Vico's New Science of the Intersubjective World

VICO’S NEW SCIENCE OF THE INTERSUBJECTIVE WORLD

VICO’S NEW SCIENCE OF THE INTERSUBJECTIVE WORLD

VITTORIO HÖSLE

translated and edited by

Francis R. Hittinger IV

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2016 by University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hösle, Vittorio, 1960- author. | Hittinger, Francis R., translator, editor.

Title: Vico’s New science of the intersubjective world / Vittorio Hösle ; translated and edited by Francis R. Hittinger.

Other titles: Einleitung, Vico und die Idee der Kulturwissenschaft. English

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. |

Translation of: Einleitung: Vico und die Idee der Kulturwissenschaft : Genese, Themen und Wirkungsgeschichte der Scienza nuova; originally published in v. 1 of Prinzipien einer neuen Wissenschaft èuber die gemeinsame Natur der Vèolker. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016029261 (print) | LCCN 2016034741 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780268100285 (hardback) | ISBN 0268100284 (hardcover) |

ISBN 9780268100308 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268100315 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Vico, Giambattista, 1668-1744. Principi di una scienza nuova. | History—Philosophy. | Philosophy. | Social sciences. | BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / General. | HISTORY / Europe / Italy. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Philosophers. | PHILOSOPHY / Social.

Classification: LCC B3581.P73 H6713 2016 (print) | LCC B3581.P73 (ebook) |

DDC 195—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029261

ISBN 9780268100315

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu.

For Jan Rohls, in gratitude and admiration for his splendid history of Christianity.

CONTENTS

PREFACE OF THE AUTHOR TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

When in 1990 Christoph Jermann and I published the first complete German translation of the critical edition of Vico’s Scienza nuova—Prinzipien einer neuen Wissenschaft über die gemeinsame Natur der Völker (Hamburg: Felix Meiner)—because of the enormous complexity of the work, I deemed it necessary to add a long introduction, which was in fact a monograph. In 1997, it came out in Italian as Introduzione a Vico (Milan: Guerini e Associati), translated by Claudia and Giovanni Stelli, and edited by Giovanni Stelli. The text has been widely used in both Germany and Italy, because it was conceived as an introduction for people who are not yet Vico scholars and because it tried, at the same time, to cover as many as possible of the variegated themes that pervade the New Science. My model was Croce’s 1911 book La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, even if I disagree with him on most philosophical issues.

The possible main merit of this text consists not so much in the familiarity with most facets of Vico’s main work, which was the result of the quite demanding task of translating it into a non-Romance language, nor in the relatively comprehensive reception of the secondary literature, mainly German and Italian, but in the philosophical evaluation of Vico’s project. The appropriation of his main thoughts, rather than mere historical erudition, was the aim of the book, which prepared my later systematic study of 1997, Moral und Politik: Grundlagen einer politischen Ethik für das 21. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck).

Since the latter book came out in English in 2004 as Morals and Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), I am particularly glad to see an English translation of this study on Vico. My former student, Francis Hittinger, combines stylistic elegance with an excellent command of Latin and Italian, and also his knowledge of German is remarkable. He has mainly worked from the Italian version, but I have compared his translation with the German original, of which it is a faithful rendition. Needless to say, I have added a lot of material in the notes and in the bibliography to render justice to some of the most important studies of the last twenty-five years; I also deleted some notes that were dealing with literature relevant at the time, but today of less importance. I am aware that some of my notes are rather long: they usually contain discussions of secondary literature or of historical details that are of interest primarily for the scholar but that the person mainly interested in the basic structure of Vico’s work may skip through.

The structure of the book has remained the same—even if I subdivided the original large second part into two parts—because the structure truly corresponds to the book’s topic. After having taught Vico twice in the United States, I am convinced that my book will help the student, and probably also many colleagues, to have a philosophically fruitful, philologically reliable, and holistic view of what Vico was after, which of his claims were true innovations and where he went wrong, and what his lasting place in the history of European thought is.

WORKS OF VICO AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In the present work, reference is always made to the classic multivolume edition of Vico’s works edited by Fausto Nicolini (1911–1941; Opere, 11 books in 8 volumes; Bari: Laterza). Giovanni Gentile collaborated on the first volume, and Benedetto Croce, who had unilaterally edited the first edition of the fifth volume, published in 1911, collaborated with Nicolini on the second edition of that volume (revised and expanded). Nearly identical editions of the Italian set of volumes listed below—varying only in dates of publication or volume number in some instances and with minor addenda and revisions in others, but largely with the same pagination as cited in the text—have been made openly accessible online, thanks to the digitization of the Scrittori d’Italia series by the Università di Roma, Sapienza. These digitized texts can be consulted at the Biblioteca italiana website (http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/) and make it possible for an attentive reader or specialist to conveniently locate the full textual citations as cited within this work.

The volumes with their respective titles and years of publication are listed below, including abbreviations as cited in the text:

The abbreviations are also listed below alphabetically, as an aid to readers:

As indicated in the lists above, references to the third and last (1744) edition of the Scienza nuova appear with the designation ³SN (instead of the slightly misleading ²SN of the original) and the standard section number (§) throughout this text. References—although rare—to the first Scienza nuova appear with the designation ¹SN, also with the relevant section number. Hösle’s original apparatus in the German edition cites the volume, book, and page numbers of the standard Nicolini edition listed above, after giving the section numbers, which were dropped in the Italian translation. In this edition, I have reintroduced the section numbers, so that English-language readers as well as readers with knowledge of Italian will be able to easily find and read the passages by section numbers SN either in standard English translations (like Marsh [2013] or Bergin and Fisch [1948]) or in common Italian editions (for example, Battistini [2007] and Nicolini’s abridged Opere [1953]) without necessarily needing to consult the complete multivolume Nicolini edition.

However, the reader should note that since the second book of the complete Nicolini critical edition of the so-called second Scienza nuova (IV, 2) contains materials not included in the final edition of 1744, I have dropped the designation "³SN" from sections numbering higher than ³SN§1112—the last section to appear in standard editions and translations of the SN (e.g., in Marsh, Bergin and Fisch, or the Italian original). This is because the Nicolini volume (IV, 2), besides books 3–5 of the last edition of the SN (³SN §780–§1112), also includes an appendix with additions of variants and redactions relative to the second edition of 1730, plus two other unedited versions from the period 1730–1744. Therefore, where Hösle cites Nicolini’s sections past ³SN §1112, the citation will appear, for example, as follows: §1113, IV, 2, p. 160. I have done this to reduce confusion and to facilitate use.

The Centro di Studi Vichiani di Napoli started in 1982 a new critical edition of the Vichian works—Opere di Giambattista Vico. The 1744 edition of the Scienza nuova, however, has only appeared in 2013 in this edition. I decided to continue to use Nicolini’s classic edition.

In translating the cited passages of Vico, I have used standard translations in most cases. The standard English-language edition I have chosen to use of the "second SN" (³SN)¹ is that of David Marsh (2013). References to the first SN follow Pompa (2002). Likewise, English citations of De nostri temporis …, of the Liber metaphysicus, of De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei, of the Diritto universale, and of the Vindiciae come from Elio Gianturco’s (1990), Lucia Palmer’s (1988), Giorgio A. Pinton’s (2004), John D. Schaeffer’s (2011), and Donald Phillip Verene’s translations (in Bayer and Verene 2009), respectively, and translations of the Vita from Bergin and Fisch’s Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (1944). The English translations of secondary source quotations, and of some Italian and Latin passages found in the text, are mine unless otherwise noted.

A difficult question was which of the two English translations of the Scienza nuova should be used. Bergin and Fisch did an extraordinary job, combining philological precision with philosophical competence. Hösle and Jermann again and again consulted their translation when working on their own. But the much more recent translation by Marsh is smoother, and its publication by Penguin guarantees that it is now more widely used in courses taught in colleges and universities. Still, Marsh’s translation is far from faultless—Donald Phillip Verene has individuated several of its errors in his critical review (1999). Therefore, I have not remained inflexibly dedicated to any translation, and in certain cases I have opted for alternatives in consultation with the author. To give here but a few arbitrary examples, we prefer simply diviners for Vico’s sappienti in divinitá d’auspíci, rather than Marsh’s literal but more cumbersome wise men who interpret divine auspices; we usually employ the term political for the Italian adjective civile, whereas Marsh habitually renders it civil (we keep, however, civil theology instead of political theology in order to avoid any allusion to Carl Schmitt); and we opt for poetic abnormality in the case of Vico’s mostro d’arte poetica rather than Marsh’s contradictions in poetic metre. That said, the present translation of Hösle’s text refers extensively to Marsh’s translation of the Scienza nuova, with only some minor modifications and corrections, partly inspired by Verene. It is worth mentioning that in producing his new English translation, Marsh also used several translations of the Scienza nuova, including the German one by Vittorio Hösle and Christoph Jermann. Thus it is not insignificant that Marsh’s own translation is itself partially indebted to the contribution and accuracy of the German translation and the scholarly background of the presently translated introduction to that translation. It has taken several generations of translators and readers to get to the core of Vico and make him clear.

In my translation of Hösle’s work, I have limited the relatively frequent quotes from Latin and Italian in the German original to only a few iconic quotations from the original languages and mostly cited the English text only. In many ways, Hösle’s recurrent quotations from the original grew out of the author’s own unique position as an Italian-born and both native German- and Italian-speaking scholar (now teaching and conducting his research in the United States while maintaining close ties to the continent). As it was originally written as an introduction to his and Christoph Jermann’s landmark translation of Vico’s main work into German, in translating the text I constantly kept in mind that many times the extensive citations and paraphrasing of Vico’s text were intentionally made to accompany and aid the reader with the reading of the primary text he or she would actually have had at hand in the same edition. My approach to these references reflects the fact that I am mainly an Italianist and classicist by training. Therefore, working with both the German and Italian versions of this text, I wanted to be loyal to the philological and scholastic traditions of my disciplines, of which Vico, too, is a product and, ultimately, devotee. Thus I decided that it would be valuable not only to repristinate these original direct references to Vico’s text as they appeared in the German, as I mentioned above, but also to expand them. At times this was inspired by the usefulness of textual passages the Italian editor deemed worthy of inclusion; at other times I did it because I thought Vico’s own voice supplemented Hösle’s philosophical commentary or made it even clearer; and at still other times, because I found a passage or reference to a passage sufficiently puzzling simply because of Vico’s own density and complexity. Practically this means that most often I cite the primary texts faithfully according to Hösle’s own choices of in-text citation, but also sometimes cite a whole passage for the English readership where I felt the meaning was not clear or would be bolstered by a fuller citation. Sometimes this happens at places in the text where Hösle had paraphrased Vico, at times where the reader of the monograph may not have the edition of Vico handy, but where I think he or she still needs to have a passage present for comprehension.

That said, I have tried to keep these additional citations to only the most necessary and illuminating—but they are by no means exhaustive. I urge the reader to take advantage of the fully noted in-text citations of Vico’s work to pause, study, and compare specific passages in Vico’s voice along with this introduction to Vico: this is a work designed to aid in serious study of Vico’s thought through his complete œuvre. In the course of translating, editing, and preparing this manuscript, my understanding has benefited as much from Hösle’s knowledge and interpretation of Vico as from his rigorously sign-posted and comprehensive system of references to Vico’s texts.

I first met Vittorio Hösle in 2008 as a master’s student in his seminar on Vico’s New Science at the University of Notre Dame. It has been a great honor to work with Vittorio in bringing this project to fruition, during some of the busiest seasons of my doctoral studies at Columbia, and I thank him for his gracious assistance in correcting any errors I have made in the preparation of his work and for his kind patience throughout the several years of this collaborative process. I also thank my wife, Maria A. Hittinger, and my friends and colleagues at both the University of Notre Dame and Columbia University whose encouragement and support has been so meaningful and appreciated.

Francis R. Hittinger IV

1. For an explanation of the meaning of the term "second SN," see chapter 1, p. 34.

Introduction

Only a few works in the history of philosophy are as inaccessible, enigmatic, and mysterious as Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni (Principles of the new science concerning the common nature of nations); yet few are as stimulating and fascinating. Vico’s unusually poetic language, vivid imagination, ability to reveal deep connections between different facets of human culture and civilization, and insight into the internal logic of the archaic forma mentis all instantly captivate his reader. Vico’s talent in recapturing long-forgotten worlds and exposing them to the light of day was so exceptional it even seems that he possessed the golden bough. That one of the most eloquent and unique works of modern literature owes its own development to the encounter with Vico’s archaic world of giants and heroes is thus hardly coincidental. The universality of Vico’s erudition—his studies of language, law, the state, art, religion, customs, and mentalities (above all, pertaining to the Greek, Roman, and medieval cultures and civilizations)—undeniably requires a broadly educated and cultured reader. But even such an educated, and good, reader could become discouraged when faced with this author’s baroque learning, deliberately archaizing style of thought, and labyrinthine prose.

Vico himself is somewhat responsible for the late onset of his reception—resulting from both the merits and the shortcomings of his masterpiece. Even though he anticipated, as few others, many of the concerns later pertinent to nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and historical sciences, he was still a man of the seventeenth century—this being one of his most distinctive traits. Vico thus easily managed to lead his contemporaries—with respect to whom he was at least a century ahead—to view him as a passé humanist, and hardly the intellectual pioneer of his day. At first glance, Vico’s polemics—such as those against Cujas and Hotman—seem even more perplexing to us today. We must also continue to account for his innumerable errors. In his citations and references, Vico habitually depended on an evidently more creative than exact memory. If only a small fraction of his philological errors in the Scienza nuova were found in a single publication today, they would be enough to virtually end an academic career, even for a genius like Vico.¹ Additionally, Vico is captive to biases—though certainly shared by a majority of his contemporaries—that now strike us as hopelessly irredeemable: I’m thinking, for example, of his chronological beliefs. Separating the true genius of his thought from the vast muddle of erudition characteristic of his times demands strict concentration on essentials. If the Vichian three-stage model of the stages of human development were applied to philosophy, it could certainly be argued that Vico’s sort of philosophy belongs, at heart, to the age of the gods (if philosophy itself, of course, were not a product of the age of men): it has the primitive force and energy of an intuitive-visionary, often even barbaric, kind of thinking that shuns neither logical contortion nor error in substance if buttressing his discoveries. Such force is what most clearly distinguishes Vico from the epigonic sophistication of the majority of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s followers.²

Indeed, often Vico truly opens to deeper comprehension only if the reader is willing to try to understand his arguments in the context of the debates and discussions to which they relate. While a philological approach concerned simply with identifying Vico’s sources and influences is unfruitful, careful study—for example, of Roman law, its reception, and discussion of it in the intellectual milieu of Vico’s time—is imperative for grasping the philosophical significance of his theory of law. A necessary corollary is a teleological examination of Vico, or rather an investigation of developments that, posterior to him—for the most part independently—led to similar conclusions. Generally, only training in the modern social and historical sciences enables us to grasp the truths in Vico’s ideas, to ascertain the real problems—still vexing us—that Vico confronts, for example, when he takes up the question of the relationships subsisting between the institution of patron and client (clientela) in ancient Rome and medieval feudalism.

There is little sense, however, in approaching Vico’s works as a repository for extracting sundry intellectual materials—in a fashion all too characteristic of some North American Vico scholarship of the 1970s—often interpreted as mere prolepses of theories in vogue. Vico’s Scienza nuova intends to be science, that is, a system whose parts are meaningful only vis-à-vis the whole. Vico’s historical discoveries are explicitly rooted in his metaphysics, based in the framework of Christian Platonism. In this regard, the traditional Catholic reading of Vico that minimizes, if not completely ignores, the explosive force of his new ideas—reducing him to a mediocre heir of Augustine—is mistaken; equally so, the interpretation seeing in Vico an anticipation of the materialistic, and even irrationalist, tendencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Vico’s grandeur and originality actually reside in his conceptualization of a rational theory of the irrational foundations of human culture and civilization. His deeper objective was this: to integrate the discovery of human nature’s bestial moments and human culture’s temporal dimension within the objective idealist system he believed uniquely capable of endowing such a discovery with scientific rigor. Whoever fails to grasp this objective fails to grasp both Vico’s place in history and his continuing relevance to contemporary philosophy. It has been shown that the theories of Feuerbach, Marx, Darwin, Weber, Frazer, Freud, Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss were both contained in him in nuce and—following their success in the educated elites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—became responsible for the destruction of objective idealism. Nonetheless, still today Vico challenges contemporary philosophy to grasp not only that these theories are compatible with this objective idealism but also that on this basis they can attain a higher degree of consistency. Such a demonstration cannot be fully developed within the scope of this investigation. In the present work, rather, the first chapter will examine Vico’s life, sources, and writings. The second and third chapters will discuss the concerns and problems of the Scienza nuova. The fourth chapter will trace the broader history of Vico’s reception and fortune. The intent is to prepare the reader for precise study of the Scienza nuova, to equip him or her with the necessary categories and context, and to familiarize him or her with the most important moments in the critical debate on Vico. Vico’s intellectual evolution presents, moreover, a truly remarkable example of a genius’s maturation in a hostile environment. Additional attention to this aspect is thus inherently valuable.

ONE

Vico’s Life, Sources, and Works

Vico is one of the few philosophers who have written an autobiography. Vico’s autobiography, Vita scritta da se medesimo (Life [of Giambattista Vico] written by himself), is a priceless work for the general reader as well as for the specialist seeking greater insight into the Scienza nuova and its author.¹ It is one of the most personally touching works that a philosopher has ever written, and it is exceptional within the genre of autobiographical literature. This is because Vico applied his major philosophical discovery—that of the historicity of humanity’s existence—to his own life, attempting to write his life story according to the principles of the Scienza nuova. Vico seeks to identify and outline a teleology within his own development and, with heroic resignation, sees the same hand of providence he believes he has discovered in the protean flux of human history at work in the adversities of his own bitter existence. Providence, as we will see, is essentially the capacity to transform the negative into the positive. If an individual’s wisdom can be defined as harvesting the wheat of positivity from the chaff of one’s negative experiences, we can say that Vico reconciled wisdom and science in applying the categories of his masterpiece to his own life. The bittersweet stateliness permeating the Vita—the touching combination of the most profound grandeur and a sort of childish naiveté²—springs from the intense personality of someone wholly convinced that his vocation lay in philosophy and that through philosophy he could find the key to understanding his destiny, accepted with resignation before the will of God.

It is clear that Vico tends, on the whole unconsciously, to distort many of his life events because of his teleological perspective in the Vita. Vico’s tendency for self-mythologizing, moreover, also requires the historian to approach his account with critical caution.³ Vico not only omits many things that seemed irrelevant to him at the time, but his autobiography also unquestionably contains objective inaccuracies.⁴ Nonetheless, it is in the nature of every autobiography to reveal its subject precisely in the places in which it falsifies real events. An autobiography, as opposed to a biography, is also—and perhaps particularly thanks to such errors—an important source for understanding its author’s personality. Twentieth-century research has convincingly shown, for example, that Vico was hardly as intellectually isolated in his youth as his autobiography might lead one to believe and that, moreover, he was impacted by certain influences he chose to keep to himself. Although we will touch upon this later,⁵ suffice it to say that such silence is not accidental, and requires explanation. Whoever truly desires to understand Vico cannot mention the presence of those influences without also trying to understand the mature Vico’s reasons for thinking them better not to mention.

1.1 THE FORMATIVE YEARS

Giambattista Vico was born in Naples on June 23, 1668, the sixth of eight children born to Antonio Vico and his wife, Candida Masullo. His father was a poor bookseller, and—unlike his melancholic mother—of naturally cheerful temperament.⁶ Vico’s experience of poverty, which would haunt him nearly his entire life, definitively influenced him. Both his understanding of the importance of economic conditions in the historical process and his sympathy for the Roman plebeians can be easily traced to these humble origins.⁷ Vico’s father, in any case, managed to provide a good education to two of his sons. After attending primary school—where he already proved his talent (despite a three-year, forced interruption of his studies because of a serious accident)—Giambattista enrolled in the Jesuit School in 1679. His teacher was the nominalist Antonio Del Balzo. But feeling unfairly treated, the proud youngster quickly left the school to study grammar and logic on his own (the latter with the textbooks of Petrus Hispanus and Paulus Venetus). These studies proved disastrous, and the humiliating experience helped form the idea, which Vico regularly repeats, that it is a mistake to train children in the abstract and deductive sciences, since the memory and imagination are especially vivacious in childhood, and need training in other disciplines.⁸ Vico thus gave up his studies for a year and a half, but in 1683—inspired by his participation at a meeting of an academy⁹—resumed his studies at the Jesuit gymnasium, where another teacher, Giuseppe Ricci, taught him Scotus.¹⁰ In 1684, however, Vico again left the gymnasium, this time privately dedicating himself to the study of Suarez’s metaphysics.

This metaphysical formation proved consequential when, assuaging the will of this father, Vico began to study law around 1684, initially at Francesco Verde’s school. But he found Verde’s approach—concentrated on the analysis of individual cases—disappointing, as he perceived that it lacked proper principles. Thanks to his study of metaphysics, he insisted on explaining particular cases as outcomes obtained by departing from axioms or maxims.¹¹ He therefore left this school and resumed his apprenticeship in civil and canon law as an autodidact¹² aided, respectively, by Hermann Vulteius’s and Henricus Canisius’s manuals. By 1689, he had matriculated at the University of Naples as a student of jurisprudence, and it seems that he graduated doctor in utroque at Salerno in 1693 or 1694.¹³ During the 1680s, Vico composed some poems in the mannerist style of the times, a style he would later so acerbically condemn for being corrupt and contrary to authentic poetry. Despite a precocious success defending his father in a court trial in 1686, Vico did not feel suited for a career as a lawyer. Thus, when offered employment by Domenico Rocca, Marquis of Vatolla, who needed a tutor for his children, Vico gratefully accepted. Vico’s years in Vatolla are shrouded in a legendary air of mystery. First, it is uncertain whether he actually served in this house for nine years.¹⁴ Moreover, the impression that Vico exclusively spent these years in the solitude of the castle at Cilento—as the pages of the Vita corresponding to this time lead one to believe—is false. In all truth, Vico spent only a part of the year at Vatolla, since he was often in Naples and Portici, where the Rocca family usually resided.

Of course, the idealization of the Vatolla years is conditioned by Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, Vico’s secret model for his autobiography. It is generally true that Vico’s philosophy is an attempt to grasp—according to Cartesian principles—a world unknown to Descartes, and in this respect it can be called anti-Cartesian. His critique of Descartes at the beginning of the autobiography¹⁵ underscores its antidiscours nature: recognizing that human beings owe their formation to a tradition from which they neither can nor should liberate themselves, Vico refuses to proceed antihistorically from methodological fictions. Nevertheless, there is a resemblance between Vico’s years of solitude in Vatolla and Descartes’s years in Holland. Vico certainly projected onto these years—likely his most formative—much of the isolation to which he was later condemned precisely because of his criticism of an Enlightenment that rejected the intersubjective and historical roots of humanity. This was the tragic, fundamental contradiction in Vico’s life: the very thinker who, unlike any other in the early modern period, aspired to transcend the philosophy of the subject was one of the loneliest philosophers in history.¹⁶ But even if those years did mark the beginning of Vico’s intellectual isolation from his contemporaries, it is nonetheless certain that he remained in contact with the Neapolitan intellectual world and, meanwhile, began to deepen his familiarity with a variety of new disciplines, in particular returning to studies in the classical tradition; the starting point was his education in law.¹⁷

Vico’s education in canon law brought him into contact with Étienne Agard de Champs’s (Antonius Ricardus’s) writings on the theory of grace. Over the course of his life, Vico remained faithful to Agard de Champs’s position, which was, however, unexceptional in terms of its logical rigor and—inspired by Augustine—aimed at a middle way between Pelagian and Calvinist doctrines.¹⁸ Valla’s observations on the language of the