I do not believe in my faculties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single exception of what I believe is a sacrilege to doubt.
Petrarch, in a letter to Francesco Bruni, 25 October 1362
In a letter to a friend Petrarch described his ascent of Mount Ventoux. The letter, ostensibly written on 26 April 1336, has long been hailed as a seminal document in the history of consciousness. Both critic and historian alike have seen it as recording one of those moments marking a seismic shift away from medieval modes of thinking and relating. Many have found in the letter a discovery of the beauty of place, of the power of nature, of the sublimity of landscape; while others have detected the awed recognition of the sheer vastness of space, an unprecedented empirical extension of man’s image of the world in the fourteenth century. And both have pointed to a new appreciation of classical antiquity. The very inspiration to climb Mount Ventoux derived, as Petrarch himself discloses, from his reading of Livy’s History of Rome. The deliberate climb up its steep slopes has thus taken on an iconic significance marking not only the emergence of the Renaissance spirit, but also the modern self.
Yet this is all very odd because the major concern of the letter points not forwards, but back into the spiritual certainties of the medieval world. It is true that in the very first paragraph of the letter Petrarch claims that his only motive for climbing the mountain was to see what so great an elevation had to offer and that when he reached the top he was dazed by the view. It is also true that he quotes the classical authors, Virgil and Ovid. These elements, prefiguring the Renaissance, are clearly articulated, especially in the first part of the letter, and accompanying them is a commitment to the emerging idea of friendship. Petrarch is anxious to share his adventure. In the letter he relates how, after much reflection as to who might make the best partner for the expedition, he decides to climb with his younger brother, Gherardo. This interest in friendship was a manifestation of his zealous engagement with classical texts, especially Cicero and Seneca. Even so the thrust of the writing is ‘backward-looking’, overtly Catholic and deeply pious. Petrarch’s over-arching preoccupation is with the onward journey of the pilgrim-soul. What is dramatised, in fact, is not far removed from the spirit of Dante.
In the letter the event of climbing the mountain on that bright April day quickly takes on allegorical significance. While his brother chooses a direct path straight up the ridge of the mountain to its very peak, Petrarch persists in taking a less strenuous route and so constantly descends into the valleys. To the amusement of his brother, he loses his way at least three times. The weakness of his will compels Petrarch to reflect on the nature of spiritual life: ‘Yes, the life which we call blessed is to be sought for on a high eminence, and strait is the way that leads to it.’ As the mountain peak comes to signify God, so the valleys come to represent the realm of sin, the shadow of death, and the torments of hell.
Finally, when he does reach the top of the mountain, Petrarch finds himself divided between two contending impulses: the desire to turn his attention inwards to review further the state of his soul and the desire to enjoy the beauty of the vista stretching beyond him. It is at this point that he picks up his copy of Augustine’s Confessions and, opening the book at random, reads the following lines: ‘And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers and the circuit of the oceans and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.’ The effect of Augustine’s words is immediate and dramatic. Petrarch writes: ‘I was satisfied I had seen enough of the mountain. I turned my inward gaze upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again.’
On his descent, Petrarch links his life to Anthony and Augustine, both of whom, through the instant application of a spontaneously read text, had become converted to the Christian faith. The beauty of the landscape and the sense of the infinity of space forgotten, Petrarch ponders instead the eternal possession of his soul and the way it is constantly jeopardised by the sins of vanity, concupiscence and indolence. The thought of the soul’s precariousness makes him shudder. As he clambers down the steep slope, he turns on his first impulse to climb the mountain out of curiosity and pleasure and condemns it. So much for the bold prefiguring of the Renaissance.
In truth, Petrarch’s famous letter, consistently associated with the liberating energies of the Renaissance, actually describes a spiritual story of inner transformation – a Pauline experience of metanoia released by the quotation from Augustine. Other details support this interpretation. There can be little doubt that in his letter Petrarch casts his brother as a type of Alypius (the friend who witnessed Augustine’s conversion in the garden at Milan). Though not explicitly mentioned, it is not without symbolic significance that when Petrarch climbed the mountain on that spring day in 1336 he was thirty-two years old, exactly the same age as Augustine at the time of his momentous conversion. Petrarch is envisaging himself as a type of Augustine. The analogical imagination of the medieval world is, surely, at work here. As the eminence of the mountain is a metaphor for God, so are the valleys metaphors for darkness and depravity. As the direct path upwards is seen as representative of the right moral action and the operancy of the will (a concept central to Augustine’s work), so the movement downwards is seen as moral weakness and as the failure of volition, the manifestations of original sin. The letter forms a parable. The method of composition is not that far removed from Dante’s La Vita Nuova.
And yet the new spirit that historians have detected in the letter, if wildly overblown, cannot be dismissed. For the letter manifests a psyche pulled in contrary directions – a soul that seeks its salvation through Faith, certainly, but also a soul that initially takes pleasure in the free act of exploration, a soul connecting its experience not only to Augustine but also to the great classical authors, a soul loving the vastness of an uncloistered space, and which, above all, reflects continually on its own nature and tugging inner divisions. Beyond the manifest moral intention of the letter the reader glimpses a certain complexio oppositorum, a contradictory character, a new set of ambivalences in action. So the scholars are not to be entirely disregarded.
About six years later the full spiritual import of the experience on Mount Ventoux was examined more systematically. Written in Latin, it took the literary form of a sustained dialogue between Petrarch, named ‘Franciscus’ (Petrarch’s Christian name), and the author of the Confessions, ‘Augustinus’ (his name in Latin). Petrarch gave it the title De Secreto Conflictu Curarum Mearum: The Secret Conflicts of My Cares or, more simply, Secretum. Although not widely known it is a key autobiographical document of the mid-fourteenth century.
Most of Secretum was composed between October 1342 and March 1343, a year after Petrarch had been crowned poet laureate in Rome and just when his brother, Gherardo, had become a Carthusian monk. Written during a period of uncertainty and depression, it is a terse, sober and intensely introspective work. Like Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, to which it is deeply indebted, it was conceived as a fundamental act of self-analysis and an inner preparation for death. Although Petrarch was only thirty-eight, and had another three decades to live, the prospect of death haunts the conversation. Death, indeed, is the dark drum beat of Augustinus’ music. In the preface to his book Petrarch made it clear that such a private act of self-scrutiny was not intended to be classed with the rest of his literary work. Much in the manner of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and the Stoic tradition of keeping a personal journal, he views himself as the first and primary audience: ‘So, little Book, I bid you flee the haunts of men and be content to stay with me, true to the title I have given you of ‘My Secret’: and when I would think upon deep matters, all that you keep in remembrance that was spoken in secret, you in secret will tell to me over again.’
The word ‘secret’ is emphatic. In the Latin ‘secretum’ carries not only the meaning of secret, but also of ‘retirement’, ‘solitude’ and ‘privacy’. At this historical moment, the author is becoming a secretary to his innermost being. He is cutting himself off from the tribe and writing for himself; the project is connected to the task of salvation, but at the same time it involves the struggle to name and understand the vacillating moods and inconstant energies of one invisible life. Not published in his lifetime, Secretum was to become one of Petrarch’s most cherished books. He kept it by his bed as a permanent aid to recollection, an inner resource for the exacting art of living well. The colloquy was nothing less than his spiritual barometer. Long after it was written, he would pick it up to gauge the oscillating temperatures of his unsettled soul.
The work is not easy to classify. It is not straight spiritual autobiography in the manner of Augustine’s Confessions; nor is it a philosophical journal in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; nor, like Peter Abelard’s History of My Calamities, is it a letter couched to a distant friend. It is a mixture of overlapping categories. It is part theological, part literary-critical, part autobiographical, part confessional. The register of the colloquy shifts between evangelical sermon, the classical Socratic dialogue, and the most intimate confessional exchange. In an allegorical tradition deriving from Boethius, it opens with the sudden radiant arrival of Lady Truth. In the three subsequent volumes it emulates, in part and unevenly, the classical tradition of dialectic. At points Franciscus and Augustinus argue over contrary conceptions, Franciscus representing the stumbling student, Augustinus the enlightened teacher. At the close of the preface Petrarch claims that the work has been shaped by the methods that Cicero had taken from Plato. And, of course, what Cicero learnt from Plato was dialectic – that form of guided conversation where opinion (doxa) was put to the analytic test and where fresh conceptions, emerging in the open discussion, were further defined and examined in the rational pursuit of truth. It was a dialogue in which the student advanced towards a greater understanding although, paradoxically, he was often left either numbed or disorientated. In Plato’s early dialogues even to know nothing was viewed as an ethical leap over the strutting convictions of unexamined ignorance. And, while in the Secretum Augustinus seems statuesque and authoritarian in comparison with the mercurial and mischievous Socrates, one does sense the halting movement of Franciscus towards a greater self- awareness and a greater recognition of his own inner conflicts. Something like the elenchus is erratically at work.
Alongside the classical form of dialectic, and giving the book a distinctively Christian timbre, is an even stronger model – that of the sacrament of confession which, ever since the fourth Lutheran Council in 1215, had been given greater importance in the religious life of the church. In the Secretum Augustinus uses the schema of the seven deadly sins to gauge the state of Franciscus’ soul. But the two paradigms do not harmonise. Their dissonance indicates powerful unresolved conflicts at the heart of the text, at the heart of Petrarch and at the heart of the late medieval culture to which he belonged. In the Secretum, when Augustinus is not the Socratic questioner, he is the unremitting Father Confessor. At one point he urges Franciscus to: ‘tell me fully all that torments you.’ This is not the playful voice of Socrates, but the voice of the Catholic priest with the sacramental power to elicit guilty secrets, to judge their gravity and confer the fitting penance. At times, reading Secretum is like standing near the closed door of the confessional box overhearing the whispered anxieties of a shipwrecked soul. We feel like intruders. The Socratic voice of open enquiry, asking for the definition of terms and withholding all prior judgements, modulates quickly into a menacing voice seeking only one thing, the confession and repentance of sins. There is something disturbing in the changing modulations of Augustinus’ voice. Representing two traditions of self- understanding – the polar continents of Socratic speculation and Pauline faith – he is given two incompatible roles. Inevitably, the mentor’s inner dissociation limits the outcome of the student’s investigation into his own divided existence.
It is in the confessional moments that the colloquy comes closest to autobiography. In his role as Father Confessor, Augustinus sometimes offers simple spiritual advice: ‘redouble your efforts… In the meantime pray’. Elsewhere, he gently elicits and listens in order to grasp the precise symptoms of his unhappy patient and potential penitent. Under such close questioning of inner states, of secret dispositions and informing motives Franciscus’ despondency gradually breaks out: ‘Moreover, while other passions attack me only in bouts, which, though frequent, are but short and for a moment, this one has usually invested me so closely that it clings to and tortures me for whole days and nights together. In such times I take no pleasure in the light of day, I see nothing, I am as one plunged in the darkness of hell itself, and seem to endure death in its most cruel form. But what one may call the climax of the misery is, that I so feed upon my tears and sufferings with a morbid attraction, that I can only be rescued from it by main force and in despite of myself.’ The introspective attention, the concern for the minutiae of the actual state of feeling and the way it
mutates, is sharp and recalls the more existential passages of Augustine’s Confessions. What is significant in the late medieval context is that here the melancholy is not allegorised, nor related to Biblical figures, nor brought alongside a plethora of classical examples. It is left to stand in its own right as human experience, as a psychological state requiring recognition. A state of anguish is being expressed without intellectual defence and with a high degree of specificity. Intermittently, we encounter a phenomenology of consciousness hovering on the edge of unchartered territory. This is remarkable. Even more remarkably the states of feeling are left unresolved, ambiguous, elusive.
These confessional revelations are also seen to possess a therapeutic value. The confessor becomes ‘the doctor’ or ‘the surgeon’ whose task is, by calculated degrees, to open up and dress the various wounds of the soul. Franciscus tells Augustine: ‘in my case there is no wound old enough for it to have been effaced and forgotten.’ The discussion of these wounds and their symptoms brings relief and opens the gate to inner transformation. Structured through the literary form of dialogue, it is the talking cure in action.
At times, Augustinus himself has the task of putting into language some of Franciscus’ most cherished memories. In the middle of the second dialogue he asks: ‘Do you remember with what delight you used to wander in the depth of the country? Sometimes, laying yourself down on a bed of turf, you would listen to the water of a brook murmuring over the stones; at another time, seated on some open hill, you would let your eye wander freely over the plain stretched at your feet; at others, again, you enjoyed a sweet slumber beneath the shady trees in some valley in the noontide heat, and revelled in the delicious silence.’ Franciscus, startled to have his own intimate experience returned to him by Augustinus, simply responds: ‘I recall it all now, and the remembrance of that time makes me sigh with regret.’ Although this is a passing fragment in a long discursive exchange between the two men, it constitutes a small leap in consciousness, almost a new sensibility. This does not sound like Abelard, nor Dante; it resonates with a freshness of feeling. It registers a brief moment when the actual experience of life and its recall are coming to the fore, when memory has a new creative role, when the relationship with Nature is given a lyrical value and when the formation of the individual person is seen as central. The remembrance of what has been and nostalgia over its passing – only a fragment, yes, but it quivers with the future life of autobiography: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Proust.
Though Franciscus glances back at his childhood and youth, the main emphasis is on his present dilemmas in relationship to ‘the last four things’: Death, Judgement, Hell or Heaven. The over-riding concern is with the life to come. Augustinus’ lengthy sensational meditations on death terrify Franciscus. Perhaps it is this very terror of death and the possibility of damnation that is the cause of the paralysis of his will with which the first dialogue opens? Is it a dread of the impending Last Judgement that freezes the flowing stream of life and strikes his will to live? For if there is a creative force working for individuation in Secretum, there is a much stronger counter-force at work keeping Franciscus’ mind at a cool distance from the poetic actuality of his enigmatic experience, regimenting his mind and crabbing his emotions.
This counter-force would seem to derive largely from the life-negating thrust of Augustinian theology. ‘It is very prudent to despise oneself’, Augustinus tells Franciscus in his diatribe against the pleasures of travel, attachment to the five senses, the desire for a literary reputation and the love of women, especially Laura – for ‘commerce with Venus takes away the vision of the Divine.’ When Laura, the only love of Petrarch’s life, to whom he had dedicated over three hundred lyrical sonnets, died on the 16 April 1327, he wrote in the first guard leaf of his Virgil, where he recorded his bereavements: ‘I have experienced a certain satisfaction in writing this bitter record of a cruel event … for so I may be led to reflect that life can afford me no further pleasures; and, the most serious of my temptations being removed, I may be admonished by the frequent study of these lines, and by the thought of my vanishing years, that it is high time to flee from Babylon.’
The sombre note testifies to the state of inner division: the overwhelming attraction to Laura undermined by the judgement that it was ‘a temptation’ and part of ‘Babylon’; the erotic love – unconsummated and idealised – finally banished with the hectoring language of denial: confessio peccatorum. At this stage it seems it was still not possible to integrate
erotic love fully into either the Christian notion of grace or the classical notion of eudaimonia. Such total renunciation, echoing that of Peter Abelard, led in a man of Petrarch’s constitution to that medieval malady of accidia, the draining of the will to live, the pervasive melancholia from which he suffered. It led also to a bleak misogyny which badly disfigures some of his essays. It is pertinent that when the book was finally printed in Venice in 1501 the publisher appended a note describing the work as ‘a three days’ dialogue concerning Contempt of the World’. The dualism is extreme. Here the medieval world-picture is still firmly in place.
But another factor working against individuation and the autobiographical impulse was, paradoxically, Petrarch’s own high reverence for the classical tradition. For his adherence to the classical conventions constrained as much as liberated. Quite simply, there are too many citations and references. To use Franciscus’ analogy, the book is a forest of other writers: Virgil, Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, Horace, Ovid, Lucian, Juvenal and Terence. In the preface when Petrarch first beholds the Lady Truth he speaks not directly, but through Virgil’s words from the Aeneid. Lady Truth responds by referring Petrarch to his own literary productions and to the fact that he has already written about her in his epic poem Africa. Then she introduces him to the writer Augustine. And Augustinus reciprocates by quoting his own Confessions and by reminding Franciscus, once again, of his literary corpus. Some of Augustine’s writings are so assimilated that their sources are not even acknowledged. The consummate knowledge of canonical works descends to a cerebral game of academic jousting. It is no accident that the first words spoken by Franciscus are those of Virgil. The voice of the author becomes too often the voices of others. Art becomes ventriloquism. The citations proliferate. The intertextuality clots.
Yet, perhaps, the greatest part of Petrarch’s life-long autobiographical project was achieved not in Secretum but in his wealth of letters. As Cicero wrote to Atticus, as Seneca wrote to Lucilius, so Petrarch wrote to his select group of friends, as well as to his ancestors. In these letters he was able to marry the intimate details of his life with philosophical speculation. In a style partly shaped by the particular friend he was writing to, he could explore and objectify his own experience: his many febrile journeys, his spontaneous impressions of new places, his state of health, his diet, his daily chores, his dreams, his love of the countryside, his birth in Arrezzo, his exile from Florence, his hatred of Avignon. Weaving what he called a fabric of many coloured threads he was able to create a portrait of himself as an urbane and reflexive man of letters, not a man rooted to one place, but a citizen of a larger cultural world – almost a Renaissance man.
The letters are deeply influenced by his reading of Cicero and Seneca. The practices of Stoicism cut deep. Often he presents himself as more a child of Athens than of Jerusalem. One letter, particularly, presents an arresting image of him as poet and philosopher, a vivid compound of Socrates and Virgil. It was addressed to Francesco Bruni, the papal secretary in Avignon, and dated 25 October 1362: ‘What am I then? I am a fellow who never quits school, and not even that, but a backwoodsman who is roaming around through the lofty beech trees all alone, humming to himself some silly little tune, and – the very peak of assumption and assurance – dipping his shaky pen into his inkstand while sitting under a bitter laurel tree…. I do not believe in my faculties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single exception of what I believe is a sacrilege to doubt.’ This, much more than the acclaimed letter describing the ascent of Mount Ventoux, beautifully captures the élan of the emerging Renaissance and even the spirit of early Romanticism. It reveals an individual in a state of trance and lyrical uncertainty, a man who knows from the inside the quality of negative capability, who has the courage to doubt almost everything as a means, perhaps, to stumble upon new metaphors, new concepts, even new modes of being. What strikes, in the context of the fourteenth century, is the open cast of mind. Humming to himself (though still under the bitter Laurel/Laura tree) he dips his shaky pen into the inkwell to create and recreate himself continually. In the flowing syntax of these eloquent sentences one senses an existential rhythm and ease of being far removed from the evangelical Dante and the medieval world.
It is in his letters that Petrarch is able to paint his many-sided, often deeply divided self. He depicts his daily battle against three particular appetites – greed, ambition, lust – and shows how he struggles to achieve self-control and self-sufficiency. Moderation in all things is his motto. He frequently proclaims the virtue of a quiet life in solitude and sets it
against the turbulence and distractions of the city: rus contra urbem, the country against the city. We catch him reading and writing, reclaiming the classics, planting trees, cultivating friends: an urbane man working quietly on himself through the vicissitudes of life. This is very much a reclamation of the Stoic enterprise of working on the self through the reciprocities of friendship and the exchange of intimate epistles. Petrarch knew and espoused its value. He kept copies of his letters, constantly revising and emending them so that they became a cherished record of his own existence and its multiple forms. Through the art of letters he composed himself.
Putting the letters together and seeing them in relationship to Secretum we encounter an elusive man, constantly struggling to give shape to his complex and divided experience. One does not read Petrarch for long without stumbling upon a latent conflict between Christianity and Classicism, between the love of Laura and the love of God, between the enchantment of poetry and the severity of ethics, between curiosity before the empirical world and the terror of what might follow death. It is a poignant moment in Secretum when Augustinus urges Franciscus to disown the laurel for his emblem – an emblem linking him to the classical world, to poetry, but above all to Laura – and to adopt the fig, the tree under which Augustine was converted in the garden at Milan.
Petrarch was the first to make the world-historical judgement that the millennium before his birth had been a debased cultural period, a time of an appalling ignorance of mind and a mean provincialism of spirit. Following the splendours of Roman and Greek civilisation, he judged it as a long period of decline. The image of the medieval world as the dark ages began with Petrarch. He was the first to think this momentous thought. And he lived in the hope that the classical spirit, which for him represented the highest form of life, could be re-awakened, even, in the hands of uniquely gifted individuals, surpassed. That hope was more than realised.
For Petrarch the challenge was to improve the classical model, to take it further. The point of emulation, he said, was to surpass the original. If he himself did not always achieve this, he nevertheless established the cultural challenge. The prospect of a classical Renaissance coursed through his blood. A century after his death his first northern biographer, Rudolph Agricola, named him as the liberator of classical culture and the symbol of Ciceronian generosity of mind. We could go even further and say that, if it is true that Petrarch was Augustinian and medieval in many of his affiliations, he was all but modern in his restless and reflexive consciousness, in his depression and despondency, in his inner awareness of his fluctuating moods, in his desire to create and recreate himself through the constant discipline of his writing. If Dante is one of the last great prophets of Catholic Christianity, then Petrarch, in spite of his Augustinian leanings, is one of the very first Humanists. He stands at the elusive intersecting line between two cultures. In his right hand a fig leaf, in his left a sprig of laurel.