; Quint. 7.2.46; Zippel cites Aquinas, ST I.1.10c, I Perih. 2c.
43
Serv. Aen. 6.875.
44
Quint. 7.3.4-6.
45
Ter. Eun. 119
46
Ter. Eun. 131; Hor Epist. 1.1.65-6; here as elsewhere, Valla’s citations differ from the versions in modern
texts.
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This is the complaint of Philippus: that there were not “two thousand men in the state
who had a thing.” 47 Sometimes the point is utility, as in ‘it’s the thing’ or ‘it’s just your
thing,’ (21) and sometimes the question is what the question is (which pertains to the next
book, however), as in Cicero’s work On the Laws: “Is there such dissension about just
one thing, which is what is actually ‘pertinent to the thing’?” 48 And it is no wonder that
one word has so many special meanings since it includes them all comprehensively.
(22) ‘Thing’ works better (I feel) than the Greek ‘pragma,’ which is usually translated as
‘action,’ though we too sometimes say ‘action’ for ‘thing,’ as Cicero does in the Rhetoric
when he states that arguments derive from what is alleged either of ‘persons’ or of
‘actions,’ and Sallust likewise in the Jugurthine War: “Every authority transfers his own
guilt to the actions of others.” 49 This may be what Ulpian means: “it was actually
established in the nature of things that there are more actions than words.” 50 And this
may also have been the reason why Aristotle wanted to use ‘to on’ more often than
‘pragma,’ though he would have used ‘pragma’ rather than ‘to on’ had he attended to the
character and meaning of the words. 51
(23) I have had much to say of the first three terms, which are almost the same in
character. I shall also discuss the other three, which have different features, treating them
as honored guests and not discharging them dishonorably – all the more since we would
seem to insult those to whom we have denied the rank of transcendental. But no one who
fairly denies someone a greater honor causes him insult, though perhaps it would be fair
for me to allow more because I have seemed to put them on the same level with
‘something,’ the term that contrasts with nothing but ‘nothing’ itself. (24) ‘Many’
contrasts with ‘one,’ however, and ‘evil’ with ‘good’ and ‘false’ with ‘true,’ which
themselves are ‘something.’ ‘One’ occurs as ‘one thing,’ moreover, as in ‘just one I seek
from you, judges.’ I hardly dare say that ‘good’ is taken’ as ‘good thing’ since we read
that ‘all aim at the good.’ 52 ‘True’ for ‘true thing’ I do not recall finding, but it is used for
‘truth,’ as ‘false’ is used for ‘falsity’ – likewise, ‘good’ for ‘goodness,’ ‘evil’ for
‘wickedness’ and, yes, ‘one’ for ‘unity’ (or actually for ‘one thing’) as in ‘from one to a
hundred.’
(25) Aristotle claims that one is not a number but the ‘beginning’ of number, as if
beginnings of things were not parts of those same things but, consequently, things in
themselves. 53 Someone who reads the beginning of a book reads a book; someone who
touches a person’s head touches a person; someone who sees the beginning of a swamp
sees a swamp. These facts must be ascribed not to the chicanery of sophists but to the
47
Cic. Off. 2.73: Cicero describes Lucius Marcius Philippus, consul in 91 and a great orator, who made this
remark in defending an agrarian law.
48
Cic. Leg. 1.53-4: the text of Cicero’s Laws that Valla cites is corrupt, but the sense of ‘res’ is the same.
49
Zippel cites Cic. Rhet. Her. 2.1; Sall. Jug. 1.
50
Dig. 19.5.4: Ulpian is thinking of legal transactions rather than actions in general, and the former is closer
to ‘negotium.’
51
In fact, pragma is more common than to on in Aristotle, but its range is broader.
52 a
Valla alludes to the famous opening of the Nicomachaean Ethics: Arist. EN 1094 1-3.
53 Arist. Meta. 1052b23-4; 1088 a 6-7.
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practice of human beings, which is the progenitor of words. Everyone says ‘singular
number’ and ‘plural,’ ‘one in number’ and ‘many in number,’ and Aristotle himself spoke
this way not infrequently. 54
(26) Two women who share twelve hens and a rooster have agreed to divide the eggs
every day, so that the even number goes to one, the odd number to the other. “Since
single eggs are sometimes produced, which woman will get them, tell me – neither,
perhaps?” “Of course not: they will go to the one that gets the uneven number.” One egg
makes a number, then. And so poor women sometimes have better sense about
understanding words than the greatest philosophers. Women actually make use of words,
while philosophers play games with them. (27) This is how Aristotle talks about ‘number
being numbered’ or ‘being numerable.’ 55 But I go along with the women and say that I
do not understand. What is numbered by number? Not number itself, just as measure is
not measured nor measurable and weight is not weighed nor weighable, but by this
measure and by this weight we measure and weigh other things.
(28) The ‘true’ or ‘truth,’ strictly speaking, is knowledge of or acquaintance with a thing
of some sort; it is the light of the soul, as it were, which also extends to the senses. This
light I hold to belong to the soul itself, as sight and the power of seeing belongs to the
eyes; it is not something external like the sun’s light, though God displays qualities of
things to the mind as the sun shows colors of bodies. (29) Plato proposed nothing
different in his books On the Republic, saying that truth is like the sun, and that
knowledge and acquaintance is like a view without clouds. 56 Since there is falsity in us,
why not truth as well? Surely when we declare what is true and false, we refer to the soul
of the speaker because truth or falsity lies there. For false bread and false wine and a
false prophet are by no means bread, wine and a prophet, while true bread, true wine and
a true prophet are nothing else but bread, wine and a prophet, as we perceive.
(30) Truth and falsity, therefore, are in us, but the source of our truth is in God, just as
our light comes from the sun. The cause of falsity is shutting out the divine light, just as
darkness comes from taking away the sun since God is really the truth, as the sun is light,
which Plato just now observed. Sometimes these things are represented not in the soul
but by the mouth, and then speech can be false without the soul’s erring when someone
speaks otherwise than he perceives. But by the same token speech can be true when it is
not himself that someone deceives, as just mentioned, but another. (31) Occasionally
these terms are applied to behavior as well. ‘Is he truly sleeping, or pretending?’ ‘Is it a
true groan, or a false one?’ They are even applied to a thing, occasionally, as if truth
were in it, as in ‘I found the truth of the thing’ when I have clearly attained knowledge of
it, and ‘the truth of the thing is this’ or ‘actually, the true thing’ when we evidently know
that such is the case. But I do not find what actual difference it makes for the learned to
speak ‘what is true’ rather than ‘truly.’
54 Arist. Meta. 999 b 26-1000a1, 1053 a 14-54 a 35; Phys. 242 a 65-42 b 40; Zippel cites Occam, Sum. log. 1.39.
55 Arist. Meta. 1081a14; Phys. 219b6.
56 Pl. Rep. 508D-9B.
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(32) Coming to the third term, however, what should I say about the difference between
‘I do good’ and ‘doing well’ except that ‘doing good’ is not used? But these people want
it to be possible for ‘good’ to be done ‘not well,’ which is quite absurd. Suppose a person
needing money annoys me and I take out my stick and give him a scolding, should I not
be said ‘to have done good not well’? Who would really deny that I have done well by
showing the beggar my stick? But because I scolded the beggar I have not done well, and
surely I have not done good. Thus it must be said that there were two sides to the act, one
good, the other not good: by showing the stick I have done both well and good, but by
scolding neither well nor good.
(33) Accordingly, acting ‘justly’ and doing the ‘just’ are also the same, if only such talk
occurred, though we would prefer to say it either with the adverb, ‘do it reverently,
piously, justly and well’ but not ‘do the reverent, pious, just and good,’ or with the plural
number, ‘do reverent, pious, just and good deeds.’ (34) As Aristotle writes in the
Politics: “To act justly is impossible for those who do not do just deeds.” 57 And yet the
expression containing these words is absurd, as Quintilian says: “I would think it
ridiculous to add it to them except that Cicero uses it, ‘those who do the just thing, doing
justly,’ and evidence is certainly not lacking since ‘common pasture is permitting
common pasturing.’” 58 We say ‘I seek the just,’ however, for ‘I seek the just thing.’
57 Not at Arist. Pol. 1323a31-2, as in Zippel, though the context is right.
58 Zippel cites Quint. 5.10.85.
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3 EXCEPT IN A FEW SPECIAL CASES, THE TERM ‘CONCRETE’ MEANS NOTHING.
(1) Because we have made a few points about adjectives which, as they say, are
‘substantivated,’ the topic requires that we discuss concrete and abstract terms since
adjectives of this sort are called ‘concrete’ when changed into a substantive. 59 The
subject is what these people call ‘metaphysical,’ where, as if gathering grapes from an
arbor, they quickly get busy with ladders, baskets and pruning-hooks because obviously
the Greek grapes grow only in this location, while Latin fruit comes from other
vineyards, as it were. 60 Yet I find their wines watery or worse.
(2) ‘White,’ ‘black,’ ‘ruddy’ and similar terms that they call ‘concrete’ are said to signify
a white thing – two meanings, in other words: a body (when the word refers to a body)
and also the quality, which in itself is called ‘abstract,’ like ‘whiteness,’ ‘blackness,’
‘ruddiness’ and other such terms. On this matter I cannot make a general pronouncement
and immediately condemn these people with a single word, even though I believe they
must certainly be found guilty. 61 Lest I go too fast and stumble, I shall proceed step by
step on this point.
59 Above, 2.10 for ‘substantivated’; the topic of this chapter is the grammar and syntax of adjectives and
adjectival pronouns treated as substantives. Valla shows, but does not explain, that the use of these words
varies by gender. When masculine and femine substantive adjectives are generic, they are mainly plural, as
when barbari refers to all barbarians in general, though a singular like sapiens (‘wise’) can also be generic.
Some masculine and feminine adjectives, however, both singular and plural, are specific rather than
generic, like the feminine singular fera, meaning a particular wild animal, or the neuter plural hiberna,
meaning a winter camp. When singular neuter adjectives are substantive, they can refer either to a single
object, so that an aridum is a particular stretch of dry ground, or to an abstraction like uprightness or
honestum. Neuter plurals like honesta, meaning upright acts, can also be generic. Such neuters may be in
apposition with nouns of other genders or with infinitives.
Almost all relative, interrogative and indefinite pronouns, which can be adjectival or substantive, are
formed on the same stem (qu-) and are mainly identical. But the relative pronoun (qui, quae, quod) has
three genders in both singular and plural, while the interrogative or indefinite (quis, quid) has only two in
the singular when it is substantive. When used as an adjective, however, the interrogative is identical to the
relative. Both the relative (qui, etc.) and the interrogative (quis, etc.) form a number of compounds:
quidam, quicumque, quispiam, quisque, aliquis and so on. Valla approaches these issues empirically, citing
or inventing dozens of cases to show that there is no simple pattern of ‘concrete’ terms, by which he meant
the pattern implied by the distinction between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ terms that arose in post-classical
Latin.
In classical Latin, abstractus occurs only as the past participle of the verb abstrahere, ‘to remove’ or
‘separate,’ while concretus can be an independent adjective; its primary meaning is ‘composed’ of parts or
‘compacted,’ and its uses are mainly physical, applying to ice or congealed milk, for example. Christian
authors used it first in this way, in the literature on the six days of creation and elsewhere, but eventually
the concretus/abstractus pair entered theological language as a semantic opposition. It was this later usage
that provoked Valla, but his main point in this detailed (and tedious) chapter becomes clear only at the
beginning of the next, where he reveals that his target is entitas (‘entity’), a word that cannot exist in Latin,
as he will argue, because it is an abstract noun ending in -itas, a class of substantives that can be derived
only from certain adjectives, never from participles like ens (‘being’), the source of entitas.
60 The words ‘ladder’ (scalae) and ‘basket’ (calathus) had attracted the attention of authorities on Latin
diction, the latter as a fancy Greek substitute for the Latin quasillum: Quint. 1.5.16; Paul. Fest. 47M.
61 Zippel cites Occam, Sup. quat. lib. Sent. I.5.1; Sum. log. I.5-10.
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(3) First of all (leaving aside the points that I have just discussed, along with ‘any,’ a
derivative of ‘one,’ which is sometimes found for ‘any thing’), when we say ‘white of an
egg’ and ‘white of the eye’ and ‘white [tablet]’ of the praetor or judges or decurion, the
meaning is a thing plus whiteness, and yet it does not mean just any such thing, randomly
and generally, but something specific and definite, in the way that some use ‘black’ and
‘red’ for ‘black script’ and ‘red script.’ 62 (4) Such usages are ‘holy’ for a temple, as in ‘if
someone takes a holy thing from the holy [place]’; and ‘fatty’ for lard; and ‘fallen’ for
possessions that for various reasons revert to someone after a death; and ‘Tusculan,’
‘Cumaean,’ ‘my Pompeian’ or ‘your Pompeian’ for my estate or your estate which is in
the region of Tusculum or Cumae or Pompeii. 63 ‘Borrowed,’ ‘deposited,’ ‘loaned’ and
‘owed’ are the same and also ‘hollow’ for a cavity or hole.
These and all such terms signify one specific thing so that they cannot be called
‘concrete.’ 64 (5) Otherwise they signify just quality, as in Vergil:
Young deer with hides still dotted in white,
with whiteness or whiting, in other words; and in another line:
Seen in the dark of night,
in darkness, obviously; 65 and in Pliny: ‘winds that drive out the fair,’ where the fairness is
plainly meteorological; and in Cicero: ‘that resonant [voice] somehow brightens, even in
old age’; 66 which is like Paul’s phrase, ‘what is the breadth, the length, the height and the
deep,’ meaning depth, bathos, a word translated as ‘height’ elsewhere in the same author:
‘O the height of wealth in God’s knowledge and wisdom,’ which Jerome in his
Commentary on Daniel and elsewhere translates as ‘O the depth of wealth.’ 67
(6) Every day we read such things: ‘in this man there is nothing foolish,’ ‘nothing silly,’
‘nothing spiteful’; or else ‘nothing holy,’ ‘nothing pious,’ ‘nothing just,’ as in Plautus:
His coming was a pleasure but his going is more grievous,
62
The album of the praetor, a Roman magistrate, was a white tablet; the same word applied to lists or
registers kept by other officials; the titles of laws recorded in such documents were written in red: Quint.
12.3.11; Dig. 2.1.7; Ov. Fast. 1.415.
63
Zippel cites Cic. Ep. fam. 5.15.2, 7.3.1, 9.1.2, 12.20; the context of these examples is legal, but the
phrases seem not to be quotations.
64
What does L mean by ‘concrete’? He seems to mean a class term, hence not a particular, expressed by an
adjectival noun, like bonum for ‘good,’ but not an abstract noun, like bonitas for ‘goodness.’
65
Zippel cites Verg. E 2.41; G 1.478.
66
Zippel cites Plin. Ep. 2.17.7; Cic. Sen. 9.28; not exact quotations.
67
Zippel cites Ephes. 3:18; Rom. 11:33; Hier. Comm. Dan. 2.22 (MPL 25, 500); altus can describe either
great height or great depth.
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meaning more grief. 68 The reason given is that you usually find these words connected
with verbs that express quality: ‘white gladdens the eyes, black saddens them’; ‘cold
delights those who swelter.’ But I have never heard about ‘touching cold,’ ‘thrusting
hot,’ ‘white running,’ ‘black flying’ or ‘ruddy singing,’ nor has anyone else, in my
opinion, unless it was a barbarian who spoke. Why so? Because these verbs are used
with bodily things: ‘I ‘touch snow’ and ‘thrust a sword’; ‘a horse runs,’ ‘a crow flies,’ ‘a
cock sings’; so these verbs would definitely be found in application to the terms we are
discussing, at least in the singular, if their meanings were concrete.
(8) This I would call amazing, almost unsupported by reason but completely borne out by
usage: that those very words, whose concrete meaning I deny, I admit to have concrete
meaning in the plural (not that those people have heard of it, however), both for the
Greeks and for us: ‘whites are more pleasant than blacks,’ all white things more than all
the black, in other words. Likewise, ‘I would rather buy the fat than the lean,’ ‘the
beautiful are always more expensive,’ ‘the ugly are sold more cheaply,’ ‘no one steals the
cheap, only the expensive.’ Ovid:
The cold fought the hot, the wet against the dry,
soft battled hard and weighty against weightless,
meaning things that were hot, cold, wet, dry, soft, hard, weighty – and then something
unusual is said, scarcely possible in Latin (but good Greek, if the article is used), meaning
things without weight. 69 (9) Sometimes in more specialized cases these terms signify
places: places ‘wild with beasts’ or ‘rough with brush’; ‘through steeps of mountains,’
through the ‘trackless,’ ‘solitary’ and ‘dense,’ meaning though places of this kind.
Add to this a more important piece of evidence and a surprising one. (10) So much does
the singular of such words shun concreteness that on account of this, when adjectives
describing bodily things are substantivated, they do not permit the singular number: the
‘stony,’ ‘marble,’ ‘leaden,’ ‘iron,’ ‘silken’ and countless other [plurals]. 70 As the ancients
made use of the ‘glassy,’ ‘stringy’ and ‘woody,’ we have the ‘silvery,’ ‘golden,’
‘crystalline’ and ‘jewelled,’ but not ‘glassy,’ ‘stringy,’ ‘woody’ ‘silvery,’ ‘golden,’
‘crystalline’ and ‘jewelled’ [in the singular]. (11) What reason might we give for this
except that the singular number of an adjective converted into a neuter substantive
signifies only quality, which is not possible for adjectives of bodily things and almost all
others, allowing the [plural] ‘laudable,’ ‘shameful,’ ‘pleasant,’ ‘lovable,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘kind,’
‘happy’ and ‘annoying,’ but not ‘laudable,’ ‘shameful,’ ‘pleasant,’ ‘lovable,’ ‘sweet,’
‘kind,’ ‘happy’ and ‘annoying’ [in the singular]?
68 Zippel cites Plaut. Amph. 641.
69 Zippel cites Ov. Met. 1.19-20; Greek can form nouns by using a definite article with an adjective, so that
ta abarea, for example, would mean ‘the weightless [things]’; having no article, Latin cannot do this, but
Ovid takes poetic license, making sine pondere (‘without weight’), a prepositional phrase, the equivalent of
ta abarea and using it as a substantive. [What does the dagger mean in Z’s text?]
70 Both bombicinus and sericus mean ‘silken.’
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(12) Then I was on the point of saying that there seem to be a few extraordinary cases,
exceptions to the rule, as with the pronouns ‘mine, ‘yours,’ and ‘his,’ to which ‘another’s’
is related: ‘I gave mine,’ ‘I did not give yours,’ ‘he never gives his, but another’s,’ as in
Sallust: ‘coveting another’s, having squandered his own.’ 71 But there is also a particular
cause behind this in that these words, unlike those mentioned above, do not signify a
bodily or, so to speak, a substantial thing, since ‘mine,’ ‘yours,’ ‘his’ and ‘another’s’
have as much to do with quality and action as with substance, as in ‘lying is not my
[way].’
(13) Moreover, there is a another reason why these words cannot be brought under the
rule, as it seems, when the substantive in question does not agree with its referent in
gender, as in the passage of Homer that I mentioned, ‘to be many-mastered is no good.’ 72
Also in Vergil:
For barnyard beasts the wolf is grim,
And storms for field plants ripe;
For us unhappy Amaryllis
Blows like wind through trees.
Water’s sweet when kids are weaned,
Sweet the strawberry tree;
Pliant willows feed birthing herds,
Amyntas alone feeds me.
And elsewhere in Vergil:
… inconstant and ever mutable is
woman,
and in Cicero: ‘Death seems evil to me,’ and also ‘Is it evil because it is grievous.’
(14) This also occurs when the reference is to an infinitive, as in Juvenal:
Leaning on another’s reputation is a thing to be pitied,
71 Zippel cites Sall. Cat. 5.4.
72 Valla translates the first three words of two lines from the Iliad which he has already quoted (2.1) in
Greek: ouk agathon polukoiraniê. The second word, meaning ‘good,’ is a neuter adjective, but the noun to
which it refers, ‘the rule of many,’ is feminine; Valla mirrors this incongruity in Latin with a neuter
adjective (bonum) and a masculine noun (principatus). The passages that follow from Vergil, Cicero and
Juvenal make the same point. The word (suppositum) translated here as ‘referent’ is the past participle of a
verb (suppono) common in classical Latin, but the classical word is by no means equivalent to the
suppositum of medieval logic and grammar, a major point of contention among the philosophers whom
Valla attacks.
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although the word can be better regarded as an adjective. 73
Morever, a certain wittiness in speech excuses it, as in ‘stealing the holy from a holy
[place],’ meaning a holy thing, since if you change ‘from a holy’ into another phrase or
leave it out, you will not get the point of the word ‘holy,’ as in ‘stealing the holy from a
temple’ or ‘no one should steal the holy.’ Do you see how wit excuses fancy, as in the
phrase ‘one may repel force with force,’ as if [the two nouns] meant the same thing when
they do not since [the first] means violence but [the second] means strength? But one
puts up with the expression because the doubling of the word is witty. (15) Though
evidence to the contrary may be found here or there, it will not make a rule, and what is
said will generally be more affectation than usage. But philosophy and dialectic do not
make it a practice, nor indeed should they, to stray from the usage of words which is most
customary, from the path trod by all and paved in stone.
Now the meaning of the follwing phrases actually has more to do with quality or action:
‘I came down into the open,’ ‘I arrived on the flat,’ ‘the case was reduced to a brief,’ ‘the
ships are on the dry [land]’; likewise ‘by agreement,’ ‘on condition,’ ‘on hire,’ ‘on lease,’
‘on loan,’ and ‘on trust.’ 74 And these are clearly qualities: ‘smooth in speech,’ ‘uncertain
in age,’ ‘hesitant of mind,’ ‘insecure in expression,’ meaning smoothness, uncertainty,
hesitancy and insecurity.
(16) And to come to the points that have moved us to this discussion faster than was
proper, ‘just,’ ‘pious,’ ‘blessed,’ ‘true,’ ‘good’ and such terms, when they are
substantives, signify nothing but quality. Vergil:
… the just and the mindful she begs,
meaning not the just thing and the mindful thing, but justice and mindfulness. Vergil
again:
… and a mind that knows the right,
meaning rightness. And again:
holding the false and distorted as close as warnings of the true,
meaning falsehood, distortion and truth. (17) ‘False’ is the same as ‘falsity,’ and ‘good’
is the same as ‘goodness,’ except that ‘good’ has two meanings; we call justice ‘harsh’
and ‘mild,’ and by the mild kind we mean goodness, as when we say that something is
73 Zippel cites Verg. E 3.80-3; A 4.569-70; Cic. Tusc. 15.9; Juv. Sat. 8.76; some quotations inexact; Valla is
thinking of miserum in the line from Juvenal as an adjective made into a substantive and referring to the
infinitive incumbere.
74 Cic. Ep. Att. 6.3.1; ND 3.74.
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judged ‘by a fair and good [standard].’ 75 ‘Fair’ itself is also the same as ‘fairness,’ and
‘upright’ is the same as ‘uprightness,’ as when ‘there are a number of aspects of an
upright [character]’ and ‘there are a number of aspects of uprightness.’
(18) ‘Eternal’ is the same as ‘eternity,’ and there are many examples, as in ‘the works of
many people last into eternal [time]’ and ‘works are written by many people for eternity.’
‘Evil’ is the same as ‘wickedness’ (as I have said) or ‘depravity,’ ‘useful’ the same as
‘utility,’ ‘suitable’ as ‘suitability,’ ‘proper’ as ‘property,’ ‘contrary’ as ‘contrariety’ and
so on. 76
Hence, the notion of concrete terms is neither general nor random, but it is nearly empty
and groundless. 77 (19) I would rather they had put these terms in the masculine and
feminine genders than in the neuter. For adjectives are substantivated in the masculine
gender and the feminine, and they signify a thing with the quality, but the things
themselves are only a man and a woman, as in ‘the swarthy is hotter by nature than the
fair,’ ‘the light is more beautiful by nature than the swarthy and the dark,’ ‘many are the
ill,’ and ‘rare are the chaste.’ You have such thoughts about no animal other than the
human and indeed about no other thing. ‘The angry [one] has no plan,’ ‘the greedy [one]
does nothing right except at death,’ ‘the [one who is] submissive to the husband is hardly
ever beaten’: the reference is not to a lion, dog, eagle or dove but to a man and a woman.
(20) Likewise with ‘some,’ ‘a certain,’ ‘a particular,’ ‘anyone who,’ ‘another,’ ‘none,’
‘this,’ and ‘that’ [in the masculine and feminine], so that it makes no difference whether
or not one adds ‘man’ or ‘woman’: ‘no man is here,’ ‘no woman is silent’; ‘none is here,’
‘none is silent’ or ‘no one is here,’ ‘no one is silent.’ 78 But whoever said ‘nothing is
silent’? Whether simple or composite, this term has no neuter substantive like those
mentioned above – ‘something,’ ‘a certain thing,’ and ‘anything.’
(21) This also holds for the general interrogative word, ‘who’ or ‘which,’ as in ‘who is
present?’ and ‘which is dead?’ where it is certainly a man and a woman. Those Greeks
whom Priscian followed were wrong, therefore, in leading to him to say ‘Who invented
letters? A man. Who is useful for the plow? An ox. Who swims in the sea? A fish.’ 79
For when one asks ‘Who invented writing?’ it is exactly the same as asking ‘Which
person?’ How clumsy it would be if your answer were ‘a dog’ when I asked ‘who is
waiting for me?’ If a dog and not a person were waiting, the answer should have been
‘no one is waiting for you, just a dog.’
(22) It is clear that I was asking about a person, in fact, since otherwise I would not have
said ‘who’ but ‘what is waiting for me?’ as in other cases. For one should not ask ‘who is
useful for the plow?’ and ‘who swims in the sea?’ but ‘what?’. If someone were to ask
75
Cic. Rhet. Her. 2.20; Caec. 65; Dig. 17.1.12.9, 40.4.22.pr.; Ter. Adelph. 987.
76
Above, 2.24.
77
Above, 3.3.
78
Since these words are gendered in Latin, it is not necessary, for example, to add mulier (‘woman’) to
distinguish a feminine ‘that’ (illa) from a masculine (ille) or a neuter (illud).
79
Zippel cites Priscian, Gramm. 17.6.43
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‘who is useful for the plow?’ my answer would be ‘a plowman or farmer’; if the question
were ‘who swims in the sea?’ it would be ‘no one, as far as I can see’ or else ‘he’; if it
were ‘who invented letters?’ it would be ‘Cadmus (they say) invented Greek letters,
Carmenta Latin letters and Esdra Hebrew letters.’ 80 The reason, as I said, is that ‘who’
[masculine] refers only to a man and [in the feminine] to a woman. But ‘what,’ as in
‘what animal is useful for the plow?’ or ‘what beast swims in the sea?’, never becomes a
concrete term but is always an adjective, just like ‘what man invented letters?’, ‘what
horse is suited to the course,’ ‘what animal is useful for the plow?’ or ‘swims in the sea?’.
I have called it an adjective, then, because it has three forms, [masculine, feminine and
neuter], that lack a substantive.
(24) But ‘which’ is always substantive. An example similar to Priscian’s is given by
Boethius or by Bede in the book On definition when he says: ‘If you ask “which is a
man?”, the correct answer will be “an earthly, rational, mortal, two-legged animal
capable of laughter.”’ 81 If you turn this around, the statement is intact. ‘It is a man’: is
this the correct response to one who asks the question, ‘which is an earthly, rational,
mortal, two-legged animal capable of laughter’? On the contrary, it is a perverse answer
because it responds not to ‘which’ but to ‘what,’ and besides the question is perverse
because you should have asked ‘what is an animal?’.
(25) Let me add examples in oblique cases: ‘I hear someone,’ ‘I hear no one,’ ‘I find
someone whom I observe, whom I hear [all both masculine and feminine].’ You may say
‘I see [someone] running,’ ‘I hear [someone] eating,’ ‘I observe [someone] sleeping’
correctly of a person but not correctly of a horse, wolf or ox. Now I have never read nor
heard anyone say ‘I see running,’ ‘I hear eating,’ or ‘I observe sleeping’ [without the
oblique cases]. [26] However, I have read ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ for water of that kind, and this
comes from the Hebrews – ‘arid’ or ‘dry’ for land because when the land was separated
from the waters at God’s command, dry was made from wet. 82 The Latins would say this
in the neuter gender, as I mentioned above: ‘the ships are on the dry [land].’ ‘So many,’
‘how many,’ ‘some,’ ‘just as many’ and many others are never finely distinguished in the
neuter.
(27) But if participles are not substantivated in the neuter gender, they may at least have
concrete meaning so that ‘running’ may may mean a running thing, ‘eating’ a thing that
eats and ‘sleeping’ a thing that sleeps. Nor will ‘being’ be substantivated in the neuter,
surely, and thus it would signify a thing that is. But the following words, though they are
very few, are different: ‘contingent,’ ‘accident,’ ‘consequent’ and ‘antecedent’; they
signify a particular thing, but not everything, that is contingent, accidental, consequent or
antecedent. In the genitive especially, and in the ablative with a preposition, such
substantivated participles are found, also some non-participles, but their meaning is not
concrete; in Cicero, for example: ‘I am aware of your contention that the gods have a
kind of appearance which has nothing of the concrete, nothing of the solid, nothing of the
80 Zippel has cf. Isid. Etym. 1.3-4; 2 Esdr. 8:1-12.
81 Zippel cites Boet. De diffin. 1 (MPL 64:907).
82 Zippel cites Ps. 94:5.
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distinct, nothing of the prominent, and that it is clear, tenuous and transparent,’ meaning
no concreteness, solidity, distinctness, or prominence. 83 All this means, in fact, is nothing
concrete, nothing solid, nothing distinct, nothing prominent. How many words I fashion
and how much labor I undertake for what makes no difference! What is the point of this
dispute of which our ancestors made no mention, as if it were worthless goat’s wool?
83 Zippel cites Cic. Nat. D. 1.27.75.
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4 NO NOUNS IN -ITAS COME FROM SUBSTANTIVES BUT FROM ADJECTIVES,
AND NOT FROM ALL ADJECTIVES.
(1) Why is it that they make ‘entity’ from this ‘being’ of theirs – if I may raise this issue
now as well – as they do in many other cases, such as ‘whatness’ from ‘what,’
‘initselfness’ from ‘in itself’ and ‘thishereness’ from ‘this here,’ all fetched out of some
lair of barbarism? 84 In the first place, these terms are not handed down from Aristotle;
next, they cannot be derived from substantives, though ‘being’ and ‘which’ are
substantives; nor finally do they come from all adjectives – only from those of the second
declension that end in -us (and not even all of these); or from those of the same
declension ending in -er; and those of the third declension in -is or certain other letters,
and again not all of them.
(2) In the second declension, then, ‘healthiness,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘honesty,’ ‘holiness,’
‘severity,’ ‘divinity’ and ‘humanity’ come from ‘healthy,’ ‘good,’ ‘honest,’ ‘holy,’
‘severe,’ ‘divine,’ and ‘human,’ and also ‘readiness’ from ‘ready.’ In the third,
‘lightness,’ ‘heaviness,’ ‘easiness,’ ‘moderation,’ ‘fineness’ and ‘thinness’ come from
‘light,’ ‘heavy,’ ‘easy,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘fine’ and ‘thin.’ A good many such words also
ended in –tudo, since in the antiquity-hunters one may see ‘sweetness,’ ‘sanctity,
‘severity’ and ‘levity’ [ending in -tudo, all] in the same sense, along with ‘blessedness’
and ‘beatitude’ – harsh words, in Cicero’s view, though he thinks that use may soften
them. 85 Likewise, ‘rapidity,’ ‘wholesomeness,’ ‘poverty’ and ‘happiness’ come from
‘rapid,’ ‘wholesome,’ ‘poor’ and ‘happy.’
(3) I have heard of no derivative in -itas from ‘running,’ however, or from ‘eating’ or
‘crying’ or ‘standing’ or ‘sitting’ or ‘reading’; ‘entity,’ therefore, cannot be derived from
‘being.’ Thus, beyond the fact that the word has no basis in authority, there are two
reasons why we are forbidden to form ‘entity’: because these words ending with n and s
do not allow such substantives in -itas; and because no substantive like ‘being’ produces
from itself a substantive in -itas; the sole exception is ‘citizen,’ from which ‘citizenry’
comes, though it is hardly a substantive, being like ‘rich’ or ‘poor [person].’ Therefore,
‘citizenry’ does not signify a quality because this is not what ‘citizen’ signifies, in the
way of ‘healthiness’ and ‘healthy,’ ‘honesty’ and ‘honest,’ ‘sweetness’ and ‘sweet,’
‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ (in Cicero, for example). 86 ‘Olivity,’ a name that some writers use,
actually means ‘olive-harvest’ or the time when olives ripen, which is not a property that
belongs to them, and yet it seems that the word comes from an adjective, ‘olive [in three
genders.]’ 87
84 Above, n. 59; Zippel cites Paul. Ven. Lib. met. 1, 5; Sum. nat. (Venice, 1503), 93r, 95r.
85 Zippel cites Cic. Nat. d. 1.34, 95; Quint. 8.3.32; for stylists who were fond of such odd words, which
Valla sees as archaisms, see Gel. 13.3.2; Apul. Soc. 3; Lact. Ira 10.7; the unlikely austeritudo seems to be
Valla’s invention.
86 Cic. Part. 32, 63; De orat. 3.181; Tusc. 3.9-11.
87 Zippel cites Varro, RR 1.60; see also Menip. fr. 219; Col. RR 1.1.5; 12.50.1, 52.1, 8, 15; Paul. Fest. 202
(M).
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(5) No one, however, either Latin or Greek, has ever said ‘deity,’ or in Greek theotês – at
least none of those whom we call ‘the ancients.’ For neither ‘God’ nor theos signifies a
quality. Our people said ‘divinity’ from ‘divine,’ therefore, and the Greeks theiotês from
theios. In any case, it would also have been pointless to adopt another word with the
same meaning. And yet we read it in Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, though I do not
know if it is found in every text or was corrupted by copyists and then followed by the
Church Fathers. Those who translated it into our language have ‘divinity’ rather than
‘deity’ either because the reading they had was theiotêtos rather than theotêtos or because
they had seen ‘deity’ rather than ‘divinity’ in none of the Latin authors. But as I said, the
Church Fathers, both the Greeks and our own, used ‘deity,’ doing so when it was clearly
unnecessary, lacking ancient authority and with no basis in analogy. 88
(7) In the seventh book of the City of God, Augustine had only this to say: ‘it does not
offend writers of our language to use this word “deity” to translate more distinctly from
Greek what they call theotês.’ 89 But I see that you were offended, Augustine, since in a
work so vast I never find you using that word. 90 Why does one read nothing about the
other word, which exists in the ancient authors – theiotêtos, I mean – and agrees with the
theory of grammar? Why did you not mention it? Because you were not an excellent
Hellenist?
Yet you were an excellent Latinist. Why did you not talk about rules for these words?
Do they differ at all? (8) Thomas Aquinas, who was no better at Latin than you were at
Greek, ventured to do so after you, writing in his Commentary on the Epistle to the
Romans: ‘Because of this he said “divinity,” which signifies participation, rather than
“deity,” which signify’s God’s essence.’ 91 Where else in Paul did you read ‘deity,’
Thomas, since you say that he used the word ‘divinity’ here. I will not mention how
absurd a reading ‘deity’ would be in the passage, ‘Everlasting his power and divinity.’ 92
What author, what book, what method taught you this distinction? Why did you not
listen to Boethius, who proposed a general theory on this topic? 93
(9) I would say the same about ‘identity,’ plainly a word as absurd as ‘itness’ would be if
based on ‘it,’ and about tautotês, a word whose strangeness I might perhaps endure if – as
88
Valla’s point is that abstract nouns of quality must derive from adjectives of quality, not from nouns that
do not signify quality; hence, ‘divinity’ must come from the adjective ‘divine,’ divinus or theios, not from
the noun ‘God,’ deus or theos; this rules out ‘deity’ but allows ‘divinity’ in both Latin and Greek. Zippel
notes that the reading at Col. 2:9 in modern editions of the New Testament is the theotêtos to which Valla
objects but that the Vulgate has divinitatis. Modern dictionaries list both theotês and theiotês as classical
usage, thus contradicting Valla. Zippel cites Occam, Sum. log. 1.6; Paul. Ven. Log. ma. 2.13 (Ven., 1499,
175v, 176r), but Valla seems to be talking about the Fathers as next after the ancients. Deitas appears in
Christian writers as early as Tertullian, Arnobius and Lactantius and then becomes very common.
89
Zippel cites Aug. DCD 7.1; the quotation is not exact.
90
Augustine also uses deitas in DCD 10.1 and 11.29 and often in other works.
91
Zippel cites Aquinas, In omn. S. Pauli Apost. epistolas comment. 1.6.
92
Zippel cites Rom. 1:20.
93
Zippel refers to the Boethius passage below ???
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some of them claim – it meant ‘likeness’ and if tauton meant ‘like.’ 94 In a word – or
rather words – from our language, I will not endure this strangeness, especially given the
rule against it that requires nouns of this sort to be formed only from adjectives, and not
from all of them.
(10) Yet we read it in Cicero: ‘Do you suppose that any Appiety or Lentulity counts more
with me than marks of excellence?’ 95 These two examples (no others are found) are
plainly derived from adjectives, since both the house and the clan are called ‘Appian’ –
the origin of the Appian Way, the Appian Law and the Appian fruit. And likewise
‘Lentulus’ was a diminutive from [the word for] ‘slow,’ as were Crassulus and
Barbatulus from ‘stout’ and ‘bearded.’ Publius Oppius mocked the name Lentulus as if it
were an adjective, as if children less diligent at reproducing than their parents were rather
slow or ‘a little slow.’ 96 And this usage occurs not in Cicero’s writings but in a letter,
where obviously he is not serious, joking about aristocratic pride.
(11) Boethius discusses this in his Commentary on the Perihermenias: “To name some
particular quality of a substance, not transferable to any other, I would use a word coined
for it – if it were permissible to coin a word – so that the form of the proposition would
be made clearer. Accordingly, we might name this quality ‘Platonity’ with a coined
word, as when we say that ‘humanity’ is a quality of a human being. This ‘Platonity’ is a
quality of only one person, then, and only of Plato, not just anyone, while ‘humanity’
belongs to Plato and to any others covered by this term. Because ‘Platonity’ applies to
the one Plato, the result is that the mind of one who hears the term belonging to Plato
refers it to one person and to one particular substance. But when he hears [the noun]
‘human,’ he refers its meaning in the same way to as many people as he knows to be
covered by ‘humanity.’” 97
(12) Indeed, Boethius was correct to deny that this word ‘Platonity’ could be coined, but
it was disingenuous of him to talk as if ‘humanity’ were formed from ‘human,’ for if
‘humanity’ comes from [the noun] ‘human,’ why not also ‘Platonity’ from ‘Plato’? But
if one cannot say ‘humanity’ on the basis of [the noun] ‘human,’ then surely not
‘Platonity’ from ‘Plato.’ In fact, ‘humanity’ comes from the adjective ‘human,’ which
comes in turn from [the noun] ‘human,’ as ‘Plato’ is the basis of ‘Platonic’ or ‘Platonist’
94 Idem in Latin and tauton (from ho autos) in Greek mean ‘the same,’ while the Latin similis means ‘like’;
Aristotle (Meta. 905 b 21) uses tautotês to mean ‘identity.’
95 The quotation is from a letter (Ep. fam. 3.7.5, cited by Zippel) written by Cicero to Appius Claudius
Pulcher and mentioning a Lentulus from another great family, the Cornelii. The name ‘Appius,’ used
rarely except by the Claudii, is actually a praenomen, corresponding to ‘Marcus’ in ‘Marcus Tullius
Cicero,’ not to ‘Tullius,’ which was Cicero’s family or ‘gentile’ name (nomen); the name by which we now
know Cicero was his cognomen, originally perhaps a nickname of an ancestor. So famous were the
Cornelian Appii, that towns, aquaducts, streets, laws, and fruits were named after them. In ‘Publius
Cornelius Lentulus Spinther,’ ‘Lentulus’ is a cognomen, corresponding to ‘Cicero,’ but it is also a
diminutive form of an ordinary adjective, lentus, with a wide range of meaning: ‘supple,’ ‘slow,’
‘persistent’ or ‘untroubled.’ Crassus (‘dense,’ ‘stout,’ ‘coarse’) and barbatus (‘bearded’) were also used as
cognomina.
96 Publius Oppius ???
97 Zippel cites Boethius, In lib. Arist. de interp. 2.7 (PLM 64, 464).
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or ‘Platonian,’ resulting in qualities of ‘Platonicity’ or ‘Platonism’ or ‘Platonianism.’ But
I see no way for ‘Platonity,’ a noun that does not arise from an adjective of quality, to
signify quality.
(13) What to say when some (not counted among the ancients) have added ‘identity,’
‘whatness’ and ‘itness’ – ‘same thingness,’ ‘what thingness’ and ‘that thingness,’ in other
words? Such expressions are not far from the absurdity of ‘initselfness,’ ‘thishereness’
and various others that even Crassus would have found ridiculous, no less so than the
thing that made him laugh at least once in his life, according to Lucilius. 98
(14) Actually, I have found no substantives based on adjectives that end in -eus and
signify a material – ‘woodiness’ from ‘woody,’ ‘marbleness’ for ‘marble,’ ‘ironness’
from ‘iron.’ These are not adjectives of quality, I believe, to which ‘mine,’ ‘yours’ and
‘his’ are somehow similar, and I have never heard of a ‘mineness,’ ‘yourness’ or
‘hisness’ coming from them. Some legal authories venture to use this last one,
nonetheless, but they do not even understand the proper use of the pronoun. On the quite
difficult application of this word and of ‘his,’ its root, I have recently written a little book
dedicated to Giovanni Tortelli of Arezzo. 99 But if these nouns in -itas, which also signify
quality according to Boethius, do not come from all adjectives, how much less likely is it
that they come from substantives?
5 THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘ESSENCE’ AND ‘TO BE’ WITH THE ARTICLE, AND
LIKEWISE WITH OTHER TERMS LIKE ‘WILL’ AND ‘TO WILL’ WITH THE ARTICLE.
(1) Now I come to the predicaments; for the first of these (as I have shown) Quintilian
says ‘essence’ is the correct translation. 100 This is what he says elsewhere about this
word: ‘Many words are formed from Greek, especially by Sergius Flavius, and they are
just as crude as “abling” and “essence;” why we should have such scorn for them I fail to
see, except that we criticize ourselves unfairly and then struggle with an impoverished
language.’ 101 In one of his letters, Seneca denies that to on and hê ousia can be expressed
in Latin. 102 (2) Preferring not to translate ousia word for word, Boethius used
‘substance,’ which is hupostasis in Greek. As a result, when ‘substance’ is applied not to
its Greek equivalent but to a different term, some inevitably use the Greek term
‘hypostasis’ in place of a Latin term. Clearly, it was not because Boethius shunned the
98 Zippel cites Cic. Fin. 5.92; identify Crassus, Lucilius ???
99 Zippel cites Angelo de Periglis, Tractatus suitatis, in Tractatus universi iuris (Lyon, 1541), I, 7; and Ad
Ioannem Tortellium Aretinum cubicularium apostolicum de reciprocatione sui et suus liber, written by
Valla in 1449-50; identify Tortelli ??? The possessive pronouns – ‘mine’ (meus), ‘yours’ (tuus), ‘his’
(suus) and so on – were of special importance in law for describing claims of possession and ownership.
They are declined like adjectives, but suus, related to the reflexive pronoun sui, is more restricted than the
others in its syntax, applicable only to the subject of the clause in which it appears.
100 Above, 1.6.
101 Zippel cites Quint. 8.3.33; above, n. 25 on Flavius and Plautus; the participle quens is an unusual form of
the defective verb quire, ‘to be able,’ probably itself a back-formation from nequire, ‘to be unable,’ but
modern editions of Quintilian have queentia.
102 Zippel cites Sen. Ep. 58.6-8; these are Greek words for ‘being’ and/or ‘essence.’
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word ‘essence’ as difficult that he did this, for he frequently uses this word, though in a
different sense, and this was the reason why many recent Latin writers have gone
wrong. 103 On this point, I must first register a few objections to establish a broader
context for later discussion of the question that I have opened.
(3) Boethius (assuming that he is the translator of Aristotle’s Predicaments) writes as
follows: ‘In addition to what has already been said, however, there seems to be another
way of being prior. For of those things that are convertible in that they follow from
essence, what is somehow the cause of another’s essence is rightly said to be prior by
nature. That there really are such things is obvious, for in that it follows from essence, a
person’s being is convertible with a true statement about it.’ And right after this:
‘Whatever things are convertible in that they follow from essence….’ 104 (4) For what
Aristotle says in Greek, one can read neither ‘being,’ since Greek has no gerund, nor
‘essence’ – only the infinitive with an article. Because Boethius knew they meant the
same thing, however, he put one in place of the other. Who believes that ‘essence’ is one
thing and ‘the to-be’ something else? Boethius was certainly clear in the fifth book of his
Commentary on the Perihermenias, where he says: ‘It is necessary for that not to be, to
have no essence, in other words.’ I make the same claim about ‘to be’ and ‘essence’ as
about other such cases: that infinitives mean nothing different when they are treated as
nouns derived from their verbal forms. 105
(5) The Greeks teach this too, and therefore they apply the article and the preposition to
infinitives as they do to nouns, confirming that they are verbs no longer but obviously
nouns. And we also affix adjectives to these words as if they were nouns – though rarely,
and only in the nominative and genitive cases. This is why Boethius avoided the
infinitive in the genitive, though he does not always observe the rule. Persius writes
also
our dreary way of living;
… and I noted
Your knowing means nothing unless someone else knows
that you know it;
and also
To each his own wish.
And Martial adds
103 Zippel cites Boethius, In Cat. Arist. I (‘De substantia’), PLM 64.181-202.
104 Where Aristotle has t«n går éntistrefÒntvn katå tØn toË e‰nai ékoloÊyhsin, the Latin is eorum
enim quae convertuntur secundum essentiae consequentiam, using the noun essentia (‘essence’) to translate
the infinitive einai preceded by the article to (‘the to-be’); Arist. Cat. 14 b 10-15, 27-8; Zippel cites
Aristoteles Latinus, 1.1-5, 76; on convertibility, see above, n. 27.
105 Zippel cites Boethius, In lib. Arist. de interpret., 2 nd ed., 5 (PLM 64.585).
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Your want is what I refuse, Dindymus, and
Your refusal is what I want. 106
(6) ‘The to-live,’ then, is nothing other than ‘life,’ and ‘the to-run’ is nothing other than
‘running,’ just as ‘to dance,’ ‘to read,’ ‘to hear’ and ‘to see’ with the article are just
‘dancing,’ ‘reading,’ ‘hearing’ and ‘sight’; ‘to love’ with the article is ‘loving’ or ‘love,’
‘to will’ likewise is ‘willing,’ ‘to know’ is ‘knowing,’ ‘and ‘to be able’ is ‘ability’ or
‘might.’ When people speak crudely, this is why they say ‘as much as I am able,’
meaning ‘to the best of my ability’ or ‘with all my might’ or ‘if I have the strength.’ (7) I
said that the Greeks apply the preposition with an article to the infinitive, as in en tô
peripatein, en tô trechein, en tô petesthai, which have the same force as our gerunds ‘in
walking,’ ‘in running,’ ‘in flying.’ Who does not know that these are just the same as ‘in
a walk,’ ‘in a run’ and ‘in a flight’? When infinitives are used in a nominal sense, then,
they mean the same thing that these nouns mean. Priscian’s understanding here is better
than in the previous case: ‘But the infinitive means the same thing as the content of the
verb, for “to run” is “a run” and “to write” is “a writing” and “to read” is “a reading.”’ 107
(8) Therefore, infinitives are often associated with nouns and with words declined like
nouns, as in Persius:
But it’s a fine thing to be pointed out, for ‘that’s him’
to be said.
And Terence in the Brothers:
To plead your case in front of them is always a better approach;
and in the Eunuch:
To love by long distance
Is definitely better than nothing. 108
Also ‘to read is good,’ ‘to run is useful,’ ‘to write is appropriate,’ ‘to philosophize is best’
– these examples from Priscian are quite good, but the ones I have chosen are more
appropriate since I have connected adjectives with these same infinitives as if they were
substantives, which Priscian does not do. 109 (9) I called the examples I have chosen more
appropriate because I have followed Quintilian, who writes: ‘In the Satire, “and I noted
our dreary way of living,” when he uses the infinitive verb in place of a noun, what he
means is really “our life.”’ 110
106 Zippel cites Pers. 1.9-10, 27; 5.53; Mart. Ep. 5.83.2.
107 Zippel cites Prisc. Gramm. 18.4.43; above, 3.21.
108 Pers. 1.28; Ter. Ad. 608; Eun. 640-1.
109 Zippel cites Prisc. Gramm. 18.4.43.
110 Zippel cites Quint. 9.3.9.
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And since the ecclesiastics often dispute this point, I will confirm it from sacred
scripture: Paul To the Philippians, ‘To live for me is Christ, but greed is to die,’ where
he did not say ‘that I live’ and ‘that I die’ but ‘to live’ and ‘to die’ with the articles, to zên
kai to apothanein; and To the Hebrews, using the genitive with a preposition, ‘fearing
death through a whole life they submit to slavery,’ dia pantos tou zên. 111 (10) Likewise,
in the Gospel of Luke, ‘And to many blind people he gave sight’: where Greek uses the
article and infinitive, to blepein, one would write ‘And he gave it to many blind people to
see’ in order to translate as literally as possible into Latin, as the uneducated say lo
vedere, where nowadays the infinitive is really a noun.
Priscian confirms this elsewhere, writing: ‘But note that the infinitive verb has the force
of a noun with the same meaning.’ Some used to say that this is why ‘infinitive’ is the
name of this verb. For I say ‘to read is good’ as if I were saying ‘reading is good,’ and
thus the Greeks write chairein, ‘to be healthy,’ at the head of their letters where we write
‘health.’ This ‘to be healthy’ with the article is the same as ‘health,’ just as ‘to live,’ ‘to
die’ and ‘to see’ with the article are the same as ‘life,’ ‘death’ and ‘sight.’
6 ON DISTINGUISHING THE USE OF THESE WORDS, ‘ESSENCE’ AND ‘SUBSTANCE,’ SO THAT
OUR SPEECH IS NOT TANGLED IN CONFUSIONS
(1) If Boethius did not avoid this word, ‘essence,’ as something difficult, even using it
where difficulty could have been apparent to him, what was his reason for staying away
from it where it was proper, particularly when it prevents him from using hupostasis, as if
that word could not be translated into Latin?
Is it because ousia is usually translated as ‘substance,’ as when Luke talks about the
prodigal son who wasted all his substance (ousia)? 112 Ulpian used this Greek word,
writing: ‘In the case of wine, because its usia is the same, strictly speaking, I agree that
there is proof of the object even if there is a mistake about the material.’ Discussing a
similar issue, another jurist uses the Latin word: ‘Usufruct is the right to use another’s
things while keeping their substance intact.’ (2) But this word apparently can have a
different meaning for the jurists, like the word in Luke, with whom the jurist Scaevola
also agrees when he says: ‘To the same Titius I will one hundred and fifty to be paid and
returned from my substance.’ Also Caius in the Institutes: ‘But those who are destructive
or insane are ordered to be subject for their whole lives to a guardian because they cannot
reasonably take care of their substance.’ 113 Here ‘substance’ means property, resources or
inheritance, which the Greeks always call usia, never hypostasis, and they think this is
why a rich man is called plousios because he is pollês ousias, ‘of much substance.’ But
this sense of the word is not our topic now.
111 Zippel cites Philipp. 1:21, Heb. 2:15.
112 Zippel cites Luke 15:13.
113 Zippel cites Dig. 7.1.1, 18.1.9, 22.3.27; Gaius, Instit. Epit. 1.8.2.
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(3) Or is it because major authorities have used this word ‘substance’ for ‘essence,’ as
Cicero does in the Divisions of Rhetoric: ‘But in cases where the defense is that
something was done rightly, when the substance of what was done is the reason….’ 114
And Quintilian: ‘Our subject will be the first elements taught by the rhetorician and
questions asked about the very substance of rhetoric’; and elsewhere: ‘But the rhetoric
that we are discussing is like eloquence; for what we mean is its very substance.’ 115 So it
seems that not even Quintilian himself ventures to use ‘essence’ – likewise the
grammarians, when they say that a word signifies substance or quality.
(4) Or is it that some authors use the the words interchangeably? Although Priscian
rarely uses ‘essence,’ for example, he uses ‘substance’ more often, and, in the same book
that I mentioned above, he says: ‘These things show the substance or essence of the
thing.’ And in book 8: ‘That this mood is the basic form of the verb seems to follow
from its very nature, as with the nominative case in nouns, because it signifies the
substance or essence of the thing, which is not the case with other moods. For no
imperative, optative or dubitative in the subjunctive mood signifies the substance of an
action or effect, only the mind’s desires for a thing that has no substance.’ 116 For these
writers, ‘substance’ means something other than what it now means to philosophers.
This is true of Augustine as well, who sometimes use expressions like ‘essence or
substance,’ though he also says that in talking about God it is correct to use ‘essence,’
incorrect to use ‘substance.’ 117
(5) Or is it that the Greeks sometimes take ousia and hupostasis in the same sense, and
may I add huparxis as well? Damascene writes in book 1 of the Isagoge: ‘The word
hypostasis has two meanings: sometimes it is hyparxis only, and in that sense hypostasis
and usia are the same; but sometimes it is hyparxis both per se and as idiosystata, in
which sense a hypostasis indicates a numerically different individual.’ (6) However, the
same author had already said: ‘In the holy Fathers, “essence,” “nature” and “form” are
the same,’ and also ‘“substance,” “person” and “individual” are the same.’ 118 But in
religious matters, debating this difference is dangerous, which is why Jerome says in a
letter to Damasus that poison hides beneath the words hypostasis and ousia, and, because
of the dubious and ambiguous sense of these words, that some had fallen into heresy and
that he had been called a heretic by others, and accordingly he advised the Pope in Rome
about what to do. 119
114
Zippel cites Cic. Part. 30.106; the text in modern editions differs, reading subiecta for substantia, thus
eliminating Valla’s evidence.
115
Zippel cites Quint. 1.pr.21, 2.14.2-3.
116
Zippel cites Prisc. Gramm. 8.12.63, 18.7.69, also Valla’s confusion about the location of his previous
reference to a passage in Priscian, resulting from different editions of the DD.
117
Zippel cites Aug. Trin. 7.4.7 (PLM 42.939).
118
Zippel cites Damasc. Dialect. 41-3 (PGM 94.607, 612, 673); identify John Damascene, Dialectic
(Kephalaia philosophika, first part of Pêgê gnôseôs); huparxis can mean ‘reality,’ ‘existence,’ ‘substance’
or ‘property,’ and being idiosustata would make such an entity ‘self-composed.’
119
Zippel cites Hier. Epist. 15 (PLM 22.357); identify Pope Damasus.
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(7) Letting this rock pass by for fear of shipwreck, then, let us return to the words of
Aristotle, where nothing religious is at stake. He understands ousia in many ways. In
book 6 of the Philosophy he says: ‘Usia is used in many ways, of which four are
particularly important. For along with the universal and the genus, the what-it-was-to-be
of each thing seems also to be its usia, and the fourth of these is what underlies. But the
underlying, that of which other things are said, is itself never said of anything else. For
this reason, it is the first to be distinguished. What seems to be usia primarily, in fact, is
what first underlies, and, as such, usia is taken to be matter in one way, form in another
way and in a third way what is made of them.’ 120
(8) In the second book On the Soul, Aristotle also writes: ‘For usia may be used in three
ways, as we have said: one of these is indeed species, but another is matter, and a third is
composed of them both, where matter is their potency but form is their entelechy.’ Also
in book 1: ‘But if this is the soul’s usia, that it moves itself….’ And also: ‘Nor is the
essence of the soul the reason why it moves in a circle.’ 121 What marvel is this, Aristotle,
what prodigy of Peripatetic impudence? When you use one word to cover such variety,
terms that distinguish all things and all categories, do you not confuse them instead, since
there is nothing that is not either movement or activity, matter or potency, form or species
or entelechy or else what is made of them?
(9) This is why Macrobius, translating the word itself correctly, makes the meaning of
‘essence’ somewhat confused when the topic is the same as above, the soul. He writes:
‘Plato said that the soul is self-moving essence, Xenocrates that it is self-moving number,
Aristotle that it is entelechy, Pythagoras and Philolaus harmony, Posidonius idea,
Asclepiades the coherent use of the five senses, Hippocrates a thin spirit pervading the
whole body, Heraclitus of Pontus light, Heraclitus the naturalist a spark of starry essence,
Zeno spirit condensed in body, Democritus spirit implanted in atoms and so easily moved
that it penetrates the whole body, Critolaus the Peripatetic something made of the fifth
essence.’ (10) And in another passage, where he discusses Aristotle’s controversy with
Plato on the soul’s movement, these are his words: ‘If movement were the essence of the
soul, it would not cease moving, for there is nothing that accepts the contrary of its
essence. Now fire will never grow cold and snow will never spontaneously warm up, but
the soul sometimes stops moving, for we observe that the body is not always active.
Movement is not the soul’s essence, then, since it accepts the contrary of motion.’ 122
(11) Shortly afterward, where he defends Plato and refutes Aristotle with arguments from
many philosophers, Macrobius says: ‘But things for which it is the same to be and to be
moved never cease moving because they cannot exist without their essence.’ (12) And
next: ‘Thus, when we say that the soul is moved by itself, it does not follow that we
should regard mover and moved as a duality, but we recognize its essence in the
movement itself.’ And elsewhere: ‘Descending from the sphere, which is the only divine
120 Zippel cites Meta. 6.3, 1028 b 33-29 a 3, but this passage is actually from book 7, the most important and the
most difficult exposition of Aristotle’s metaphysics, cited by Valla in a crudely literal translation by ???;
diff. numbering of books ???
121 Zippel cites An. 406 a 1-2, 407 b 6-7, 414 a 14-16; note forma/species, morphê/eidos; also entelechy.
122 Zippel cites Macrob. Somn. 1.14.19, 2.14.26; identifications, esp. Heraclides and Heraclitus ???
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form, the soul is drawn out into a cone as it floats down, just as a line comes from a point
and extends into a length from an undivided source; and then from its point, which is a
monad, the soul comes here into the dyad, which is the first extension; and this is the
essence that Plato called undivided and likewise divided in the Timaeus, when speaking
about the structure of the world-soul.’ Again: ‘Therefore, if we will admit that trees are
indeed moved, but with a movement suited to them, why would we deny this to the soul –
that it is moved with a motion appropriate to its essence?’ 123
(13) Look at all the words we use up in order to know which word to use – ‘substance’ or
‘essence’ – because of the perversity of certain people! What shall we do, then? If we
prefer ‘substance,’ we seem to stray farther from the correct Greek and also to banish
‘essence’ as a word which is empty and useless (and good riddance). But if we prefer
‘essence,’ we shall depart from usage already accepted (to which some concession must
be made). And whichever way we choose, we shall still stumble upon the confusions of
language that I have pointed out. (14) Therefore, in order to allow both truth and usage
each to play its part, so that we may speak more distinctly and more clearly as well, we
must, in my view, say ‘substance’ when speaking about a thing composed of those two
principles (as Aristotle would say). When speaking about what he calls ‘matter,’ we
should call it ‘essence’; and if we ever need to cite some Greek author, we will make use
of the Greek word in the way that we have done. ‘Form,’ however, we understand to be
quality. 124
These are issues that we must discuss in what follows. This being so, the first category
(as Boethius liked) should be called ‘substance.’ 125 For a body is composed of matter and
form, or of essence and quality, and it must be aknowledged that soul is likewise
composed, although we will have something to say about this as well.
7 THE CLASSIFICATION OF SUBSTANCE: AGAINST PORPHYRY AND OTHERS
Porphyry – a man of great authority and very learned, if we believe Boethius – did what
most people did and classified ‘substance’ into ‘bodily’ and ‘bodiless.’ Since it is a
category, ‘substance’ is treated as the highest genus, while ‘bodily’ and ‘bodiless’ are
said to be differences, always arranged in pairs. When these differences are reduced to
substantives, they make species, as when ‘body’ is made out of ‘bodily.’ But ‘bodiless’
did not get a substantive of its own in their scheme, though by my reckoning it will be
‘spirit’ or ‘soul.’ (2) ‘Body’ is nothing but ‘bodily substance,’ however, and ‘spirit’ or
‘soul’ is ‘bodiless substance.’ When ‘body,’ which is a species of ‘substance,’ is
123
Zippel cites Macrob. Somn. 1.12.5-6; 2.15.9, 12, 16.17.
124
For substance in Aristotle as a composite of two principles, matter and form, see above, 6.7; the Greek
word of which Valla will make use is ousia, transliterated as usia.
125
Zippel cites Boethius, In Porphyrium dialogi a Victorino translati, 1 (PLM 64.41-2); In Porphyrium a se
translatum commentariorum libri, 3 (PLM 64.102-4), noting that V’s target here is Boethius (as propagated
by Peter of Spain, Summul. 2.2 [Cologne: 1499, bii-iii]; Paul of Venice, Summul. 1.3 [Venice: 1488, a4];
and Paul of Pergola, Logica [Venice: 1501, aii], who would have been read at Padua when V taught there)
more than Porphyry.
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classified into differences or species, it becomes a genus of those species – likewise
‘spirit’ or ‘soul,’ which I do not find classified.
(3) Porphyry classifies ‘body’ as ‘ensouled’ and ‘soulless’ or ‘non-ensouled.’ The
species of this genus have no names of their own, but they are called ‘ensouled body’ and
‘soulless body.’ The species ‘ensouled body’ also becomes a genus classified into
‘sentient’ and ‘insentient.’ The former species, ‘sentient ensouled body,’ has its own
name, which is ‘animal,’ but the latter species has no name. (4) ‘Animal’ in turn
becomes a genus when classified into ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ differences,’ but neither
of its species, called ‘rational animal’ and ‘irrational animal,’ has a name. The species
‘rational animal’ is also classified into least differences, from which arise other species:
‘mortal rational animal,’ which has its own name, ‘man’; and ‘mortal irrational animal,’
which is called ‘beast,’ but this can be further classified as a genus and is not a least
species. (5) ‘Man’ is a least species because ‘man’ never becomes a genus unless we
move on into other qualities, as when ‘one man is good, another not good’ or ‘one is
male, another female,’ and so on. The species ‘man’ is divided into individuals, like
‘Socrates’ and ‘Plato.’ 126
Just as a least species never becomes a genus, a highest species also never becomes a
genus, but in between they are genera with respect to lower levels and also species with
respect to higher levels. (6) Furthermore, a difference added to a genus makes a species,
as when ‘bodily’ added to ‘substance’ makes ‘body.’ But the addition of this word
subtracts meaning, for ‘substance’ means more than ‘bodily substance,’ and so species
and genus are just part and whole since ‘bodily substance’ or ‘body’ is a part of
‘substance’ regarded as a whole. Inasmuch as a man’s body is divided into head and
torso as parts of a whole, the head then becoming a whole in relation to its parts, and the
trunk likewise, in the same way the highest genus is a whole for the species nearest it
(which Cicero in many passages calls ‘parts of the genus’), and they in turn become
wholes for subsequent species. 127
(7) But I cite no examples of other genera and species because this classification by
Porphyry is scarcely sound in any of its parts. Not to mention that ‘thing’ (which Ulpian
called a ‘comprehensive word’) 128 is the highest genus, classified into ‘substantial’ and
‘insubstantial,’ how can it be that while soul belongs to ‘bodiless substance,’ I find it
under ‘bodily substance,’ like finding cold cohabiting with heat and light dwelling in
darkness? 129 An ‘ensouled body’ like a man is composed of bodily and bodiless
126
individuum as ‘undivided’ and ‘individual,’ see above, 6.5-6, 12.
127
Zippel cites Cic. Top. 9.40; Part. orat. 12.42.
128
Zippel cites Ulp. in Dig. 12.1.1; cf. DD 2.17.
129
In Porphyry’s tree, the first differences under substance (ousia) are bodily (sômatikos) and mental
(noêtikos). Man – not, like the bodiless gods, a pure mind – eventually comes under the former; this is not
a problem for Porphyry’s definition of man because the human body is still ensouled, making man alive in
way that surpasses mere sentience (empsuchon v. zôon) but not, as Valla claims, endowed with a bodiless
soul. Under substance, however, Valla makes a different distinction, opposing ‘bodiless’ rather than
‘mental’ to ‘bodily,’ which better supports his objection – that man’s soul ends up on the wrong, embodied
side of the tree. Boethius ???
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substance, and this certainly belongs not to one species but to contrary species. Someone
separating black sheep from white should not put the half-white among the black nor
among the white either but should set them apart from both.
For to say that man is a ‘body’ is not to talk about a man, and it is worse than saying
‘man is a soul’ since soul is the better part of man. (9) This did not escape the notice of
these people, but they thought that soul is not a substance, and so they said that both trees
and plants have soul (a point to be discussed shortly), also making a foolish distinction
between ‘animate body’ and ‘animal,’ as if these were different. Now no animal at all
need be called ‘immortal.’ Indeed, because the angels who are in heaven or in the place
below are not ‘animate bodies,’ they are also not ‘animals,’ not having been endowed
with body.
(10) Therefore, ‘bodiless substance’ or ‘spirit’ is divided into ‘creating’ and ‘created’;
‘created’ into ‘angelic’ and ‘non-angelic’; ‘angelic’ (if you like) into ‘celestial’ and
‘infernal,’ with ‘Michael,’ ‘Gabriel,’ ‘Satan’ and ‘Lucifer’ as individuals. And ‘nonangelic’
is divided into one made in the image of God and called ‘human,’ with ‘my
spirit’ and ‘yours’ as individuals; and one not made in the image of God, which perhaps
can also be divided into species, whose individuals are ‘the spirit of this brute’ and ‘of
that one.’ (11) ‘Bodily substance’ or ‘body’ is divided into ‘plant’ and ‘non-plant’; and
‘plant body’ itself can perhaps also be divided into its own species, whose individuals are
‘this olive,’ ‘this laurel.’ ‘Non-plant body’ is divided into ‘gold’ and ‘non-gold’ and
perhaps even farther, with ‘this gold piece,’ ‘this silver ring’ as individuals.
(12) ‘Animal’ belongs to neither genus, neither black sheep nor white, as I mentioned,
nor does it belong to ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ or ‘body’ even though it is composed of all three.
Therefore we shall classify it by itself into ‘human’ and ‘non-human.’ I exclude ‘Christ’
from ‘animal’ because he is not just man but God as well. As individuals belonging to
‘human’ I have already mentioned ‘Socrates,’ ‘Plato.’ The ‘non-human’ or ‘beast’ can, if
you prefer, be divided into many species, as I have shown. Therefore, since the first
category is ‘substance’ and is divided into ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ and ‘body,’ let us see what
Aristotle thinks about them both.
8 ON SPIRIT AND ON GOD AND ANGELS
(1) ‘Spirit,’ as I was saying, is on the one hand ‘creator,’ on the other hand ‘created.’
Although I acknowledge that the Creator is a substance, nonetheless I would say not that
he is composed of matter and form but that there is one essence of God and three
properties, and whether these may be called ‘qualities’ I shall examine in the appropriate
place. But I think that nothing can correctly be called ‘matter’ in such a thing. For who
but an unbearably arrogant philosopher, without regard for usage and custom in speaking,
would say ‘the sun’s matter’? Ordinary language treats ‘matter’ like wood in a box,
stones in a house or the action in a lawsuit: for the sun and other things, therefore,
‘essence’ is better, and thus also for God. Augustine does this, writing ‘one essence of
God, three persons,’ as the Greeks used both prosôpa and hupostaseis, ‘persons’ or
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‘substances,’ though three ‘natures’ is what they called the former – none of these words
sufficing for the very thing that needs to be indicated, as Augustine also testifies. 130 (2)
As we say to God, ‘You alone are holy, you alone Lord,’ are we not also saying ‘You
alone are a holy man and Lord,’ as if God were a man? Or ‘You alone are God and
holy,’ as if there were other gods? 131
Also according to Moses: ‘He who is, sent me,’ and, ‘What made man’s mouth? Or what
fashioned the deaf and the mute, the sighted and the blind? Was it not I?’ And in John:
‘There are three that give witness in heaven: Father, Word and Holy Spirit, and these
three are one.’ 132 (3) Is ‘He’ not written as if it were ‘He, a man’? And is it not ‘What
man made man’s mouth except me, God?’ And is ‘these three’ not like ‘these three men’
because they cannot be called ‘three gods’? Likewise, do we not read ‘not three eternal,
but one eternal’ because by construing the phrase we break it down to ‘the eternal are not
as three but as one that is eternal’? Is this adjective ‘eternal,’ when converted into a
substantive and made concrete, not used for a man, as I have shown? 133
(4) And according to Paul: ‘For who of men knows what the things of man are except the
spirit of man which is in him?’ as if ‘spirit of man’ were any one of the men. And then:
‘Thus also those things that are of God nobody has known but the spirit of God,’ as if
‘the spirit of God’ were a man. For that phrase ‘but the spirit of God’ expresses an
exception from the rest of men. And although the Greek does not read ‘nobody’ but
‘none,’ oudeis, it still applies only to men in the same way as ‘none’ in the absolute
sense. And this passage is similar: ‘Nobody knows the Father but the Son, and nobody
knows the Son but the Father or one to whom he has chosen to reveal him.’ 134 And this
agrees with our saying that ‘there is no other who fights for us but you, our God’; surely
it is ‘other man,’ as if God were a man. And this agrees with ‘there is no one who brings
comfort but you, God’; 135 and also with what is said when someone asks ‘What is God?’
as if this were ‘What man is God?’ although he knows quite clearly that God is not a
man.
(5) When words suitable for topics involving God are lacking, then, we adapt those that
we can use, and we relate God to things created by him, as Paul says: ‘The invisible
things of God are seen and understood by worldly creatures through things that are
visible.’ 136 In this way we may say that the sun is like God, not just like the soul which
was made in God’s image and likeness.
130
Zippel cites Aug. Trin. 7.5.10 (PLM 42.942), not exact.
131
The Gloria from the Mass ???
132
Zippel cites Exod. 3:14, 4:11; I John 5:7, the Johannine colon.
133
DD 3.18.
134
Zippel cites I Cor. 2:11; Matt. 11:27; the AV rendering of the verse from Matthew makes Valla’s point:
‘no man (oudeis, nemo) knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man (tis, quis) the Father,
save the Son.’
135
From the Mass, as above ???
136
Zippel cites Rom. 1:20, but V’s words are a close paraphrase.
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In the sun is a shimmering (whether it should be called a property or a quality), a power
and, as I would put it, the sun’s very life. In the sun a light is produced and, in a sense,
born from the shimmering. In it is a blaze that spreads and breathes out. I say the same
about all fire. (6) I shall not say in accord with this that the shimmering and life is like
the Father, the light like the Son and the blaze like the Holy Spirit, or that the Father is
divine power, the Son divine wisdom, the Holy Spirit divine love. But I shall add
essence and indeed relate it to the Father, so that now I may say not ‘the sun’s power and
life’ but ‘the powerful and living sun’; and then relate essence to the Son not as ‘the light
of the sun’ but as ‘the luminous sun’; and to the Holy Spirit not as ‘the blaze of the sun’
but as ‘the blazing sun.’ And the Father will be ‘powerful and living God,’ the Son ‘wise
God’ and the Holy Spirit ‘loving God.’
(7) From this it is clear why God is one though God is called three, and how God begat
God, as if there were a second God as the wicked believe. For even though the Father
generates light eternally, he still does not generate the essence which for him is one in
common with the Son and the Holy Spirit. (8) And unless I am mistaken, this is why the
Greeks talked about three hupostaseis, because beyond those three ‘properties’ (if one
must put it this way) of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit lies something substantial that I
name ‘essence,’ assuming that it should be named in this way. 137 And essence is
something in things, an essence that those people sometimes call ‘subject,’ sometimes
‘substrate,’ sometimes ‘matter,’ though I could not really prove it to someone who denied
that it is there. 138 But if it is the case that the sun is just power, light and heat, likewise
God the Father will also be the power that generates God as light while breathing forth
God as love, who is the Holy Spirit.
(9) But perhaps it would have been better if those who do not even know the ratio of the
side of a square to the diameter had avoided this whole discussion of matter and form.
And it suits us no better since we find no meaning for such a thing either in the Old or in
the New Testament. Writing about the source of the Nile, Lucan was not off course:
You ask about things that the world works to make go, and yet,
whatever cause you say lies in these very numerous channels,
for me it’s always that the gods have willed them, far and wide. 139
So then, what God has willed to be hidden, let it be hidden, and let us not be so titanically
rash as Aristotle, who wished to seem ignorant of nothing, daring to climb up to heaven
and break in. (10) Enough about this, then: I have touched on these points so that the
terms ‘substance,’ ‘essence,’ ‘subject’ and ‘matter’ would give no one a chance to
quibble, especially when we speak about God. Other issues we shall pursue later.
137
Zippel cites Basil, De spiritu sancto 38 (PGM 32.150); Camporeale, Valla, pp. 243, 427; Z’s ed., pp.
393, 397.
138
Zippel cites Paul of Venice, Lib. met. 1, 32, in Sum. nat. (Venice: 1503, 92-3, 117-18).
139
Zippel cites Luc. Phars. 1.417-9, check trans. ???.
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(11) Now let us hear what Aristotle himself thinks about God. In book 11 of the
Philosophy, he says, ‘Phamen de ton theon einai zôon aidion ariston,’ which agrees with
this statement by Porphyry, ‘The genus animal contains god and man, which are species.’
But an animal is an animate body, and what is God’s body? Obviously it is heaven,
which this person supposes to be one, even though astronomers had already discovered
another one greater than that Aristotelian god, and they call it the new sphere. These are
his words in the same book, ‘Hoti de heis ouranos, phaneron,’ and also, ‘Heis ara
ouranos monos.’ And lest God lack a companion – a sort of wife – he says that ‘God and
nature make nothing in vain.’ Ovid follows him when he writes that
God and a kinder nature settled this fight,
but what is this nature supposed to be, a kind of she-God? 140
(12) He sometimes says, however, that nature cannot do everything she wants, and so
neither can God do everything, a sinful thing to say. Really, what does ‘God’ mean here?
If nature is other than God, surely God will be neither nature’s opponent, since opposing
good is something evil, nor nature’s assistant, since nature’s power requires no
assistance. Thus he will be either a redundant god or none at all. I believe that ‘nature’
was their name for this force, a property and a quality of the cosmic body, and this is why
the ancients said that the cosmos itself is ‘nature.’ (13) Pythagoras was the first to call
the world a ‘cosmos’ because of its orderly beauty. And these people clearly thought the
cosmos was an animal, calling man a ‘microcosm’ by analogy with that ‘macrocosm,’ so
that heaven or god would also be an animal like man. In my opinion, then, what these
mathematicians had was a garden not of knowledge but of their own foolishness, as they
latched on to man’s fate. People stupidly follow them when they say that something
happens ‘at a good time’ or ‘a bad,’ at ‘the right moment’ or ‘the wrong’ one. Fates are
up to the will of God, not of heaven or time. 141
(14) Others have a different way of attributing everything to nature, contending that
earthquakes, comets and other such things happen spontaneously without anyone’s
willing them and also that many things occur randomly and by chance, as if they were
something haphazard or ruled by fortune. When they try to trace the causes of these
things, they seem to be fantasizing or ranting like soothsayers. And if anyone objects that
my understanding of Aristotle’s position is unsatisfactory, let him listen to Plutarch,
writing in the books that he titled On the Opinions of the Philosophers: (15) Aristotelês,
ton men anôstatô theon, eidos chôriston, epibebêkota tê sphaira tou pantos, hêtis estin
aitherion sôma, to pempton hup’autou kaloumenon; diêrêmenou de toutou kata sphairas,
tê men phusei sunapheis, tô logô de kechôrismenas, hekastên oietai tôn sphairôn zôon
140 b a a
Zippel cites Meta. 1072 28-9, 74 31, 38; Cael. 271 33; Porph. Isag. a Boetio trans. (PLM 64:136); Ov.
Met. 1.21. The texts from Aristotle are: ‘We say, then, that God is an eternal living thing [zôon, also
‘animal’] and the best’; ‘But there is one heaven, clearly’; ‘Therefore there is only one heaven.’
141
Zippel cites Plut. Plac. phil. 886B; Diog. L. 8.1.48; Thomas, ST I.84.2; Bonaventura, Itin. ment. in Deum
2; Boethius, De diffinitione (PLM 64.907); Arist. Phys. 252b25; Valla, Encomium Sancti Thomae on
Bonaventure; explain ‘garden’ and ‘mathematicians.’
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einai suntheton ek sômatos kai psuchês, hôn to men sôma estin aitherion kinoumenon
kuklophorikôs, hê psuchê de logos akinêtos, aitios tês kinêseôs kat’energeian. 142
(16) This is a monster, not a God. Even though it is a single animal, it is still composed
of several animals as well – the seven spheres, or rather ‘coiled snakes.’ For this looks to
me like the serpent that they called a ‘hydra’: although it was one animal, it had seven
heads, so the number of souls and animals was the same, seven. But the number will be
more, not just seven or eight, because there are more spheres that these people call
‘epicycles,’ like whelps inside a parent with whelplets inside them. This is just the
monstrosity that Aristotle describes, that in the unborn fetuses of certain mice are found
other fetal mice. He also understands the sphere of the sun to be next to the lunar sphere
and in second place rather than fourth – like putting his god’s knee next to the ankle
rather than the shin. 143
(17) Skipping many of these problems, I would really like to put this question to him: If
this God did not make the world because the world always existed along with him, what
then did he make? If the world always was, then also humans, animals, trees and plants
all have no beginning, and they themselves are eternal along with God. If they do not
owe their beginning to God, surely they do not owe him continuity, durability or
constancy either. What grows from seed comes from another source, to be sure, but on
what account can it then lack a beginning?
(18) I do not mention that he declares beasts, stones and dust to be part of God. Since
these things are part of the world, far from having to be understood as lacking an origin,
this origin was recent, or it may be obvious from the plain fact that humans did not exist,
as claimed, for many ages, since for two or three thousand years hardly any of the arts
was discovered. If humans did exist for endless ages, why are there no traces of so many
arts during the three thousand years before Homer? If there were no men, why not no
animals, I ask? But the world itself did not exist, no? For who is so blind in thought, so
bereft of mind as not to understand that the world was produced for our sake. That
rotation of the spheres (if any are to be called ‘spheres’) and of heaven around the earth
with the waters balanced in the middle, what would it mean? (19) I am silent on the
evidence from the poets about chaos, the origin of the human race, the flood and several
other things that they recorded as if passed down from one person to another. Pythagoras
and the Stoics certainly maintain that the world was made by God and for the sake of
humans. 144
142 Zippel cites Plut. De plac. philos. 1.6.881 (Diels, Dox. Gr. 305A.2-13); ‘Aristotle says that when God on
high, a form apart, has entered into the sphere of the whole, he becomes an aetherial body of some sort,
which he calls the fifth. This is divided into spheres, by nature united, but by reason separated out, and
each of the spheres is supposed to be a living thing, composed of body and soul; the aetherial body is in
circular motion, but the soul is reason unmoved, the cause of the motion as activity.’ check translation ???
143 Zippel cites Thomas, ST I.32.1 ad 2; Paul of Venice, Lib. coeli et mundi 16, in Sum. nat. (Venice: 1503,
31); Arist. HA 580b29-31; De mundo 392a28-9.
144 Zippel cites Plin. HN 8.57; Cic. Off. 1.22.
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The world is not animate, then, nor are the spheres implanted with those minds that the
Greeks call noi and recent Latin authors translate as ‘intelligences’ (though ‘notions’
would be no worse a translation) from ‘being intelligent,’ apo tou noein, claiming that
those same globes are moved by them – meaning, I suppose, that God commanded just
the right number of angels to perch there, as if Aristotle, who makes gods into animate
bodies (either those that I have described or others), would think that any spirits or any
souls exist without body. For I find that Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, Hercules, Juno,
Minerva, Venus and others worshipped by the common people are gods for Aristotle
also. This is evident from hundreds of passages, one of them in the Magna moralia: ‘As
for the love that is of God, it is not accepted that there is any love in return or any love at
all, for it would be shameful for someone to say that he loves Jupiter.’ 145
I omit his not distinguishing gods from demons or spirits, as both Homer and other poets
did, along with almost all the rest of the authorities. In book 4 of the Ethics, he writes:
‘… like things dedicated to the gods, liturgical articles and sacrifices, and also anything
spiritual’; and in book 8: ‘If the demon thinks well of you, what need of friends?’ (21) In
the Politics, he also takes gods to be spirits more than once, and they are certainly no
different than the gods that I have named. He attributes contemplation to them even
though he denies them activity, as if contemplating were not acting and contemplation
were not action. He does not know that contemplating is the same as the examining and
questioning that occurs in humans, not in God. He did this to acquire the authority of
contemplation for his studies, and thus by making humans like gods, he made gods like
humans. 146
(22) So then, this great God does nothing but contemplate? Has he nothing to do or to
provide for any other being, no good to do us nor any harm, not just while we live but
even when we have done with life? What is piety, then; what are religion and
saintliness? After this life, what reward is there for virtue or what penalty for vice? And
what more have we to do with him than wild animals if at the end of mortal life the end is
the same for both kinds? (23) These things mean nothing to Aristotle’s god, but also
according to Aristotle there are no souls after the body passes. 147 Better Thales, then, and
also Pythagoras, Plato, the Stoics and the poets, who maintained that our souls survive
after death. But we have moved on to the soul, and we should discuss it now, letting
these few words about God suffice.
145 b
Zippel cites Arist. Met. 12.8.1-4; Mag. mor. 1208 28-31; Aquinas, ST I.79.10; Paul. Ven. Lib. de an. 42,
in Sum. nat. (Venice: 1503, 92).
146 b b b b
Zippel cites Aris. EN 1122 21, 1169 7-8; Pol. 1252 26-7, 1332 16-23; but for ‘peri pan to daimonion’ in
the first passage, a modern translation has ‘any form of religious worship,’ and in the second Aristotle
(quoting Euripides) uses ‘daimôn’ to mean something like ‘fortune’: Valla is being obtuse, though perhaps
not intentionally.
147 a
Zippel cites Arist. Pol. 1253 20-23; also De anima ???
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8 ON THE SOUL
(1) Although Aristotle rejects everyone’s view as absurd, he has what amounts to the
most absurd position of all when he gives soul to trees and plants. Poets, who are granted
the broadest license of expression, seem more modest about this in claiming that the trees
and bushes that they describe as living have a mind, and that in the trees are goddesses
called ‘hamadryads’ because they appear and disappear together with the trees. 148
What does it actually mean to distinguish ‘animals’ from ‘animate bodies,’ which no one
has done but the tribe of sophists? 149 (2) An ‘animal’ is so called because a soul
‘animates’ it, and the ‘inanimate’ is not an ‘animal.’ These terms are actually nothing
more than ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate,’ and the one expression adds nothing to the other,
for all the learned Latin writers use ‘animal’ and ‘inanimate’ as contraries, and they think
there is no difference between calling something ‘inanimate’ or ‘unanimated.’ But surely
‘animal’ is no different than what is ‘animating’ or ‘something animal.’ Things that are
‘animal’ or ‘animate,’ however – which is how many of the ancients described the world
– how are they different from ‘animals’? This is why those same ancients called the
world an ‘animal.’ Whatever is ‘animate,’ then, or ‘animating’ or ‘something animal’
will be an ‘animal.’
(3) Thus, according to Aristotle, plants are animals. Why? Because he plainly called
them ‘animals’ in his books On the Generation of Animals? 150 Or because a zôon is said
to be from ‘living,’ apo tou zên, not from ‘soul,’ and so it seems not unreasonable that he
could have given life to those things that seem somehow to live and die? Not at all. For
it is not that plants, seeming somehow to be alive, should have been called zôa; on the
contrary, because they are not zôa (a name that no one previously used for trees, to the
best of my knowledge), therefore they should have been called not alive, except that it
sometimes helps to speak metaphorically – ‘eau de vie,’ ‘quicksilver,’ ‘live sulphur,’
‘quicklime,’ ‘living rock.’
(4) Sacred scripture sometimes speaks this way, as Gregory explains: ‘Plants and bushes
are alive, yes, but they do not feel.’ I say they do not live because of a soul but because
of liveliness, since Paul also says: ‘Fool, it gives life to its seeds only by dying.’ It lives
by dying, then, in order to give life. 151 (5) Finally, these ‘animals’ or ‘animate bodies’ of
Aristotle’s have no consciousness. And if we look at the origin of the word, the soul gets
its name apo tou anemou, from a ‘breath’ or a ‘breeze,’ which is why we say ‘hold your
breath’ for ‘restrain yourself’ and many such expressions. In the end, even though trees,
bushes and plants are said to live, they are really not said to live by a soul; otherwise,
there would be as many souls in my body as there are hairs, and more in the body of a
beast where there are more hairs. But it is ridiculous even to say so.
148 Zippel cites Arist. An. 411b27-30, Part an. 655b30-56a1.
149 Zippel cites Boethius, In Porph. dialogus secundus (PLM 64:51).
150 Zippel cites Arist. Gen. an. 757 b 16-18.
151 Zippel cites Greg. Nys. De hom. opificio 8 (PGM 44:146); I Cor. 15:36.
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(6) The Epicureans and Stoics spoke more accurately in denying that these things are
ensouled or empsucha because they possess no desire, no spirit, no reason. What I call
‘spirit’ is thumos, which is not what Juvenal gives to humans alone. I believe he was
following Terentius Varro, who proposed three levels of the soul: one in our bones, nails
and hair, which he thinks to exist in trees and plants; the second in our senses of sight,
hearing and so on, shared with animals; and the third, which is the highest, supposedly
the site of the intelligence that belongs to man and God alone – meaning the cosmos, for
he thinks that the cosmos is God and fully ensouled. (7) Proof that this statement is more
clever than correct comes from common as well as learned speech, as I have shown,
which asserts itself not only as master of language but even as better than Varro. Cicero
often uses ‘spirit’ for ‘soul,’ and in naming the three goods as those of spirit, of body and
external goods, he said ‘spirit’ for ‘soul’ – for the Greek psuchê, of course. Sallust: Our
whole strength lies in spirit and body. 152
(8) Yet I am not surprised that Aristotle endowed plants with a soul which is destroyed
along with their life since to some extent this is what he does with the human soul. For
he sticks it together as if it had two chunks, irrational and rational – one that comes to be
and passes away, the other neither produced nor corruptible; one created from the
potency of seed, the other divine. But if the soul is constructed or assembled from parts,
lower and higher, evidently it will be some sort of centaur or satyr or triton, human on top
and elsewhere a horse, goat or fish. For just as those things are two-formed and, one
might say, two-souled, so will our soul be two-formed and two-souled, one might say,
but switched around, with the anterior part animal and the posterior divine. Actually I
see no difference here between animal and human.
(9) These are his words in the books On the State: ‘The soul is divided into two parts, one
of which in itself possesses reason, while the other in itself does not really possess reason
but can obey it.’ And again: ‘The city can be composed of unequal things, as an animal
from soul and body, the soul from reason and desire, a household from husband and wife
and ownership from master and servant.’ Boethius also vouches for this in the Music,
writing ‘What else is it that joins together the very parts of the soul which, according to
Aristotle, is composed of the rational and irrational?’ (10) And lest you suppose that
these are two properties of the soul, he makes one prior to the other, as in the same books
On the State: ‘Just as soul and body are two, we see likewise that the soul also has two
parts, one irrational, the other having reason, and their states are two in number, one of
them being desire, the other mind. And since body is prior to soul in generation, what
does not have reason is therefore prior to what has it. This is evident from children in
whom anger (thumos), will and even strong desire are implanted right from birth, while
reason (logismos) and mind develop naturally (egginesthai pephuke) as they advance in
age. And thus he thinks that one part perishes and another does not perish. 153
(11) Indeed, this is what he says in the books On the Soul: ‘There is no doubt, in fact,
that the soul is not separable from the body – nor the different parts of it, supposing that
152 Zippel cites Juv. 15.147-9; Aug. DCD 7.23; Cic. Fin. 3.10, 5.13; ND 2.15, 41; Tusc. 5.30; Sall. Cat. 1.2.
153 Zippel cites Arist. Pol. 1277 a 5-8, 1333 a 16-18, 34 b 17-18; Boethius, Inst. Mus. 1.2 (PLM 63:1172).
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the soul is, in its very nature, separable.’ And then: ‘If sense, then both imagination and
desire. For wherever there is sense, both distress and pleasure also are, and where these
are, of necessity there is also strong desire. But it is not yet clear about mind and the
power of contemplation. This seems to be a different kind of soul, however, and it
happens to be separated, as the eternal is from the corruptible. But other parts of the soul
are not separable, as some say they are, which is clear from the foregoing argument.
Obviously, however, the parts are rationally distinct.’ 154
(12) And why would he not suppose that perishing part of the soul, since it is corruptible
and almost bestial, to be separate from the eternal and divine? In the books On the
Generation of Animals, he wants it to come to be from the body itself, stating: ‘The body
comes from the female, the soul from the male, for the soul is the usia of a particular
body.’ And also: ‘… then if the male is the maker of this sort of soul.’ (13) And in the
books On the Soul: ‘Since usia is used in three ways, as we have said, one of these being
“form,” another “matter,” and a third “what comes from both,” then, of these three,
matter is potency and form is entelechy. Because what comes from them is the ensouled,
the body is not the entelechy of the soul, but the soul itself is the entelechy of some body.
Hence they have the correct view who see the soul as neither being without body nor
being any body, for in fact it is not a body but something of a body.’ 155
(14) And elsewhere: ‘But of things that are, we say that usia is one kind. Of this,
furthermore, we call matter what in itself is not a this of any sort; while form and species
is just that according to which we call something a this; and the third is what comes from
both. But matter is potency, form is entelechy, and entelechy is twofold: one kind is like
expertise, for example, another like contemplating. Now usiae are regarded as bodies
especially, particularly natural bodies since these are principles of other bodies. Among
natural bodies, however, some have life, and some do not have it. We say that life is selfnourishing,
also growth and decay. (15) Therefore, every natural body that shares in life
is an usia, but usia understood in this way as composite. Since a body of this kind – one
having life – also exists, the soul will not be a body, for a body is a subject and matter
rather than what accords with a subject. Necessarily, the soul is usia as the form of a
natural body with the potency to have life.’ And a little further on: ‘Accordingly, it
makes no sense to ask if the soul and body are one, nor likewise wax and its shape, nor,
in general, the matter of any thing and that of which it is the matter.’ 156
(16) Given these twists of words and meanings, who does not see that Aristotle’s
understanding of the soul was quite inept? The souls of the dead that made themselves
manifest to various people (as Homer and all the magicians agree) could have reminded
him that they neither perish nor come from the body nor lack feelings, or else they were
compounded of two parts and natures, like an animal whose body is the container of the
soul. But one part of the soul cannot be called the container of another part of the soul,
unless perhaps he wants it to be the covering of a bodily container. Moreover, on
154 Zippel cites Arist. An. 413 a 4-5, b 22-9.
155 Zippel cites Arist. Gen. An. 738 b 25-6, 41 a 13-14; An. 414 a 14-21.
156 Zippel cites Arist. An. 412 a 6-21, b 6-8.
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whether that rational part is God, whether it lives after the body has passed away, I do not
understand what he says. For if everything that comes to be perishes or is corrupted, as
he claims, then either the human soul perishes or it did not come to be, both of which are
false.
(17) I would like to ask him whether the soul of a beast is a quality or a substance. If he
says it is a quality, then the soul of a human will be a quality, which is far from the truth,
for of what thing will it be a quality? But if it is a substance, then something passes away
into nothing, and likewise something will be made out of nothing. And yet all the
schools of philosophers deny both these things. I, however, call it something which is no
longer a quality or an action but something greater, a substance.
Well, then, are the schools of the philosophers right to deny this? Not at all. For who but
one destitute of intellect would think that soul-substance is made of body-substance, any
more than what is body would be made of what is soul? (18) The soul of a beast will be a
substance, then, not a quality. And it is not produced from the potency of matter (as they
claim) by means of what I have called a cause, but it is made or created or brought into
being out of nothing by the will of God. Now ‘creating’ in the sense of ‘making
something from nothing’ is accepted by none of the Greeks, for whom ktizô, which our
modern writers translate as ‘create,’ would really mean ‘found,’ as in ‘founders’ of cities,
ktistai. Hence Paul To the Hebrews: ‘A tabernacle not made by hand, not of this
founding.’ 157 And none of the most expert Latin writers accept it.
This substance that comes from nothing also returns to nothing. Why not the same for
everything that belongs to a human? I shall say something about this shortly. (19) But
now, to contribute something of a philosophical kind, I shall use the same example that I
used in another work. Just as earthly fires down here are very like heavenly fires up
there, the same goes for the souls of animals and our souls, for like the lights of candles
theirs are snuffed out, and ours live on forever like the stars. 158 About this same fire,
which bears somewhat on this topic, I shall also speak below.
Plutarch says that Aristotle and Dicaearchus believe that the soul is not actually immortal
but that it still shares in a kind of divinity. 159 Does he claim that this divine thing is the
reason by which we are said to differ from animals? Let us discuss this also.
(20) Suppose this divine thing exists: Aristotle still makes it common to us and the beasts,
writing as follows in the books On the Generation of Animals: ‘For there is nothing
divine about them, like the genus of bees.’ And in the books On the Parts of Animals he
reveals that this divine something is reason when he maintains that the bee and certain
others have prudence and that they are more prudent than certain others. Yes, and they
even have courage or, translating word for word, manliness or andreia. (21) Yet in many
157 Zippel cites Heb. 9:11, where the AV has ‘building’ and modern versions have ‘creation’; V clearly
intends the former even for the Vulgate creaturae or creationis, read as a Latin rendering of kt€sevw in the
strict sense.
158 Zippel cites De vero et bono, ed. Lorch, 3.7, p. 107.
159 Zippel cites Plut. Plac. phil. 5.1.
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other places he denies that beasts are endowed with reason, and so they all say that man is
a rational mortal animal, the beast an irrational mortal animal. 160 But those who have
discussed this applied no solid reasoning. If the brutes have memory and will, why not
also the reason that comes in between them?
160 Zippel cites Arist. Gen. an. 761 a 5; Part. an. 648 a 6-10; An. 428 a 24-9a6; Prob. 956 b 35-6.
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