SOURCE: Charles Trinkaus, "Petrarch and Classical Philosophy," in The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 1-26.

[In the following excerpt, Trinkaus examines Petrarch's contributions as a philosopher and argues that his "conception of ancient philosophy was shaped by his sensibilities as a poet."]

Petrarch's knowledge of ancient thought was amazingly extensive. Yet how he incorporated this knowledge into his own philosophy is not entirely clear. De Nolhac and Sabbadini laid the foundations for our efforts to reconstruct Petrarch's classical humanism, and Billanovich, Pellegrin, and Wilkins, with major assistance from such scholars of the previous generation as Rossi and Bosco, have come close to completing the edifice.¹ But scholars continue to differ on the questions of what ideas Petrarch drew from his knowledge of ancient philosophies, and how, to what degree, and when he made use of his readings.²

Petrarch identified himself at various times as a poet, a historian, a rhetorician, and a moral His awareness of the classical philosophical³ heritage was formed by his responses to it in all of these roles. Yet the way in which his conception of ancient philosophy was shaped by his sensibilities as a poet is of special interest. It is likely that Petrarch understood classical philosophy better through Vergil and Horace than through the philosophers he came to know, which suggests that his grasp of ancient philosophy was more characteristically that of a poet than that of a historian. It also suggests that it was possibly through the medium of his poetic understanding of ancient thought that he was incited to conceive and fulfill the roles of both rhetorician and moral philosopher.

Petrarch's kind of poetry had a special relationship to the new mode of philosophical consciousness that was emerging in the Renaissance to which he made so important a contribution. Aristotle, in explaining his famous claim that poetry is more philosophical than history, said that the philosophical character of poetry may be seen in the universal nature of its statements, "whereas those of history are singulars."⁴ We must recognize the universality of Petrarch's poetry. Yet we must recognize its subjectivity as well. His use of emotional experience, the recreation in emotion of that experience, and the imagined prolongation and projection of it in the Canzoniere underline the difference between his poetry and the kind Aristotle discussed. It is not enough to say that Petrarch's verse was lyric, and hence more personal, whereas Aristotle was referring to epic and dramatic, and thus more objectified poetry. Petrarch's great achievement was that he realized poetic objectivity through the medium of subjective experience.

To say that Petrarch thought philosophically as a poet is not to minimize his importance as a philosopher but to point out his unique mode of thinking. Petrarch's work, whether poetic, historical, or philosophical, is of critical importance as the first major manifestation of the great transformation from the objective mode of classical thought and perception to the subjective Renaissance and modern modes.⁵ While many questions remain concerning the character and the extent of such a shift in the basic conceptions of Western art and thought, Petrarch gave a powerful impulse to the movement toward subjectivity.

Under this large assumption about the differences in basic patterns of thought and perception in the ancient and modern worlds, Petrarch's manifold contradictions seem to fall neatly into place. But it is far too neat. It is like saying that we are all romantics in our modern retrospective classicism, since we regard antiquity through the screen of our own affections and imaginations, imitating it and idealizing it because of our own needs and motivations. We view it as at once distant and highly relevant, a historical perspective that Petrarch helped to shape. This insight, stressed by Panofsky, is true in a sense, but it threatens to dissolve amidst our own subjectivity. Not all of modern thought and perception is subjective; otherwise we could not make claims to science or to scholarly understanding. Even Petrarch helped develop the "objective" study of antiquity. On the other hand, not all ancient thought and perception was substantive and objectivistic. Important aspects of it, and especially much of what attracted Petrarch, pointed the way toward more modern modalities.⁶

[Petrarch's] inclination was to value philosophy primarily for its contribution to the strengthening of human virtue. The tendency of contemporary scholasticism was to regard discussions of substantive questions in theology as of limited viability and, almost by default, to move toward the exegetical and pastoral. Petrarch expressed great suspicion regarding both the emphasis on dialectical analysis and the interest in Aristotelian natural philosophy of his contemporaries. He seems, however, to have had a rather scanty knowledge of medieval philosophy. He was certainly not very sympathetic to the possibility that the vogue for dialectic in fourteenth-century scholastic thought might have represented a parallel development to his desire to consider philosophical thought as humanly centered and motivated.⁷ Petrarch also seems not to have been aware of those fourteenth-century contributions to natural philosophy that represented experimental departures, however limited, from an all-determining Aristotelian physical framework. It is Petrarch's knowledge of ancient philosophy, however, that is my main concern here.

The philosophical thought of the ancient Greeks and Romans is an enormous, highly diverse body of material. It is now known only through those texts that survived in medieval manuscripts or have been recovered from papyri in the past century. These texts are supplemented by descriptive accounts by other ancient authors and modern collections of scattered quotations from ancient, early Christian, Syriac, Arabic, Jewish, and Byzantine writers. It is tempting to make use of modern scholarship and historical sophistication to give a single characterization to this diverse mass (as Cranz has so suggestively done; see note 5). But this is clearly a risky undertaking. Some portions of ancient philosophy are rather well known, possibly even understood by modern historians and philosophers. But others, even when reported to be of the greatest importance in antiquity, are unknown, or hardly known. A further element of complication is that ancient philosophical writings contain much that is religious, magical, scientific, literary, critical, and rhetorical, while ancient writings in these other disciplines also contain much that is philosophical.

Ancient philosophy as it is presently known includes the partially understood pre-Socratic speculators concerned with the cosmos and the "nature" of things— the physici. Also identified are the equally poorly understood teachers of political discourse whom we call, by their own designation, the sophistes. Some Sophists claimed inspiration from contemporary Greek tragedy and traced their ancestry through the poetic tradition back as far as Homer and Hesiod. They were not only admirers of tragedy; their ideas are reflected in Euripides and mocked in Aristophanes. The physici preceded and were contemporary with the Sophists, some of whom had studied under and been influenced by them. The physici, conventionally divided into Ionians and Eleatics, seem to have followed our loose distinction between empiricists and metaphysicians, though this seems to dissolve in almost every instance thought to be adequately understood. The Sophists seem to have drawn from both the empirical and metaphysical traditions of the pre-Socratics.

Petrarch, of course, knew far less about either the physici or the Sophists than do modern scholars. For the most part, he scattered references through his works and his correspondence to sayings or anecdotes of an early Greek or other ancient thinker which helped to reinforce or exemplify his point rhetorically. Of the pre-Socratics, Petrarch devotes greatest attention to Pythagoras and Heraclitus. Pythagoras he knows only as a sage, moral reformer, and orator, but he cites him frequently because of his great reputation for wisdom in the later ancient sources with which Petrarch was familiar.⁸ He knows something of Heraclitus's ideas from Seneca and therefore as the Stoics had interpreted him for their own purposes, but he used these ideas more substantively. He cites Heraclitus twice to assert the chaotic and fluctuating character of the world of human experience under the domination of fortune, once at the beginning of book 2 of the De remediis and again at the begining of book 2 of his De otio religioso.⁹ Valerius Maximumus's Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri was a major source for the anecdotes and sayings of others. The writings of Cicero, Seneca, Aulus Gellius, and Macrobius also served him well.

Petrarch hardly seems to have known of the Sophists except as enemies of Socrates and Plato, mentioning Gorgias's great age¹⁰ and quoting Protagoras as Pythagoras (though significantly).¹¹ The name "Sophist" he reserves for the scholastic dialecticians and natural philosphers of his day, the twisters of truth and vendors of learning. Socrates was admired by the humanists principally for the emphasis he placed on man and for his self-knowledge, education, and morality. The modern dispute about whether Socrates must also be seen as a Sophist or as Plato portrays him, their archenemy, had little meaning for the Renaissance humanists.¹²

Petrarch, however, is surprisingly uninterested in Socrates, even considering the paucity of his available knowledge. With all his yearning to know Plato, he seems to have seriously studied only the Calcidius partial translation of the Timaeus, though he also possessed a copy of the Henricus Aristippus translation of the Phaedo (BN. lat. 6567A).¹³ For his scattered anecdotal references to Socrates, Petrarch resorts to Valerius Maximus, Cicero, and Apuleius's De deo Socratis, slender pickings to be sure. There is little expression in Petrarch of the strenuous admiration that Salutati and other humanists showed for Socrates. The crucial and much quoted statement from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations¹⁴—"But Socrates was the first who brought down philosophy from the heavens and, snatched from the stars, forced it to live on earth among men and to deal with morals and the affairs of men"—was curiously cited in a letter to Gerardo as an example of how philosophers ridiculed each other. He refers to Aristotle's of ridicule, cited in Cicero's De officiis,¹⁵ of Isocrates (misreading the name as "Socrates") for his mercenary behavior.

It might seem that Petrarch's affirmations of the importance of moral philosophy would have made him more responsive to Socrates. His admiration of Cicero would seemingly have led him to note Cicero's addition to the passage just cited from the Tusculans: "I have principally adhered to that (sect) which, in my opinion, Socrates himself followed: and argue so as to conceal my own opinions, while I deliver others from their errors, and so discover what has the greatest appearance of probability in every question …" Petrarch only rarely refers to the passage in the Academica¹⁶ where Socrates is asserted to have been the first to discuss moral philosophy and to have affirmed "nothing himself but to refute others, to assert that he knows nothing except the fact of his own ignorance." Toward the end of On His Own Ignorance he does cite Socrates' "This one thing I know, that I know nothing," and adds to it Arcesilas's saying that "even this knowing nothing cannot be known" (both passages are apparently drawn from the Academica), but his purpose is to reject or ridicule this attitude along with a general condemnation of philosophy. "A glorious philosophy, this, that either confesses ignorance or precludes even the knowledge of this ignorance."¹⁷

Nonetheless the general influence of Socrates on this work cannot be excluded. Though different in tone and method from the Dialogues, Petrarch built it around the ironic stance of his own acknowledged ignorance and the unacknowledged ignorance of many others. This stance he might well have borrowed from Socrates. He at least understood the rhetorical impact of this posture, although he had not been able to read Plato's Apology and did not indicate his Socratic model. Yet he used this ploy to draw conclusions similar to those that Plato perhaps intended for Socrates' defense. It is one of several examples where Petrarch employs classical models in order to assert or discover his own cultural identity through an act of role playing.

Petrarch wrote four comments on Socrates in his Rerum memorandarum libri which show him to have been aware early in his philosophical career of the chief anecdotes about Socrates and his reputation. Under the rubric "On Leisure and Solitude"¹⁸ he briefly cites the anecdote from Cicero's De senectute¹⁹ about Socrates as an old man learning to play the lyre. In the next rubric, "On Study and Learning," he repeats the topos of Socrates having brought learning down to earth and turned it from the dimensions of the heavens to the interior of the human heart. "Beginning to treat of the diseases and motions of the soul and of their remedies and the virtues, he was the primus artifex of moral philosophy, and as Valerius said, 'vite magister optimus'."²⁰ Skipping the third, his fourth item under "On Oracles" is equally brief. He narrates from Cicero's De divinatione Socrates' advice to Xenophon to join the expedition of Cyrus and his adjunct that this was a human counsel and that in the case of more obscure matters he should consult the oracle. However, Petrarch misread "Epicurus" for Cyrus and proceeded to berate Socrates for being an Epicurean. "But how much better you were and of how much sounder counsel than he to whom you sent your disciple, except in this one matter that he seemed to you the best and most advisable [leader]."²¹ Apart from the extraordinary anachronism, one may wonder how Socrates could possibly have seemed an influence in the direction of Epicurus to Petrarch.

His major discussion of Socrates in the Rerum memorandarum libri was under "On Wisdom," cataloguing sayings of the wise. Though it may not eliminate a suspicion that Petrarch was somewhat lukewarm in his admiration of Socrates because of his seeming scepticism, Petrarch lays forth his amplification of Valerius Maximus's essentially moralistic and Stoic version. He starts with the Socratic advice to seek nothing from the gods except what truly benefits us and expands the sparse treatment of this theme by his source into a favorite review of all the evils of a Christian's false desires. But he uses as his model not Socrates but the tenth Satire of Juvenal.²² He seems here to have copied his own earlier letter (Le familiari, 4.2 and Gamma) which uses the Juvenal passage as well as Cicero and Seneca. Other moral anecdotes or sayings of Socrates are added, drawn from Seneca's Ad Lucillium, Aulus Gellius, and Valerius Maximus.

It is difficult to account for Petrarch's rather conventional and not particularly enthusiastic treatment of Socrates. There are undoubtedly other references I have not cited, but those I have cited show his knowledge to have been thirdhand, deriving from Plato or Xenophon through Cicero or Seneca. But perhaps the main reason for Petrarch's lack of enthusiasm is that essentially he knows the sceptical Socrates of his Latin sources and not the religious philosopher embedded in Plato's Dialogues.

With Plato himself it was quite different.²³ Petrarch possessed the medieval Latin Plato—Calcidius's partial translation of the Timaeus,²⁴ Henricus Aristippus's translation of the Phaedo, and probably the latter's Meno.²⁵ He owned a large Greek manuscript of some of Plato's works which he hoped to be able to read after he had learned Greek, but this enterprise ended with the premature departure of Barlaam of Calabria. A list of its contents reveals what he could have known had he been able to read Greek: the Clitophon, the Republic, the Timaeus, the Critias, the Minos, the Laws, the Phaedrus, Letters. In addition it contained Diffinitiones Platonis, Confabulationes Platonis, Demodocus de consilio, Critias de Divitiis, and Axiochus de morte.²⁶ In his De ignorantia Petrarch refers to this manuscript to indicate the extensiveness of Plato's writings, disdained by his young critics as "one or two small little books." Petrarch says with his usual numerical looseness, "I have sixteen or more of Plato's books at home, of which I do not know whether they have heard the names." He also says that if they come to his house, "these literate men will see not only several Greek writings but also some which are translated into Latin all of which they have never seen elsewhere."²⁷ It is questionable whether Petrarch possessed some new Latin translations of works of Plato other than the medieval three.

Petrarch's comments on Plato in De ignorantia and the Rerum memorandarum libri show great admiration. How much did he actually know of Plato's philosophic doctrines? References to his copy of the Phaedo are rare. Identifiable references usually come from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations.²⁸ His knowledge of metempsychosis is not specifically related to the Phaedo. Comments on the divisions of the soul are based on those attributed to Plato by Cicero. In the Secretum "Augustinus" alludes to Plato's statement of the progression of desire from sensual to heavenly in the Symposium (which Petrarch could not have read).

But this alludes also to St. Augustine's discussion in the Confessions.²⁹ "Augustinus" also cites Plato more directly: "For what else does the celestial doctrine of Plato admonish except that the soul should be pushed away from the lusts of the body, and their images eradicated so that purely and rapidly it may arise toward a deeper vision of the secrets of divinity, to which contemplation of one's own mortality is rightly attached?" This is an authentic echo of the Phaedo, and "Franciscus" at this point acknowledges that he has begun to read Plato, but the loss of his tutor in Greek has interrupted him.³⁰ In the Secretum "Augustinus" quotes the Phaedrus, not read by Petrarch: the poet "beats in vain on the doors of poetry if he is in his right mind."³¹ This is certainly a commonplace in many Latin sources.

Petrarch mentions the doctrine of ideas, which he must have known from Cicero's Tusculans and elsewhere, in the De vita solitaria. But it is based on another source of medieval and early Renaissance Platonism, Macrobius's In somnium Scipionis³² Plotinus, rather than Plato, is cited, and the hierarchy of the virtues is set forth—political, purgative, purged (acquired in solitude), and the fourth and highest, "archetypal," or "exemplary." "Hence the [Platonists] hold that the three other kinds of human virtue originate as though from some eternal exemplar, just as the name itself indicates; or, as Plato would say, from the ideas of the virtues which, like the ideas of other things, he placed in the mind of God."³³ Despite his professed yearning to know Plato, Petrarch makes little use of the Phaedo on the questions that interested him most. He infrequently repeats even the commonplaces widely disseminated in Latin sources concerning the teachings of Plato.

Petrarch's most extensive statement about Plato runs for five pages in book 1, chapter 25, of his Rerum memorandarum libri, under the rubric "On Study and Learning."³⁴ He sketches Plato's life, drawing principally on Apuleius's De Platone et eius dogmate, with additions from Cicero and Macrobius. Again following Apuleius, Petrarch summarizes Plato's teachings. It turns out to be a catalogue of topics (discussed at greater length by Apuleius): matter, ideas, the world, the soul, nature, time, the wandering stars, animals, providence, fate, demons, fortune, the parts of the soul and the bodily domicile, the senses, the shape of the human body and the arrangement of its parts, the division of goods, virtues, the three kinds of minds, the three causes for seeking the good, pleasure, labor, friendship and enmity, degraded love, the three loves, the species of human faults, the condition, customs, and death of the sage, the commonwealth, and the republic, its customs and best laws. In Apuleius, he says, the reader will find all these matters treated in succinct brevity and not at all unpleasantly.³⁵ It suggests the medieval taste for encyclopedic epitomes and the compilation of rhetorical loci communes.

Petrarch's more pressing concern is to show Plato's compatibility with Christianity. Unlike Aristotle, Plato taught the creation, not the eternity, of the world (though in this Apuleius seems to differ from Cicero). Petrarch hoped here to cite only secular authors, but finds he cannot and switches to St. Augustine. A question arose that was to surface again with Ficino, Pico, and the other Renaissance Platonists: How did Plato arrive at his anticipations of Christianity, and should he, rather than Christ, be given credit for these doctrines? Petrarch cites Augustine's De doctrina Christiana (2.28.43) to the effect that Plato was a contemporary of the prophet Jeremiah and had learned of at least the pre-Christian truths of the Hebrews on his journey to Egypt. But then he cites Augustine's own correction of this tale in De civitate Dei (8.1 1), where he asserts that Plato and Jeremiah were not contemporaries and that Plato also lived before the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament had been made. Hence these truths must have been made manifest by God to Plato, as St. Paul argued in Romans 1:19. Thus Plato is made the equivalent of the Renaissance Platonists' priscus theologus, or else he discovered these truths by colloquy with someone versed in Hebrew letters. Except on the question of the incarnation, Petrarch advises a reading of Augustine's Confessions to see the extent Petrarch of the parity between Plato and Christianity.³⁶ Petrarch asserts that as had been said of Carneades,for Plato there was but a single end for both philoso-phizing and living. This seems to have been basic to Petrarch's conception of philosophy.³⁷

Petrarch perhaps most eloquently praises Plato in the De ignorantia. It is a rhetorical statement that does not enter into the substance of either the philosophy of Plato or of Aristotle, whom he is denouncing. Plato has been called the prince of philosophy. By whom? Cicero, Vergil, Pliny, Plotinus, Apuleius, Macrobius, Porphyry, Censorinus, Josephus, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and others. Who denies this glory to him? Only Averroës. But there is also the question of weight as well as numbers. Here, too, Plato excels. "I would state without hesitation that in my opinion the difference between them is like that between two persons of whom one is praised by princes and nobles, the other by the entire mass of the common people. Plato is praised by the greater men, Aristotle by the bigger crowd; and both deserve to be praised by great men as well as by many, even by all men." Both came far in natural and human matters, but the Platonists rose higher in divine, and Plato came nearer to our goal. Hence the Greeks today call Plato divine and Aristotle "demonious."³⁸ Petrarch then cites the large number of books written by Plato, attested by his own Greek manuscript.

The situation with Aristotle is very different. Petrarch seems to have known both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric fairly well, judging by the nature of his citations of them. Only one Aristotle manuscript, however, can be identified as Petrarch's own, an Ethica with commentaries (BN lat. 6458, with scarce anno-tations). This led De Nolhac to comment, "But themanuscript at least establishes, for reasons that we have said, that Petrarch studied Aristotle but little."³⁹ It is not certain that this is true. Petrarch at least seems to have read Aristotle and used him for a com-monplace book, as he did certain Latin authors. Nor does the manuscript show the kind of overt hostility to Aristotle in the use of his sayings that other pas-sages on him have led us to expect.

This essentially rhetorical use of Aristotle for purposes of argumentation can be seen in Le familiari and the Invective contra medicum. A key statement in the Ethics (1103 B 28) is that "we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good." This would seem to have found much favor with Petrarch, and he affirms it as applying to himself. Petrarch denies that Aristotle actually observes this criterion in his great polemic against Aristotle and Aristotelians, the De ignorantia.⁴⁰ Twice he uses Aristotle's advice that faults of one extreme must be corrected by leaning to the other, "as people do in straightening sticks that are bent" (1109 Β 4-7). He does this once in admonishing the four cardinals on how to reform the contemporary Romans, and once in fictitiously admonishing Julius Caesar.⁴¹ Aristotle, discussing deliberation as an intellectual virtue, points out that the end of the investigation is the discovery of the beginning or the first cause: "What is last in the order of analysis seems to be first in the order of becoming" (1112 B 23-24). Petrarch in a brief note to a close friend uses this statement merely to suggest that he has finally got around to writing. Just as it pleases the philosophers, he who is first in deliberating is last in performing—certainly a loose proverbializing of an originally serious philosophical point.⁴²

Petrarch suggests to a friend that the day of birth may be worse than the day of death, as the one brings sorrows and the other joys. "But lest we should depart from the opinions of the vulgar—from whom, nevertheless, if we should progress toward salvation, how far we must part—it is said that death is to be feared, and that most widely repeated saying of Aristotle is heard, 'death is the ultimate of terrible things.'" Aristotle was discussing courage (1115 A 27), and death is the greatest of the terrible things a man must face. But Petrarch adds, twisting Aristotle's meaning, "He, himself, also deliberately wished to call it, not the greatest but the last." There follows a long list of heroic ancient deaths and misfortunes to show, no doubt, how terrible is this world.⁴³

Petrarch turns another citation from the Ethics to his advantage in the Invective contra medicum. His basic argument is that medicine is less honorable than poetry because it is more necessary, and thus it is comparable to agriculture. To make his point he cites Aristotle's discussion of justice, where an equality of exchange between two mutually needy persons, each of whom has something the other wishes, must take place: "For it is not two doctors that associate for exchange, but a doctor and a farmer" (1113 A 17-78). Petrarch says, "I do not wish to insult you that I place you and farmers together, Aristotle does the same.… I believe that on account of reverence for Aristotle you have allowed this to be suffered in silence."⁴⁴

In our final example, Petrarch seems to have applied the Nicomachean Ethics to a more comparable argument. In Le familiari 8.3, he is discussing the relative advantages of places to live. "The crowd thinks even philosophers and poets are hard and stony, but in this as in so many things they are mistaken, for they also are of flesh, they retain humanity, they abandon pleasures. Moreover, it is a certain measure of necessity, whether philosophic or poetic, which it is suspected they pass by. 'Nature,' as Aristotle says, 'is not sufficient by itself for speculation but also needs a sound body, and food, and the other means of existence.'"⁴⁵ So also says Aristotle in his discussion of the greater happiness of the life of contemplation (1178 B 34-35).

Petrarch cites the Metaphysics several times, though entirely from book 1. Twice he interprets Aristotle as saying that the first theologians were poets, because this fits the notion of theologia poetica he is promoting in competition with scholastic theology. In the Invective the reference (to Metaph. 983 B 28) is vague: "Certainly the first theologians among the pagans were poets as the greatest of the philosophers and the authority of the saints confirm."⁴⁶ In the well-known letter to Gerardo analyzing his own eclogue as a form of theology, Petrarch first refers to the use of allegory in Scripture as poetry and suggests that the pagan poets do the same—that is, mean God and divine matters when they speak of gods and heroes—"whence also we read in Aristotle that the first poets were theologians."⁴⁷ Aristotle, no doubt thinking of Homer, says, "Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the present generation, and first framed accounts of the gods, had a similar view of nature (to Thales'); for they made Ocean and Tethys the parents of creation.…" But as E. R. Curtius pointed out, Aristotle is trying to discuss the origins of natural philosophy and not theology.⁴⁸ In the Invective Petrarch refers to his medical opponent's criticism that even Aristotle reprehended the poets for their arrogance which aroused the envy of the gods. This, at least, seems to be the argument he refers to. But Petrarch's answer is equally vague because, he says, he does not have the Metaphysics with him at Vaucluse. Petrarch does not find it agreeable to scold the poets for their liberty of speech or to excuse the envy of the gods, but he assumes his enemy does not cite this passage any more accurately than he does others.⁴⁹ Aristotle, of course, argues that the gods cannot be jealous of philosophers, as the poets suggest, since to engage in the study of metaphysics is divine and honorable because it deals with divine matters.

Whether he had his Metaphysics at Vaucluse when writing his Invective or not, Petrarch certainly knew this passage. He refers at least twice to its concluding line: "All the sciences are more necessary than this but none is better." This is a basic argument of his invective, that medicine is not of greater dignity than poetry (or philosophy) because it is more necessary, but that the reverse is true. The less the necessity the greater the nobility and dignity of an art or a science. He pursues the same argument in Le familiari (1.12), which according to Billanovich was apparently composed not long before the Invective of 1353,⁵⁰ and in which he refutes the fictitious old dialectician who argued that Petrarch's art, by which Petrarch guesses he means poetry, is the least necessary of all. This Petrarch gladly admits, for poetry is written for delight and beauty, not out of necessity. His opponent's argument makes all the most sordid, necessary things the most noble. As he would have it, "Philosophy and all the other arts which in any way make life happy, civilized and beautiful, if they confer nothing to the necessities of the vulgar, they are ignoble. O new and exotic doctrine unknown also to him whose name they celebrate, Aristotle! For he said: 'Necessariores quidem omnes, dignior vero nulla.'"⁵¹ He is equally sharp toward his medical opponent: "Impudent idiot, you always have Aristotle in your mouth.… He certainly did not approve of your little conclusion where he said 'All others indeed more necessary, none, indeed, more worthy! I do not indicate the place, for it is a most famous place, and to a famous Aristotelian!"⁵²

Clearly, Petrarch uses Aristotle for essentially rhetorical, not philosophical, purposes. Yet he agrees with a basic philosophical attitude of Aristotle's—the superiority of the liberal arts, particularly philosophy and poetry, over the mechanical. This is specifically illustrated in the principle of the inverse ratio of necessity and nobility. Petrarch also knows and uses the Rhetoric, sometimes disagreeing with Aristotle's assertions. He draws on the discussions in books 2 and 3 of the emotions to which the orator appeals and of the problem of style. Petrarch particularly chides his medical foe, who professes to understand rhetoric and poetry, for his ignorance of Aristotle's Rhetoric, Poetics, and De poetis.⁵³ The latter two Petrarch obviously knew of but could not have seen.

Petrarch's statements against Aristotle in De ignorantia may now be placed in better perspective. It is not so much Aristotle but the cult of Aristotle that he is attacking. All pagan philosophers are to be condemned equally for their non-Christian statements, made from ignorance. Aristotle is neither better nor worse than Plato in this respect. Petrarch revealingly says of his young friends that they "are so captivated by their love for the mere name 'Aristotle' that they call it a sacrilege to pronounce any opinion which differs from his on any matter." Petrarch's so-called "ignorance" may be due to his inadvertent differences from Aristotle, or to the problem of stating the same view with different words. "The majority of the ignorant lot cling to words … and believe that a matter cannot be better said and cannot be phrased otherwise: so great is the destitution of their intellect or of their speech, by which their conceptions are expressed."⁵⁴ Petrarch adds (as he did in his entry on Aristotle under "On Eloquence" in his Rerum memorandarum libri) that he cannot understand how Aristotle has such a bad style when Cicero had praised its sweetness. Not knowing that Cicero refers to Aristotle's dialogues, he thinks the poor quality of the translations into Latin has destroyed Aristotle's style. His contemporary Aristotelians, "whereas they can in no way be similar to Aristotle himself of whom they are always speaking, attempt to render him similar to themselves, saying that he, as a man who sought after the highest matters, was contemptuous of any eloquence, as if no splendor of speech can dwell in high matters, when on the contrary a high style is most fitting to a sublime science."⁵⁵

The De ignorantia makes clear Petrarch's preference for "our Latin writers"—Cicero, Seneca, and Horace—who have "the words that sting and set afire and urge toward love of virtue and hatred of vice."⁵⁶ Despite his interest, albeit wavering, in the Greek philosophers, Petrarch fundamentally prefers the Latin tradition. He is basically concerned with rhetoric and not philosophy as we and the ancients know it.

It is impossible to review in detail the enormous influence and use in his writings of the works of the two Latins who had any claim to be called philosophers— Cicero and Seneca. In Umberto Bosco's magnificent (though still not entirely complete) index to Le familiari, Petrarch's citations of Cicero far exceed those of any other writer.⁵⁷ The Tusculan Disputations is the most cited single work of Cicero. Petrarch's interest in this work and in Seneca (and there is a marked predominance of citations from the Epistulae ad Lucilium) shows his concentration on consolatory Stoicism. Roman Stoicism, although differing significantly in the two versions presented by Cicero and Seneca, retains the common hortatory emphasis on the classical goal of moral autonomy. This, it seems, was central for Petrarch.

The most important idea Petrarch got from classical philosophy was the notion of pyschic and moral self-sufficiency. He could have drawn equivalent ideas from Plato's image of Socrates but did not, either through unwillingness or inability. He surely encountered the notion in the Nicomachean Ethics, but it was here entangled with the more mundane aim of securing a sufficiency of external goods to ensure the virtuous man's performance of his moral and civic duties. Cicero's exposition of Panaetius's views in the De officiis and of Posidonius's (presumably) in the De natura deorum set the problem in the same framework. Hence Petrarch's lesser use of these works. Significantly, in On His Own Ignorance, he discusses the De natura deorum, particularly Balbus's exposition of Stoicism. But rightly unsure of how much of these views to attribute to Cicero, Petrarch plays up the emphasis on Providence. He fails to find in it the magnificent paean to the rational powers of man that had once so appealed to Lactantius and would again to Giannozzo Manetti.⁵⁸

As Petrarch does not see this concern for moral autonomy as necessarily a pagan position opposing the Christian doctrines of grace and justification, he comfortably engages in a series of role identifications or philosophical experimentations. It is here that the claim that Petrarch engages in philosophy as a poet finds its principal basis. His doctrine of imitation—that one should penetrate to the essence of a model and then benefit from it in a totally original and autonomous way—is familiar. In his invectives and his letters he sought to emulate but not ape Cicero and thought that even in his retirement and love of solitude he was following Cicero's example of composing his moral treatises in his country retreats. With Seneca the role playing becomes even more explicit, in Petrarch's conception of himself as a lay counselor and moral adviser, particularly through his letters and in his use of the pseudo-Senecan De remediis fortuitarum as a model for his own De remediis utriusque fortunae. He explicitly played the role of St. Augustine in the Secretum, but in this work it is "Franciscus" who plays the part of St. Augustine, while "Augustinus" is developed as a kind of Christian Seneca. Seneca is even more central to the De vita solitaria than the directly attributed citations indicate, as passage after passage echoes the letters and moral dialogues of the Latin sage. I have already suggested that although the evidence is not explicit, his ironic plea of ignorance in De ignorantia can be conceived as analogous to Socrates' profession that he was wisest of all because he knew nothing.⁵⁹

It is particularly in connection with the Secretum and the De remediis that the question of Petrarch's concept of moral autonomy needs to be discussed. Klaus Heitmann in his study of the De remediis and in subsequent articles on the Secretum is deeply concerned with his seeming lack of discrimination between Stoicism and Aristotelianism and even sometimes Christianity, though he strongly affirms Petrarch's ultimate Christian orthodoxy.⁶⁰ So also notes Bobbio in her study of Seneca and Petrarch.⁶¹ Yet Petrarch in his personal experience of accidia or despair and in his sense of its omnipresence in his contemporaries turned to the elaboration of a theology of sola gratia—salvation by grace alone.⁶² Time and again he repudiates the classical notion, particularly as it is stated by Cicero, that man's virtuousness is in his own hands, whereas we must thank the gods, or fortune, or providence for our material well-being. Petrarch could not be more emphatic in repudiating virtue as the sole or the supreme goal in life. He does, however, see a link between the attainment of moral autonomy in this life and the desire, faith in, and hope for the grace that can lift the Christian out of his condition of despair and grant him the necessary justification for salvation. It is the role of the writer, the poet, the philosopher, the moral counselor, the rhetor to assist the ordinary man by exposition and exhortation to detach himself from his alienating and self destructive involvement in the affairs of the world.

Reason (Ratio) in the De remediis counsels Dolor and Superbia to find their own moral center when bad or good fortune leads them to succumb emotionally with elation or fear to the uncontrollable flow of events as they impinge upon each individual. The self-integrating attitude he urges is a psychological, emotional, and moral detachment but not a withdrawal. Only the man who achieves this moral autonomy can even enter into the economy of grace and salvation.

Seneca, too, understood that the formal rigidities of Stoic doctrine were inapplicable to case after case of actual life. Like other Stoic moralists, he devised a casuistry that would alleviate the strictness of the code. In Seneca, there is a rhetorical convergence with Aristotle's more principled stress on the need for external goods. Petrarch could easily follow the example of Seneca rhetorically, as he could follow Cicero in his Academic affirmation that a rigid philosophical or moral rule was not essential.

Thus Petrarch, with all the inadequacies and defects of his knowledge of classical philosophy, managed to intuit and to adapt to the needs of his own religion and age perhaps antiquity's greatest moral insight—the ideal of selfsufficiency or autarkeia. In a syncretic way, Petrarch was able to unify opposing schools of philosophy, and even Sophists, rhetors and philosophers, through the writings of Cicero and Seneca. With the models of St. Augustine and St. Jerome before him, he could see how Platonism, Stoicism, and Ciceronian rhetoric could be drawn upon to serve and clarify the Christian goal of salvation. Like Augustine, he was aware of the differences between pagan and Christian doctrine and alert to the dangers of a failure to discriminate. But with his deep appreciation and understanding of this central insight drawn from classical moral philosophy, he was able to adapt, transform, and apply it to the new moral and religious situation of the later Middle Ages. Petrarch himself thus became a paradigm for posterity and thereby guided the transformation of late medieval culture into that of the Renaissance.

If Petrarch through his poetry "became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such" (Burckhardt), he tried to persuade others to do so through his letters and treatises based on classical moral philosophy. In this way the poet became a philosopher and sought to make his own subjective insights universal. Through establishing the centrality of his own and every other man's subjectivity, he laid the basis for much of modern philosophy and spirituality—except for modern natural science, which has grown out of the great rival of Petrarch's world view, late medieval natural philosophy. The poet describing what the human condition might be becomes the philosopher making subjective statements concerning individuals that simultaneously acquire the nature of universals. And this is what Petrarch meant when he thought of himself as a poeta theologicus.

Notes

1. I refer here to the names of some of the greatest Petrarch scholars. For full references to the works of these authors, see List of Works Cited. To the names of Nolhac, Sabbadini, Rossi, Bosco, Billanovich, Pellegrin, and Wilkins, there should certainly be added Guido Martellotti and B. L. Ullman. See under "Petrarca" and "Studies."
2. Cf. the following, which concern Petrarch's "inconsistencies": Klaus Heitmann, "Augustins Lehre," "L'insegnamento agostiniano," and Fortuna und Virtus; Hans Baron, "The Evolution of Petrarch's Thought," "Petrarch'sSecretum," and "Petrarch: His Inner Struggles"; Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, chap. 2, "Ideals of Eloquence and Silence in Petrarch." I have tried to resolve some of the dilemmas in "Petrarch: Man between Despair and Grace," chap. 1 of Image.
3. Cf. P. O. Kristeller, "Il Petrarca, l'umanesimo e la scolastica."
4. Poetica, 1451a-b. (Bywater trans.)
5. More than twenty years ago, Leo Spitzer showed how the Latin verse of Pontano and Poliziano broke out of the mold of antiquity, unable to dispel the personal lyric quality so freely evident in their Italian poems, despite their classicizing aims and conscious imitations. See his "Latin Renaissance Poetry." Edward Cranz has more recently stressed a similar transformation of the philosophical perceptions of antiquity and early Christianity in the High and late Middle Ages, and specifically in Petrarch; see "Cusanus" and "1100 A.D." Professor Cranz is currently preparing a major study of this theme which is briefly summarized in these papers.
6. A good antidote to the objectivistic stereotype of the classical mentality is the comprehensive survey of Rodolfo Mondolfo, La Comprensione del soggetto. For Petrarch's contribution to the scholarly study of antiquity, see Billanovich, "Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy," and Roberto Weiss, Renaissance Discovery, 30-38. For Panofsky's thesis concerning the Renaissance view of antiquity, see Renaissance and Renascences, 108-13 and passim.
7. The use of dialectic seems to have been resorted to by many thinkers to compensate for their loss of confidence in the reliability of metaphysical speculation. They, as the humanists after them, sought to make precise statements about the relationship of thought to perception and language rather than sweeping assertions about what, in their view, could be known only vaguely.
8. He scatters twelve references to anecdotes and sayings through Le familiari. There are two entries on Pythagoras in his Rer. mem.; they closely follow Justin, Epitome; Cicero, Tusc. 5. 3-4, and De inven. 2.1.
9. Cf. Image, 49, 195-96, 343 nn. 103-05, 400 n. 38; De rem. in Op. om., 121-25; De otio, 59-60. Cf. Seneca, Epist., 58. 23.
10. Rer. fam., 6. 3. 17.
11. Nachod, 125. Cf. Image, 50.
12. Ancient historians have recently given greater recognition to the Sophists. They are frequently designated as the founders of ancient humanism or of the humanist tradition. Whether the rather scanty knowledge of and interest in the Sophists on the part of Renaissance humanists can be accounted for is not of present concern. But there is no doubt that the humanists followed Cicero in considering Socrates as the true founder of their own tradition. What they would have thought of the Sophists if they had possessed or known of Cicero's lost translation of Plato's Protagoras cannot be said. See Werner Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, book 2, chap. 3, "The Sophists"; W. K. C. Guthrie, Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, part 1, "The World of the Sophists"; Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists. On Renaissance humanists and the Sophists, see my "Protagoras in the Renaissance."
13. Pellegrin, La bibliothèque, 105, lists no. 148 of the 1426 inventory of the Visconti-Sforza Library (Phedon Platonis) as Paris, BN. lat. 6567A. Cf. L. Minio-Paluello, "Il Fedone latino," 107-13. De Nolhac, Pétrarque et l'humanisme, 2, 141 and n. 3, expresses surprise that Petrarch had not made greater use of the Phaedo. But see L. Minio-Paluello on Petrarch's marginalia to BN. lat. 6567A. He suggests (113) that Petrarch may have read this work only in his final years.
14. Tusc., 5.4.
15. Rer. fam., 10.5.15; De offic, 1.1.
16. Acad., 1.4.15.
17. De ignor., Nachod, 126.
18. Rer. mem., 1.9. (Unless lines and pages are specified, numbers refer to book and section.)
19. De sen., 8.26.
20. Rer. mem., 1.27.
21. Ibid., 4.22; Cic. De divin., 1.54.
22. Rer. mem., 3.71.
23. One might say with De Nolhac (1.9) that "the need to oppose a name to that of Aristotle, as much as the study of Cicero and St. Augustine, caused Petrarch to grasp the importance of Plato."
24. Paris BN. lat. 6280. See De Nolhac, 2.141; Pellegrin, 98. It is no. 121 of the 1426 inventory of the Visconti-Sforza Library.
25. See note 13.
26. De Nolhac (2.133-40, 313) discusses this manuscript and Petrarch's efforts to learn Greek in order to read it. Pellegrin lists it (98) as no. 120 of the 1426 inventory and as no. 463 of the 1459 inventory (310). She suggests in n. 2 that because of similarity of contents, it may well be Paris BN grec 1807, which came from Catherine de Médicis.
27. Prose, 756; Nachod, 112-13.
28. Tusc., 1.30; Rer. fam., 3.18.5 (1.139); 4.3.6 (1.165).
29. Prose, 46; Confess., 10.6.
30. Prose, 98-100.
31. Ibid., 174; Phaedrus 245 A.
32. In somn. Scip., 1.8; Prose, 340-42.
33. Prose, 342.
34. Rer. mem., 1.25, pp. 26-31.
35. Ibid., 1.25, lines 78-94.
36. Ibid., lines 99-157.
37. Ibid., lines 158-69.
38. Prose, 750-54; Nachod, 107-11.
39. 2:152. De Nolhac discusses Petrarch's knowledge of Aristotle on 147-52. Pellegrin (115) identifies this manuscript as (293) no. 190 of the 1426 inventory and as no. 78 of the 1459 inventory (293).
40. Prose 744-46; Nachod, 103-04.
41. Rer. fam., 11.16.35, and 23.2.42.
42. Ibid., 11.4.1.
43. Ibid., 3. 10. 7.
44. Contra med., 3.328-35.
45. Rer. fam., 2.159.
46. Contra med., 3.448-49.
47. Rer. fam., 10.4.2 (2.301).
48. European Literature, 217-18.
49. Contra med., 3.490-97.
50. Petrarca letterato, 1:49-50.
51. Rer. fam., 1.12.4-5.
52. Contra med., 3.100-06.
53. Ibid., 2.270-81;3.173-86.
54. Prose, 742-44; Nachod, 102.
55. Rer. mem., 2.31, pp. 64-66, lines 37-43.
56. Prose, 744-46; Nachod, 102.
57. Citations to Cicero run to six and a half columns. The Bible and Vergil run for four and three and a third; Seneca runs for two and a third. Horace gets one and two-thirds, and Augustine one and a half. All other classical authors run for less than a column, the historians claiming a certain prominence, rightly enough, as the source for his exempla. Of the philosophers Plato is given two-thirds of a column and Aristotle and Socrates each one half. Cicero, Vergil, Seneca, Horace, and St. Augustine are, then, his most cited classical authors, with Cicero massively dominating. Cf. B. L. Ullman, "Petrarch's Favorite Books," Studies, 117-37.
58. Prose, 726-40; Nachod, 79-100.
59. Cf. the important comments on Petrarch's role playing of the various careers he assigned himself in Thomas M. Greene, "The Flexibility of the Self," 246-49, especially 248. Greene has also written the most profound study (in my judgment) of Petrarch's theory and practice of imitation, "Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic."
60. See note 2.
61. Aurelia Bobbio, Seneca e la formazione spirituale e culturale del Petrarca.
62. Image, 35-41.