Theological Origins of Modernity

petrarch and the invention of individuality 57
in fact his work was generally known only from the excerpts presented in
Peter Lombard’s famous Sentences. Moreover, with the revival of Aristotle
in the thirteenth century, Augustine suff ered a marked decline, although
the Franciscans and Augustinian Hermits remained loyal to him. 78 It
was thus only with the nominalist revolution and the rise of humanism
that Augustine returned to the center of theological and philosophical
speculation. 79
Petrarch sees Augustine philosophically as a Platonist. Petrarch, however,
did not know Plato well. He believed, for example, that for Plato the
fi nal good is virtue, which can only be attained by imitating God. Th erefore,
he was convinced that for Plato to philosophize was to love God. Th is
is a point, he argued, with which Augustine agreed. 80 Furthermore, since
“there can be no doubt that the only true knowledge is to know and to
honor God, [it follows that]: ‘Piety is wisdom.’ ” 81 To know God, however,
one must know oneself. Th e supreme philosophical/theological work is
thus Augustine’s Confessions, and it was this work, above all others, that
shaped Petrarch’s Christianity.
Th e importance of Augustine for Petrarch becomes apparent in his famous
account of his ascent of Mount Ventoux. 82 Allegorizing his brother’s
direct ascent up the mountain and his wayward course to their diff erent
approaches to the divine, he writes that when he reached the summit, he
sat down and opened his copy of the Confessions and his eyes immediately
fell upon the following passage: “And men admire the high mountains,
the vast fl oods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference
of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.” 83
He says that he was stunned and angry with himself that he still admired
earthly things. He concludes, citing Seneca, that “long since I ought to
have learned, even from pagan philosophers, that ‘nothing is admirable
besides the mind; compared to its greatness nothing is great.’ ” 84 What he
learned from Augustine and what he feels he ought to have learned already
from Seneca was the comparative unimportance of earthly goods
(including fame) and the crucial need for self-examination, for it is only
by knowing oneself that it is possible to come to know the eternal. 85 It was
this insight that was at the heart of the great transformation in Petrarch’s
thought that produced his most introspective and penetrating work, My
Secret, or Th e Soul’s Confl ict with Passion.
petrarch’s search for himself
My Secret has been called the “most scathing self-examination that any
man ever made.” 86 It is written as three confessional dialogues between