Theological Origins of Modernity

66 chapter two
that any such human beings ever existed. Finally, the virtues of the fourth
category pertain to God alone and are utterly beyond human beings. Th e
highest form of life possible for actual human beings, in Petrarch’s view,
is thus the life of the man who truly masters his passions by eliminating
rather than merely moderating them. For Petrarch such a life is only possible
if it is led in private to please oneself and not in public for the praise
of the multitude.
Th e ability to succeed in such a life depends in good measure upon individual
human capacities, and particularly the strength of one’s will, but
Petrarch never claims that such capacities are all that is needed. Without
Christ and his help, he asserts, no one can become wise and good. 159 Petrarch
thus seems to reject Pelagianism. For Petrarch, God as the Trinity is
the highest power, the highest wisdom, and the highest good. 160 Th is claim
tells us a good deal about Petrarch’s theological views. Ancient thinkers
such as Cicero, according to Petrarch, understood that the divine must
be rational and good, but they did not and could not comprehend divine
power because they were unable to grasp the divine capacity for creatio ex
nihilo. Th is was the great breakthrough that Christ and Christianity made
possible. 161 It is this crucial fact that “Epicurus and his followers could
not know and our Aristotelian philosophers do not deign to know.” 162
Th ey did not understand that the world is created through the word as
an expression of divine will, that is, that the articulation of the word creates
the world because it is the expression of divine will and power. Th e
ancients were unable to understand such a God because they continued
to measure all gods by human capacities. Omnipotence, however, is not
possible for man. Like the nominalists Petrarch lays great emphasis on
the omnipotence of the divine will and the radical separation of God
and man.
In contrast to the nominalists, however, Petrarch sees a God who is
willful but not unsettling. For nominalism, the idea of absolute divine
power had as its corollary divine unpredictability. For Petrarch, by contrast,
God is “the one, the Good, the True, the stably abiding.” 163 As such,
he is a lodestone for human beings: “Human longing is boundless and
insatiable until it comes to rest in thee, above whom there is no place to
which it could still rise.” 164 In his omnipotence, such a God, in Petrarch’s
view, is both unreachable and yet infi nitely lovable. Petrarch ties together
this view of the divine and the role of religion in human life with his concern
for virtue in his late treatise, “Of Our Own Ignorance and Th at of Many
Others”: