Theological Origins of Modernity

petrarch and the invention of individuality 59
through dialogue or discussion. Self-knowledge thus comes about through
seeing oneself through the eyes of another, but another who is also in some
sense another self. 99 As Petrarch later remarks in the Remedies, such talk
“will discover you unto yourself, who seeing all things, sees not yourself.”
100 Th e purpose of such a discovery is not merely self-understanding
but self-improvement and self-perfection.
Th is becomes clear if we compare My Secret to its obvious model,
Augustine’s Confessions. In the Confessions, Augustine speaks directly
to God, lays bare his soul to one who already knows it thoroughly in the
hope of forgiveness and the redemption of his sins. In My Secret, Petrarch
speaks to a human being long dead, who of course does not know anything
about him, with the goal not of gaining forgiveness but of curing himself. 101
He does not throw himself on God’s mercy but hopes through his imaginary
therapeutic conversation to free himself from the passions that have
distracted and enslaved him. His goal is thus not redemption but self-perfection,
and he hopes to achieve this not by grace but by the human will. 102
At the center of My Secret is thus not God but the ideal of undiff erentiated
moral perfection, ontologically Platonist and morally Stoic. 103 Moreover,
the Augustine who appears in My Secret is more akin to Seneca than to the
Augustine who actually wrote the Confessions or the City of God. 104
the superiority of the private life
At the end of the My Secret, Petrarch promises Augustine: “I will be true to
myself, so far as in me lies. I will pull myself together and collect my scattered
wits, and make a great endeavor to possess my soul in patience.” 105
He foresees, however, that he will be distracted from this goal by a crowd
of important worldly aff airs. A life of virtue in which one remains true
to oneself requires removal from the press of daily life. Petrarch explains
and justifi es this retreat in Th e Solitary Life (1346–56). In this work, written
during the plague years, he lays out a path between the vita activa of classic
virtue that he portrayed in his Africa and the vita contemplativa of monasticism
that withdraws itself from any engagement with others. 106 Th is
path is in fact a conception of what we have come to think of as the private
life that frees itself from the burden of public aff airs not out of any hatred
of man or love of God but in order to enter into a life of study, of reading
and writing surrounded by friends and devoid of the distracting passions
engendered by the world. 107
Petrarch asserts unequivocally in Th e Solitary Life that public life is incompatible
with virtue. At the heart of this claim is his conviction that