SOURCE: Francis X. Murphy, "Petrarch and the Christian Philosophy," in Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World, edited by Aldo S. Bernardo, State University of New York Press, 1980, pp. 223-47.

[In the excerpt below, Murphy examines Petrarch's humanism and argues that he was a "genuine Christian philosopher."]

During the month of February, 1325, Francesco Petrarca purchased a manuscript of the De civitate dei of St. Augustine for 12 florins from the executors of Cinthius, a cantor of Tours. The budding poet was twenty-one, and on leave in Avignon from his legal studies in Bologna. This information is contained in a note in his own hand on the manuscript, and represents what is probably the earliest of Petrarch's preserved autographs. As such, it is also the first of a long series of annotations that supply an avid posterity with authentic biographical detail, in contrast to the frequently ambiguous if not contrived information he wove into his poems and prose compositions.¹

The acquisition of the De civitate did not immediately affect Petrarch's literary tastes or student mores. He confesses that it was only when he joined the household of the Colonna in the 1330s that he began to take an interest in the sacred scriptures and the literary productions of the Christian authors.²

On his definitive return from Bologna, in 1326, Petrarch and his brother Gerard had taken residence in Avignon and engaged in the frivolous pastimes that prevailed among officials and supernumeraries who flocked to the papal court. Nevertheless, almost from the moment of his arrival, Petrarch became part of the literary scene and the commerce in manuscripts and codices encouraged by the pontifical court's largesse. One of his first accomplishments was a critical edition of the first, third and fourth decades of Livy that had been handed down in separate fascicles by the Middle Ages.³

Meanwhile, on Good Friday, April 6th, 1327, Petrarch had experienced the fatal encounter with Laura in the Church of Santa Chiara in Avignon, a fact faithfully recorded on his Virgil manuscript. About this time, too, he had taken minor orders in the Church, apparently to obtain a livelihood in the household of the Colonnas. His assumption of clerical status entailed the daily recitation of the divine office—laudes Cristo diutumas—that he acknowledges he performed with little enthusiasm until his conversion, years later.

Inspired with love for the litterae humaniores by Convenevole da Prato, his early preceptor in grammar and rhetoric, Petrarch found himself impelled toward the achievement of greatness through the pursuit of classical studies. Despite his complaints about the corruption prevalent in the papal court, it was there he encountered kindred spirits in the pursuit of learning. Of these, the Dominican historian, Giovanni Colonna played an important role, Eight of the Epistolae rerum familiarium are addressed to this learned friar.⁴

Colonna wrote a De viris illustribus in which he presented examples of virtue to encourage readers to better their lives. This was, of course, the traditional purpose of ancient historical writing. St. Jerome's work of the same name was his model. But his immediate inspiration is to be found in John of Salisbury's prescription for the Christian humanist: "the cult of virtue fostered by eloquence through the use of letters"—licterarum usus.⁵ The relationship of Petrarch's De viris to Colonna's has not been completely unraveled. Both authors paraphrase ancient historians—Colonna, Valerius Maximus; Petrarch, Livy—as they announce their intention to exemplify virtuous deeds. But by a curious twist, Colonna chose learned men as his viri illustres,—Plato, Cicero, Paul, Origen, Augustine—while Petrarch concentrated on upright men of action. Colonna compiled a list of some 300 writers for whom he furnished biographical and bibliographical information. Petrarch selected 36 pre-Christian heroes for whom he provided extensive, moralizing lives. This singular interest in moral greatness pervades all his major compositions. It dictates his philosophical interests; and is the criterion he employs in his rejection of the philosophers and theologians of his own day whom he accuses then of cultivating the knowledge of virtue with no intention of achieving its practice.⁶

In 1333 Petrarch journeyed to Paris, then on to Flanders and Germany at the expense of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. On this voyage, he enjoyed the hospitality of the Hermits of St. Austin with many of whom—Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro, Bartolomeo da Urbino, Jean Coci, and Bonaventura da Perargo—he remained on intimate terms all through life. To this period belong the earliest of his rimes as well as a Metrical Epistle (1.2) directed to pope Benedict XII calling on the pontiff to return with the papacy to Rome. To it likewise must be traced his introduction to Augustine and the first stirrings of his interest in the Christian philosophy.⁷

Somewhere in the course of 1333, the Austin monk and teacher, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro, gave Petrarch a pocket-sized copy of St. Augustine's Confessions together with a fatherly admonition regarding his way of life. Petrarch carried the little book with him through the length and breadth of Europe, including the scaling of Mt. Ventoux, and a near drowning in the bay of Nice.⁸ Dionigi, the learned Augustinian churchman, had taught at the University of Paris, and was a noted commentator on the writings of Aristotle particularly his Politics and Rhetoric. These were works foreign to Petrarch's tastes, although, later in controversy, the poet boasts that he had read all of Aristotle's moral compositions and listened to not a few others.⁹ While he does not mention Dionigi's productions,—which is strange since Petrarch seems to have modelled his Rerum memorandarum libri on the Facta et dicta memorabilia of Valerius Maximus for which the Austin friar had written an extensive commentary—Petrarch looked on him as his spiritual father and literary mentor, and addressed to him one of his most famous Epistolae, the account of the ascent of Mt. Ventoux.¹⁰

Petrarch traced his active interest in the Christian literature to his reading of Augustine's Confessions, and in particular to the passage where Augustine describes his discovery of philosophy through his encounter with Cicero's Hortensius and the change it wrought in his intellectual development. Petrarch is not entirely uninfluenced by the Augustinian self-relevation in his own literary inventiveness, when he confesses that previously, with juvenile if not demoniac insolence, he had looked upon the Christian authors as barbaric, of little consequence in comparison with the secular literature. The Confessions changed his perspective, While they did not lead him to dismiss his early vices—would that I could forgo them even at this age! he wrote much later—they did give him a new literary and moral insight.¹¹

In 1335, Petrarch purchased Augustine's De vera religione and on a blank leaf of the codex inscribed the first known catalogue of his literary possessions, some fifty titles with an obvious concentration on the works of Cicero. In a sort of coda to this list, he recorded his four Christian acquistions, all Augustinian works: the De civitate dei, the Confessions, the Soliloquies and a De deo orando. It was only two years latter, apparently on his first sojourn in Rome, that he began to expand his collection of Christian manuscripts.

On March 6, 1337 in Rome, he purchased the Homilies on the Gospels of St. Gregory the Great; and on the sixteenth of that month, Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos. The latter codex contained the bishop of Hippo's sermons on the last fifty Psalms of the Davidic psalter, and is copiously annotated with Petrarchan glosses. Much later, Boccaccio was to give him a complete copy of the Enarrationes in a large unwieldly codex that Petrarch treasured despite its bulk and difficulty in handling.¹² Petrarch's meditative activity recorded in the annotations on these manuscripts indicate clearly that it is to this period of his life—in his early 30s—that should be traced the first serious stirrings of a deeper religious self-consciouness. A gloss on the De vera religione dated the first of June 1335, and another of July 10, 1338, contain prayers composed apparently under the influence of the Soliloquies, in which Petrarch expresses the sentiments of a soul in pain, desirous of living virtuously, but weighed down by worldly cares. The second of these prayers is found in other manuscripts marked with the rubric "oratio cotidiana." Among the earliest of the annotations on his first copy of the Enarrationes is a meditation on examining one's conscience and a prayer of religious repentence. Thus by 1338, Petrarch had undergone a considerable change of religious sentiment.¹³

In the Canzoniere there is no direct record of Petrarch's passion for Laura during the first six years that followed their fatal encounter. The earliest intimation of his enslavement is recorded in his Sestina II (xxx) where he says, that, if his figures are correct, his sighs go back exactly seven years. Thus on April 6, 1334, his love for Laura was still alive and strong. Nevertheless, in the Epistle to Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, presumably of April 26, 1336, ten years to the day since he departed Bologna, there is the admission that for the past three years he had desired to liberate himself from the cruelty of this unrequited love. But in the Canzone IV of 1337, Petrarch depicts the poet ensconced in his amorous desires during a whole decade. This was the year of his journey to Rome where, besides the awakening of an intense national sentiment, he felt a further stirring toward liberation. There, the coeval Sonnet depicts a struggle between his love for Laura and his fear for his eternal salvation.

On his return from Rome, Petrarch fled Avignon for Vaucluse, and there he made the first "collected edition" of his rimes. In his second Madrigal, the poet acknowledges the perils to which his life is exposed and speaks of changing direction "toward midday," apparently close to age thirty-five, that was considered the middle of life by the ancients. Finally in the haunting sonnet, Padre del Ciel, Petrarch addressed a prayer to God to save him "today," in the eleventh year of his amorous passion, thus Good Friday, April 10, 1338. "Rammenta lor come oggi fusti in croce." One does not expect consistency of a poet, particularly one suffering from the pangs of excruciating love unfulfilled. But the evidence embodied in the Lauran poetry would seem to supplement the indications in his manuscript glosses. In the late 1330s Petrarch was involved in a war within himself to shift his spiritual orientation.¹⁴

Petrarch's first trip to Rome with its antiquarian and bibliophilic delights occurred a year after his account of the Ascent of Mt. Ventoux in which he gives the impression of being deeply imbued with the Augustinian Weltschmerz, an excellent possibility if he had mastered the writings of Augustine then in his possession. But Petrarch's confusing literary habits, particularly the frequent reworking of his texts, his predilection for inventing Epistolae and his habit of inserting newly discovered classic as well as patristic quotations in his polished writings long after their original composition, gives one pause in accepting at face value the Epistle to Dionigi with its earliest recording of a poet's Alpinist adventure. This in turn introduces doubt when dealing with the chronological and biographical material in his other, obviously contrived literary accomplishments, as has been the painful experience of Petrarchan scholars over the past six centuries. The suspicions that surround the factual information contained internally in the first book of the Epistolae rerum familiarium in particular render the information on the manuscripts, and possibly also the Lauran chronology, of considerable importance in tracing the history of his relation with the Christian philosophy. Petrarch's literary habits are part of the machinery of an extremely deep and diversified mind. He said explicitly that he did not write for the vulgar crowd, but was busy about intricate phases of human knowledge (De vita sol., prol). In this sense he is a man and a philosopher unique for his time.¹⁵

In his own estimation Petrarch is a moral philosopher and a poet.¹⁶ But while a convinced Christian and a pundit with strong moral convictions, he has little direct contact with the thinkers and theologians of his own times. Though his universe was still the closed classical world of antiquity, he was not a medieval poet or theologian as was Dante. Nor was he the libertarian scholar and litterateur found in a Poggio Bracciolini or a Laurentius Valla of the following century. Despite his involvement in the political happenings of his age as diplomat and counsellor, not infrequently travelling on ambassadorial tasks to Paris, to Prague, to Venice and to Naples, and his proffering of unsolicited advice to tyrants, kings and popes, he displays no interest in the development of political theory going on under his very eyes.

Petrarch seems to have ignored the ideological struggle between the papacy and the rising national states, and simply gives no consideration to the polemical writings of William of Ockham, Marsiglio of Padua, John of Paris, or James of Viterbo, or any of the pamphleteers on both sides of the vast quarrel between the papacy and the national monarchies for control of the disordered world in which he lived. He wants the emperor or the king to force the issue, and make the pope resume his proper station as spiritual lord of the universe. When Cola di Rienzi attempts to restore peace and order to the eternal City, Petrarch encourages him with high sounding, patriotic advice. But he seemingly has no interest in the theories of his contemporaries who are seeking to rearrange the constitutional structure of his worldly habitation.¹⁷

On the other hand he is fully conscious of factors involved in the political arena such as the habits and characteristics of individual peoples and nations. he quotes the Emperor Frederick II, germanus origine, italus conversatione, when he warns that the Italians should be dealt with benevolently by their rulers. They can easily be led to repentance, and to respect for authority. With the Germans, by contrast, he says, leniency is an occasion for insolence, and mercy is looked upon as weakness. The Italians should be treated with civility; by no means with familiarity. For no people are quicker to seize the opportunity to search out the vices of others, and while themselves living as a Sardanapalus, to render judgment with the severity of a Fabricius or a Cato. The German can be dealt with familiarly. In this case, familiarity does not breed contempt, but a mutual, affectionate appreciation.¹⁸

Despite his unbridled criticism of the papacy, it must be stated at once that Petrarch was a believing Christian—a Catholic as he himself frequently asserts in the course of his Invective On His Own Ignorance and That Of Many Others. In the third book of the Secretum, Augustine questions him regarding the piety of his youth. "Do you remember how great was your fear of God at that time? How much you thought of death? How strong was your religious affection? How great was your love of goodness?" And Francesco replies: "I do indeed remember; and I deplore the fact that with my progress in years, my virtues have diminished." In later life, Petrarch insists that he had fasted on bread and water every Friday from his youth.¹⁹

Despite his acknowledged moral lapses, or perhaps in consequence of the compunction he felt over his spiritual weaknesses, his faith is unquestioning. It was nourished by his youthful training; his daily recitation of his prayers—the oratio cotidiana of his manuscript glosses; the psalms and readings that constituted the divine office, which, in later life, he arose during the night to recite; and his familiarity with both the Austin monks and the Augustinian corpus, particularly the Confessions and the De vera religione. It is also evident in the support for Christian beliefs that he is constantly turning up in the pagan authors, particularly Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and guardedly Aristotle.²⁰

Petrarch's intent differed considerably from that attributed to him by modern, mainly nineteenth century scholars who saw him throwing off the yoke of religious obscurantism by his insistence on his right to an unfettered judgement, and establishing himself as a precursor to the Protestant revolt, if not the age of the Enlightenment. Petrarch's total engagement is quite the contrary; it is to amalgamate the ancient wisdom of his pagan poets and orators with the Christian creed within the framework of the Church that was simply a normal inescapable part of his consciousness.²¹

In a contrary vein, Étienne Gilson deals with him too harshly in his Unity of Philosophical Experience where the ebullient historian of medieval philosophy brackets Petrarch between Nicholas of Autrecourt and Erasmus as responsible for giving the coup de grâce to the perennial philosophy of the thirteenth century, scholastic renaissance. He accuses Petrarch of having thereby destroyed the possibility of an authentic theological revival in his own and later ages.²²

The accusation is interesting. For in fact Petrarch had no use for the Christian philosophers of his day, and was equally hostile to the theologians, holding them responsible for the very same ideological crime of which Gilson accuses him. Petrarch excoriates his contemporaries for debilitating the traditional theology. Not only does he not reflect the thinking of his generation, but he even avoids mentioning their names. Actually, he makes specific reference to a few great men of the previous century when, in a polemic jibe at a Gallic critic in his Invective Against One Who Criticized Italy, he names Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Peter the Lombard, and James of Viterbo—all Italians—as the only competent teachers the university of Paris ever had.²³

Petrarch's judgment on the culture of his day was devastating. He blames the decadence on the multiplication of teachers and scribblers, intent on monetary gain rather than wisdom. He claims, not without reason, that much of the older theology had been perverted by dialectics, and that philosophy was being destroyed by the vain pursuit of logic if not of sophistry. Once there were professors worthy of the name of theologians, he explains with indignation. But now in their insolence they attempt to subject God to the laws of their feeble intellects; and so describe the intricacies of the workings of nature that you would think they had just come from heaven where they had been present at the councils of the Almighty.

Behind this decadence Petrarch saw the shadow of Averroes and the spectre of Aristotle. The latter, as the source of the new knowledge regarding the nature of things, had been quickly thrust into the position of an oracle whose ipse dixit drove Petrarch literally into a rage. The cult of Averroes found a home among the medieval doctors who, with Pietro d'Abano (d. 1313) and the school of Padua cultivated a naturalistic materialism. Petrarch accused the Averroists of teaching that the created universe was eternal, without beginning or end, thus denying creation and the final judgment; maintaining that the human soul enjoyed immortality as a component of the world soul, thus denying the resurrection; and of cultivating astrology to the detriment of man's free will. In many of his longer letters and philosophical works, Petrarch conducts a recurring assault on these heresies.

As a Christian given to philosophizing, Petrarch was concerned with attacks on monotheism, and particularly on the Catholic creed with its belief in one God, creator of heaven and earth, and judge of the living and the dead. In his apologetic moods, he is ambiguous in his judgements on Aristotle, at times appealing to his authority, at others blaming the fell state of theology on the Stagirite's influence; but he does know that the Latin style in which Aristotle had come down to him was faulty: qualis est nobis, non admodum delectari (as we have him, he is hardly pleasing). In the end, Augustine is his theologian, and Cicero his philosopher. But when he finds his Cicero once more discussing the gods, after speaking so eloquently of the Supreme Being, Petrarch chides him: "Heu, mi Cicero, quid ais? Tam cito Dei unius et tui ipsius oblivisceris?" (Alas my Cicero, what are you saying? Have you so quickly forgotten the one God and your own nature?)²⁴

In his old age, the poet-scholar contemplated writing a refutation of Averroes, "who raves against Christ his Lord and the Catholic faith." But he had to entrust the task to a youthful friend, the Florentine Austin friar, Louis Marsilius. Petrarch advises the young monk—to whom, in view of his failing eyesight and impending death, Petrarch gave his precious copy of the Confessions, restoring it to the Augustinian patrimony whence he had received it—to delve deeply into the second book of Augustine's De doctrina christiana. There the bishop of Hippo had dealt with the distinction, newly resuscitated by the Averroists, that limited knowledge to the domain of philosophy and granted to theology only the sphere of belief and opinion.

Augustine had insisted on the convergence of all knowledge, both religious and profane, since the totality of what man can know is a gift of the creator. In this framework, Petrarch described the genuine theologian as one who should know many things beyond the realm of faith, indeed if possible, almost everything. Certainly as God, to whom all things are subject is one, so the knowledge of God must be one, under which all things have their proper place.²⁵

It is to Augustine that Petrarch owes his own knowledge of theology; and though he made no claim to be other than a "moral philosopher and a poet," the evidence of his theological awareness is clear enough in his later, polemical writings as well as in the first book of the De vita solitaria, where he deals with man's knowledge of the presence of God in the world. In an eloquent passage not far removed from the dialectical method he pretended to despise, Petrarch outlines the creative presence of God to the one seeking him, for all practical purposes as if he were a professional theologian engaged in preaching. He sets out his thesis, introduces proof from scripture, then draws his conclusion, applying it immediately to the pragmatic order where his true interest lies. Commenting on an Epicurean maxim, "Always behave as if Epicurus were watching you," Petrarch remarks that it is the advice of a sage, despite the bad reputation that Epicurus has for some of his ideas. Nevertheless the Christian is not in need of such counselling since he lives continually in the presence of Christ who as God is everywhere, and of his guardian angel assigned to every individual.

How then explain the fact that the believing Christian is not ashamed to do evil? Here Petrarch introduces the testimony of Cicero. He does not discount the witness of Augustine's De vera religione, but seeks the concurrent wisdom of a stranger who certainly did not know Christ. To Cicero he attributes the observation that most people are incapable of seeing anything with the mind; they see only what is placed before their eyes. It takes a supreme effort to turn the mind from sense knowledge, and to force one's thinking out of its accustomed ways. Hence the sinner, though a believer, easily ignores the presence of Christ.²⁶

Toward the end of this section of the De vita solitaria, Petrarch speaks of the possibility that a human being, still bound to the earth, might hear the chanting of the angelic choirs, and see things that on returning within himself, he could not describe. This passage is of considerable interest in that it does not reflect the poet's normal approach to preternatural phenomena. Referring to the stigmata of St. Francis, for example, he shows a reverent but reserved interest. While he venerates the saint's down-to-earth simplicity, he does not over-praise his poverty, and withholds judgment regarding the miracles attributed to him. In his reference to mystical experience, he is ambiguous: he does believe in heavenly immortality; but his true preoccupation is with the immortality he hopes to have engineered in this world. With Cicero he feels, non omnis moriar.…

In his reference to mystical experience, in the De vita, Petrarch seems to reflect the verses of Dante's Paradiso, where the Florentine poet spoke of "having seen things that he neither know how to, or could repeat, on returning from there above."

       e vidi cose che ridire
Né sa né può chi lassù discende
(1, 5-6)

Here, as in the Triumphs of Death and Eternity, Petrarch is influenced by his near contemporary, Dante, an indebtedness he is reluctant to acknowledge. In fact, he was chided by Boccaccio for his neglect of his fellow poet. Petrarch's answer in a long letter, acknowledges the justice of the accusation. He says however that, as he has also cultivated the vernacular poetry, he did not want to be accused of imitation or plagiarism resulting from coincidences that could occur if he read other poets. It is a lame excuse; but it helps explain Petrarch's failure to reflect the massive theological vision that was Dante's.²⁷

Gilson has demonstrated that Petrarch did not see himself as the first renaissance man. His perspective was far short of the historical consciousness of a Flavio Biondo (1388 to 1463) who seemingly first selected the period of A.D. 410 to 1440 as the age between antiquity and modernity to which, in 1518, the designation media aetas was applied.

Petrarch does speak of himself as "situated on the confines of two peoples, looking at once backward and forward—velut in confinio duorum populorum constitutus ac simul ante retroque prospiciens (Rerum memor. 1, 2). The phrase has been interpreted as signifying the Petrarchan consciousness of initiating a new age. But in the context, the meaning is significantly different. Petrarch is complaining about the neglect of ancient learning by his contemporaries. he says they are handing on nothing to posterity. Thus future ages will be blissfully ignorant of the past and thus without complaint. In their complacency they will resemble antiquity, but for a totally different reason. Antiquity had no right to complain since it possessed a plenitude of learning.²⁸

Petrarch's ideal was not to reproduce the past as will be the aim of the ages coming after him. His intention was to discover and preserve what still existed, and in this he gave the lie to his own gloomy prediction—si ut auguror res eunt—"if things go as I seem to think they will." In his determination to resurrect the learning of the past he turned his attention to the early Fathers of the Church, particularly after settling in Milan in 1353, where he had access to the manuscript treasures in the library of the Church of St. Ambrose. Scattered through his writings are a large number of patristic references, but they are largely illustrative or anecdotal, seldom doctrinal. With Augustine it is different. Petrarch has absorbed much of the master's thought, citing the De Trinitate as well as the earlier books that he had in his possession, and using Augustine as part of his intellectual armory. There are definite traces of Augustinian thought, particularly of the De civitate dei, in Petrarch's heroic poem, Africa, as Calcaterra has demonstrated.²⁹ Here, and though less obviously, in the De viris illustribus, the author's basic themes of Roman virtue and eternal destiny have an evident Augustinian tinge. These works were begun in 1338, soon after Petrarch's awakening to the deeper aspects of the Christian philosophy. It is likewise to Augustine that Petrarch turns for the solution of a problem that bothered him in his later writings concerning his utilization of the pagan learning. In this he was a medieval man, echoing unwittingly Chrétien de Troyes: "The Christians are right, and the pagans are wrong."³⁰

Augustine had used the allegory of the Jews despoiling the Egyptians of their treasures before the Exodus; and Petrarch cites this principle in justification of his own inveterate steeping in the pagan classics. He is also well aware of St. Jerome's difficulty in his pre-occupation with the secular learning, applyng to himself the accusation hurled at Jerome in a dream: Mentiris; ciceronianus es, non es christianus—"You lie; you are a ciceronian, you are not a Christian".³¹ He seems to think that Jerome made a great effort to avoid the pagan authors thereafter, missing the full import of the accusation made by Rufinus of Aquileia who charged Jerome with continually parading his Maro, his Tullius, his Flaccus like smoke before his readers' eyes, that he might appear learned and of great erudition! Petrarch seems equally unaware of Jerome's own solution. With the cry regarding his well-stocked memory—"having dyed the wool once purple, what washing could make it clean," Jerome resorted to the passage in Deuteronomy (21. 10-13) where the pious Jew was justified in marryng a captive, gentile woman if first he shaved her head and eyebrows and clipped her nails. Having rid her of vanity and superstition, says this supreme misogynist, he could then retain what was useful.³²

Among the other early churchmen, Petrarch is fairly well acquainted with Ambrose of Milan whose De officis ministrorum he recognizes as a christianized version of Cicero's De officiis. Petrarch possessed several manuscripts of the bishop of Milan's sermons, particularly his De penitentia, and his funerary orations for his brother Satyrus. Petrarch admires him for the part he played in the conversion of Augustine, although he is well aware of the long itinerary that brought Augustine to Christ along the path of the platonists and neo-platonists.

Petrarch is equally familiar with Lactantius' Institutes praising the author's ciceronian style; and he employs the names of Cyprian, Rufinus, Benedict, Pope Gregory I and Isidore of Seville, though of the latter's Etymologies he says, "I seldom use them." He was not enamored of the early Christian poets from Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola to Prosper of Aquitaine and Sedulius. Likewise but for a few anecdotes, the Greek fathers were merely names: Origen, Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzen. Petrarch signals John Chrysostom for special mention. But though he read and annotated a considerable number of Latin texts of the Fathers, this is the extent of his patristic learning.³³

In the second book of the De vita solitaria, where he praises the wisdom of the saints and sages who had escaped from the world to take refuge in solitude, Petrarch cites a great variety of real and legendary Christian heroes. For the most part he has been delving in the Lausiac History of Palladius, the Eusebian-Jerome Chronicle, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and the Golden Legend of James of Voragine.³⁴

Of the churchmen between Gregory I (604) and Peter the Lombard, Petrarch took little notice. He did possess a copy of Abelard's Historia calamitatum and shows considerable sympathy for its victim. But he confesses that he did not know enough of Abelard's other writing to judge concerning his reputation as a heretic. The literature on the De contemptu mundi beginning with Peter Damian and including Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent III seems to have influenced Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortune. While he does not mention John of Salisbury directly, much of his detail in attacking the dialecticians comes very close to being modelled on, if not drawn, from, the Polycraticus.³⁵

Among Petrarch's annotated manuscripts are a number of twelfth century authors such as Richard and Hugh of St. Victor, Berengarius of Poitiers, the Gesta of Innocent III, Stephen of Tornai, and Albertus Magnus; but there is little indication that these works entered deeply into Petrarch's thought. Pierre Courcelle contrasts Petrarch's reaction in reading the Confessions to that of Ailred of Rielvaulx, attributing to the highly spiritual minded monk a much deeper penetration into the depths of Augustine's thought. He assesses Petrarch's interest as more literary and philosophical. But Courcelle thus seems to miss the full significance of Petrarch's Secretum in which the fictional Augustine of the dialogue is the real Petrarch, who displays an acute understanding of the spiritual analysis engaged in by the author of the Confessions?³⁶ At the same time, Petrarch aims at supplying an ideal of the Christian way of life better suited to the spiritual needs of his contemporaries—the rising class of merchants and officials—a docta pietas—differing from the ascetic and monastic demands of the medieval spirituality. The Secretum is not modelled directly on the Confessions; it is much closer in inspiration to the Soliloquies. With the real Augustine's actual conversion, there was a total turning from the world of everyday affairs. Petrarch was determined to remain in the world and still achieve spiritual well-being. This is the message of his search for easier, divergent paths in contrast to his brother's direct mounting in the ascent of Mt. Ventoux; and in this respect, the Epistola to Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro is very close in time and content to the Secretum.³⁷

Complicating enormously the problem posed by Petrarch's attitude toward the Christian philosophers is the startling probability, raised once more by Billanovich that the first section of the Epistolae rerum familiarium is a literary creation having no direct connection with the time and place in which they were supposedly composed. I must confess that in a recent rereading of the Petrarchan corpus, the possible significance of the closing line of the Epistle to Bishop Giacomo Colonna, Hoc saltem oro, ne finxisse me fingas—this at least I ask, do not imagine that I have imagined this—struck me with impelling force. The whole letter deals with the accusations that Petrarch has deceived his public—that he has simply imagined his own Augustinian devotion, imagined the very existence of Laura, and imagined the unfulfilled promise to make the journey to Rome. In view of these accusations acknowledged by Petrarch himself, to have the discussion close suddenly with that alliterative, but brassy phrase, ne finxisse me fingas raises the spectre of a subtle Petrarchan joke—an epystola iocosa as he refers to the letter he had apparently received from his episcopal patron and to which this letter is the answer.

Attributing his patron's ironic accusations to his urbanity, he asks the bishop how far he intends to go with his joking. "You indicate," he says, "that many have gathered great opinions about me because of my fictitious creations." And it is in this connection that he brings up once again the legitimacy of using the pagan poets and philosophers. There arises a suspicion of a close relation between this Epistola and the Secretum, lending substance to the possibility that it is of much later composition than it purports to be. While Morris Bishop and Ernest Hatch Wilkins simply dismiss this notion, Billanovich takes it for demonstrated.³⁸

A starker suspicion stalks the chronological claim and the provenience of the Epistola to Dionigi da Brogo San Sepolcra. There can be little doubt that the details of the scaling of Mt. Ventoux are an allegorical description of the difference between his brother's sudden withdrawal from the world to join the Carthusians upon the death of his beloved, and Petrarch's dilatory search for compromises on his divagating path to the summit of spirituality. Nor can the sudden change to morose silence when his eyes fell on the passage from Augustine, admonishing men for seeking pleasures in contemplating the skies and travelling the seas, but neglecting their own interior selves, be understood outside the context of the meditations that form the substance of the dialogue in the Secretum.

What seems most likely is that during the decade of 1340 Petrarch found himself gradually impelled to follow the Augustinian pattern first in his intellectual pursuits, then in his gradual retreat from the sins of the flesh that had resulted in his fathering two illegitimate children, for all his insistence in his literary compositions that the praise of virtue was useless if one did not strive to live virtuously. There is sufficient evidence that during the Jubilee year of 1350, on his pilgrimage to Rome, he made a definite commitment to a virtuous life. Writing to reassure his brother Gerard, he says that he had received sacramental absolution after revealing the festering sores of his hidden sins to his confessor and that he intended to do so habitually for the future.³⁹

There is no direct reference to this personal experience in the Secretum, but the dialogue is the fruit of Petrarch's far-ranging meditation of his inner psychological structure and awareness. It is a sort of spiritual metaphysics, not distinguishing between the id and the superego of Freudian analysis, but pursuing the Augustinian uncovering of the soul's inner recesses.

The Secretum is a dialogue between Augustine as the master and his pupil Francesco. While contrived to allow the author to play a double role, the discussion is much less artificial than that of the De remediis utriusque fortune. The latter is still within the medieval tradition. The Secretum breaks through that barrier and verges toward a new creation. It is a realistic production of Petrarch the humanist who has not merely absorbed the classic learning but has amalgated the Stoic ethic with the Christian consciousness of man's inner liberation in response to the message of salvation. As such it exhibits Petrarch's mastery of the dialectical machinery he deplored so bitterly in the professional philosophers and theologians, but which he turns to good use in his own psychic and spiritual introspection.

The central message of the Secretum is the need to strip the soul of its mundane wrappings—the layers of self-deceit that prevent the individual's autorealization and final freedom. This notion is of Stoic origin, of course, and had been developed at length by Seneca, a fact of which Petrarch is fully aware. But Augustine had advanced the analysis by introducing Platonic elements in a Christian perspective. In the De civitate dei Petrarch discovered a basic Augustinian postulate. It is not the corruption of the body that weighs down the soul and is therefore the cause of sin. It is rather sinfulness in the soul that renders the body corruptible and thus engenders the punishment of original sin. This distinction is based on the fact that the will can induce man to deceive himself by finding satisfactions in terrestrial and therefore transitory pleasures.

By its very nature the soul cannot be satisfied with finite pleasures. It is in search of the absolute. But on this earth it is subject to the buffeting of vain desires and foolish ambitions due to the contrariety of human wilfulness. But the will is not geared to evil; it seeks only the good. It is in the psyche that the difficultly exists; in the dark corridor between the intellect's searching for light, in order to understand, and the will's impulse to love even when it is exposed only to the appearances of goodness. Thus the problem faced by the individual is to free himself of the encirclement of vices, primarily for Petrarch, pride, avarice, lust and acedia, to discover the soul's pristine beauty.⁴⁰

In the Secretum Francesco is assured that his soul was originally well endowed by heaven; but that it has degenerated from its former beauty due to the contagion that surrounds the body. The soul has become so torpid that it forgets its origin and its eternal creator. Nevertheless, the sudden discovery of a great truth through an instant intuition can illuminate the abyss of the soul where the will resides, and awaken it to a consciousness of its potential as a responsible agent, exercising true freedom in the love of which it is capable.

Petrarch's dramatic reaction to the reading of the passage from the Confessions on Mt. Ventoux would seem to have been an experience of this kind. He is plunged into stunned silence at the rebuke he received in the unexpected admonition from his spiritual guide, Augustine. Then as he arrives at the inn, he experiences the sudden release that results in a powerful creative effort. Petrarch gives the impression that this beautifully contrived Epistola, with its enmeshed themes, polished literary expression, and nuanced psychological revelations was the work of an hour or two of leisure while his retainers were preparing dinner, and after a strenuous, day-long mountain climb. Even granting that the learned allusions and literary citations were inserted later, it is a bit too much to expect the reader to accept this as a straight-forward record of a day's experiences. It is a psychological document, and as such in close affinity with the Secretum both in time and subject matter.⁴¹

Petrarch reaches a climax in his argument in the third book of the Secretum when Augustine catechizes Francesco in regard to his love for Laura. At first Francesco protests violently that his affection for this most noble of God's creatures was wholly without self-interest and therefore pure. Under cross-examination, however, he admits that it was in consequence of his contact with Laura that his passions finally got the best of him, and that instead of leading him to the practice of virtue, his lady love had first reproved and then abandoned him.

Augustine takes advantage of this admission to pound home his point. Francesco's original contention that he desired to achieve the love of God through the love of one of God's creatures was blasphemous. It was the obverse of the proper order. God is to be loved in and for himself; and his creatures are to be loved in God. In the second book, Petrarch has supplied the perspective for this contention by confronting human love with its two possibilities. It can serve as a source of sin, or as an occasion for redemption. The origin of human perversity is not in love, but in the human spirit that is capable of confounding its values and thus its loves.⁴² The remedy is not to be sought in knowledge as such, nor in flight from the body. Seneca witnesses to the latter truth.

As to knowledge, in his Invective Against the Doctor of Medicine, Petrarch says explicitly that he would certainly blame himself for not having read all the medical books if he could see that their therapeutic devices had made these men either better or more learned, or even only healthier of body. But since he could find no such improvement either in the exterior or interior man, he thanks his good fortune that he had been spared this reading, which might have brought him to the same miserable state in which he finds the men of medicine.

In a highly rhetorical passage of his De otio religioso, Petrarch reveals the extent of his admiration for Augustine. He calls him a noble soul, endowed with divine ingenuity who lacked neither the light to search out the falsehoods of the enemy, nor the power to strengthen the minds of his friends. In what appears to be a direct reference to the technique he employs in his Secretum, Petrarch says Augustine's questions and responses are fully worthy of one who battles for the faith and performs as an athlete of the truth. He refers to the De civitate dei as Augustine's standard bearer.⁴³

The significance of the Secretum is that it is not a meditation in the medieval sense of the term—a dwelling on the miseries of life worsened by one's sinfulness, with a morbid preoccupation with death, and a longing for liberation from earthly cares. The Secretum does dwell on these themes, and rings all the cadences of the De contemptu mundi with both Augustinian desperation and Bernardian ruthlessness. But it rises to a new experience. Petrarch faces death with the studied indifference of the Stoic and the Christian. But his intention in so doing is not to arrive at the atrium of paradisial joy here on earth. That hope is afar, in the al di là. His desire is rather to penetrate to the unfathomable depths of his inner being to find the basis for man's intimations of immortality and his potential for eternal bliss. He finds that in this life, man can only reach convalescence, a balance between the tensions of spiritual and bodily maladies over against the possibility of perfect health.⁴⁴

One objective of the Secretum was to offset the Occamistic dualism that separated the natural world from the divinity, theology from philosophy, and that grounded religious conviction not on a rational theodicy but on a direct contact of the soul with its creator. In this effort, Occamism reflected a renewal of the Augustinian search for illumination. But it perverted this effort when it turned to the logicism of the later scholastics. By its rejection of a metaphysical foundation for man's spiritual beliefs, it tended to destroy the function of religion as a bridge between man's worldly and transcendant aspirations.

Petrarch tried to find a way between what he considered the excesses on both sides. His was not a return to the ordered scholasticism of a Thomas Aquinas, or even to Bonaventure who was closer to the authentic Augustinian tradition. It is rather an attempt to utilize the psychological experiences of which he was conscious in a very personal fashion to create a spirituality closer to the need of his immediate contemporaries. In so doing Petrarch ran counter to both the structured theology of the schools, and to the superficial dialectics of the new pseudo-aristotelianism.

In Augustine, Petrarch had found the final security he sought for his employment of the classic authors whom he did not want to consider pagans. He says repeatedly that if Plato or Cicero or even Caesar had known Christ and his teachings, they would certainly have embraced the true faith. He believes that these men were models of upright reasonableness whom he does not blush to use as counsellors and guides for the well-being of the faith and moral teaching. If Augustine had not thought the same of them, he could never have written his great De civitate dei!⁴⁵

In Petrarch's Egloga I, there is a long discussion on the relation of poetry to morality where Petrarch insists that in his eyes poetry is a theology of man—de hominibus. The distinction between the poet and the religious thinker arises from the direct object and the form of their meditations, not from a difference in moral obligations. He thus justifies his own vocation and his employment of the muses. There is a commentary on this Egloga with its definition of poetry in his Epistola familiaris (X. 4).

Toward the close of the Secretum, Petrarch has Francesco exclaim: "I believe that not even God can make me embrace eternity, or the heavens and the earth. For me human glory suffices; for this I long, and as a mortal, I have no desire but for mortal things." This outburst leads Augustine to his final correction in which he summarises his message regarding the meaning to be given to life, and the criterion for judging the world in its proper existence. While secular things have a limited and transitory value, they are not to be despised as man adheres to his proper self, gathering together the scattered fragments of his mind, and remains within himself diligently.⁴⁶ This is the essence of Petrarch's moral philosophy, and as such his justification as a Christian and a poet.

In his letters written in old age, Petrarch looks toward death benevolently. He confides to Pandolfo Malatesta that his life is most insecure, since he has been struck down by illness four times in the course of the past year. But he is in a gentle mood, as he intimates with true Christian indifference, that he would like to be discovered in death with his head resting on the Psalter of David, the poet of his advanced years, and presumably, we hope, with his Virgil at his side. "Et certe jam tempus est," he remarks, "non expedit ad fastidium vivere; ad satietatem sufficit." (And indeed it is now time. For it is not good to live beyond one's time; it is enough to live unto satiety.)⁴⁷ (Sen. XXII, 8).

In the Petrarchan humanism, man's humanity is not to be despised, just as it is not to be made the final purpose of his existence. Petrarch prescribes the completion of the whole man, soul and body, insisting on the integral interaction of all his faculties, mind, will and senses. It is in his achievement as an analytic therapist of the soul, and as such, a true moralist, that he deserves the designation of a genuine Christian philosopher, rather than the Gilsonian accusation that he was a forerunner of the breakdown of the Christian culture.

Petrarch's Weltanschauung or ubicazione was not that of the structured scholastic whose systematic vision of the world was tied to the closed cosmos of his daily experience. Petrarch was a man born out of due time who, by penetrating into the depths of the spirit within him, broke the bonds of intellectual limitation posed by the decadence of the Christian aristotelianism. He thus predated the Copernican revolution, not in its actual discovery of the immensity of the material universe, but in redimensioning man's relation to space and time, under the shadow of eternity—sub specie eternitatis. Petrarch might not have been fully at home in our contemporary world, but at least he would have understood the problems of the spirit troubling modern man. If this be not true philosophy, what is?

Notes

1. Pietro P. Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano del Petrarca (Turin, 1966), 37-81. Cf. Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l'humanisme, 2 v. (2nd ed. Paris, 1907; new Printing, Turin, 1959) II, ch. IX.
2. Epist. Sen. XVI, I (Senilium rerum libri XVII in Opera omnia, Basel, 1581); see Gerosa, op. cit., 115, n. 67.
3. G. Billanovich, "Petrarca e i classici," in U. Bosco, ed., Studi Petrarcheschi 7 (Bologna, 1961), 21-34.
4. W. Braxton Ross, "Giovanni Colonna, Historian at Avignon," Speculum, 45 (1970), 533-545.
5. Ioannes Saresberiensis, Policraticus (ed. C. J. Webb, Oxford, 1909) prol., 12; cf. W. Braxton Ross, 539.
6. De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia in Francesco Petrarca, Prose (ed. G. Martellotti, et al. La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e testi, VII, Milan, Naples, 1955), 746-48; cf. "Note critiche," ibid., 1163-66.
7. Epist. posteritati, ed. Prose, op. cit., 10-14.
8. Epist. Sen. XV, 7, Prose, 1132-34.
9. De Ignorantia, Prose, 744; cf. R. Arbesmann, Der Augustiner-Ermitenordern und der Beginn der humanistischen Bewegung (Wurzburg, 1965), 16-36.
10. Epist. fam. IV, I, Prose, 830-844.
11. Epist. Sen. VIII, 6. Cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 49.
12. Cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 336-337, nn. 72-75.
13. Epist. Sen. XII, 2. See. L. Delisle, "Notice sur un livre annoté par Pétrarque", in Notices et extraits des mss. de la Bibliothèque Nationale, XXXV, 2 (Paris, 1897). Cf. Gerosa, op. cit. 48-49, n. 15.
14. See E. Gilson, Pétrarque et sa Muse (Oxford, 1946); n. 1.
15. See G. Billanovich, Petrarca letterato. I. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome, 1947), 47-49; N. Iliescu, Il Canzoniere petrarchesco e Sant' Agostino (Rome, 1962), 38-42.
16. Epist. Poster.: "ad omne bonum et salubre apto sed ad moralem precipue philosophiam et ad poeticam prono …"
17. Cf. J. H. Robinson and W. Rolfe, Petrarch the First Modern Man (New York, 1898); P. Piur, Petrarca Buch ohne Namen und die papstliche Kurie (Hall, 1925); M. Bishop, Petrarch and His World (Indiana U. Press, 1963), 305-319.
18. Epist. Sen. I, I, Prose, 1036. See G. A. Levi, Classicismo e neoclassicismo in Questioni e problemi di storia letteraria italiana, 824-831.
19. Secretum III, Prose, 150.
20. Epist. Sen. XII, 2; Gerosa, op. cit., 279-316.
21. Cf. L. Geiger, Petrarca (tr. D. Cossila, Milan, 1877); Rinascimento e Umanesimo in Italia e Germania (Milan, 1891); G. Voigt, Il risorgimento dell'antichità classica (Florence, 1889). Cf. V. Bonetti-Brunelli, Le origini italiane della scuola umanistica (Milan, 1919).
22. E. Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York, 1937), 102-105.
23. Cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 181 and n. 1; "Note critiche," Prose, 1177.
24. De remediis, 1, 46; on Averroes, see De Ignorantia, Prose, 750-52; on Cicero, cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 284-288; De Ignorantia, Prose, 726.
25. Epist. Sen. XV, 6; cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 365-66, and n. 29.
26. De vita sol. I, Prose, 348-350.
27. Epist. fam. xxi, 15, Prose, 1002-1014.
28. E. Gibson, "Notes sur deux lettres de Pétrarque" in Studi Petrarcheschi 7, 42-50.
29. C. Calcaterra, "S. Agostino nelle opere di Dante e del Petrarca," in S. Agostino, (Milan, 1931); P. Gerosa, op. cit., 50-52, n. 21.
30. See Gerosa, op. cit., 166-179.
31. Jer. Epist. xxii, 30; Cf. De ignorantia, Prose, 758; Epist. fam. II, 9, Prose, 820.
32. Cf. F. Murphy, Rufinus of Aquileia (Washington, 1945), 8-13; 64-66.
33. Cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 161-66.
34. De vita sol, Prose, 436-454.
35. Gerosa, op. cit., 180-224.
36. P. Courcelle, "Un humaniste épris de Confessions: Pétrarque" in Les Confessions de Saint-Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (Paris, 1963), 339-351; but see, Gerosa, op. cit. and F. Tateo, Dialogo interiore e polemica ideologica nel "Secretum" del Petrarca (Florence, 1965), 36-37, n. I.
37. Epist. fam. IV, 1, Prose, 830-843.
38. Epist. fam. 11, 9, Prose, 816-827. Cf. G. Billanovich, Lo scrittoio del Petrarca, 190-198; M. Bishop, Petrarch and His World, 381; E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, 1961).
39. Epist. Sen, VIII, 1: "Iam a multis annis sed perfectius post Iubileum, a quo septimus decimus annus hic est (1367) sic me adhuc viridem pestis illa deseruit. Scit me Christus liberator meus verum loqui. Epist. fam. X, 5: "abditas scelerum meorum sordes, que funesta segnitie longoque silentio putruerunt, in apertum manibus salutifere confessionis elicui … idque saepius facere …" Cf. Gerosa, op. cit., 112-114.
40. Secretum in Prose, 22-215; See F. Tateo, op. cit.; Gerosa, op. cit., 82-119.
41. See Billanovich, Lo scrittoio del Petrarca, 192-195 for the temporal affinity.
42. Secretum III, Prose, 136-148; see Tateo, op. cit., 62-66.
43. De otio religioso, ed. G. Rotondi, (Vatican City, 1958) I, 18: Et Augustinus in eo libro quem sepe hodie in testimonium arcesso, e.g., De vera religione, cap. 65.
44. Secretum III, Prose, 166: "Non curandum sanamdumque sed preparandum dixi animum." Tateo, op. cit., 65-67 points out the relationship between this sector and the Canzone CCCLX of the Rime.
45. Epist. fam. II, 9, Prose, 820.
46. Secretum III, Prose, 214: "sparsa fragmenta recolligam moraborque mecum sedulo."

47. Epist. Sen. XIII, 8. Much earlier, in his Vergine bella, Petrarch had deplored the

    Mortal bellezza, atti et parole m'anno
    Tutta ingombrata l'alma.
    Vergine sacra et alma,
    Non tardar, ch'i' son forse a l'ultimo anno.

    (Mortal beauty, its words and deeds have totally overburdened my soul. O Virgin, pure and hodly, do not delay, for I may be in my ultimate year.).