Reading the Roman historian Livy’s account of Philip V of Macedon’s ascent of a peak in the Hebrus Mountains inspired in the Italian Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch, the desire to attempt the ascent of a similar summit. Petrarch recorded the adventures of the ascent in a letter to his confessor Father Dionigi in 1336. Petrarch professed to write the letter later in the day of the journey. Some scholars doubt that the ascent was ever made; others believe that the letter was written years later. Indeed, the letter betrays a sense of retrospection, of thought in focus on one moment of existence.
The ascent of the mountain was long and tiresome; Petrarch took the long way, less steep, but just as fatiguing as the short, craggy way, which his companion, his brother Gherardo, took. Gherardo got to the summit long before Petrarch, whose path was long and winding; he frequently descended on errant paths. When he reached the peak he was exhausted. So like his climb, he wrote, is the pursuit of truth. The sublime view from the top of the surrounding landscape, the Adriatic and the distant Mediterranean, yielded contemplation. Petrarch thought about his past, his unfulfilled spiritual goals. As he looked upon the Alps he thought about great events of the past: the spectacular, such as the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s march on Rome, and the mundane, such as St. Augustine’s introspective “review” of his “past deeds.” The awesome view of God’s creation lost its hold as Petrarch struggled with doubt and confusion respecting the path he had chosen and the spiritual summit that he had failed to reach. Petrarch had brought with him a pocket copy of Augustine’s Confessions, from which he read the first passage upon which his eyes fell: “men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.” Stunned, Petrarch descended the mountain in silence, reflecting on “the courses of my life.” Henceforth Petrarch’s path led within, to himself.
Even in the simple ascent of a mountain, a personal confrontation with nature, Petrarch engaged in a dialogue with the human past, with Augustine, and with himself. We see in this reflective dialogue a resemblance to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; but over a millennium separated Aurelius’ life and experience from Petrarch’s. Over the course of these centuries, a vast distance not only of time but of culture and thought emerged, separating the world of Dante and Petrarch from the world of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero. Because of changes in society and culture and changes in his own life, Petrarch was able to see the distinction of the present from the past. But more, Petrarch was able to do what Marcus Aurelius had never done, nor had subsequent thinkers of the European Middle Ages: Petrarch came to empathize with these distant humans of the past, to see them as like—and unlike—himself. “Medieval scholars tended to miss the individuality of the writer,” says Donald Wilcox, “and they studied ancient works only as authoritative guides to general truth. By contrast, Petrarch and his successors considered the ancients to be wise but also human and limited; the classics contained much wisdom, but the insights were those of particular men with personal weaknesses and limitations growing out of their historical situation.”
Petrarch gained this historical perspective through his intellectual interaction with past thinkers, such as Cicero and Augustine. Finding and reading the lost letters of Cicero to his friend Atticus, Petrarch discovered to his astonishment the letters revealed a different Cicero than the infallible statesman and stoic of the Medieval imagination. Disappointed, Petrarch wrote letters to the long-dead Roman. “I searched long and avidly for your letters,” Petrarch moaned in one letter to Cicero, “and having found them where I least thought to, avidly read them. I heard you, Marcus Tullius, saying much, complaining of much, in various moods. I already knew what a teacher you were for others; now at last I learned that you did not know how to guide yourself.” Petrarch, having once conceived of Cicero in abstract terms, came to see him as an actual man of the past, different yet similar, with a character both good and bad. In his essay, On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, Petrarch challenged the traditional devotion to Aristotelian thinking, writing: “Aristotle was a human and could well be ignorant of some things, even of a great many things.”
Petrarch was a superb writer of epistles, whether to friends or to individuals of the past; his most unique epistle was to posterity—to all future humans notwithstanding their birth, status, or heritage. The Letter to Posterity is autobiographical and confessional in nature, as are many of Petrarch’s works. What to us must have been an exciting time to live—fourteenth-century Italy—was to Petrarch a time of suffering and disillusionment, a time to think about the greatness of the past. “I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own,” he wrote. “In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages.” The vicarious experience of the past was Petrarch’s path to contentment in the present.
Petrarch’s search for happiness by means of the dialogue with the past reached a level of superb literary achievement with the publication of The Secret, or the Soul’s Conflict with Passion, written in 1342. The Secret is, significantly, an imaginary dialogue between Petrarch and St. Augustine, the latter assuming the guise of spiritual mentor, even conscience, Petrarch appearing as the typical vain and ignorant (universal) human. Petrarch’s skill was to bring the reader into the dialogue, so that it seems indeed as if two men are discussing life and the search for truth. Petrarch repeatedly confesses his vanity and sin only to get caught in ever new attempts of self-praise. The recognition of ignorance counters the proclamation of knowledge. The weight of the body hinders the flight of the soul. Self-deception is rampant throughout the dialogue—and throughout life itself.
Modern historians argue that Petrarch’s time was crucial for the development of Renaissance humanism, namely because of the emergence of teachers, orators, and historians who dedicated themselves to the studia humanitatis, the study of humans and human expression. In part a reaction to the perceived inflexibility of Medieval thought; in part concerned with the importance of eloquence as a vehicle for personal and human truth; in part a patriotic, republican response to the new dynamism of Italian city-states; the activities of Renaissance humanists were cemented together by Petrarch’s new historical perspective. It is no accident that the humanist Lorenzo Valla was not only a philosopher but a philologist and historian who proved the fourth-century Donation of Constantine to be a forgery. Machiavelli not only wrote the most sophisticated political philosophy of his day but also side-splitting comic plays and The Discourses on the ancient historian Livy. Besides being one of the best biblical scholars of the Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus wrote satire, the Praise of Folly, steeped in the history and legend of antiquity. Petrarch and his contemporaries surpassed the thinking of Socrates, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius by basing their philosophy of history on a personal sense of historical change. Classical antiquity became less a source of abstract truth—a distant, unobtainable mirage—and more a looking-glass into which Renaissance thinkers saw themselves. During the Renaissance “history,” in the words of Donald Kelley, became “the centerpiece of the humanist world view.”
Yet Petrarch’s life reveals as well that the Renaissance dialogue with the past was by no means secular. The humanists of the early modern world were Christians. Cicero and Socrates were important, but not so important as Christ. The exploration of and interaction with the past was always within the confines of a broader truth rarely glimpsed in time.
The American Plutarch 