Petrarchan Humanism

Gur Zak's Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self is a little gem. The summary on the back cover is helpful, as far as it goes:

Overcome by a strong sense of fragmentation, Petrarch turned to the ancient idea that philosophy can bring harmony and wholeness to the soul through the use of spiritual exercises in the form of writing. Examining his vernacular poetry and his Latin works from both literary and historical perspectives, Zak explores Petrarch's attempts to use writing as a spiritual exercise, how his spiritual techniques absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that arose from his efforts to care for the self through writing.

The "tensions" referenced arose from Petrarch's dependence upon three model writers as guides to writing one's way to a sense of personal integration: Seneca, Ovid, and Augustine.

Seneca claimed that writing, as a mode of reflection, was a pathway to virtue. Ovid, on the other hand, wrote in order to activate desire. Virtue and desire are not necessarily in conflict, but Seneca's eclectic Stoicism regarded desire as a potential snare to the attainment of virtue. St. Augustine, though schooled in the "pagan" classics, was deeply conflicted about their value as aids to virtue and so, from an Augustinian perspective, both Seneca and Ovid were to be held under a cloud of suspicion.

Zak argues that Petrarch spent much of his life struggling to find some sort of balance among these three competing modes until, late in life, he wrote a series of letters that "bring to the fore a sense of reconciliation, of compromise, of finding a middle ground between these different tendencies and practices" (Zak, 143).

He then takes the reader through selections of Petrarch's correspondence in order to demonstrate how the great man of letters achieved his goal. In the end, it appears that he settled upon a kind of cost-benefit analysis: "Despite their unavoidable limitations, Petrarch ultimately asserts...that the pursuit of virtue through writing and the reading of secular letters is the best means available in this life to care for both himself and the world around him, to bring it back to the virtue and glory of old" (ibid., 157).

In other words, Petrarch learned to say "no" to St. Augustine (and did so, in part, by weighing Augustine's own practice of reading "secular letters" against his saintly admonitions against them).

It takes a humanist, like Petrarch or Shakespeare, to recognize that there are customs "more honour'd in the breach than the observance" (Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.4.18).