chain of reasoning valid, when we say that a perfect knowledge of one's
misery will beget a perfect desire to be rid of it, if only the power
to be rid may follow the desire.
_Petrarch_. I have professed that I will believe you in everything.
_S. Augustine._ I feel there is still something you would like to urge,
even now. Do, please, confess it, no matter what it may be.
_Petrarch._ Nothing, only that I am much amazed I to think I should
never yet have wished what I have believed I always wished.
_S. Augustine._ You still stick at that point. O well, to put an end to
this kind of talk I will agree that you have wished sometimes.
_Petrarch._ What then?
_S. Augustine._ Do you not remember the phrase of Ovid--
"To wish for what you want is not enough;
With ardent longing you must strive for it."[6]
_Petrarch._ I understand, but thought that was just what I had been
doing.
_S. Augustine._ You were mistaken.
_Petrarch._ Well, I will believe so.
_S. Augustine._ To make your belief certain, examine your own
conscience. Conscience is the best judge of virtue. It is a guide, true
and unerring, that weighs every thought and deed. It will tell you that
you have never longed for spiritual health as you ought, but that,
considering what great dangers beset you, your wishes were but feeble
and ineffective.
_Petrarch._ I have been examining my conscience, as you suggested.
_S. Augustine._ What do you find?
_Petrarch._ That what you say is true.
_S. Augustine._ We have made a little progress, if you are beginning to
be awake. It will soon be better with you now you acknowledge it was
not well hitherto.
_Petrarch._ If it is enough to acknowledge, I hope to be able to be
not only well but quite well, for never have I understood more clearly
that my wishes for liberty and for an end to my misery have been too
lukewarm. But can it be enough to desire only?
_S. Augustine._ Why do you ask?
_Petrarch._ I mean, to desire without doing anything.
_S. Augustine._ What you propose is an impossibility. No one desires
ardently and goes to sleep.
_Petrarch._ Of what use is desire, then?
_S. Augustine._ Doubtless the path leads through many difficulties, but
the desire of virtue is itself a great part of virtue.
_Petrarch._ There you give me ground for good hope.
_S. Augustine._ All my discourse is just to teach you how to hope and
to fear.
_Petrarch._ Why to fear?
_S. Augustine._ Then tell me why to hope?
_Petrarch._ Because whereas so far I have striven, and with much
tribulation, merely not to become worse, you now open a way to me
whereby I may become better and better, even to perfection.
_S. Augustine._ But maybe you do not think how toilsome that way is.
_Petrarch._ Have you some now terror in store for me?
_S. Augustine._ To desire is but one word, but how many things go to
make it up!
_Petrarch._ Your words make me tremble.
_S. Augustine._ Not to mention the positive elements in desire, it
involves the destruction of many other objects.
_Petrarch._ I do not quite take in your meaning.
_S. Augustine._ The desire of all good cannot exist without thrusting
out every lower wish. You know how many different objects one longs for
in life. All these you must first learn to count as nothing before you
can rise to the desire for the chief good; which a man loves less when
along with it he loves something else that does not minister to it.
_Petrarch_. I recognise the thought.
_S. Augustine_. How many men are there who have extinguished all their
passions, or, not to speak of extinguishing, tell me how many are there
who have subdued their spirit to the control of Reason, and will dare
to say, "I have no more in common with my body; all that once seemed
so pleasing to me is become poor in my sight. I aspire now to joys of
nobler nature"?
_Petrarch_. Such men are rare indeed. And now I understand what those
difficulties are with which you threatened me.
_S. Augustine_. When all these passions are extinguished, then, and not
till then, will desire be full and free. For when the soul is uplifted
on one side to heaven by its own nobility, and on the other dragged
down to earth by the weight of the flesh and the seductions of the
world, so that it both desires to rise and also to sink at one and the
same time, then, drawn contrary ways, you find you arrive nowhither.
_Petrarch._ What, then, would you say a man must do for his soul to
break the fetters of the world, and mount up perfect and entire to the
realms above?
_S. Augustine._ What leads to this goal is, as I said in the first
instance, the practice of meditation on death and the perpetual
recollection of our mortal nature.
_Petrarch._ Unless I am deceived, there is no man alive who is more
often revolving this thought in his heart than I.
_S. Augustine._ Ah, here is another delusion, a fresh obstacle in your
way!
_Petrarch._ What! Do you mean to say I am once more lying?
_Augustine._ I would sooner hear you use more civil language.
_Petrarch._ But to say the same thing?
_S. Augustine._ Yes, to say nothing else.
_Petrarch._ So then you mean I care nothing at all about death?
_S. Augustine._ To tell the truth you think very seldom of it, and
in so feeble a way that your thought never touches the root of your
trouble.
_Petrarch._ I supposed just the opposite.
_S. Augustine._ I am not concerned with what you suppose, but with what
you ought to suppose.
_Petrarch._ Well, I may tell you that in spite of that I will suppose
it no more, if you prove to me that my supposition was a false one.
_S. Augustine._ That I will do easily enough, provided you are willing
to admit the truth in good faith. For this end I will call in a
witness who is not far away.
_Petrarch_. And who may that be, pray?
_S. Augustine._ Your conscience.
_Petrarch_. She testifies just the contrary.
_S. Augustine._ When you make an obscure, confused demand no witness
can give precise or clear answers.
_Petrarch._ What has that to do with the subject, I would like to know?
_S. Augustine._ Much, every way. To see dearly, listen well. No man is
so senseless (unless he be altogether out of his mind) as never once
to remember his own weak nature, or who, if asked the question whether
he were mortal and dwelt in a frail body, would not answer that he
was. The pains of the body, the onsets of fever, attest the fact; and
whom has the favour of Heaven made exempt? Moreover, your friends are
carried out to their burial before your eyes; and this fills the soul
with dread. When one goes to the graveside of some friend of one's own
age one is forced to tremble at another's fall and to begin feeling
uneasy for oneself; just as when you see your neighbour's roof on fire,
you cannot fool quite happy for your own, because, as Horace puts it--
"On your own head you see the stroke will fall."[7]
The impression will be more strong in case you see some sudden death
carry off one younger, more vigorous, finer looking than yourself. In
such an event a man will say, "This one seemed to live secure, and yet
he is snatched off. His youth, his beauty, his strength have brought
him no help. What God or what magician has promised me any surer
warrant of security? Verily, I too am mortal."
When the like fate befalls kings and rulers of the earth, people of
great might and such as are regarded with awe, those who see it are
struck with more dread, are more shaken with alarm; they are amazed
when they behold a sudden terror, or perchance hours of intense agony
seize on one who was wont to strike terror into others. From what
other cause proceed the doings of people who seem beside themselves
upon the death of men in highest place, such as, to take an instance
from history, the many things of this kind that, as you have related,
were done at the funeral of Julius Cæsar? A public spectacle like this
strikes the attention and touches the heart of mortal men; and what
then they see in the case of another is brought home as pertaining
also to themselves. Beside all these, are there not the rage of savage
boasts, and of men, and the furious madness of war? Are there not
the falls of those great buildings which, as some one neatly says,
are first the safeguards, then the sepulchres of men? Are there not
malignant motions of the air beneath some evil star and pestilential
sky? And so many perils on sea and land that, look wheresoever you
will, you cannot turn your gaze anywhither but you will meet the
visible image and memento of your own mortality.
_Petrarch_. I beg your pardon, but I cannot wait any longer, for, as
for having my reason fortified, I do not think any more powerful aid
can be brought than the many arguments you have adduced. As I listened
I wondered what end you were aiming at, and when your discourse would
finish.
_S. Augustine._ As a matter of fact, you have interrupted me, and it
has not yet reached its end. However, here is the conclusion--although
a host of little pin-pricks play upon the surface of your mind, nothing
yet has penetrated the centre. The miserable heart is hardened by long
habit, and becomes like some indurated stone; impervious to warnings,
however salutary, you will find few people considering with any
seriousness the fact that they will die.
_Petrarch_. Then few people are aware of the very definition of man,
which nevertheless is so hackneyed in the schools, that it ought not
merely to weary the ears of those who hear it, but is now long since
scrawled upon the walls and pillars of every room. This prattling of
the Dialecticians will never come to an end; it throws up summaries and
definitions like bubbles, matter indeed for endless controversies, but
for the most part they know nothing of the real truth of the things
they talk about. So, if you ask one of this set of men for a definition
of a man or of anything else, they have their answer quite pat, as the
saying goes; if you press him further, he will lie low, or if by sheer
practice in arguing he has acquired a certain boldness and power of
speech, the very tone of the man will tell you he possesses no real
knowledge of the thing he sets out to define. The best way of dealing
with this brood, with their studied air of carelessness and empty
curiosity, is to launch at their head some such invective as this,
"You wretched creatures, why this everlasting labour for nothing; this
expense of wit on silly subtleties? Why in total oblivion of the real
basis of things will you grow old simply conversant with words, and
with whitening hair and wrinkled brow, spend all your time in babyish
babble? Heaven grant that your foolishness hurt no one but yourselves,
and do as little harm as possible to the excellent minds and capacities
of the young."
_S. Augustine._ I agree that nothing half severe enough can be said of
this monstrous perversion of learning. But let me remind you that your
zeal of denunciation has so carried you away that you have omitted to
finish your definition of man.
_Petrarch_. I thought I had explained sufficiently, but I will be more
explicit still. Man is an animal, or rather the chief of all animals.
The veriest rustic knows that much. Every schoolboy could tell you
also, if you asked him, that man is, moreover, a rational animal
and that he is mortal. This definition, then, is a matter of common
knowledge.
_S. Augustine._ No, it is not. Those who are acquainted with it are
very few in number.
_Petrarch._ How so?
_S. Augustine._ When you can find a man so governed by Reason that
all his conduct is regulated by her, all his appetites subject to
her alone, a man who has so mastered every motion of his spirit by
Reason's curb that he knows it is she alone who distinguishes him from
the savagery of the brute, and that it is only by submission to her
guidance that he deserves the name of man at all; when you have found
one so convinced of his own mortality as to have that always before his
eyes, always to be ruling himself by it, and holding perishable things
in such light esteem that he ever sighs after that life, which Reason
always foresaw, wherein mortality shall be cast away; when you have
found such a man, then you may say that he has some true and fruitful
idea of what the definition of man is. This definition, of which we
were speaking, I said it was given to few men to know, and to reflect
upon as the nature of the truth requires.
_Petrarch._ Hitherto I had believed I was of that number.
_S. Augustine_. I have no doubt that when you turn over in your mind
the many things you have learned, whether in the school of experience
or in your reading of books, the thought of death has several times
entered your head. But still it has not sunk down into your heart as
deeply as it ought, nor is it lodged there as firmly as it should be.
_Petrarch_. What do you call sinking down into my heart? Though I think
I understand, I would like you to explain more clearly.
_S. Augustine._ This is what I mean. Every one knows, and the greatest
philosophers are of the same opinion, that of all tremendous realities
Death is the most tremendous. So true is this, that from ever of old
its very name is terrible and dreadful to hear. Yet though so it
is, it will not do that we hear that name but lightly, or allow the
remembrance of it to slip quickly from our mind. No, we must take time
to realise it. We must meditate with attention thereon. We must picture
to ourselves the effect of death on each several part of our bodily
frame, the cold extremities, the breast in the sweat of fever, the side
throbbing with pain, the vital spirits running slower and slower as
death draws near, the eyes sunken and weeping, every look filled with
tears, the forehead pale and drawn, the cheeks hanging and hollow,
the teeth staring and discoloured, the nostrils shrunk and sharpened,
the lips foaming, the tongue foul and motionless, the palate parched
and dry, the languid head and panting breast, the hoarse murmur and
sorrowful sigh, the evil smell of the whole body, the horror of seeing
the face utterly unlike itself--all these things will come to mind and,
so to speak, be ready to one's hand, if one recalls what one has seen
in any close observation of some deathbed where it has fallen to our
lot to attend. For things seen cling closer to our remembrance than
things heard.
And, moreover, it is not without a profound instinct of wisdom that
in certain Religious Orders, of the stricter kind, the custom has
survived, even down to our own time (though I do not think it makes
for good character altogether), of allowing the members to watch the
bodies of the dead being washed and put in shrouds for their burial;
while the stern professors of the Rule stand by, in order that this sad
and pitiful spectacle, thrust forsooth beneath their very eyes, may
admonish their remembrance continually, and affright the minds of those
who survive from every hope of this transitory world.
This, then, is what I meant by sinking down deeply into the soul.
Perchance you never name the name of Death, that so you may fall in
with the custom of the time, although nothing is more certain than the
fact or more uncertain than the hour. Yet in daily converse you must
often speak of things connected with it, only they soon fly out of mind
and leave no trace.
_Petrarch._ I follow your counsel the more readily because now I
recognise much in your words that I have myself revolved in my own
breast. But please, if you think it well, will you impress some mark
on my memory which will act as a warning to me and prevent me from
this time henceforth from telling lies to myself and fondling my own
mistakes. For this, it seems to me, is what turns men from the right
way, that they dream they have already reached the goal, and make
therefore no effort any more.
_S. Augustine._ I like to hear you speak so. Your words are those of
a man alert and watchful, who will not bear to be idle and trust to
chance. So here is a test which will never play you false: every time
you meditate on death without the least sign of motion, know that you
have meditated in vain, as about any ordinary topic. But if in the act
of meditation you find yourself suddenly grow stiff, if you tremble,
turn pale, and feel as if already you endured its pains; if at the same
time you seem to yourself as if you were leaving your body behind,
and were forced to render up your account before the bar of eternal
judgment, of all the words and deeds of your past life, nothing omitted
or passed over; that nothing any more is to be hoped for from good
looks or worldly position, nothing from eloquence, or riches, or power:
if you realise that this Judge takes no bribe and that all things are
naked and open in His sight; that death itself will not turn aside for
any plea; that it is not the end of sufferings, but only a passage: if
you picture to yourself a thousand forms of punishment and pain, the
noise and wailing of Hell, the sulphurous rivers, the thick darkness,
and avenging Furies,--in a word, the fierce malignity everywhere of
that dark abode; and, what is the climax of its horror, that the misery
knows no end, and despair thereof itself is everlasting, since the
time of God's mercy is passed by; if, I say, all these things rise up
before your eyes at once, not as fictions but as truth, not as being
possible, but inevitable, and of a surety bound to come, yes, and even
now at the door; and if you think on these things, not lightly, nor
with desperation, but full of hope in God, and that His strong right
hand is able and ready to pluck you out of so great calamities; if you
but show yourself willing to be healed and wishful to be raised up; if
you cleave to your purpose and persist in your endeavour, then you may
be assured you have not meditated in vain.
_Petrarch_. I will not deny you have terrified me greatly by putting
so huge a mass of suffering before my eyes. But may God give me such
plenteous mercy as that I may steep my thought in meditations like
these; not only day by day, but more especially at night, when the
mind, with all its daily interests laid aside, relaxes and is wont to
return upon itself. When I lay my body down, as those who die, and
my shrinking mind imagines the hour itself with all its horrors is
at hand: so intently do I conceive it all, as though I were in the
very agony of dying, that I shall seem to be already in the place of
torment, beholding what you speak of and every kind of anguish. And
so stricken shall I be at that sight, so terrified and affrighted,
that I shall rise up (I know it) before my horrified household and cry
aloud, "What am I doing? What suffering is this? For what miserable
destruction is Fate keeping me alive? Jesu, by Thy mercy,
"Thou whom none yet hath conquered, succour me,"[8]
"Give Thy right hand to me in misery
Through the dark waves, O bear me up with Thee,
That dying I may rest and be in peace."[9]
Many other things shall I say to myself, as one in a fever whose mind
every chance impression carries hither and thither in his fear; and
then I go talking strangely to my friends, weeping and making them
weep, and then presently after this we shall return to what we were
before. And since these things are so, what is it, I ask, which holds
me back? What little hidden obstacle is there which makes it come to
pass that hitherto all these meditations avail nothing but to bring
me troubles and terrors: and I continue the same man that I have ever
been; the same, it may be, as men to whom no reflections like these
have ever come? Yet am I more miserable than they, for they, whatever
may be their latter end, enjoy at least the pleasures of the present
time; but as for me, I know not either what my end will be, and I taste
no pleasure that is not poisoned with these embittering thoughts.
_S. Augustine._ Vex not yourself, I pray you, when you ought rather
to rejoice. The more the sinner feels pleasure in his sin, the more
unhappy should we think him and the more in need of pity.
_Petrarch._ I suppose you mean that a man whose pleasures are
uninterrupted comes to forget himself, and is never led back into
virtue's path; but that he who amid his carnal delights is sometime
visited with adversity will come to the recollection of his true
condition just in proportion as he finds fickle and wayward Pleasure
desert him.
If both kind of life had one and the same end, I do not see why he
should not be counted the happier who enjoys the present time and puts
off affliction to another day, rather than the man who neither enjoys
the present nor looks for any joy hereafter; unless you are perhaps
moved by this consideration that in the end the laughter of the former
will be changed to more bitter tears?
_S. Augustine._ Yes, much more bitter. For I have often noticed that
if a man throws away the rein of reason altogether (and in the most
excessive pleasure of all this is commonly the case), his fall is more
dangerous than that of the man who may come rushing down from the same
height, but keeps still some hold, though feebly, on the reins. But
before all else I attach importance to what you said before, that in
the case of the one there is some hope of his conversion, but in that
of the other nothing remains but despair.
_Petrarch._ Yes, that is my view also; in the meanwhile, however, have
you not forgotten my first question?
_S. Augustine._ What was it?
_Petrarch_. Concerning what keeps me back. I asked you why I am the
only one to whom the profound meditation on Death, that you said was so
full of benefit, brings no good whatever.
_S. Augustine._ In the first place it is perhaps because you look on
death as something remote, whereas when one thinks how very short life
is and how many divers kinds of accidents befall it, you ought not to
think death is far away. "What deludes almost all of us," as Cicero
says, "is that we regard death from afar off." Some correctors--I would
prefer to call them corruptors--of the text have wished to change the
reading by inserting a negative before the verb, and have maintained
that he ought to have said, "We do NOT regard death from afar off." For
the rest, there is no one in his senses who does not see death one way
or another, and in reality Cicero's word _prospicere_ means to see from
afar. The one thing that makes so many people suffer illusion in their
ideas on death is that they are wont to forecast for their own life
some limit, which is indeed possible according to nature, but at which,
nevertheless, very few arrive. Hardly any one, in fact, dies of whom
the poet's line might not be quoted--
"Grey hairs and length of years he for himself
Expected."[10]
The fault may touch you nearly, for your age, your vigorous
constitution and temperate way of life perchance have fostered a like
hope in your heart.
_Petrarch._ Please do not suspect that of me. God keep me from such
madness--
"As in that monster false to put my trust!"[11]
If I may borrow the words Virgil puts in the mouth of his famous pilot
Palinurus. For I too am cast upon a wide ocean, cruel and full of
storms. I sail across its angry waves and struggle with the wind; and
the little boat I steer shivers and seems to be letting in the water
in every part. I know well she cannot hold out for long, and I see I
have no hope at all of safety unless the Almighty Pity put forth His
strong right hand and guide my vessel rightly ere it be too late, and
bring me to shore--
"So that I who have lived upon the waters may die
in port."[12]
Of this I think I should have a good hope, because it has never been
my lot to put any confidence in those riches and power on which I see
so many of my contemporaries, yes, and older men as well, relying. For
what folly would it be to pass all one's life in toil and poverty and
care, heaping up riches, just to die at last and have no time to enjoy
them? So, then, in truth, I regard this dark shadow of death, not as
something afar off, but very nigh and ever at the doors. And I have not
forgotten a certain little verse I wrote in my youth at the end of a
letter to a friend--
"E'en while we speak, along a thousand ways
With stealthy steps up to our very door
Death creeps."
If I could say words like these at that time of life, what shall I
say now that I am more advanced in age and more experienced in what
life is? For everything I see or hear or feel or think seems, unless I
deceive myself, connected in my mind with that last end. And yet the
question still remains, what is it that holds me back?