Dialogue the Second S. Augustine — Petrarch
S. Augustine. Well, have we rested long enough?
Petrarch. Certainly, if it so please you.
S. Augustine. Let me hear if you feel now in good heart and confidence. For when a man has been ill, a hopeful spirit in him is no small sign of returning health.
Petrarch. What hope I have is no whit in myself: God is my hope.
S. Augustine. It is wisely spoken. And now I return to our theme. Many things are against you, many temptations assail, but you yourself still seem ignorant both of their numbers and their strength. And what in warfare generally happens to one who, from a distance, sees some closely marshalled battalion, has happened to you. Such a man is often deceived into thinking his foes fewer in number than they are. But when they draw nearer, when they have deployed their serried ranks before his eyes in all their martial pomp, then his fears soon increase, and he repents him of his boldness. So likewise will it be with you when I shall display before your eyes, on this side and on that, all the evils that are pressing upon you and hemming you in from every quarter. You will be ashamed of your own boldness, you will be sorry you were so light-hearted, and begin to bewail that in its sore straits your soul has been unable to break through the wedged phalanx of your foes. You will discover presently how many foolish fancies of too easy victory you have let come into your mind, excluding that wholesome dread to which I am endeavouring to bring you.
Petrarch. Indeed, you make me horribly afraid. That my danger was great I have always been aware; and now, in spite of this, you tell me I have very much under-estimated it, and indeed that, compared with what they should be, my fears have been nothing at all. What hope have I then left?
S. Augustine. It is never time to despair. Be sure of that. Despair is the very last and worst of evils, and therefore I would have you make it a first principle to put it away wholly.
Petrarch. I knew the truth of the maxim, but in my dread forgot it at the moment.
S. Augustine. Now give me all your attention, look and listen while I recall words of your favourite seer.
“Behold what foemen gather round your walls
And at your gates make sharp their gleaming sword
To murder you and yours.”1
Look what snares the world spreads for you; what vanities it dangles before your eyes; what vain cares it has to weigh you down. To begin at the beginning, consider what made those most noble spirits among all creatures fall into the abyss of ruin; and take heed lest in like manner you also fall after them. All your forethought, all your care will be needed to save you from this danger. Think how many temptations urge your mind to perilous and soaring flights. They make you dream of nobleness and forget your frailty; they choke your faculties with fumes of self-esteem, until you think of nothing else; they lead you to wax so proud and confident in your own strength that at length you hate your Creator. So you live for self-pleasing and imagine that great things are what you deserve. Whereas if you had a truer remembrance, great blessings ought to make you not proud but humble, when you realise that they came to you for no merit of your own. What need for me to speak of the Eternal Lord God when even to earthly lords men feel their minds more humbly bound if they experience any bounty of theirs which they are conscious of being undeserved. Do we not see them striving to merit afterwards what they feel they should have earned before?
Now let your mind realise, as it easily can, on what paltry grounds your pride is set up. You trust in your intellect; you boast of what eloquence much reading has given you; you take pleasure in the beauty of your mortal body. Yet do you not feel that in many things your intellect fails you? Are there not many things in which you cannot rival the skill of the humblest of mankind? Nay, might I not go further and, without mentioning mankind, may I not say that with all your labour and study you will find yourself no match in skill for some of the meanest and smallest of God’s creatures? Will you boast, then, of intellect after that? And as for reading, what has it profited you? Of the multitude of things you have perused how many have remained in your mind? How many have struck root and borne fruit in due season? Search well your heart and you will find that the whole of what you know is but like a little shrunken stream dried by the summer heat compared to the mighty ocean.
And of what relevance is it to know a multitude of things? Suppose you shall have learned all the circuits of the heavens and the earth, the spaces of the sea, the courses of the stars, the virtues of herbs and stones, the secrets of nature, and then be ignorant of yourself? Of what profit is it? If by the help of Scripture you shall have discovered the right and upward path, what use is it if wrath and passion make you swerve aside into the crooked, downward way? Supposing you shall have learned by heart the deeds of illustrious men of all the ages, of what profit will it be if you yourself day by day care not what you do?
What need for me to speak of eloquence? Will not you yourself readily confess how often the putting any confidence in this has proved vain? And, moreover, what boots it that others shall approve what you have said if in the court of your own conscience it stands condemned? For though the applause of those who hear you may seem to yield a certain fruit which is not to be despised, yet of what worth is it after all if in his heart the speaker himself is not able to applaud? How petty is the pleasure that comes from the plaudits of the multitude! And how can a man soothe and flatter others unless he first soothe and flatter himself? Therefore you will easily understand how often you are deluded by that glory you hope for from your eloquence, and how your pride therein rests but upon a foundation of wind. For what can be more childish, nay, might I not say more insane, than to waste time and trouble over matters where all the things themselves are worthless and the words about them vain? What worse folly than to go on blind to one’s real defects, and be infatuated with words and the pleasure of hearing one’s own voice, like those little birds they tell of who are so ravished with the sweetness of their own song that they sing themselves to death? And furthermore, in the common affairs of every-day life does it not often happen to you to find yourself put to the blush to discover that in the use of words you are no match even for some whom you think are very inferior men? Consider also how in Nature there are many things for which names are altogether wanting, and many more to which names have indeed been given, but to express the beauty of them—as you know by experience—words are altogether inadequate. How often have I heard you lament, how often seen you dumb and dissatisfied, because neither your tongue nor your pen could sufficiently utter ideas, which nevertheless to your reflecting mind were very clear and intelligible?
What, then, is this Eloquence, so limited and so weak, which is neither able to compass and bring within its scope all the things that it would, nor yet to hold fast even those things that it has compassed?
The Greeks reproach you, and you in turn the Greeks, with having a paucity of words. Seneca, it is true, accounts their vocabulary the richer, but Cicero at the beginning of his treatise On the Distinctions of Good and Evil makes the following declaration, “I cannot enough marvel whence should arise that insolent scorn of our national literature. Though this is not the place to discuss it, yet I will express my conviction, which I have often maintained, not only that the Latin tongue is not poor, as it is the fashion to assert, but that it is, in fact, richer than the Greek;”2 and as he frequently repeats elsewhere the same opinion, so, especially in the Tusculan Orations, he exclaims, “Thou Greek that countest thyself rich in words, how poor art thou in phrases.”3
This is the saying, mark you, of one who know quite well that he was the prince of Latin oratory, and had already shown that he was not afraid to challenge Greece for the palm of literary glory. Let me add that Seneca, so notable an admirer of the Greek tongue, says in his Declamations, “All that Roman eloquence can bring forward to rival or excel the pride of Greece is connected with the name of Cicero.”4 A magnificent tribute, but unquestionably true!
There is, then, as you see, on the subject of the primacy in Eloquence a very great controversy, not only between you and the Greeks, but among our own most learned writers themselves. There are in our camp those who hold for the Greeks, and it may be among them there are some who hold for us, if at least we may judge from what is reported of the illustrious philosopher Plutarch. In a word, Seneca, who is ours, while doing all justice to Cicero, gives his final verdict for the Greeks, notwithstanding that Cicero is of the contrary opinion.
As to my own opinion on the question in debate, I consider that both parties to the controversy have some truth on their side when they accuse both Latin and Greek of poverty of words: and if this judgment be correct in regard to two such famous languages, what hope is there for any other?
Bethink you therefore what sort of confidence you can have in your own simple powers when the whole resources of that people of which you are but a little part are adjudged poor, and how ashamed you should be to have spent so much time in pursuing something which cannot be attained, and which, if it could be, would prove after all but vanity itself.
I will pass on to other points. Are you perhaps inclined to plume yourself on your physical advantages? But think what a thread they hang upon! What is it you are most pleased with in this way? Is it your good health and strength? But truly nothing is more frail. It is proved by the fatigue you suffer from even little things. The various maladies to which the body is liable; the stings of insects; a slight draught of air, and a thousand other such small vexations all tell the same tale. Will you perchance be taken in by your own good-looking face, and when you behold in the glass your smooth complexion and comely features are you minded to be smitten, entranced, charmed? The story of Narcissus has no warning for you, and, content with gazing only at the outward envelope of the body, you consider not that the eyes of the mind tell you how vile and plain it is within. Moreover, if you had no other warning, the stormy course of life itself, which every day robs you of something, ought to show you how transient and perishing that flower of beauty is. And if, perhaps, which you will hardly dare affirm, you fancy yourself invincible by age, by illness, and whatever else may change the grace of bodily form, you have at least not forgotten that Last Enemy which destroys all, and you will do well to engrave in your inmost heart and mind this word of the satirist—
“’Tis death alone compels us all to see
What little things we are.”5
Here, unless I am mistaken, are the causes that inflate your mind with pride, forbid you to recognise your low estate, and keep you from the recollection of death. But others there still are that I now propose to pass in review.
Petrarch. Stop a little, I beg you, lest, overwhelmed by the weight of so many reproaches, I have no strength or spirit to reply.
S. Augustine. By all means say on. Gladly will I hold my peace.
Petrarch. You have astonished me not a little by casting in my teeth a multitude of things of which I am perfectly sure they have never entered my head at all. You allege that I trusted in my own intelligence. But surely the one sign I have given of possessing some little intelligence is that never have I counted on that faculty at all. Shall I pride myself on much reading of books, which with a little wisdom has brought me a thousand anxieties? How can you say I have sought the glory of eloquence, I, who, as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago, am wont above all things to complain that speech is inadequate to my thoughts? Unless you wish to try and prove the contrary, I may say that you know I am always conscious of my own littleness, and that if by chance I have ever thought myself to be anything, such a thought has come but rarely and then only from seeing the ignorance of other men; for, as I often remark, we are reduced to acknowledge, according to Cicero’s celebrated phrase, that “what powers we may possess come rather from the feebleness of others than from any merit in ourselves.”
But even were I endowed as richly as you imagine with those advantages of which you speak, what is there so magnificent about them that I should be vain? I am surely not so forgetful of myself nor so feather-brained as to let myself trouble about cares of that sort. For what use in the world are intellect, knowledge, eloquence, if they can bring no healing to a soul diseased? I remember having given expression already in one of my letters to my sad sense of this truth.
As to what you remarked with an air of quasi gravity about my physical advantages, I must confess it makes me smile. That I of all men should be thought to have plumed myself on my mortal and perishing body, when every day of my life I feel in it the ravages of time at work! Heaven save me from such folly!
I will not deny that in the days of my youth I took some care to trim my head and to adorn my face; but the taste for that kind of thing has gone with my early years, and I recognise now the truth of that saying of the Emperor Domitian who, writing of himself in a letter to a lady friend, and complaining of the too swift decay of the goodliness of man, said, “Know you that nothing is so sweet, but nothing also is so fleeting, as the beauty of the body.”6
S. Augustine. It would be an easy task to refute all you have advanced, but I prefer that your own conscience should send the shaft of shame to your heart rather than words of mine. I will not labour the point or draw the truth from you by torture; but as those who take revenge magnanimously, I will merely prefer a simple request that you will continue to avoid what you profess you have hitherto avoided.
If by any chance the fashion of your countenance should at any time have stirred the least motion of conceit, then I beg you to reflect what soon those bodily members must become, though now they please your eye: think how their destiny is to be foul and hideous, and what repulsion they would cause even in yourself were you able to see them then. Then call often to mind this maxim of the Philosopher: “I was born for some higher destiny than to be the slave of my body.”7 Assuredly it is the very climax of folly to see men neglect their real selves in order to cosset the body and limbs in which they dwell. If a man is imprisoned for a little while in some dungeon, dark, damp, and dirty, would he not seem to have lost his senses if he did not shield himself as far as he was able from any contact with the walls and soil? And with the expectation of freedom would he not eagerly listen for the footsteps of his deliverer? But if giving up that expectation, covered with filth and plunged in darkness, he dreads to leave his prison; if he turns all his attention to painting and adorning the walls which shut him in, in a vain endeavour to counteract the nature of his dripping prison-house, will he not rightly be counted a wretched fool?
Well, you yourself know and love your prison-house, wretched that you are! And on the very eve of your issuing or being dragged therefrom you chain yourself more firmly in it, labouring to adorn what you ought to despise, if you would follow the advice you yourself had tendered to the father of the great Scipio in your poem called Africa.
“The bonds and fetters known and suffered long,
The clogs on liberty are hateful to us,
And the new freedom now attained we love.”8
Wonderful is it if you made others give the counsel which you yourself refuse! But I cannot disguise from you one word in your discourse which to you may seem very humble, but to me seems full of pride and arrogance.
Petrarch. I am sorry if I have in any way expressed myself arrogantly, but if the spirit is the true rule of one’s deeds and words, then my own bears me witness that I intended nothing in that sense.
S. Augustine. To depreciate others is a kind of pride more intolerable than to exalt oneself above one’s due measure; I would much rather see you exalt others and then put yourself above them than degrade all the world in a heap at your feet, and by a refinement of pride fashion for yourself a shield of humanity out of scorn for your neighbour.
Petrarch. Take it how you will, I profess but small esteem either for others or myself. I am ashamed to tell you what experience has made me think of the majority of mankind.
S. Augustine. It is very prudent to despise oneself; but it is very dangerous and very useless to despise others. However, let us proceed. Are you aware of what still makes you turn from the right way?
Petrarch. Pray say anything you like, only do not accuse me of envy.
S. Augustine. Please God may pride have done you as little hurt as envy! So far as I judge, you have escaped this sin, but I have others whereof to accuse you.
Petrarch. Still you will not vex me whatever reproaches you may bring. Tell me freely everything that leads me astray.
S. Augustine. The desire of things temporal.
Petrarch. Come, come! I truly have never heard anything so absurd.
S. Augustine. There! you see everything vexes you. You have forgotten your promise. This is not, however, any question of envy.
Petrarch. No, but of cupidity, and I do not believe there is a man in the world more free of this fault than myself.
S. Augustine. You are great at self-justification, but, believe me, you are not so clear of this fault as you think you are.
Petrarch. What? do you mean to say that I, I am not free from the reproach of cupidity?
S. Augustine. I do, and that you are likewise guilty of ambition.
Petrarch. Go on, ill-treat me more still, double your reproaches, make full proof of your work of an accuser. I wonder what fresh blow you have in store for me.
S. Augustine. What is mere truth and right testimony you call accusation and ill-treatment. The satirist was quite right who wrote—
“To speak the truth to men is to accuse.”9
And the saying of the comic poet is equally true—
“’Tis flattery makes friends and candour foes.”10
But tell me, pray, what is the use of this irritation and anger that makes you so on edge? Was it necessary in a life so short to weave such long hopes?
“Have no long hopes! life’s shortness cries to man.”11
You read that often enough but take no count of it. You will reply, I suppose, that you do this from a tender solicitude for your friends, and so find a fair pretext for your error; but what madness it is, under pretext of friendship to others, to declare war on yourself and treat yourself as an enemy.
Petrarch. I am neither covetous nor inhuman enough to be without solicitude for my friends, especially for those whose virtue or deserts attach me to them, for it is those whom I admire, revere, love, and compassionate; but, on the other hand, I do not pretend to be generous enough to court my own ruin for the sake of my friends. What I desire is so to manage my affairs as to have a decent subsistence while I live; and as you have delivered a shot at me from Horace, let me also from the same poet put up a shield in self-defence and profess my desire is the same as his,—
“Let me have books and stores for one year hence, Nor make my life one flutter of suspense!”12
And further how I shape my course so that I may in the same poet’s words—
“Pass my old age and not my honour lose, And, if I may, still serve the lyric Muse.”13
Let me own also that I dread very much the rocks ahead if life should be prolonged, and so would provide beforehand for this double wish of mine to blend with my work for the Muses some simpler occupation in household affairs. But this I do with such indifference that it is plain enough I only descend to such necessities because I am so obliged.
Augustine. I see clearly how these pretexts texts which serve as an excuse for your folly have penetrated deeply into your very spirit. How is it, then, you have not engraved equally deeply in your heart the words of the satirist—
“Why keep such hoarded gold to vex the mind?
Why should such madness still delude mankind?
To scrape through life on water and dry bread
That you may have a fortune when you’re dead?”14
Undoubtedly it is more because you think that it is a fine thing to die in a winding-sheet of purple, and rest in a marble tomb, and leave to your heirs the business of disputing over a great succession, than that you yourself care for the money which wins such advantages. It is a futile trouble, believe me, and quite devoid of good sense. If you will steadily observe human nature, you will discover that in a general way it is content with very little, and, in your case particularly, there is hardly a man who needs less for his satisfaction, unless you had been blinded by prejudices. Doubtless the poet was thinking of the average run of men, or possibly his own actual self, when he said—
“My sorry fare is dogwood fruit; I pluck
Wild herbs and roots that in the fields do grow,
And a few berries.”15
But, unlike him, you will acknowledge yourself that such a mode of life is far from sorry, and that in fact nothing would be pleasanter if you were to consult only your own taste and not the customs of a deluded world. Why, then, continue to torment yourself? If you order your life as your nature dictates, you were rich long ago, but you never will be able to be rich if you follow the standard of the world; you will always think something wanting, and in ‘rushing after it you will find yourself swept away by your passion.
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 of some valley in the noontide heat, and revelled in the delicious silence. Never idle, in your soul you would ponder over some high meditation, with only the Muses for your friends—you were never less alone than when in their company, and then, like the old man in Virgil who reckoned himself
“As rich askings, when, at the close of day,
Home to his cot he took his happy way,
And on his table spread his simple fare,
Fresh from the meadow without cost or care,”16
you would come at sunset back to your humble roof; and, contented with your good things, did you not find yourself the richest and happiest of mortal men?
Petrarch. Ah, well-a-day! I recall it all now, and the remembrance of that time makes me sigh with regret.
S. Augustine. Why—why do you speak of sighing? And who, pray, is the author of your woes? It is, indeed, your own spirit and none other which too long has not dared to follow the true law of its nature, and has thought itself a prisoner only because it would not break its chain. Even now it is dragging you along like a runaway horse, and unless you tighten the rein it will rush you to destruction. Ever since you grew tired of your leafy trees, of your simple way of life, and society of country people, egged on by cupidity, you have plunged once more into the midst of the tumultuous life of cities. I read in your face and speech what a happy and peaceful life you lived; for what miseries have you not endured since then? Too rebellious against the teachings of experience, you still hesitate!
It is without a doubt the bonds of your own sins that keep you back, and God allows that, as you passed your childhood under a harsh muster, so, though you once became free, you have again fallen into bondage, and there will end your miserable old age. Verily, I was at your side once, when, quite young, unstained by avarice or ambition, you gave promise of becoming a great man; now, alas, having quite changed your character, the nearer you get to the end of your journey the more you trouble yourself about provisions for the way. What remains then but that you will be found, when the day comes for you to die—and it may be even now at hand, and certainly cannot be any great way off—you will be found, I say, still hungering after gold, poring half-dead over the calendar?
For those anxious cares, which increase day after day, must by necessity at last have grown to a huge figure and a prodigious amount.
Petrarch. Well, after all, if I foresee the poverty of old age, and gather some provision against that time of weariness, what is there so much to find fault with?
S. Augustine. Ah! ludicrous anxiety and tragic neglect, to worry and trouble yourself about a time at which you may never arrive and in which you assuredly will not have long to stay, and yet to be quite oblivious of that end at which you cannot help arriving, and of which there is no remedy when you once have reached it. But such is your execrable habit—to care for what’s temporal, and be careless for all that’s eternal. As for this delusion of providing a shield against old age, no doubt what put it into your head was the verse in Virgil which speaks of
“The ant who dreads a destitute old age.”17
And so you have made an ant your mentor and you are as excusable as the satiric poet who wrote—
“Some people, like the ant, fear hunger and cold,”18
but if you are going to put no limit to the following of ants, you will discover that there is nothing more melancholy and nothing more absurd than to ward off poverty one day by loading yourself with it all your days.
Petrarch. What will you say next! Do you counsel me to court Poverty? I have no longing for it, but I will bear it with courage if Fortune, who delights to overturn human affairs, reduces me to it.
S. Augustine. My opinion is that in every condition man should aim at the golden mean. I would not then restrict you to the rules of those who say, “All that is needed for man’s life is bread and water; with these none is poor; whosoever desires no more than these will rival in felicity the Father of the Gods.”19 No, I do not tie man’s life down to dry bread and water; such maxims are as extreme as they are troublesome and odious to listen to. Also, in regard to your infirmity, what I enjoin is not to over-indulge natural appetite, but to control it. What you already have would be sufficient for your wants if you had known how to be sufficient to yourself. But as it is you are yourself the cause of your own poverty. To heap up riches is to heap up cares and anxieties. This truth has been proved so continually that there is no need to bring more arguments. What a strange delusion, what a melancholy blindness of the soul of man, whose nature is so noble, whose birth is from above, that it will neglect all that is lofty and debase itself to care for the metals of the earth. Every time you have been drawn by these hooks of cupidity you come down from your high meditations to these grovelling thoughts, and do you not feel each time as if hurled from heaven to earth, from the bosom of the stars to a bottomless pit of blackness?
Petrarch. Yes; in truth, I feel it, and one knows not how to express what I have suffered in my fall.
S. Augustine. Why, then, are you not afraid of a danger you have so often experienced? And when you were raised up to the higher life, why did you not attach yourself to it more firmly?
Petrarch. I make all the efforts I can to do so; but inasmuch as the various exigencies of our human lot shake and unsettle me, I am torn away in spite of myself. It is not without reason, I imagine, that the poets of antiquity dedicated the double peaks of Parnassus to two different divinities. They desired to beg from Apollo, whom they called the god of Genius, the interior resources of the mind, and from Bacchus a plentiful supply of external goods, way of regarding it is suggested to me not only by the teaching of experience, but by the frequent testimony of wise men whom I need not quote to you. Moreover, although the plurality of deities may be ridiculous, this opinion of the Poets is not devoid of common sense. And in referring a like twofold supplication to the one God from whom all good comes down, I do not think I can be called unreasonable, unless indeed you hold otherwise.
S. Augustine. I deny not you are right in your view, but the poor way you divide your time stirs my indignation. You had already devoted your whole life to honourable work; if anything compelled you to spend any of your time on other occupations, you regarded it as lost. But I now you only concede to what is Good and Beautiful the moments you can spare from avarice.
Any man in the world would desire to reach old age on such terms as that; but what limit or check would be to such a state of mind? Choose for yourself some defined goal, and when you have attained it, then stay there and breathe awhile. Doubtless you know that the saying I am about to quote is from lips of man, but has all the force of a divine oracle—
“The miser’s voice for ever cries, Give, give;
Then curb your lusts if you would wisely live.”20
Petrarch. Neither to want nor to abound, neither to command others or obey them—there you have my heart’s wish.
S. Augustine. Then you must drop your humanity and become God, if you would want nothing. Can you be ignorant that of all the creatures Man is the one that has most wants?
Petrarch. Many a time have I heard that said, but I would still like to hear it afresh from your lips and lodge it in my remembrance.
S. Augustine. Behold him naked and unformed, born in wailings and tears, comforted with a few drops of milk, trembling and crawling, needing the hand of another, fed and clothed from the beasts of the field, his body feeble, his spirit restless, subject to all kinds of sickness, the prey of passions innumerable, devoid of reason, joyful to-day, to-morrow sorrowful, in both full of agitation, incapable of mastering himself, unable to restrain his appetite, ignorant of what things are useful to him and in what proportion, knowing not how to control himself in meat or drink, forced with great labour to gain the food that other creatures find ready at their need, made dull with sleep, swollen with food, stupefied with drink, emaciated with watching, famished with hunger, parched with thirst, at once greedy and timid, disgusted with what he has, longing after what he has lost, discontented alike with past, present and future, full of pride in his misery, and aware of his frailty, baser than the vilest worms, his life is short, his days uncertain, his fate inevitable, since Death in a thousand forms is waiting for him at last.
Petrarch. You have so piled up his miseries and beggary that I feel it were good if I had never been born.
S. Augustine. Yet, in the midst of such wretchedness and such deep destitution of good in man’s estate, you go on dreaming of riches and power such as neither emperors nor kings have ever fully enjoyed.
Petrarch. Kindly tell me who ever made use of those words? Who spoke either of riches or of power?
S. Augustine. You imply both, for what greater riches can there be than to lack nothing? What greater power than to be independent of every one else in the world? Certainly those kings and masters of the earth whom you think so rich have wanted a multitude of things. The generals of great armies depend on those whom they seem to command, and, kept in check by their armed legions, they find the very soldiers who render them invincible also render them in turn helpless. Give up, therefore, your dreams of the impossible, and be content to accept the lot of humanity; learn to live in want and in abundance, to command and to obey, without desiring, with those ideas of yours, to shake off the yoke of fortune that presses even on kings. You will only be free from this yoke when, caring not a straw for human passions, you bend your neck wholly to the rule of Virtue. Then you will be free, wanting nothing, then. you will be independent; in a word, then you will be a king, truly powerful and perfectly happy.
Petrarch. Now I do indeed repent for all that is past, and I desire nothing. But I am still in bondage to one evil habit and am conscious always of a certain need at the bottom of my heart.
S. Augustine. Well, to come back to our subject, there is the very thing which keeps you back from the contemplation of death. It is that which makes you harassed with earthly anxieties; you do not lift up your heart at all to higher things. If you will take my counsel you will utterly cast away these anxieties, which are as so many dead weights upon the spirit, and you will find that it is not so hard after all to order your life by your nature, and let that rule and govern you more than the foolish opinions of the crowd.
Petrarch. I will do so very willingly, but may I ask you to finish what you were beginning to say about ambition, which I have long desired to hear?
S. Augustine. Why ask me to do what you can quite well do for yourself? Examine your own heart; you will see that among its other faults it is not ambition which holds the least place there.
Petrarch. It has profited me nothing then to have fled from towns whenever I could, to have thought scorn of the world and public affairs, to have gone into the recesses of the woods and silence of the fields, to have proved my aversion from empty honours, if still I am to be accused of ambition.
S. Augustine. You renounce many things well,—all you mortal men; but not so much; because you despise them as because you despair of getting them. Hope and desire inflame each other by the mutual stings of those passions, so that when the one grows cold the other dies away, and when one gets warm the other boils over.
Petrarch. Why, then, should I not hope? Was I quite destitute of any accomplishment?
S. Augustine. I am not now speaking of your accomplishments, but certainly you had not those by help of which, especially in the present day, men mount to high places; I mean the art of ingratiating yourself in the palaces of the great, the trick of flattery, deceit, promising, lying, pretending, dissembling, and putting up with all kinds of slights and indignities. Devoid of these accomplishments and others of the kind, and seeing clearly that you could not overcome nature, you turned your steps elsewhere. And you acted wisely and with prudence, for, as Cicero expresses it, “to contend against the gods as did the giants, what is it but to make war with nature itself.”21
Petrarch. Farewell such honours as these, if they have to be sought by such means!
S. Augustine. Your words are golden, but you have not convinced me of your innocence, for you do not assert your indifference to honours so much as to the vexations their pursuit involves, like the man who pretended he did not want to see Rome because he really would not endure the trouble of the journey thither. Observe, you have not yet desisted from the pursuit of honour, as you seem to believe and as you try to persuade me. But leave off trying to hide behind your finger, as the saying goes; all your thoughts, all your actions are plain before my eyes: and when you boast of having fled from cities and become enamoured of the woods, I see no real excuse, but only a shifting of your culpability.
We travel many ways to the same end, and, believe me, though you have left the road worn by feet of the crowd, you still direct your feet by a side-path towards this same ambition that you say you have thought scorn of; it is repose, solitude, a total disregard of human affairs, yes, and your own activities also, which just at present take you along that chosen path, but the end and object is glory.
Petrarch. You drive me into a corner whence I think, however, I could manage to escape; but, as the time is short and we must discriminate between many things, let us proceed, if you have no objection.
S. Augustine. Follow me, then, as I go forward. We will say nothing of gourmandising, for which you have no more inclination than a harmless pleasure in an occasional meeting with a few friends at the hospitable board. But I have no fear for you on this score, for when the country has regained its denizen, now snatched away to the towns, these temptations will disappear in a moment; and I have noticed, and have pleasure in acknowledging, that when you are alone you live in such a simple way as to surpass your friends and neighbours in frugality and temperance. I leave on one side anger also, though you often get carried away by it more than is reasonable, yet at the same time, thanks to your sweet natural temperament, you commonly control the motions of your spirit, and recall the advice of Horace—
“Anger’s a kind of madness, though not long;
Master the passion, since it’s very strong;
And, if you rule it not, it will rule you,
So put the curb on quickly.”22
Petrarch. That saying of the poet, and other words of philosophy like it, have helped me a little, I own; but what has helped me above all is the thought of the shortness of life. What insensate folly to spend in hating and hurting our fellow-men the few days we pass among them! Soon enough the last day of all will arrive, which will quite extinguish this flame in human breasts and put an end to all our hatred, and if we have desired for any of them nothing worse than death, our evil wish will soon be fulfilled. Why, then, seek to take one’s life or that of others? Why let pass unused the better part of a time so short? When the days are hardly long enough for honest joys of this life, and for meditating on that which is to come, no matter what economy of time we practise, what good is there in robbing any of them of their right and needful use, and turning them to instruments of sorrow and death for ourselves and others? This reflection has helped me, when I found myself under any temptation to anger, not to fall utterly under its dominion, or if I fell has helped me quickly to recover; but hitherto I have not been able quite to arm myself at all points from some little gusts of irritation.
S. Augustine. As I am not afraid that this wind of anger will cause you to make shipwreck of yourself or others, I agree willingly that without paying attention to the promises of the Stoics, who set out to extirpate root and branch all the maladies of the soul, you content yourself with the milder treatment of the Peripatetics. Leaving, then, on one side for the moment these particular failings, I hasten to treat of others more dangerous than these and against which you will need to be on guard with more care.
Petrarch. Gracious Heaven, what is yet to come that is more dangerous still?
S. Augustine. Well, has the sin of lust never touched you with its flames?
Petrarch. Yes, indeed, at times so fiercely us to make me mourn sorely that I was not born without feelings. I would sooner have been a senseless stone than be tormented by so many stings of the flesh.
S. Augustine. Ah, there is that which turns you most aside from the thought of things divine. For what does the doctrine of the heavenly Plato show but that the soul must separate itself far from the passion of the flesh and tread down its imaginings before it can rise pure and free to the contemplation of the mystery of the Divine; for otherwise the thought of its mortality will make it cling to those seducing charms. You know what I mean, and you have learned this truth in Plato’s writings, to the study of which you said not long ago you had given yourself up with ardour.
Petrarch. Yes, I own I had given myself to studying him with great hopefulness and desire, but the novelty of a strange language and the sudden departure of my teacher cut short my purpose.23 For the rest this doctrine of which you speak is very well known to me from your own writings and those of the Platonists.
S. Augustine. It matters little from whom you learned the truth, though it is a fact that the authority of a great master will often have a profound influence.
Petrarch. Yes, in my own case I must confess I feel profoundly the influence of a man of whom Cicero in his Tusculan Orations made this remark, which has remained graven in the bottom of my heart: “When Plato vouchsafes not to bring forward any proof (you see what deference I pay him), his mere authority would make me yield consent.”24 Often in reflecting on this heavenly genius it has appeared to me an injustice when the disciples of Pythagoras dispense their chief from submitting proofs, that Plato should be supposed to have less liberty than he. But, not to be carried away from our subject, authority, reason and experience alike have for a long time so much commended this axiom of Plato to me that I do not believe anything more true or more truly holy could be said by any man. Every time I have raised myself up, thanks to the hand of God stretched out to me, I have recognised with infinite joy, beyond belief, who it was that then preserved me and who had cast me down in times of old. Now that I am once more fallen into my old misery, I feel with a keen sense of bitterness that failing which again has undone me. And this I tell you, that you may see nothing strange in my saying I had put Plato’s maxim to the proof.
S. Augustine. Indeed, I think it not strange, for I have been witness of your conflicts; I have seen you fall and then once again rise up, and now that you are down once more I determined from pity to bring you my succour.
Petrarch. I am grateful for your compassionate feeling, but of what avail is any human succour?
S. Augustine. It avails nothing, but the succour of God is much every way. None can be chaste except God give him the grace of chastity.25 You must therefore implore this grace from Him above all, with humbleness, and often it may be with tears. He is wont never to deny him who asks as he should.
Petrarch. So often have I done it that I fear I am as one too importunate.
S. Augustine. But you have not asked with due humbleness or singleness of heart. You have ever kept a corner for your passions to creep in; you have always asked that your prayers may be granted presently. I speak from experience, for I did likewise in my old life. I said, “Give me chastity, but not now. Put it off a little while; the time will soon come. My life is still in all its vigour; let it follow its own course, obey its natural laws; it will feel it more of a shame later, to return to its youthful folly. I will give up this failing when the course of time itself shall have rendered me less inclined that way, and when satiety will have delivered me from the fear of going back.”26 In talking thus do you not perceive that you prayed for one thing but wished another in your heart?
Petrarch. How so?
S. Augustine. Because to ask for a thing to-morrow is to put it aside for to-day.
Petrarch. With tears have I often asked for it to-day. My hope was that after breaking the chain of my passions and casting away the misery of life, I should escape safe and sound, and after so many storms of vain anxieties, I might swim ashore in some haven of safety; but you see, alas, how many shipwrecks I have suffered among the same rocks and shoals, and how I shall still suffer more if I am left to myself.
S. Augustine. Trust me, there has always been something wanting in your prayer; otherwise the Supreme Giver would have granted it or, as in the case of the Apostle, would have only denied you to make you more perfect in virtue and convince you entirely of your own frailty.27
Petrarch. That is my conviction also; and I will go on praying constantly, unwearied, unashamed, undespairing. The Almighty, taking pity on my sorrows, will perchance lend an ear to my prayer, sent up daily to His throne, and even as He would not have denied His grace if my prayers had been pure, so He will also purify them.
S. Augustine. You are quite right, but redouble your efforts; and, as men wounded and fallen in battle raise themselves on their elbow, so do you keep a look out on all sides for the dangers that beset you, for fear that some foe; unseen come near and do you hurt yet more, where you lie on the ground. In the mean time, pray instantly for the aid of Him who is able to raise you up again. He will perchance be nearer to you just then when you think Him furthest off. Keep ever in mind that saying of Plato we were speaking of just now, “Nothing so much hinders the knowledge of the Divine as lust and the burning desire of carnal passion.” Ponder well, therefore, this doctrine; it is the very basis of our purpose that we have in hand.
Petrarch. To let you see how much I welcome this teaching, I have treasured it with earnest care, not only when it dwells in the court of Plato’s royal demesne, but also where it lurks hidden in the forests of other writers, and I have kept note in my memory of the very place where it was first perceived by my mind.
S. Augustine. I wonder what is your meaning. Do you mind being more explicit?
Petrarch. You know Virgil: you remember through what dangers he makes his hero pass in that last awful night of the sack of Troy?
S. Augustine. Yes, it is a topic repeated over and over again in all the schools. He makes him recount his adventures thus—
“What tongue could tell the horrors of that night,
Paint all the forms of death, or who have tears
Enough to weep so many wretched wights?
Hath the great city that so long was queen
Fallen at last? Behold in all the streets
The bodies of the dead by thousands strewn,
And in their homes and on the temple’s steps!
Yet is there other blood than that of Troy,
What time her vanquished heroes gathering up
Their quenchless courage smite anon their foes,
They, though triumphant, fall. Everywhere grief,
Dread everywhere, and in all places Death!”28
Petrarch. Now wherever he wandered accompanied by the goddess of Love, through crowding foes, through burning fire, he could not discern, though his eyes were open, the wrath of the angered gods, and so long as Venus was speaking to him he only had understanding for things of earth. But as soon as she left him you remember what happened; he immediately beheld the frowning faces of the deities, and recognised what dangers beset him round about.
“Then I beheld the awe-inspiring form
Of gods in anger for the fall of Troy.”29
From which my conclusion is that commerce with Venus takes away the vision of the Divine.
S. Augustine. Among the clouds themselves you have clearly discerned the light of truth. It is in this way that truth abides in the fictions of the poets, and one perceives it shining out through the crevices of their thought. But, as we shall have to return to this question later on, let us reserve what we have to say for the end of our discourse.
Petrarch. That I may not get lost in tracks unknown to me, may I ask when you propose to return to this point?
S. Augustine. I have not yet probed the deepest wounds of your soul, and I have purposely deferred to do so, in order that, coming at the end, my counsels may be more deeply graven in your remembrance. In another dialogue we will treat more fully of the subject of the desires of the flesh, on which we have just now lightly touched.
Petrarch. Go on, then, now as you proposed.
S. Augustine. Yes, there need be nothing to hinder me, unless you are obstinately bent on stopping me.
Petrarch. Indeed, nothing will please me better than to banish for ever every cause of dispute from the earth. I have never engaged in disputation, even on things perfectly familiar, without regretting it; for the contentions that arise, even between friends, have a certain character of sharpness and hostility contrary to the laws of friendship.
But pass on to those matters in which you think I shall welcome your good counsel.
S. Augustine. You are the victim of a terrible plague of the soul—melancholy; which the moderns call accidie, but which in old days used to be called ægritudo.
Petrarch. The very name of this complaint makes me shudder.
S. Augustine. Nor do I wonder, for you have endured its burden long enough.
Petrarch. Yes, and though in almost all other diseases which torment me there is mingled a certain false delight, in this wretched state everything is harsh, gloomy, frightful. The way to despair is for ever open, and everything goads one’s miserable soul to self-destruction. Moreover, while other passions attack me only in bouts, which, though frequent, are but short and for a moment, this one usually has 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.
S. Augustine. So well do you know your symptoms, so familiar are you become with their cause, that I beg you will tell me what is it that depresses you most at the present hour? Is it the general course of human affairs? Is it some physical trouble, or some disgrace of fortune in men’s eyes?
Petrarch. It is no one of these separately. Had I only been challenged to single combat, I would certainly have come off victorious; but now, as it is, I am besieged by a whole host of enemies.
S. Augustine. I pray you will tell me fully all that torments you.
Petrarch. Every time that fortune pushes me back one step, I stand firm and courageous, recalling to myself that often before I have been struck in the same way and yet have come off conqueror; if, after that, she presently deals me a sterner blow, I begin to stagger somewhat; if then she returns to the charge a third and fourth time, driven by force, I retreat, not hurriedly but step by step, to the citadel of Reason.
If fortune still lays siege to me there with all her troops, and if, to reduce me to surrender, she piles up the sorrows of our human lot, the remembrance of my old miseries and the dread of evils yet to come, then, at lost, hemmed in on all sides, seized with terror at these heaped-up calamities, I bemoan my wretched fate, and feel rising in my very soul this bitter disdain of life. Picture to yourself some one beset with countless enemies, with no hope of escape or of pity, with no comfort anywhere, with every one and everything against him; his foes bring up their batteries, they mine the very ground beneath his feet, the towers are already falling, the ladders are at the gates, the grappling-hooks are fastened to the walls, the fire is seen crackling through the roofs, and, at sight of those gleaming swords on every side, those fierce faces of his foes, and that utter ruin that is upon him, how should he not be utterly dismayed and overwhelmed, since, even if life itself should be left, yet to men not quite bereft of every feeling the loss of liberty alone is a mortal stroke?
S. Augustine. Although your confession is a little confused, I make out that your misfortunes all proceed from a single false conception which has in the past claimed and in futuro will still claim innumerable victims. You have a bad conceit of yourself.
Petrarch. Yes, truly, a very bad one.
S. Augustine. And why?
Petrarch. Not for one, but a thousand reasons.
S. Augustine. You are like people who on the slightest offence rake up all the old grounds of quarrel they ever had.
Petrarch. In my case there is no wound old enough for it to have been effaced and forgotten: my sufferings are all quite fresh, and if anything by chance were made better through time, Fortune has so soon redoubled her strokes that the open wound has never been perfectly healed over. I cannot, moreover, rid myself of that hate and disdain of our life which I spoke of. Oppressed with that, I cannot but be grieved and sorrowful exceedingly. That you call this grief accidie or ægritudo makes no difference; in substance we mean one and the same thing.
S. Augustine. As from what I can understand the evil is so deep-seated, it will do no good to heal it slightly, for it will soon throw out more shoots. It must be entirely rooted up. Yet I know not where to begin, so many complications alarm me. But to make the task of dividing the matter easier, I will examine each point in detail. Tell me, then, what is it that has hurt you most?
Petrarch. Whatever I see, or hear, or feel.
S. Augustine. Come, come, does nothing please you?
Petrarch. Nothing, or almost nothing.
S. Augustine. Would to God that at least the better things in your life might be dear, to you. But tell me what is it that is to you the most displeasing of all? I beg you give me an answer.
Petrarch. I have already answered.
S. Augustine. It is this melancholy I spoke of which is the true cause of all your displeasure with yourself.
Petrarch. I am just as displeased with what I see in others as with what I see in myself.
S. Augustine. That too comes from the same source. But to get a little order into our discourse, does what you see in yourself truly displease you as much as you say?
Petrarch. Stop worrying me with your petty questions, that are more than I know how to reply to.
S. Augustine. I see, then, that those things which make many other people envy you are nevertheless in your own eyes of no account at all?
Petrarch. Any one who envies a wretch like me must indeed himself be wretched.
S. Augustine. But now please tell me what is it that most displeases you?
Petrarch. I am sure I do not know.
S. Augustine. If I guess right will you acknowledge it?
Petrarch. Yes, I will, quite freely.
S. Augustine. You are vexed with Fortune.
Petrarch. And am I not right to hate her? Proud, violent, blind, she makes a mock of mankind.
S. Augustine. It is an idle complaint. Let us look now at your own troubles. If I prove you have complained unjustly, will you consent to retract?
Petrarch. You will find it very hard to convince me. If, however, you prove me in the wrong, I will give in.
S. Augustine. You find that Fortune is to you too unkind.
Petrarch. Not too unkind; too unjust, too proud, too cruel.
S. Augustine. The comic poets have more than one comedy called “The Grumbler.” There are scores of them. And now you are making yourself one of the crowd. I should rather find you in more select company. But as this subject is so very threadbare that no one can add anything new on it, will you allow me to offer you an old remedy for an old complaint?
Petrarch. As you wish.
S. Augustine. Well then, has poverty yet made you endure hunger and thirst and cold?
Petrarch. No, Fortune has not yet brought me to this pass.
S. Augustine. Yet such is the hard lot of a great many people every day of their lives. Is it not?
Petrarch. Use some other remedy than this if you can, for this brings me no relief. I am not one of those who in their own misfortunes rejoice to behold the crowd of other wretched ones who sob around them; and not seldom I mourn as much for the griefs of others as for my own.
S. Augustine. I wish no man to rejoice in witnessing the misfortunes of others, but they ought at any rate to give him some consolation, and teach him not to complain of his own lot. All the world cannot possibly occupy the first and best place. How could there be any first unless there was also a second following after? Only be thankful, you mortal men, if you are not reduced to the last of all; and that of so many blows of outrageous Fortune you only bear her milder strokes. For the rest, to those who are doomed to endure the extremes of misery, one must offer more potent remedies than you have need of whom Fortune has wounded but a little. That which casts men down into these doleful moods is that each one, forgetting his own condition, dreams of the highest place, and, like every one else, as I just now pointed out, cannot possibly attain it; then when he fails he is discontented. If they only knew the sorrows that attend on greatness they would recoil from that which they now pursue. Let me call as witnesses those who by dint of toil have reached the pinnacle, and who no sooner have arrived than they forthwith bewail the too easy accomplishment of their wish. This truth should be familiar to every one, and especially to you, to whom long experience has shown that the summit of rank, surrounded as it is with trouble and anxieties, is only deserving of pity. It follows that no earthly lot of man is free from complaint, since those who have attained what they desire and those who have missed it alike show some reason for discontent. The first allege they have been cheated, and the second that they have suffered neglect.
Take Seneca’s advice then, “When you see how many people are in front of you, think also how many are behind. If you would be reconciled with Providence and your own lot in life, think of all those you have surpassed;” and as the same wise man says in the same place, “Set a goal to your desires such as you cannot overleap, even if you wish.”
Petrarch. I have long ago set such a goal to my desires, and, unless I am mistaken, a very modest one; but in the pushing and shameless manners of my time, what place is left for modesty, which men now call slackness or sloth?
S. Augustine. Can your peace of mind be disturbed by the opinion of the crowd, whose judgment is never true, who never call anything by its right name? But unless my recollection is at fault, you used to look down on their opinion.
Petrarch. Never, believe me, did I despise it more than I do now. I care as much for what the crowd thinks of me as I care what I am thought of by the beasts of the field.
S. Augustine. Well, then?
Petrarch. What raises my spleen is that having, of all my contemporaries whom I know, the least exalted ambitions, not one of them has encountered so many difficulties as I have in the accomplishment of my desires. Most assuredly I never aspired to the highest place; I call the spirit of Truth as witness who judges us, who sees all, and who has always read my most secret thoughts. She knows very well that whenever after the manner of men I have gone over in my mind all the degrees and conditions of our human lot. I have never found in the highest place that tranquillity and serenity of soul which I place above all other goods; and for that matter, having a horror of a life full of disquiet and care, I have ever chosen, in my modest judgment, some middle position, and given, not lip-service, but the homage of my heart to that truth expressed by Horace—
“Whoso with little wealth will live content,
Easy and free his days shall all be spent;
His well-built house keeps out the winter wind,
Too modest to excite an envious mind.”30
And I admire the reasons he gives in the same Ode not less than the sentiment itself.
“The tallest trees most fear the tempest’s might,
The highest towers come down with most affright,
The loftiest hills feel first the thunder smite.”
Alas! it is just the middle place that it has never been my lot to enjoy.
S. Augustine. And what if that which you think is a middle position is in truth below you? What if as a matter of fact you have for a long while enjoyed a really middle place, enjoyed it abundantly? Nay, what if you have in truth left the middle far behind, and are become to a great many people a man more to be envied than despised?
Petrarch. Well, if they think my lot one to be envied, I think the contrary.
S. Augustine. Yes, your false opinion is precisely the cause of all your miseries, and especially of this last. As Cicero puts it, “You must flee Charybdis, with all hands to the oars, and sails as well!”31
Petrarch. Whither can I flee? where direct my ship? In a word, what am I to think except what I see before my eyes?
S. Augustine. You only see from side to side where your view is limited. If you look behind you will discover a countless throng coming after, and that you are somewhat nearer to the front rank than to that in the rear, but pride and stubbornness suffer you not to turn your gaze behind you.
Petrarch. Nevertheless from time to time I have done so, and have noticed many people coming along behind. I have no cause to blush at my condition, but I complain of having so many cares. I deplore, if I may yet again make use of a phrase of Horace, that I must live “only from day to day.”32 As to this restlessness of which I have suffered more than enough, I gladly subscribe to what the same poet says in the same place.
“What prayers are mine? O may I yet possess
The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less!
Let the few years that Fate may grant me still
Be all my own, not held at others’ will.”33
Always in a state of suspense, always uncertain of the future, Fortune’s favours have no attraction for me. Up to now, as you see, I have lived always in dependence on others; it is the bitterest cup of all. May heaven grant me some peace in what is left of my old age, and that the mariner who has lived so long amid the stormy waves may die in port!
S. Augustine. So then in this great whirlpool of human affairs, amid so many vicissitudes, with the future all dark before you; in a word, placed as you are at the caprice of Fortune, you will be the only one of so many millions of mankind who shall live a life exempt from care! Look what you are asking for, O mortal man! look what you demand! As for that complaint you have brought forward of never having lived a life of your own, what it really amounts to is not that you have lived in poverty, but more or less in subservience. I admit, as you say, that it is a thing very troublesome. However, if you look around you will find very few men who have lived a life of their own. Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others. To quote you a striking instance, Julius Cæsar, of whom some one has reported this true but arrogant saying, “The human race only lives for a small number,”34 Julius Cæsar, after he had subdued the human race to live for himself alone, did himself live for other people. Perhaps you will ask me for whom did he live? and I reply, for those who slew him—for Brutus, Cimber, and other traitorous heads of that conspiracy, for whom his inexhaustible munificence proved too small to satisfy their rapacity.
Petrarch. I must admit you have brought me to my senses, and I will never any more complain either of my obligations to others or of my poverty.
S. Augustine. Complain rather of your want of wisdom, for it is this alone that can obtain for you liberty and true riches. For the rest, the man who quietly endures to go without the cause of those good effects, and then makes complaint of not having them, cannot truly be said to have any intelligent understanding of either the cause or the effects. But now tell me what is it that makes you suffer, apart from what we have been speaking of? Is it any weakness of health or any secret trouble?
Petrarch. I confess that my body has always been a burden every time I think of myself; but when I cast my eyes on the unwieldiness of other people’s bodies, I acknowledge that I have a fairly obedient slave. I would to Heaven I could say as much of my soul, but I am afraid that in it there is what is more than a match for me.
S. Augustine. May it please God to bring that also under the rule of reason. But to come back to your body, of what do you complain?
Petrarch. Of that of which most other people also complain. I charge it with being mortal, with implicating me in its sufferings, loading me with its burdens, asking me to sleep when my soul is awake, and subjecting me to other human necessities which it would be tedious to go through.
S. Augustine. Calm yourself, I entreat you, and remember you are a man. Presently your agitation will cease. If any other thing troubles you, tell me.
Petrarch. Have you never heard how cruelly Fortune used me? This stepdame, who in a single day with her ruthless hand laid low all my hopes, all my resources, my family and home?35
S. Augustine. I see your tears are running down, and I pass on. The present is not the time for instruction, but only for giving warning; let, then, this simple one suffice. If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which; you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to nought along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field for long meditation.
Petrarch. Who shall find words to utter my daily disgust for this place where I live, in the most melancholy and disorderly of towns,36 the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the world is collected? What brush could depict the nauseating spectacle —streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against the walls, four-horse chariots coming dashing down at every cross-road, the motley crew of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting luxury of the wealthy, the one crushed down in sordid misery, the others debauched with pleasure and riot; and then the medley of characters—such diverse rôles in life—the endless clamour of their confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets?
All this destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life, banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the student’s habit of mind. So my prayers to God are earnest as well as frequent that he would save my barque from imminent wreck, for whenever I look around I seem to myself to be going down alive into the pit.
“Now,” I say in mockery, “now betake yourself to noble thoughts “—
“Now go and meditate the tuneful lyre.”37
S. Augustine. That line of Horace makes me realise what most afflicts you. You lament having lighted on a place so unfavourable for study, for as the same poet says—
“Bards fly from town, and haunt the wood and glade.”38
And you yourself have expressed the same truth in other words—
“The leafy forests charm the sacred Muse,
And bards the noisy life of towns refuse.”39
If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul. Not to repeat what you have been long well aware of, you have Seneca’s letter40 on this subject, and it is very much to the point. You have your own work also on “Tranquillity of Soul”; you have beside, for combating this mental malady, an excellent book of Cicero’s which sums up the discussions of the third day in his Tusculan Orations, and is dedicated to Brutus.41
Petrarch. You know I have read all that work and with great attention.
S. Augustine. And have you got no help from it?
Petrarch. Well, yes, at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner is the book from my hands than all my feeling for it vanishes.
S. Augustine. This way of reading is become common now; there is such a mob of lettered men, a detestable herd, who have spread themselves everywhere and make long discussions in the schools on the art of life, which they put in practice little enough. But if you would only make notes of the chief points in what you read you would then gather the fruit of your reading.
Petrarch. What kind of notes?
S. Augustine. Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise, they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason’s control.
Petrarch. Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and land and the very sky itself.42 In effect, he has given us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire.43 It is as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high—what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil’s words—
“There, in a cave profound, King Æolus
Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind,
Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls
Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side
Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top
Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand.”44
So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts,—who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line—
“And calms their passion and allays their wrath.”45
S. Augustine. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in the poet’s story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth.
But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul, and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to flee away.
By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero—
“The fount and head of all miseries.”46
Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground, the recollection of your own sins—always supposing it is not suffered to drive you to despair—then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur and complain.
As for your complaint that you have not had any life of your own and the vexation you feel in the tumultuous life of cities, you will find no small consolation in reflecting that the same complaint has been made by greater men than yourself, and that if you have of your own free will fallen into this labyrinth, so you can of your own free will make your escape. If not, yet in time your ears will grow so used to the noise of the crowd that it will seem to you as pleasant as the murmur of a falling stream. Or, as I have already hinted, you will find the same result easily if you will but first calm down the tumult of your imagination, for a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world.
And so, like a man on dry land and out of danger, you will look upon the shipwreck of others, and from your quiet haven hear the cries of those wrestling, with the waves, and though you will be moved with tender compassion by that sight, yet even that will be the measure also of your own thankfulness and joy at being in safety. And ere long I am sure you will banish and drive away all the melancholy that has oppressed your soul.
Petrarch. Although not a few things rather give me a twinge, and especially your notion that it is quite easy and depends only on myself to get away from towns, yet, as you have on many points got the better of me in reasoning, I will here lay down my arms ere I am quite overthrown.
S. Augustine. Do you feel able, then, now to cast off your sorrow and be more reconciled to your fortune?
Petrarch. Yes, I am able, supposing always that there is any such thing as fortune at all. For I notice the two Greek and Latin Poets are so little of one mind on this point that the one has not deigned to mention the word even once in all his works, whereas the other mentions the name of fortune often and even reckons her Almighty.47 And this opinion is shared by a celebrated historian and famous orator. Sallust has said of fortune that “all things are under her dominion.”48 And Cicero has not scrupled to affirm that “she is the mistress; of human affairs.”49 For myself, perhaps I will declare what I think on the subject at some other time and place. But so far as concerns the matter of our discussion, your admonitions have been of such service to me, that when I compare my lot with that of most other men it no longer seems so unhappy to me as once it did.
S. Augustine. I am glad indeed to have been of any service to you, and my desire is to do everything I can. But as our converse to-day has lasted a long while, are you willing that we should defer the rest for a third day, when we will bring it to a conclusion?
Petrarch. With my whole heart I adore the very number three itself, not so much because the three Graces are contained in it, as because it is held to be nearest of kin to the Deity; which is not only the persuasion of yourself and other professors of the true faith, who place all your faith in the Trinity, but also that of Gentile philosophers who have a traditional use of the same number in worshipping their own deities. And my beloved Virgil seems to have been conversant with this when he wrote—
“Uneven number to the gods is dear.”50
For what goes before makes it clear that three is the number to which he alludes. I will therefore presently await from your hands the third part of this your threefold gift.
Notes
1 Æneid, viii. 385-86.
2 De bonis et malis, i. 3.
3 Tusculan Orations, ii. 15. But Cicero’s words are more guarded, “inops interdum.”
4 Declamations, i.
5 Juvenal, Sat. x. 172-73.
6 Suetonius Domitian, xviii.
7 Seneca, Epist., 65.
8 Scipio is speaking of the souls admitted to heaven, freed from the body. Africa, i. 329.
9 Juvenal, i. 161 (not correctly quoted).
10 Terence L’Audrienne, 68.
11 Horace, Odes, i. 4, 15.
12 Horace, Epist. i. 18, 109. Conington’s translation.
13 Horace, Odes, I. xxxi. 19, 20.
14 Juvenal, Sat., xiv. 135.
15 Æneid, iii. 629.
16 Georgics, iv. 132.
17 Georgics, i. 106.
18 Juvenal, vi. 361.
19 Seneca, Epist., xxv.
20 Horace, Epist., i. 2, 56.
21 De Senectute, xi.
22 Horace, Epist. i. 2, 62-3.
23 Petrarch refers to a Calabrian monk who had begun giving him lessons in Greek, but left him on being appointed to a bishopric.
24 Tusculan Orations, i. 21.
25 Wisdom, viii. 21.
26 Cor. xii. 9.
27 Confessions, viii. 7.
28 Æneid, ii. 361-9.
29 Æneid, ii. 622.
30 Horace, Odes, xi. 10, 6-8.
31 Tusculan Orations, iii. 11.
32 Horace, Epist., i. 18, 110.
33 Horace, Epist., i. 18, 106-8.
34 Lucian, 343.
35 He refers to the fact that his father was banished from Florence, and he himself was born in exile at Arezzo.
36 Avignon.
37 Horace, Epist., ii. 2, 76.
38 Epist., ii. 2, 77 (Conington).
39 Petrarch’s Epist., ii. 2, 77.
40 Seneca’s Letters, lvi.
41 Tusculan Orations, cxi.
42 Æneid, i. 58.
43 Ibid., vi. 730.
44 Ibid., i. 52-57.
45 Æneid i. 57.
46 Tusculan Orations, iv. 38.
47 Æneid, viii. 334.
48 Pro Marcello, ii.
49 Catilina, viii.
50 Eclogue, vii. 75.