Francesco Petrarca

“ 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? ”

“ It needs but a trifle sometimes, when the soul is emerging from its miseries, to plunge it quite back once more into the abyss. To see the purple on the shoulders of another will rouse again all our sleeping ambition; the sight of a little pile of money sets up our thirst for gold; one look at some fair lady will stir again our desire; the light glance of an eye will awaken sleeping love.
It is no wonder plagues like these take possession of your minds, when you see the madness of the world; and when once they have found their way back to the soul, they come with fatal ease. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Petrarch. May the Most High in His mercy save me from that misery!
S. Augustine. Though Divine Mercy may deliver a man from his folly, yet it will not excuse it. Presume not upon this mercy overmuch. For if God abhors those who lose hope, He also laughs at those who in false hope put their trust. I was sorry when I heard fall from your lips that phrase about despising what you called the old story of the philosophers on this matter. Is it, then, an old story, pray, by figures of geometry, to show how small is all the earth, and to prove it but an island of little length and width? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though everything is rotten with age, the soul has never grown up, never come to maturity, and it is a truth, as the proverb says, "One soul uses up many bodies." Infancy passes, but, as Seneca remarks, "childishness remains." [47] And, believe me, perhaps you are not so young as you imagine, for the greater part of mankind have not yet reached the age which you have.
Blush, therefore, to pass for an aged lover; blush to be so long the Public's jest; and if true glory has no charm for you and ridicule no terror, at least let change of heart come to the rescue and save you from disgrace. ”

“ 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? ”

“ What you are you owe to the bounty of Nature; what you might have been she has quite cut off, or rather let me say you yourself have cut it off, for she indeed is innocent. That beauty which seemed so charming and so sweet, through the burning flame of your desire, through the continual rain of your tears, has done away all that harvest that should have grown from the seeds of virtue in your soul. It is a false boast of yours that she has held you back from base things; from some perhaps she may, but only to plunge you into evils worse still. ”

“ Petrarch. What should I say but that such a calamity would be the climax of all my miseries? Yet I should try and comfort myself with what was past. But may the winds bear away the words from our lips and the hurricane scatter such an omen to the ends of the earth!
S. Augustine. Ah, blindfold one! you see not yet what foolishness it is so to subject your soul to things of earth, that kindle in it the flames of desire, that have no power to give it rest, that cannot endure; and, while promising to charm you with their sweetness, torment you with perpetual agitations. ”

“ You may have changed the outside fashion of your life, but have not yet persuaded me that your soul is also changed.
If your flame is calmed and softened somewhat, yet it is not for certain quite put out. But you who set such price on her you love, do you not see how deeply by absolving her you condemn yourself? You delight in seeing in her the model of purity, and you avow yourself to be without any feeling and a criminal; and you protest that she is the most happy of women, while her love has made you the most unhappy of men. ”

“ Petrarch. Well do I know that old story bandied about by the philosophers, how they declare that all the earth is but a tiny point, how the soul alone endures for infinite millions of years, how fame cannot fill either the earth or the soul, and other paltry pleas of this sort, by which they try to turn minds aside from the love of glory. But I beg you will produce some more solid arguments than these, if you know any; for experience has shown me that all this is more specious than convincing. I do not think to become as God, or to inhabit eternity, or embrace, heaven and earth. ”

“ Petrarch. Spare your reproaches, I pray. Thais and Livia were both mortal women; but you should be aware that she of whom you have set out to speak is a mind that has no care for things of earth, and burns only with the love of what is heavenly. In whose face, unless truth is an empty word, a certain divine loveliness shines out; whose character is the image and picture of perfect honour; whose voice and the living expression of whose eyes has nothing mortal in it; whose very form and motion is not as that of others. ”

“ Petrarch. If it is enough to acknowledge, I hope to be able to be not only well but quite well, for never have I understood more clearly that my wishes for liberty and for an end to my misery have been too lukewarm. But can it be enough to desire only?
S. Augustine. Why do you ask?
Petrarch. I mean, to desire without doing anything.
S. Augustine. What you propose is an impossibility. No one desires ardently and goes to sleep.
Petrarch. Of what use is desire, then?
S. Augustine. Doubtless the path leads through many difficulties, but the desire of virtue is itself a great part of virtue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But let us take for granted (what is quite impossible) that the duration of life will be long and assured: still, do you not find it is the height of madness to squander the best years and the best parts of your existence on pleading only the eyes of others and tickling other men's ears, and to keep the last and worst—the years that are almost good for nothing—that bring nothing but distaste for life and then its end—to keep these, I say, for God and yourself, as though the welfare of your soul were the last thing you cared for? ”

“ For in the gross body and the pleasure of things temporal, not less drunk are you than those old Trojans were, as Virgil saw them, in their slumber and their wine.
Or, looking to another quarter, no less truth is to be found in the neat lines of the Satirist—
"Our lives unfold in morning air As lilies of a day, 'Come bring us wine,' we shout. 'Ho, there, Fetch garlands, odours, damsels fair.' But ah! before we are aware, Old Age sweeps all away." ”

“ 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? ”

“ Petrarch. If my passion is for some low woman of ill fame, my love is the height of folly. But if, fascinated by one who is the image of virtue, I devote myself to love and honour her, what have you to say to that? Do you put no difference between things so entirely opposed? Do you wish to banish all remains of honour from the case? To tell you my real feeling, just as I regard the first kind of love as a heavy and ill-starred burden on the soul, so of the second I think there is hardly any greater blessing to it ”

“ I said—or if, perchance, I am mistaken, I intended to say—that my wish was to use mortal things for what they were worth, to do no violence to nature by bringing to its good things a limitless and immoderate desire, and so to follow after human fame as knowing that both myself and it will perish.
S. Augustine. There you speak as a wise man. But when you declare you are willing to rob yourself of the riches that will endure merely for the sake of what you own is a perishing breath of applause—then you are a fool indeed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of this I think I should have a good hope, because it has never been my lot to put any confidence in those riches and power on which I see so many of my contemporaries, yes, and older men as well, relying. For what folly would it be to pass all one's life in toil and poverty and care, heaping up riches, just to die at last and have no time to enjoy them? So, then, in truth, I regard this dark shadow of death, not as something afar off, but very nigh and ever at the doors. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Unquestionably, even if the soul were mortal, it would be better to think it immortal. For error though it were, yet would it inspire the love of virtue, and that is a thing to be desired for its own sake alone, even if all hope of future reward were taken away from us; and as to which the desire for it will certainly become weaker, as men come to think the soul a mortal thing; and, on the other hand, the promise of a life to come, even if it were to turn out a delusion, is none the less a powerful incentive to the soul, human nature being what it is. ”