Theological Origins of Modernity

petrarch and the invention of individuality 67
Th ough our ultimate goal does not lie in virtue, where the philosophers locate
it, it is through the virtues that the direct way leads to the place where it
does lie; and these virtues, I must add, must be not merely known but loved.
Th erefore, the true moral philosophers and useful teachers of the virtues are
those whose fi rst and last intention is to make hearer and reader good, those
who do not merely teach what virtue and vice are . . . but sow into our hearts
love of the best and eager desire for it and at the same time hatred of the
worst and how to fl ee it. It is safer to strive for a good and pious will than for
a capable and clear intellect. Th e object of the will . . . is to be good; that of
the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth. . . .
In this life it is impossible to know God in His fullness; piously and ardently
to love Him is possible . . . [as it is] to know that virtue is the next best thing
to God himself. When we know this, we shall love him for his sake with our
heart and marrows, and virtue we shall love for His sake too. 165
On its surface, this view seems very pious, but it does not live up to Jesus’
two commandments. Petrarch does not suggest that we follow divine
commands, that we love our neighbor, or that we lead a life of poverty and
ascetic denial. Still, he also does not fall into either an Epicureanism or
Stoicism that is centered completely on man. 166 He continues to praise the
classical life of virtue, the value of friends, and the necessity of leisure, but
he praises them not in their own right but because it is pleasing to God
and is the road to our immortality. Th e highest Christian possibility, for
Petrarch, thus looks remarkably like the life of the philosophic sage and
decidedly unlike that of the saint or the martyr. Petrarch mentions the
example of Socrates only rarely, but it is clearly something like the life of
Socrates that he has in mind. Th us, in his view we come to understand our
duty not through Scripture or the works of the Fathers, but through an
introspective self-examination. “Conscience,” Petrarch tells us, “is the best
judge of virtue.” 167 It is the witness that tells us what is right. 168 Coming
to terms with this voice may include the reading of Scripture (along with
Cicero, Seneca, et al.), but it ultimately depends upon the kind of critical
self-examination Petrarch undertook in My Secret and the withdrawal
from public life that he described in Th e Solitary Life.
Petrarch thus neither sets man up to rival God nor deprives man of God.
Rather, he seeks to combine Christianity with the notion of virtue he fi nds
in Cicero and Seneca. All of this is enclosed within a notion of individuality
that is prefi gured in if not derived from nominalism. To put the matter
more generally, Petrarch seeks a synthesis of Augustinianism that emphasizes
man’s dependence on his creator with a Stoicism that emphasizes his