According to Ernest Hatch Wilkins’s biography, Life of Petrarch (The University of Chicago Press, 1961), Petrarch was one of the most remarkable men of all time for several reasons, among these his attentiveness to historical events both during his lifetime and in the past, his many interests and friendships, and his impressive scholarship and writing. In fact, according to Wilkins, it is thanks to Petrarch’s hundreds of letters and notes that “we know far more about his experiences in life than we know about the experiences of any human being who had lived before his time” (v).
Petrarch is known today for reviving interest in Greek and Latin literature and promoting humanism, which, thanks to him, became the dominant intellectual movement in the centuries to follow. Although most of his written works are in Latin, his most celebrated work today is his autobiographical songbook of 366 poems in the Italian vernacular dedicated to a woman named Laura, which we refer to as the Canzoniere or Rime sparse. Less well-known are his six Triumphs (Triumphi) in terza rima, the rhyme scheme of Dante’s Divine Comedy, on the themes of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Both works were usually published together until the late eighteenth century. When read together, St. Augustine’s influence becomes clearer.
We know that Augustine’s Confessions directly inspired Petrarch’s introspection and self-questioning in his vernacular poetry. According to Wilkins, Petrarch owned a pocket copy of Confessions that he always carried with him. One of Petrarch’s favorite passages commented on the lack of self-analysis in his contemporaries: in Book X Augustine declares, “People go to admire lofty mountains, and huge breakers at sea, and crashing waterfalls, and vast stretches ofocean, and the dance of the stars, but they leave themselves behind out of sight” (conf. 10.8.15; tr. Boulding).
A cleric who may or may not have taken minor orders, Petrarch clearly identified with Augustine’s religious life and journey toward conversion in Confessions. What he did not share with Augustine was the north African saint’s certainty and detachment from earthly things. Petrarch’s two “chains” included his love for Laura and earthly glory, which he never renounced, as he says in poem 80, “It is so hard for me to leave my accustomed life.”
Both Petrarch and Augustine seem to portray different conversion narratives in their writing, but they are really more alike than different. Like Augustine, Petrarch is a great truth seeker, lover, and sinner, but it is through seeking and sin that both men learn about love and God. Both incorporate in their works the two greatest commandments from the Gospel: that we must love the one God and love our neighbor as ourselves (in Mark 12, for instance). Both seek to enter into mystery and paradox and explore many important questions in their writing through relationship and experience with others, and, through others, with God.
Today we have inherited from the romantic poets a fascination with the unrequited love of the Canzoniere; we must return to the Triumphs to read the original story: that Petrarch’s love was requited, and his beloved leads him on a path of conversion, virtue, and grace. In the second part of the Triumph of Death, Petrarch encounters Laura’s ghost and finally asks her, “Did Love ever create the thought in your head to have mercy on my long suffering, while never leaving your high, chaste enterprise?” She replies with a smile, “My heart was never divided from you, nor will it ever be, but my severe gaze tempered your flame, for to save you and me and our youthful fame there was no other way; nor therefore with the lash is a mother less merciful.” His dialogue with Laura here mirrors his conversation with Augustine in the Secretum, Petrarch’s Latin dialogue in which he examines his faith with the help of Augustine and Lady Truth.
Augustine and Laura are the wiser and more virtuous exemplars who understand the truth of the world and the afterlife: Laura denied the expression of her earthly love for Petrarch, like Augustine gave up the “common-law wife” in favor of a life devoted to God. She made sure that her love and desire were kept in check by reason; she made sure her love for Petrarch did not exceed her love for God, as Petrarch describes in sonnet 215, “Love has joined himself with chastity in her.” In the end, the gradual transformation of Petrarch’s love for Laura over a lifetime allows her to lead him as close to peace as possible this side of Heaven (“peace” – pace – is the final word of the Canzoniere). And the Triumphs show how Laura leads him on to Heaven and Eternity (“heaven” – cielo – is the last word of the Triumphs).
