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Overview
Arguing that consolatory concerns helped spur the revival of classical schools of psychological thought, McClure reveals that the humanists sought comfort from once-neglected troves of Stoic, Peripatetic, Epicurean, Platonic, and Christian thought. He contends that the humanists' pursuit of solace and their duty as consolers provided not only a forum but perhaps also an incentive for the articulation of prominent Renaissance themes concerning immortality, the dignity of man, and the sanctity of worldly endeavor.
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606699 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1100 |
| Pages: | 324 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism
By George W. McClure
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05598-5
CHAPTER 1
PETRARCH AS SELF-CONSOLER
THE SECRETUM
In letters to friends, in an exhortation to his cowled brother, in an interior dialogue with himself, in a manual for others, Petrarch broadly formulated for himself a special role as a consoler and rhetorical healer. His versatility in fulfilling this role makes him quite unlike his classical and medieval predecessors: his efforts as a consoler transcend genre and signify a more pervasive concern to become a medicus animorum, caring for the variety of ills besetting private and public man. By the time he completed his major consolatory treatise, the De remediis utriusque fortune, Petrarch had achieved an integrated vision both of the task of the verbal healer and of the language of therapeutic oratio. Exacdy how and when he came to formulate this role is difficult to determine: his penchant for revising earlier letters and treatises defies the construction of a sure chronology of his thought. But why he formulated this role can more readily be explored, and can lead us to the center of Petrarch's endeavors as a moral philosopher and rhetorician. At the same time, it takes us to the heart of one of the principal contexts of the emergence of humanist moral thought.
In staking out a new territorial domain as a medicus animorum, Petrarch drew on several therapeutic archetypes of ancient and medieval culture: the remedies of the love poet, the consolations of the philosopher, the admonitions of the priest, and the salves of the doctor. Now in literal, now in figurative terms, strains from all these traditions find their way into Petrarch's vision of healing wisdom. Sometimes the influence of these earlier models is explicit and direct. Other times it is implicit or even, in some cases, antithetical, as when Petrarch sharpens his own therapeutic role in contradistinction to others he finds flawed or insufficient. Whichever the case, Petrarch's experimentation with varieties of consolatio and remedium is a significant Renaissance formulation of the therapeutic potential of moral wisdom and rhetoric. In this and the two following chapters we shall examine the form and content of Petrarch's many consolatory writings, with an eye toward establishing his larger view of remedial wisdom and the broader cultural implications of that view.
Petrarch spent the first years of his life in Provence, where his father, in exile, had followed the Papal Court. Studying law at Montpellier and Bologna, he became devoted instead to letters and turned to a life of literature, in the 1320s beginning his study of the Latin classics and dabbling in Italian verse. A legal career abandoned, Petrarch turned to a type of clerical life: presumably taking the tonsure and possibly even minor orders, he availed himself of the opportunities of minor benefices. In 1330 he was appointed "household chaplain" of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, a position he held on and off for seventeen years. Later he would receive a variety of benefices as canon, rector, or, archdeacon—holding these offices partly or fully in absentia. Not wishing (and technically ineligible) to assume the full pastoral duties of the cura animarum, he refused the offers of a bishopric. His true career, of course, was his life as a poet, scholar, orator, and moral philosopher. Through the patronage of individual clerics or laymen and through the support of ecclesiastical sinecures, Petrarch was virtually free to be Petrarch, the famous poet and intellectual he quickly became. Certainly by the time of his invitations to receive laurel crowns in Rome and Paris in 1340, he could readily trade on his renown. The cost for him personally, however, would be the travails of such an impermanent and itinerant existence: the shuttling back and forth between benefices and patrons. But it was also the very nature of that sometimes precarious existence that must have deepened his investment in the surer world of study and writing.
The ambiguity of Petrarch's vocation is perhaps central to our understanding of his cultural and social perspectives, his professional rivalries, and his subtle roles. He certainly internalized the competitive climate of the arts and disciplines of his day. He was enough of a lawyer to hate doctors. He was more than enough of a poet to contemn both of these. Finally, he was enough of a cleric and monk manqué to doubt the worth of any of these lay stations. Petrarch's "calling" was to be a new type of pious intellectual, giving cultural sanctity to the worlds of Roman moral thought, Tuscan poetry, and latter-day rhetoric, yet also sometimes painfully aware of the traditional spiritual limitations of secular endeavor. It was the nebulous and fluid character of Petrarch's professional and cultural role that allowed his remarkable synthesis of traditions and pieties. And it is that synthesis that evokes so many of the scholarly clichés about Petrarch: that he bridged the worlds "medieval" and "Renaissance," clerical and lay, spiritual and literary, penitential and poetic.
By virtue of his spanning these realms Petrarch forged new perspectives concerning the nature of the human psyche. One of his great contributions was his redefining of the categories of psychological health, both for himself and for others. Fusing poetic experience with other types of moral and spiritual experience, Petrarch moved beyond the formerly somewhat compartmentalized psychological worlds of the poet, philosopher, priest, and penitent. The result was a new outlook not only on the general psychology of human emotion, but also on the specific challenges posed by the human condition: particularly those of misery, illness, and death.
Certainly by the time of his writing Fam. 1.9 (in 1350), Petrarch had established in his own mind the intimate connection between eloquence and moral health. In this letter fictionally addressed to Tommaso da Messina, Petrarch sets out a definition of eloquence, which begins by suggesting a link between the domains of moral philosophy and rhetoric: "The care of the mind calls for a philosopher, while the proper use of language requires an orator." Language is not only the window on our own moral condition but also the social medium of moral exchange and influence. Through the "word," the orator instills virtue in contemporaries and in posterity. But even if the social value of the humanistic word should not inspire the study of eloquence, the private value must. For Petrarch, the written, spoken, and contemplative word is the true medicine for self-healing:
I cannot tell you what worth are to me in solitude certain familiar and famous words not only grasped in the mind but actually spoken orally, words with which I am accustomed to rouse my sleepy thoughts. Furthermore, how much delight I get from repeating the written words either of others or sometimes even my own! How much I feel myself freed from very serious and bitter burdens by such readings! Meantime I feel my own writings assisted me even more since they are more suited to my ailments, just as the sensitive hand of a doctor who is himself ill is placed more readily where he feels the pain to be. Such cure I shall certainly never accomplish unless the salutary words (verba ipsa salutaria) fall tenderly upon my ears.
It is revealing that in this, Petrarch's most direct definition of eloquence, the therapeutic purpose of rhetoric is stressed. Moreover, for Petrarch the "word" is the principal catalyst of a self-therapeutic regimen. Petrarch is deservedly famous for his capacity for introspection. His concern to know and cure the maladies of his own mind is the cornerstone for all his other efforts as a medicus animorum. Thus, it is with his efforts at self-healing that we must begin.
Petrarch's first literary experiences with psychological introspection were poetic. Like Ovid and Dante before him, he learned the habit of subjectivity through love poetry, where descriptions of lovesickness accustomed him to a pattern of emotional self-examination. As Ovid's Metamorphoses showed, the suffering of the lovesick could be literally transforming, and the bittersweet sorrow of the smitten could become comfortable and even nourishing: "Cura dolorque animi, lacrimaeque alimenta fuere" (10.75). Moreover, the cultivation of romantic grief could be tied to and even reified by poetic expression. Dante would make this plain, as he chronicled his own suffering in his La vita nuova, alternating metrical laments with a prose analysis of the anatomy of the lovesick poet. Like those of his predecessors, Petrarch's verses show him also feeding on tears, sighs, and swoons, indulging the pleasant pain of romantic longing. The purpose and process of his poetry concerning Laura is the expression of a voluptas dolendi.
Longing, however, was not the only source of Petrarch's grief. The habit of suffering formed in his love poetry extended to several types of emotional and spiritual experience, most immediately the torments of bereavement and the fear of death. In particular, the loss of Laura and several friends in the Black Death in 1348–49 plunged Petrarch into the cataclysm of the sorrows and horrors of death. In both Latin meters and Italian verse he followed the same regimen as the lovesick poet. The sweet sorrow of writing has an effect that is at once wrenching and therapeutic. In the Eclogue 11, for instance, literary guise only thinly veils Petrarch's own fresh grief over Laura. When "Furca" asks a grieving "Niobe" why she willingly chooses the "lacrimis alimenta," Niobe's answer is that only this is the proper medicine for grief:
Weeping is great comfort for a grave grief,
sighs and laments relieve an afflicted soul.
Contained grief destroys the mind;
the greatest medicine for a sad heart is to weep openly.
Likewise, in prose, several of the Familiares and other letters describe his grief over the death of friends. Confessing his need to exorcize his sorrow with writing and weeping, he sometimes used his letters as opportunities for literary catharsis—in one case (Fam. 4.10) even announcing tentative plans (never realized) for an entire treatise of self-consolation for a recent loss. Fam. 7.12 charts his emotional experience in such a bereavement, portraying a despairing Petrarch's struggle with the conflicting demands of emotion and reason:
Shall I indulge in tears and sighs and in place of my lost friend shall I embrace my sorrow incessantly? Or shall I strive to appease my mind and to escape from the echoing threats of fortune into the stronghold of reason? The latter appears preferable, the former more pleasing; virtue drives me to one; feeling bends me to the other.
Emotion, it would seem, triumphed. At the end of this letter of plangent outpourings Petrarch exclaims: "But alas I am now proving what I read in Statius: 'Speaking is sweet to those in misery' [Theb. 5.48], It is certainly so, for how many things did I, unawares, pour forth impetuously rather than through rational judgment!" And, indeed, more than once, Petrarch's mourning sought escape in "sweet grief" and literary expression.
Beyond longing, bereavement, and fear, Petrarch broadened the parameters of his self-healing to embrace larger problems of spiritual sickness and worldly despair. It is, of course, in his Secretum, a three-day dialogue between himself and his divine "physician" Augustine, that he undertakes the most prolonged analysis and treatment of his soul. In this powerful work Petrarch first began to transform and reintegrate the disparate psychological strains in classical and medieval thought. Delineating various layers of his maladies of mind and spirit, the dialogue most generally depicts Petrarch's guilt, but also sorrow, over his vulnerability to the vicissitudes of the saeculum. The dating of the work continues to be a subject of great debate. Though Petrarch's comments in the dialogue would suggest a fictive date of 1342–43, scholarly opinion is now justifiably leaning toward a later period of 1347–53. This latter date would put the writing of the dialogue after an important moment in Petrarch's spiritual life: his brother's entrance into a Carthusian monastery in 1343. The magnitude of this event is reflected in several of Petrarch's writings, most explicitly in the De otio religiose and the "Ascent of Mt. Ventoux" (Fam. 4.1), and perhaps implicitly in the Psalmi penitentiales and the De vita solitaria. It is not to our purposes here to try to solve the dating question concerning the Secretum, but suffice it to say that the dialogue was very likely written after Gherardo took the cowl, and that this fact partly explains the work's spiritual drama and its ascetic currents. Regardless, however, of whether Gherardo was the catalyst or not, Petrarch's crisis in the dialogue largely revolved around his concern to recognize and to heal his spiritual maladies. In doing so, he turns partially from a poetic model of healing to a penitential one, though, as we shall see, in a uniquely modified way.
Much of the historical importance of the De secreto conflictu curarum mearum lies in the ambiguity of its genre. Interestingly, various manuscripts and early printed editions of the work title it as a contemptus mundi. That this dialogue would be thus categorized is understandable and somewhat justified: proclaiming the misery and vanity of the saeculum, the treatise does portray Christian scorn for the temporal realm. But unlike Innocent III's De contemptu mundi, seu de miseria humanae conditionis, the dialogue is also subjective and confessional. Though taking a markedly different tack, Petrarch is Augustine's successor in fashioning the genre of spiritual autobiography. But more than a contemptus, a confessio, and an autobiography, the dialogue is also a consolatio. It is this consolatory context of the Secretum that needs to be more fully elucidated. Both the general clinical framework of the dialogue and aspects of Petrarch's despair in the second book make the work a remarkable, almost contradictory fusion of contemptus and consolatio. This ambiguity is perhaps partly revealed in the language of the title, where Petrarch settles on the term "conflictus." Besides presenting confession and self-consolation, Petrarch's dialogue describes a conflict between the spiritual and the secular man, a conflict not fully resolved even by the dialogue's end. The Secretum's grounding in a tradition of conflictus literature needs further study. Though Petrarch takes the genre much further, he may have been influenced by Hildebert of Lavardin's De querimonia et conflictu carnis et spiritus seu animae. For Petrarch, the "conflict of his cares" might have been mirrored in his attempt to contemn worldly vicissitudes as he simultaneously sought to cure them with secular consolations.
The dialogue depicts Petrarch's (Franciscus') encounter with the figures of Veritas and Augustinus, who appear before him in a vision as he reflects on the nature of his life. His principal sources for this motif were Augustine's Soliloquies and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. The motif of healing, found only partly in the former, he drew chiefly from the latter, in which Lady Philosophy engages the imprisoned Boethius to cure him of his despair. In the Secretum, Veritas brings in Augustinus, that "most excellent healer of passions he himself has experienced." Because of his interest in classical thought, because of his own prolonged conflict over secular and spiritual concerns, Augustine is the perfect doctor for Petrarch. However, Petrarch makes of Augustinus an unusual and syncretic physician, ministering not only spiritual admonitions but also secular comforts.
The dialogue moves from a general to a more specific treatment of Petrarch's maladies. In Book 1 Augustinus prescribes as a regimen for Franciscus' spiritual health an effective meditation on death and a true desire to rise from the earthly to the eternal. But he observes that Franciscus is held back from doing this by a weak will—similar to his own weak will prior to his conversion in the Confessions, a failing that reflected the dominance of secular over spiritual interests. Augustinus further ventures the diagnosis that Franciscus' inability to meditate meaningfully is caused by an overload of sensual distractions, and Book 2 explores these worldly encumbrances, narrowing in on Petrarch's own particular moral and psychological afflictions. The final book concentrates on Franciscus' most serious spiritual ills, the vanities of love and glory arising from his poetic devotion to Laura and his classical quest for fame. The Secretum, then, portrays Petrarch's mortal, volitional weakness as "Everyman" (Book 1), his particular sins as a Christian penitent (Book 2), and his special temptations as a poet and celebrity (Book 3). As a healer, Augustinus must move deftly between spiritual, moral, and emotional realms. Petrarch thus uses his fictitious physician to integrate several different types of healing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism by George W. McClure. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xi
- INTRODUCTION. THE CLASSICAL AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS, pg. 3
- CHAPTER 1. Petrarch as Self-Consoler: The Secretum, pg. 18
- CHAPTER 2. Petrarch as Public Consoler: The Letters, pg. 30
- CHAPTER 3. Petrarch as Universal Consoler: The De remediis utriusque fortune, pg. 46
- CHAPTER 4. Consolation and Community: Coluccio Salutati as Friend and Comforter, pg. 73
- CHAPTER 5. The Art of Mourning: Autobiographical Writings on the Loss of a Son, pg. 93
- CHAPTER 6. The Science of Consoling: A Litde-Known Clerical Manual of Consolation, pg. 116
- CHAPTER 7. Grief and Melancholy in Medicean Florence: Marsilio Ficino and the Platonic Regimen, pg. 132
- CONCLUSION. The Italian Renaissance and Beyond, pg. 155
- NOTES, pg. 167
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 287
- INDEX, pg. 301