[In the following essay, Greenfield examines Petrarch's poetics as it relates to Platonism, Aristotelianism, and the legitimacy of pagan literature from the classical period. Greenfield concludes that Petrarch's poetics was "an elaboration of the rhetorical and Platonic tradition against the new Aristotelianism"]

Poetry for Petrarch was the catalyst for a humanist awakening, the symbol of a renewed consciousness. Salutati and Boccaccio looked back to Petrarch and Dante as the ones who opened the way for the return of the Muses to Italy. Indeed, if the word Humanism referred to a reawakening centering around the consciousness-expanding power of poetry, Petrarch would certainly be its primary innovator.¹ Completely original in his poetry, he developed in his poetics some of the themes introduced by his Paduan predecessor Albertino Mussato. Petrarch's discussion of poetics was tightly bound up with the major issues of the thirteenth-century intellectual tradition, namely: 1) the conflict in poetics between a humanist-patristic tradition of Platonic inspiration and the new Aristotelianism based on all the translations of Aristotle's Organon; and 2) the debate over the legitimacy of classical pagan literature for the Christians. The significance to poetics of the latter debate was to raise questions about the nature of poetical and biblical metaphor, and about the place of poetry within the system of the sciences. These issues colored Petrarch's entire life in addition to his intellectual output. For this reason scholars have devoted considerable attention to his biography, the stages of which reflect the progress of these conflicts of the time.²

Petrarch spread the Platonic spirit of Cicero and St. Augustine in Florence. On one occasion he even made a gift of St. Augustine's Confessiones to the Augustin-ian monk Luigi Marsili. Under Petrarch's influence, the medieval Platonic heritage remained the center of the Cenacolo of Santo Spirito in which Marsili and, later, Coluccio Salutati participated.³ When in Padua, he strenuously fought the dehumanizing Aristotelian trend prevailing at the University of Padua in the Faculties of Law and Medicine. A result and expression of this Invectivae contra medicum.⁴ Finally, in France, as Pierre de Nolhac suggests,⁵ he came into contact with many classical manuscripts at the Library of the Sorbonne and experienced the heritage of the School of Chartres. French Humanism played an important role in the development of Italian Humanism through the influence of such representatives of the School of Chartres as John of Salisbury, Bernard Silvestris, and Fulbert of Chartres on Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati. The major feature Petrarch inherited from the School of Chartres and transmitted to Italian Humanism was an insistence on the reconciliation of classical poetry with Christianity. This doctrine was based on the Augustinian philosophical argument in the De doctrina christiana concerning the Egyptian gold appropriated by the Jews, and on the practical argument of Cassiodorus' De ordine, which suggests that grammar, comprising poetry and history in the Middle Ages, was the first of the liberal arts and was necessary for an understanding of Scripture.

While accepting the idea that the liberal arts are necessary to an adequate understanding of Scripture, Petrarch disengages poetry from its ancillary role to grammar, and defines it as an autonomous science, including the traditional disciplines of the patristic and classical heritage and devoid of the anti-classical and technical spirit of the Aristotelian theology and philosophy. Petrarch's main statements on poetical theory are contained in the Invectivae contra medicum⁶ and in letters among his Familiares and Seniles. Book III of the Invectivae specifically concerns poetics. Its tone is that of a defense, this time not against a Dominican, but against a medicus. The medicus represents the scholastic approach characteristic of fourteenth-century law, medicine, and theology.

Concurring with Augustine,⁷ Petrarch attributes the popularity of dialectic to the decadence of the humanae litterae. After the invasion of dialectic, the humanism of the church fathers gave way to speculative commentaries; philosophy and theology became matters of captious argumentation or subtle intellectual games. Thus, the Arab translations of the books of the Organon made possible the flow of late medieval dialectic into the body of logic then prevailing at the universities. The mania for syllogism, a cumbersome way of reasoning, became the subject of the debate.⁸ According to Petrarch, this disease spread and entrenched itself particularly in England's school of Occam and in Italy's Averroistic University of Padua, most noticeably in its Faculty of Medicine. Petrarch complains in a letter of the accusations against poetry directed to him by a Sicilian dialectician.⁹ He notes that this pestilence seems to be peculiar to islands, for in addition to the legions of British dialecticians and logicians, a new horde seems to be arising in Sicily. This is the third pack of monsters to have invaded the poor island of Sicily, their predecessors being the Cyclops and the tyrants. Petrarch goes on to say that these dialecticians are anti-Christian, since their naturalistic beliefs stem from the Arab commentators on Aristotle, rather than from Aristotle himself. To Averroism as a pseudo-science, to dialectic as a pseudo-philosophy, he opposes humanist wisdom, the subordination of the intellectual sphere to the moral one.

Petrarch's emphasis on moral philosophy led him not to a metaphysical but to a practical kind of wisdom, much like the philosophy of bene vivendi developed by Cicero in his Tusculan disputations. The Thomist negation of the cognitive value of poetry is itself to be discounted in view of poetry's esthetic and moral impact, according to Petrarch. In this issue Petrarch sided with the Franciscans, heirs of the Platonic-Augustinian tradition by virtue of its coincidence with their basic spiritualism.

The Aristotelian doctor who makes his charges against poetry is addressed by Petrarch as "Ypocras et Aristoteles secundus,"¹⁰ by which Petrarch means someone who is versed in naturalistic science and syllogism. The first charge of the medicus is based on the premise that what is not necessary is not worthy and noble. Petrarch, however, undoes the logic of the syllogism. If necessity argues true nobility, the farmer and the carpenter are truly noble and the ass and the cock are nobler than the lion and the eagle. So necessity does not always imply nobility. In fact, the contrary is sometimes true, since it is obvious that the eagle is no less noble than the cock, although it is less necessary than the cock. The fact that the art of medicine is more necessary makes it only an ars mechanica. How does the doctor dare to proclaim himself a follower of Aristotle if he ignores the basic distinction made in the Metaphysics (983a 10-11) between the productive and theoretical arts? With this distinction Aristotle locates the artes mechanicae among the productive arts. On the other hand, Aristotle holds the theoretical arts in higher esteem because they pursue knowledge for its own sake rather than for utilitarian goals. Since goals are proper to the artes necessariae or artes mechanicae, they are less noble and the syllogism of the doctor turns out to be incorrect even in Aristotelian terms.

Continuing in this vein, Petrarch argues that the doctor should understand the limits of his trade, insofar as its nobility is concerned, from the fact that there are many doctors but only a few poets. As Horace said, "neither men nor the gods, nor the booksellers allowed the poets to be mediocre" (Ars Poetica 372-3), and it is for this reason that they are few and good. Poetry's gratuity is the mark of its superiority; its lack of necessity makes it a theoretical art, hence more worthy than medicine.

The doctor had subsequently argued that since medicine cures the body and helps people to live better, it is on the same level as ethics and poetry. But Petrarch counters by observing that medicine is directed to the cure of the body and is, therefore, at the service of the body. In the same way the liberal arts, as they aim at the benefit of the soul, are at the service of the soul. Now since the soul clearly leads the body and stands above it, it follows that the liberal arts lead and are above the arts which aim to cure the body. Nor should the doctor think, continues Petrarch, that poetry is not a liberal art simply because it is not mentioned in the traditional division of the arts. It is true that poetry is not mentioned by Hugh of St. Victor in his Libri septem eruditionis, where he says that the liberal arts include grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, distinguishing them from the artes mechanicae including lanificium, armatura, navigatio, agricultura, venatio, medicina, and treatricum. But poetry goes without mention here because, along with history, it is included in grammar, the leading art. Nobody would deny the existence of philosophy simply because it is not mentioned among the seven liberal arts, and since grammar subsumes poetry, Petrarch concludes that the place of poetry among the liberal arts is so obvious as to have been taken for granted.

In the next point of controversy, the doctor argues that a science is firma et impermutabilis, while poetry is a matter of variable meters and words and is, therefore, not a science. Petrarch counters that the doctor should inquire what this variation means before excluding poetry from the sciences, for what changes is words, while the things remain "upon which the sciences are founded."¹¹ Science, too, uses words which change according to historical periods, yet it is not judged wholely on the words it uses. Poetry is a science "firm and immutable," as is obvious from the fact that its exercise lends eternity to the poet. It gives the poet a glory which Petrarch's Secretum identifies with the particular achievement of the poet in society: through his poetry the poet survives beyond his bodily death. Since poetry transcends the finite barriers of the human life span, it has no time limits and assures the survival of worthwhile human endeavour. Poetry sets itself against the transitoriness of other human values, as a means to eternity. Being eternal, then, its laws remain the same from antiquity to modern times. Hence poetry is a science.

Another accusation made by the doctor is that poets are the enemies of religion: "What do you think of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Cyprian, the martyr Victorinus, Lactantius and all the other Christian writers," asks Petrarch, "since you accuse the poets of being enemies of religion?"¹² He adds that poets have always been concerned with divine matters, and many of them have defended the existence of a unique God. On the other hand, doctors have not become any healthier for reading the treatise of Galen and the Greek treatises based on a naturalistic approach. Furthermore, the doctor seems to ignore the opinion of the philosopher Aristotle, of whom he proclaims himself a follower. In Metaphysics 983b 29 Aristotle calls the poets "theologians," since these ancient poets were striving for an understanding of God even more than the philosophers were. Privately, poets believed there was only one God, although the people in those times were uncultured and incapable of understanding concepts of monotheism. Homer thus presented them with images that they could grasp, images of many gods who, in a fashion similar to men, committed crimes and fought with one another. In this way, Homer indicated that since a multiplicity of gods led them to disputes much as it does with man, there must be some sort of supreme being to inspire harmony.

Poetry is theology for Petrarch as well. In the Familiares, (10.4), he writes: "Poetics is not very different from theology. Are you amazed? Actually I could easily say that theology is that form of poetics concerning itself with the godhead. Christ is described now as a lion, now as a worm, and is this not a form of poetry? It would be a long matter to enumerate all the other similar images which can be found in Scripture."¹³ Considering their relationship further, Petrarch says that poetry and theology are identified not only because the ancient poets were theologians, but also because poets and theologians shared a figurative language whose main element is the metaphor. This language was invented by the ancient poet-theologians: in their desire to understand the first causes, struck by the worth and nobility of these generative principles, they built temples and established ministers and a cult to celebrate them. In order to pray and implore the divinity, they had to create a language more noble than the colloquial one, suitable to address the divinity, so they invented poetry. This is a particular form of speaking and writing involving numerus, which confers suavitas.¹⁴ This form was called poetry, and the people who used is were called poets. Since it was born out of the need to communicate and address the divinity properly, it is a divine form of speech shared by Scripture; however, while poetry and theology have a common means of expression, their subject-matter remains different. For theology always speaks of true facts and presents true gods, while poetry has often portrayed fictional events and false gods. Except for this difference in subject matter, then, poetry and theology basically involve the same literary forms. So there is a tradition which emphasizes the literary quality of Scripture and notices the poetical language used in such works as Jerome's Breviary, St. Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, and Cassiodorus' Exposition in his Psalterium. St. Augustine himself saw David as a poet, and interpreted the Psalms allegorically. Petrarch provides an allegorical interpretation of his Bucolics in much the same vein as St. Augustine had done with the Psalms (Fam. 10.4; 10.3).

The suavitas of the poetical language, its allegorical veil, the doctor counters, is a form of obscurity which, just as it creates wonders, deceives the reader. Petrarch, however, defends the obscurity of poetical allegory, likening it to that of Scriptural allegory.¹⁵ Following the Augustinian argument, he says that the divine word must be obscure, for it is the expression of an inconceivable power, access to which must be rendered difficult to make its understanding pleasing and wondrous. Similarly, poetry uses allegory to signify things not easily understood in a way which stimulates the intelligence of the reader to understand them. Thus, with the allegorical sermo ornatus the poet creates wonders, as Horace also noted; the creation of wonder is a main characteristic of poetry. So veritas is hidden under the ornamentation of allegory. And beauty resides both in this cortex and in the veritas hidden by the cortex, because content and form complement one another. The cortex creates in the reader a sense correlative to the veritas, as St. Augustine found in Scripture; Petrarch extends this power to poetry.

It bears noting here that although Petrarch is moved to emphasize that both form and content must be given proper care, it is the stylus or sermo ornatus, as he calls it, which must be particularly cultivated by the poet. Petrarch's notion of style is a very complex one, as it involves not only poetics but the "expression" of all the humanae litterae. It is strictly related to the concept of imitation. In the Familiares 1.8 he says: "Like the bees, who do not regurgitate the flowers as they find them but combine them to make wax and honey,… so words and style should be our own although composed out of many.… Some are like silk worms, which spin everything out of themselves. Let us, however, peruse the books of the wise."¹⁶ The invitation here is to read carefully the form of expression of the classical writers and to retain their spirit, from which all things follow, not simply to copy them: "Like a father and a son whose features and dimensions are different yet have in common what the painters call 'air.' Do not copy words and expressions, but inspire the general 'air.'"¹⁷ "Mix the old with the new."¹⁸ Imitation is then intended as an invitation to be alert to the general "air," i.e., to the spirit or style of the ancient writers.

While the Thomist movement and even some famous Christian writers de-emphasize form and style, often seeing them as a useless adjunct, Petrarch conceives of style as an integral part of content, by virtue of its formative power over content. Later Petrarch clearly felt a conflict between his attachment to form and the disregard of it by famous Christian writers, whom he otherwise admired:

I loved Cicero, I admit, and I loved Virgil; … similarly I loved, of the Greeks, Plato and Homer.… But now I must think of more serious matters. My care is more for salvation than for noble language. I used to read what gave me pleasure, now I read what may be profitable.ߪ Now my orators shall be Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory; my philosopher shall be Paul, my poet David.… But although I put the Christian writers first, I do not reject the others. I seem to love both groups at once, provided that I consciously distinguish between those I prefer for style and those I prefer for content.¹⁹

The doctor's final objection concerns a passage in Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae (1.1.8). Boethius narrates that at his deathbed the poetical Muses came to comfort him, but Philosophy sent the "scenicas meretriculas" away and wished for the presence of her muses ("meae Musae"). Following Priscian's grammatical reasoning, the doctor tries to establish that the "meae" refers to philosophical Muses rather than to poetical Muses in general. Petrarch laughs at the internal contradiction inherent in the doctor's argument, for it seeks to undermine the existence of poetry by borrowing explanations from the field of grammar. In his turn, Petrarch argues that the Muses have always been muses of poetry. By calling them "meae," the personification of Philosophy means that the Muses, in general, are close to her, for philosophers have frequently dealt with poetics, as Aristotle's Poetics proves. Actually, Lady Philosophy in Boethius differentiates between the theatrical and other kinds of poetry, which Petrarch uses as evidence that theatrical poetry has too often deviated from the path of truth. But this is not a fault peculiar to poetry. All good things have an impure side, just as oil has dregs and philosophy has Epicurus. In fact, philosophy, like poetry, has been accused of impurity. In Book VIII of the Confessiones (2.3), St. Augustine writes that the books of the philosophers are filled with deceptions and lies; yet by this he does not mean to condemn philosophy, for in the same book he extensively praises Platonic philosophy. He condemns only that branch of philosophy which by the use of limited rational syllogisms claims to arrive at unconditional truths. The impure part of poetry comes from the dramatic poets condemned by Plato in the Republic (398a and 606-607) because the theater had become unworthy of the majesty of the gods. But epic poets like Homer and Virgil have never written drama. Thus, the condemnation should not be extended to them.

To sum up Petrarch's poetics, we find it an elaboration of the rhetorical and Platonic tradition against the new Aristotelianism. He mentions Thomas Aquinas only once, but opposition to a technical, dehumanized theology, philosophy, and poetry runs through his entire work. For Petrarch, poetry is a theoretical art because it makes use of grammar and all the other liberal arts. What raises poetry above grammar and the other liberal arts is the poetical language it shares with the Bible. This language has divine origins because it was invented to speak about the gods. Furthermore, it serves as a vehicle for divine revelation, not only on account of its content and origins, but because with its allegorical form of expression it has the air of divine truth, from which every truth proceeds. With its language, then, poetry holds to the spirit of things, and the stylus ornatus is the specific characteristic of poetry which gives it a formative power unsurpassed by any other art. In addition, poetry immortalizes the poet through posterity, a theme dear to Petrarch's sonnets in the Canzoniere. For insofar as the poet avails himself of the classical poets, imbuing their style with the spirit of his own times, his poetry will come to have enduring force.

Petrarch's poetics is particularly influenced by Platonism.²⁰ In Book VIII of St. Augustine's De civitate Dei, he read about the superiority of Platonism to all other philosophies. And in the work of St. Augustine, Petrarch found much correspondence with Christian Fathers.²¹ He knew Plato, too, through Macrobius' Somnium Scipionis. He knew Chalcidius' version of the Timaeus and Apuleius' De Platone et eius dogmate.²² In addition to this indirect tradition, the School of Chartres handed down to him the ideal of a reconciliation of paganism and Christianity, of classical humanist wisdom and the newly rediscovered Aristotle.²³ The direct influence of John of Salisbury of the School of Chartres on Petrarch has been recently pointed out by Paolo Gerosa.²⁴ Like John of Salisbury in the Metalogicon, Petrarch considers logic a science of persuasion involving basically moral criteria and directed toward practical aims. All this is not to say that Petrarch did not recognize Aristotle's scientific acuity. Petrarch, however, calls Aristotle a student of Plato: "Aristotle, a disciple of Plato, was a man of great intelligence and eloquence; though not comparable to Plato, nevertheless he easily surpasses quite a few."²⁵ Petrarch's Platonism is of extreme importance, for he is the transmitter of the Platonic heritage in poetics to the Florentine humanists. This tradition was not transmitted without influence from medieval thinkers; Gerosa's investigation of Petrarch's sources indicates that the medieval heritage was his firm cultural background, while he emphasized the classical sources as a "discovery."²⁶ Thus, his poetics reflect that humanist tradition which, issuing from the classical and Platonic tradition, became crystallized in the system of St. Augustine. This tradition was transmitted to the Renaissance by such early humanists as Mussato, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati.

Notes

1. B. L. Ullman, Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome, 1955), pp. 11-40, supports the idea that early humanist reawakening means reawakening of poetry.
2. E. H. Tatham, Francesco Petrarca: The First Man of Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1925-26); E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, 1961).
3. E. Garin, La letteratura degli umanisti, in Storia della letteratura italiana (1966), III, 7, sees as symbolic of this heritage the gift of the Confessiones made by Petrarch to the humanist Augustinian monk Luigi Marsili, who revamped the Augustinian spirit in the Florentine circle. Petrarch sides with the Franciscans, i.e., the Augustinian Platonic tradition, against the Dominicans who, in the middle of the thirteenth century, following Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, abandoned that tradition. Platonic idealism corresponded to the spiritualism of the Franciscan order, while Aristotelian intellectualism corresponded to the rationalism of the Dominicans. Hence a continuous polemic between the two schools of thought.
4. For a discussion of this cultural climate, see G. Toffanin, Storia dell'Umanesimo (Bologna, 1933), p. 13, and Il secolo di Roma (Bologna, 1942); U. Bosco, "Il Petrarca e l'umanesimo filologico," Giorn. Stor. della lett. It., 120 (1943), 65.
5. Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l'Humanisme (Paris, 1907), I, 39.
6. Invectivae in Francisci Petrarchae Opera Omnia (Basel, 1581). For the text with an Italian translation see P. G. Ricci's edition in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti et al. (Milan, 1955).
7. De doctrina christiana 4.1; 2.50.
8. Secretum 1.1 in Prose, p. 52. "Ista quidem dyalecticorum garrulitas nullum finem habitura, et diffinitionum huiuscemodi compendiis scatet et immortalium litigiorum materia gloriatur; plerumque autem, quid ipsum vere sit quod loquuntur, ignorant."
9. Familiares 1.7. See the critical ed. by Rossi-Bosco, 4 vols. (Firenze, 1933-42). Cf., among others, P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II (New York, 1965), pp. 111-118.
10. Invectivae in Prose, p. 648.
11. Invectivae in Prose, p. 648: "In quibus scientiae fundatae sunt."
12. Invectivae in Prose, p. 648. "Quid de Ambrosio, Augustino et Ieronimo, quid de Cypriano, Victorinoque martire, quid de Lactantio ceterisque Catholicis scriptoribus sentias?"
13. The Latin text with an Italian translation appears in E. Garin, Il pensiero pedagogico dell'Umanesimo (Firenze, 1958), p. 32. "Miraris? parum abest quin dicam theologiam poeticam esse de Deo: Cristum modo leonem modo agnum modo vermem dici, quid nisi poeticum est? mille talia in Scripturis Sacris invenies que persequi longum est."
14. Garin, Il pens. ped., p. 32. "Id quadam non vulgari forma, sed artificiosa et exquisita et nova fieri oportet." See also Isidore's Etymologiae 8.7, 1.3; Suetonius, De poetis 2; and Boccaccio's Gen. Deor. 14.7.
15. Invectivae in Prose, pp. 669-70. "Quid sermo ipse divinus, quem etsi valde oderis, tamen aperte calumniari propter metum incendii non audebis? Quam in multis obscurus atque perplexus est. Cum prolatus sit ab eo Spiritu Sancto.…"
16. Garin, Il pens. ped., p. 31. "Apes in inventionibus imitandas, que flores, non quales acceperint, referunt, sed ceras ac mella mirifica quadam permixtione conficiunt.… Illud affirmo: elegantioris esse solertie, ut, apium imitatores, nostris verbis quamvis aliorum hominum sententias proferamus.… Rursus nec huius stilum aut illius, sed unum nostrum conflatum ex pluribus habeamus; felicius quidem, non apium more passim sparsa colligere, sed quorundam haud multo maiorum verminum exemplo, quorum ex visceribus sericum prodit, ex se ipso sapere potius et loqui, dummodo et sensus gravis ac verus et sermo esset ornatus.… Perscrutemur doctorum hominum libros."
17. Familiares 22.19; English translation in Morris Bishop, Letters from Petrarch (Bloomington and London, 1966), p. 198.
18. Seniles 2.3 in Garin, Il pens. ped., p. 38: "Veteribus nova permisce."
19. Fam. 22.10 in Bishop, p. 191.
20. P. P. Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano del Petrarca (Torino, 1966), p. 246.
21. De Remediis 11.119; Fam. 22.5.
22. Giovanni Gentile, "Le traduzioni medievali di Platone e Francesco Petrarca," Studi sul Rinascimento (Firenze, 1936); Roberto Weiss, Il primo secolo dell'Umanesimo (Roma, 1949).
23. Pierre de Nolhac, ch. ix.
24. Gerosa, p. 248.
25. Rerum memorandarum 1.26. "Aristoteles, Platonis discipulus, vir excellentis ingenii et eloquii, Platoni quidem impar, sed multa facile superans."
26. Gerosa, p. 258, lists all the medieval thinkers who, like the rings of a long chain, connect St. Augustine to Petrarch.