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Mind Versus Soul; Petrarch’s Secret Conflict

Charles Breland

Literary culture and artistic greatness flowered in ancient times under the influence of the great Greek, and later Roman masters. This was a time of expressive creationism, and one in which artists, poets, and writers were revered as highly influential members of society. These men studied many disciplines and sought, through their work, to heighten the greatness of their civilizations while advancing their own fame. Their importance declined, however, as the Roman empire fell from power and the classical period came to a close. What followed was the Middle Ages. In this period the church, through papal power, controlled both public and private life in Europe. The population fell into a state of illiteracy and deculturization. Not only were new works not being created, but many ancient writings and works of art were condemned as pagan and destroyed. The only learning that existed took place in monasteries and was religious in nature. In the fourteenth century, papal power finally began to decline with the Babylonian Captivity, and the subsequent Great Schism of the church. This, along with the revival of a democratic spirit in Italy paved the way for a renewed interest in secular learning and philosophy, as the concept of citizen leadership once again came into vogue. These people would have to be educated, not just in religious indoctrination, but also in a way that would make them fit to carry out the decisions in public life.

The Italians found a fitting model for this “new society” in the classical period of ancient Greek and Roman prosperity. Out of the darkness of the medieval period rose up men like Dante, Boccaccio, and most importantly Petrarch. These men revived Latin culture, and the works of ancient writers and philosophers such as Homer, Plato, Seneca, and Cicero. This rinascita was the rebirth of the classical learning and ideals that would come to dominate Italy for the next 300 years. Petrarch was both a founding father of the renaissance, and a model for many who followed after, but his conscious was divided between his love for the ancient world, and his fear of the neglect of his own spirituality. Always in the back of his mind was the concern that his quest for knowledge and his desire for fame and happiness would lead to his eventual damnation, and separation from God. For this reason many of Petrarch’s works reflect the struggle within his soul of two seemingly antagonistic forces. His mind is pitted against his soul as he tries to bring about a reconciliation by synthesizing one way of life from his two motivating desires: the desire to achieve this-worldly glory, and the fear of not achieving other-worldly salvation. These he juggled and combined in his own mind, in the way that he found to be most reassuring.

Petrarch’s love for Laura, a woman who he saw in church as an adolescent is famous for its prominence in his works, and its importance as a motivating factor in his life. Petrarch began writing poetry soon after he first saw her, and continued to profess his love, unrequited though it was, until his death 50 years later. During this time he wrote hundreds of poems of love expressing his devotion to Laura, and references to her pervade much of his work. Petrarch was troubled by the combination of lust and love that occupied his mind on a daily basis. He came to consider this love as a burden, a continuous plague on his life that kept him from achieving happiness through its lack of fruition. In his Rime Sparse, he says that a personified love, a classical reference to Cupid “took up his deadly bow and lay in ambush for me as I passed,” and that this caused him “grievous pain” from which he wished he could, but was unable to protect himself.[i] This trouble resulted from convictions about his unholy desires towards Laura, and more specifically, the sin of lust that weighted his soul down. The conflict between his modern attitude towards love and his medieval feelings of the importance of a life featuring moderation of passions in achieving peace and salvation would present itself in almost all of his works.

In the Secretum Petrarch, speaking as St. Augustine, refers to Plato’s view on love by saying that “nothing prevents one from knowing the divine so much as one’s carnal appetites and inflamed desires.”[ii] In this work, Francesco and St. Augustine may well be the two sides of Petrarch’s character, and if viewed as such, it presents a great dissection of his mind from his soul. Petrarch views Laura and his love for her as perfect. He never at any point gives up on this ideal. Still, he comes to view this love as a bondage, which kept him from achieving the happiness that he desired. Many men throughout time, however, have been troubled by this conflict. What is unique to Petrarch is the attempt to reconcile these two contradictory views to each other in his own mind.

Petrarch’s fusion of these results in language that seems to present Laura as a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. If he effectively accomplishes this then he can adore Laura in the way he has for so many years, and yet justify his emotions as pious and worshipful, rather than lusting. This theme of a holy Laura, and a seeming blend of the two distinct women can be seen often in Petrarch’s writings. In his poetry he often refers to her as a glorious angelic being, often shrouded in light. In a poem that is especially telling he writes of seeing Laura as being like “Upon a river bank a pure white deer” who when he tried to touch her said that “My Caesar willed that I belong to none.”[iii]. This is an image of a virgin who must remain so because of God’s plan. Finally, after her death, he presents her as taking pity on him, and as indeed a guide to heaven. He speaks, then, to her in much the same way that Catholics pray to the Madonna.

Petrarch also struggled trying to combine ancient views on the dignity of man, with the medieval concept of man as a flawed creature and “Adam’s son”. In the middle ages, man was viewed as a lowly creature that should live each of his days cursing his insignificant existence. Man’s only purpose, it was believed, was to exalt God, and any activity outside of this was, if not sinful, at least unnecessary. In the renaissance a new view of man was stressed. Man was, as Genesis said, created in the image of God, and was a creature that God was most pleased with. Along with this came the idea that man deserved to enjoy himself and was a proud creature that could accomplish things while on the earth. Petrarch was entirely convinced of his own greatness, but was afraid that this pride would keep him out of heaven. He desperately wanted to follow the example Augustine had set in his Confessions of devaluing his own existence and following Christ-like modesty. He quotes Vergil’s Aeneid in the one passage where he says he cried out for Jesus to deliver him.

Rescue me from this evil, my unconquered leader.

Give your right hand to me in my wretchedness,

And take me with you over the water, so that

At least in death I may find peace.[iv]

But, this desire to present himself as a pennant servant of God could never fully overtake the egoistic view Petrarch held of himself. At best, he comes off as one who believes that man is a lowly creature but then places himself as the best among these. Startlingly, one of the best examples of his egotism came near the end of his life, when he should have been basking in the adoration of others. Instead he chose to present a letter so full of self-adulation that it is startling. Even more interesting is the fact that instead of just presenting it as a list of his accomplishments, he instead tries to pretend he is writing in humility. In his Letter to Posterity he begins in a tone meant to infer that the general populous would come to look at him with god-like reverence. He says he was “in truth, a poor mortal like yourself.” He then proceeds to tell of his numerous attributes. Eventually he says that he has “perceived pride in others, never in myself, and however insignificant I may have been, I have always been still less important in my own judgment.”[v] It seems that he has many attributes, and we are led to believe that all faults present in him are there because he is a “poor mortal”, meaning that any faults present in him were beyond his control.

This leads to his medieval inclination to refer to Fortune as a being that influences and controls the lives of all her subjects. While the stress for most renaissance writing would be on the Roman ideal of virtu which involved man taking control of his own destiny through wit and courage, Petrarch still held to the medieval idea of man enslaved by fate as well. Once again he sits on whichever side of an opinion seems most flattering to him. He presents himself as overcoming, through his own prowess, many of the limitations that held other men of his time, but then whenever he is faced with any shackle he cannot break, he blames a cruel and malevolent fortune. In the Secretum he says that if one is beset by a problem, he should “bear it with courage, if Fortune, who turns human affairs upside down, reduces you to it.”[vi] In the Rime Sparse he says that “If stars control our lives, as some are sure, then I was born beneath a cursed sky.”[vii] He often speaks of Fortune in these terms, as having anthropomorphically caused all of the problems in his life, as opposed to those problems being a result of faults of his own.

In overcoming these faults Petrarch, as has been stated, hoped to achieve fame. This too, presented a problem for him in some ways as he tried to balance this with the medieval, Christian beliefs that life was futile and there could be no happiness on the earth. His greatest desire was to be beloved while he lived and remembered and praised after his death, and yet Augustine, who Petrarch admired and whose teachings Petrarch both believed and feared, always admonished the futility of the corporal world. To Augustine the things of this world represented a roadblock, impeding passage into Heaven. Petrarch’s conviction of this is highlighted in a passage of the Secretum in which Augustine tells Petrarch he must be “well aware of the many different objects which one can desire in life. All these must be discounted as worthless, so that one may rise to the earnest desire for perfect happiness.”[viii] This suggests that those worldly desires can keep the soul from finding God. Petrarch would even come to view Laura’s death as a possible upbraid by God to teach him that “nothing here below has lasting worth.”[ix] It must be noted that Petrarch, while holding that he had no interest in fame, and insisting that his Secretumwas written for his eyes only, labored through multiple revisions, and went so far as to burn those of his letters he did not find flattering. In the end, Petrarch could not shake his desire for renown, as his Letter to Posterity is a postscript to his lust for fame. His best justification for this came in Augustine’s words in the Secretum. He tells Petrarch that eventually, even if he does not strive for it, “it is impossible for virtue not to beget glory”[x] and because of this, Petrarch receives absolution from responsibility for his desire for fame, and concludes that fame is just an inevitable result of his desire to serve God.

Still, Petrarch did give a substantial amount of serious thought to his soul, and on a greater scale, moral philosophy. In this respect he was very medieval. He thought that scholastic philosophy, the study of subjects such as astronomy and anatomy, was unimportant because it did nothing to help one become closer to God. In the Secretum Augustine chides him for his historical work, and even moreso for his attempt to write his epic Africa, as these would distract him from the religious writing and introspection on which he should spend his time. This belief troubled him so that he even stopped working on hisLives of Illustrious Men, and left Africa incomplete. He also disliked civic philosophy, and thought that it too was a distraction to meditation on the soul and on salvation. Petrarch went so far as to chastise Cicero in his Letter to the Shade of Cicero, where he questions Cicero as to why he would be “self-involved in calamities and ruin! What good could you think would come from you incessant wrangling, from all this wasteful strife and enmity?”[xi] he asked. This was shocking language coming as an affront to a person who was idolized by the people of the renaissance as representing all that was good about the classical Latin heritage. This focus on introspective, liturgical philosophy over secular philosophy was one of the areas of Petrarch’s most steadfast medievalism.

This did not mean that he proposed a life of monastic seclusion, no matter what he might have tried to present. It is apparent that his view of the proper context for such philosophical introspection was much more closely related to the philosophical retreat proposed by classical thinkers. In medieval times the monastery was not to be a place of beauty where monks enjoyed respite. Instead, they were barren, Spartan places where one had little to distract the focus of attention from God. In those days, monks dressed plainly and denied themselves so that they could, through their suffering, come to better know the will of God. Petrarch wanted for himself a life of ease, free of care, in which he could write as he chose. His desire was to live in a serene and majestic setting to help inspire his own greatness. In the Secretum, Augustine tells Petrarch he should go back to Italy so that his cares could be dispelled and his mind could be eased, and not just to a certain town, but that he should roam about so as not to be confined. He tells Petrarch to “Go wherever your fancy leads you, provided you go there happy. Go without care.” Further distancing this from the monastic ideal was his admonition later in the passage to “avoid being alone until you feel that no traces of you ailment remain.”[xii] This is certainly not the kind of admonition that one such as Augustine would make, and represents another attempt by Petrarch to exonerate his lifestyle in his own mind. Petrarch wanted the freedom from activity so that he could write, but had no desire to experience the lifestyle that was actually led by those who practiced monasticism.

This is yet another example of another of Petrarch’s attempts to synthesize his beliefs with the Christian system of beliefs, and most specifically to those of Augustine. The Secretum is a lucid example of this tendency because in it Augustine is made to represent the religious side of Petrarch’s character, while Francesco represents Petrarch’s worldly side. In this work, however, he uses only the Augustinian thoughts that are reconcilable to his own nature. His chastisements of Petrarch represent Petrarch’s own fears and concerns. It eventually justifies those concerns with which he is not willing to part, and condemns only those that he truly wishes to rid himself of. His fame, and lack of modesty in living are decided to be simply a result of him trying to carry out God’s plan for his life. In reaching this decision, Petrarch clears himself of any sin associated with these. The only sin for which Petrarch will allow accountability is his love for Laura, but even this is tempered by recognition of this love as the most perfect and pure form accomplishable on earth, and so hismea culpa falls well short of contrition. He seems to be trying to assuage his own fears that he is neglecting the religious life advocated in medieval times while setting himself beyond reproach, in the eyes of the public as he seeks classical ideals.

To do this he takes bits and pieces of Augustine’s writings, and applies those (sometimes out of context) to his life. One important aspect of this is that he replaces Augustine’s belief of man’s feebleness and inadequacy with his own belief that through stoic virtue and reason, man can attain freedom. This vastly misrepresents Augustine’s teachings. It brings back into light Petrarch’s purely classical belief in the dignity of mankind and the power of his intellect. Actually, Augustine held that the only way to find Christ was to accept the complete futility of your existence and to accept God’s grace for your salvation. This is curiously absent in Petrarch’s writings. He instead presents the suffering and supplication in a more cultish light. For Petrarch, it seems, self-denial was a baptismal experience, rather than a way of life that was necessary for those who would seek God. This for him was not necessary because he could, in effect, find God through his own thought, rather than through pure revelation by God. This theorization would definitely have been discounted, and most likely thought to be sacrilegious, by Augustine, but was of crucial importance to Petrarch’s view of salvation and hence his relationship with God. Petrarch has Augustine present a two-step approach to salvation. The first step is to meditate on death and the human condition, and “the second step is to yearn and vigorously strive to rise to the heights you aim at. Once these two steps have been taken, I promised that you can easily accomplish your goals.”[xiii] This presents the view of an active salvation, something to be achieved rather than received. It was these types of assumptions that allowed him to try and find comfort for his fears that he would not see Heaven, while still allowing him to seek glory and accomplishment on the earth.

This was his ultimate struggle, trying to justify his minds desire for pleasure and recognition with the necessity of his soul’s salvation. All of his other conflicts traced back to this. Petrarch always held a sense of self-importance, one that did not sit well with the clerical instruction he had received. He wanted to experience life on a vaster scale and to achieve both a feeling of self-fulfillment and widespread fame. He believed, in his own dignity and in the dignity of man, though he had been taught that only through realization of his worthlessness could he go to Heaven. He wanted fame, but was taught that life was futile and anonymous. He tried to harmonize all the opposing thoughts within him into one single overarching moral code that would validate all of his own (at times contradictory)thoughts and actions. To do this he wove the religious teachings he had received with the classical ideals he had learned about through his extensive studies to come up with an acceptable compromise. Petrarch’s fears were never fully assuaged, however, and until his death in 1374 the battle between his mind and soul would continue to rage within him.