Neither/Nor: Dialogue in Juan de Lucena's Libro de vida beata

Critics tend to agree that Juan de Lucena belongs to a transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But, since literary periodization is very slippery terrain, it is not so easy to locate Lucena’s exact spot in that wide spectrum. Likewise it is difficult to define him in other respects: he was a Jewish convert dealing with Christian concepts, and a Castilian who spent several formative years in Italy, whence he addressed his fellow nationals about key philosophical issues from an Italian perspective. His major work, De vita felici, or Libro de vida beata is in dialogue form, a genre that enjoys ambivalent literary status, between the philosophic and the literary, between mimesis and diegesis. Many transitional qualities make this work a privileged text for the study of the cultural moment in which it was produced. ¹

Dated in Rome in 1463, Vida beata examines the theological question of whether happiness can be attained in this world. The topic had been the subject of a heated polemic in Naples, nearly two decades before, which began when Lorenzo Valla proposed his solution, namely, that it is natural for men, since they are limited to sensorial perception, to seek earthly goals and take pleasure in their accomplishments, which leads to worldly happiness. These views, expressed in several versions of his dialogue De voluptate (1431), led to Valla’s prosecution by the Inquisition in 1444 because his text was widely misunderstood as a defense of face-value Epicureanism. ² It was only after the trial, in 1446, that Bartolomeo Facio, the new official historian of the Neapolitan court, became Valla’s main opponent. After an exchange of invectivae and recriminationes, Facio wrote his own dialogue, De felicitate vitae (1448), in which he contended that true happiness could not be attained in this world and it was therefore better to wait until the next. Facio’s work can thus be considered a belated overreaction to a misinterpretation of Valla’s treatise. ³

It is not insignificant that it was Facio’s dialogue that Lucena chose to imitate, and it has been pointed out how, all too eager to introduce an Italian topic into the Spanish cultural scene, he failed to articulate his novelty with previous treatments of the same topic in Castile, although he succeeded in incorporating references to the Spanish social reality, such as the praise of Jewish ancestry and the defense of converts. ⁴ With regard to form, Lucena’s text being so clearly a version of Facio’s, it is a common critical attitude to disregard seemingly minor differences and assume that the two works are closer than they actually are. The differences, however, might prove to be more meaningful than the similarities, and a close reading of the different aspects of this adaptation will allow us to better evaluate Vida beata as the revealing cultural document it is.

Lucena seems to be self-conscious of his role as one the front-runners of a cultural shift of major proportions. As a member of the intellectually active court of Bishop Alonso de Cartagena, he had likely developed early in his life a curiosity for anything new, which was further stimulated when his protector sent him to Italy to enter the service of the humanist Pope, Pius II (1458). It is from this privileged position that he became acquainted with the humanistic revolution and learned that it operated mainly through words and over the realm of the word. This accounts for his theoretical defense of literary studies in the Epístola exhortatoria a las letras, a mature work, written some twenty years later. ⁵ He also seems to have been aware of recent trends in philosophical discourse as demonstrated by his choice of Ciceronian dialogue for his most ambitious work, which, as we will see in the context of Castilian letters, amounts to a true statement of purpose.

Indeed, Lucena’s immediate predecessor, Facio, had written in the manner of Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati, who had tried to substitute the Ciceronian notion of disputatio...