The subject of Petrarch’s relationship to St. Augustine has long engaged scholars of intellectual history, church history, and literature, among other fields. This book is an ambitious, well-written, and thoughtful contribution to that extended conversation, for its author seeks to make more comprehensive and more nuanced our understanding of their relationship. In this, he also questions many of the conclusions of earlier commentators. This is a bold undertaking, and it raises provocative questions, not least about the endurance of this topic as well as about the author’s guiding principles.
Lee’s central hypotheses are that Augustine’s influence on Petrarch’s thought has been viewed to date somewhat superficially, for scholars into our own times have too often traced inconsistency and ambivalence in Petrarch’s reading of the saint, particularly with respect to theological and moral questions. Previous commentators, too often treading long-worn paths, have neglected to examine Augustine’s theology in its own right, as well as the deeper character of Renaissance humanism itself. They have too frequently found shelter within the categories of Stoicism and Peripateticism, on the one hand, and “Augustinianism,” on the other. Given the Olympian figures who have so indelibly shaped our image of Petrarch — one thinks of E. H. Wilkins and Giuseppe Billanovich, to name only two — and taking into consideration the more recent, illuminating studies of Ronald G. Witt and Carol Quillen, these are audacious propositions.
A valuable aspect of this study is its inclusiveness in terms of Petrarch’s and Augustine’s own writings. This comprehensiveness is matched by the selection of secondary voices to whom Lee defers or with whom he is in disagreement. Many readers will find especially noteworthy his discussion of the publications of Paul Oskar Kristeller, Jerrold E. Siegel, and Charles Trinkaus, in all of whom he finds at times incomplete and unconvincing assessments of Petrarch’s philosophy, his views on poetry, rhetoric, and the will. Augustine’s influence on Petrarch was not only coherent, Lee discovers, but also profoundly moral and lifelong.
The author argues his case across six chapters, beginning with “A Question of Attribution,” in which he points out, quite fairly, that Petrarch’s frequent quotation of ancient authors does not in any simple way suggest philosophical congruity with them, nor does it get at the complex identity of the act of imitation itself; in all of this, nonetheless, Petrarch remained true to Augustine. In his second chapter, “Stoicism and ‘Augustinianism’ in the Secretum,” Lee identifies in previous interpretations an “inflexible understanding” (26) of Petrarch’s Augustine (the Soliloquies and De vera religione) with regard to virtue, and particularly a notion of Stoicism. In “All in the Mind: Otium in the De Otio Religioso,” the third chapter, the author considers Petrarch’s treatise, De otio religioso, which he claims is one of his most neglected works. Otium was, for Petrarch, a kind of active leisure, leading not so much to the later humanistic debates to which it is traditionally connected but, rather, to a new vision of the virtuous processes of philosophy itself. In the fourth chapter, “The Hidden Life of Solitude,” Lee pursues these themes, distinguishing between the constructs of classical authors — Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Seneca — and the ideals of Petrarch’s De vita solitaria. Neither Stoic nor Epicurean, these ideals, he maintains, were indebted to Augustine’s vacatio, which was his idea about a state of mind rather than a literal or poetical retreat into nature.
In an interesting excursus at the end of this chapter, the author evaluates Petrarch’s landscape imagery from the point of view of his Augustinianism, that is, from the perspectives of an indwelling peace and sovereign moral calm. About his fifth chapter, “The Holy Passion of Friendship,” the author notes, and perhaps it is an overstatement, that Petrarch’s concept of amicitia “seems to have aroused almost no interest within the field” (230); this is, nevertheless, a helpful survey of friendship, from Cicero and Seneca, and Petrarch’s sophisticated Augustinian reading of them, to Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, and Gasparo Contarini. Finally, in “Eloquence and Philosophy,” the author reflects on the historiography of Renaissance rhetoric, finding again in Petrarch a consistent moral philosophical vein, notably in Africa, the Coronation Oration, De remediis utriusque fortune, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, and the Invective contra medicum. Not so much Ciceronian in inspiration, these works recall Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and, as a whole, they further Petrarch’s moral philosophical project.
This is a richly documented, synthetic, and persuasive analysis. At times, however, one asks whether the author is being wholly sensitive to the labors and subtle erudition of the scholars on whom he depends and with whom he differs. The modern reader might also welcome an answer to the question of why it is that consistency and wholeness of thought — the presence of a cohesive moral philosophical agenda — is prima facie a self-evident good. Across the range of Petrarch’s works, there are undoubtedly inconsistencies, ambiguities, and self-conscious prevarications. In these, we perceive an abiding and all-too-human frailty, alongside a sometimes playful and certainly opinionated historical imagination.
