others or myself. I am ashamed to tell you what experience has made me
think of the majority of mankind.
_S. Augustine_. It is very prudent to despise oneself; but it is very
dangerous and very useless to despise others. However, let us proceed.
Are you aware of what still makes you turn from the right way?
_Petrarch._ Pray say anything you like, only do not accuse me of envy.
_S. Augustine_. Please God may pride have done you as little hurt as
envy! So far as I judge, you have escaped this sin, but I have others
whereof to accuse you.
_Petrarch_. Still you will not vex me whatever reproaches you may
bring. Tell me freely everything that leads me astray.
_S. Augustine._ The desire of things temporal.
_Petrarch._ Come, come! I truly have never heard anything so absurd.
_S. Augustine._ There! you see everything vexes you. You have forgotten
your promise. This is not, however, any question of envy.
_Petrarch._ No, but of cupidity, and I do not believe there is a man in
the world more free of this fault than myself.
_S. Augustine._ You are great at self-justification, but, believe me,
you are not so clear of this fault as you think you are.
_Petrarch._ What? do you mean to say that I, I am not free from the
reproach of cupidity?
_S. Augustine._ I do, and that you are likewise guilty of ambition.
_Petrarch._ Go on, ill-treat me more still, double your reproaches,
make full proof of your work of an accuser. I wonder what fresh blow
you have in store for me.
_S. Augustine._ What is mere truth and right testimony you call
accusation and ill-treatment. The satirist was quite right who wrote--
"To speak the truth to men is to accuse."[9]
And the saying of the comic poet is equally true--
"'Tis flattery makes friends and candour foes."[10]
But tell me, pray, what is the use of this irritation and anger that
makes you so on edge? Was it necessary in a life so short to weave such
long hopes?
"Have no long hopes! life's shortness cries to man."[11]
You read that often enough but take no count of it. You will reply, I
suppose, that you do this from a tender solicitude for your friends,
and so find a fair pretext for your error; but what madness it is,
under pretext of friendship to others, to declare war on yourself and
treat yourself as an enemy.
_Petrarch._ I am neither covetous nor inhuman enough to be without
solicitude for my friends, especially for those whose virtue or deserts
attach me to them, for it is those whom I admire, revere, love, and
compassionate; but, on the other hand, I do not pretend to be generous
enough to court my own ruin for the sake of my friends. What I desire
is so to manage my affairs as to have a decent subsistence while I
live; and as you have delivered a shot at me from Horace, let me also
from the same poet put up a shield in self-defence and profess my
desire is the same as his,--
"Let me have books and stores for one year hence, Nor make my life one
flutter of suspense!"[12]
And further how I shape my course so that I may in the same poet's
words--
"Pass my old age and not my honour lose, And, if I may, still serve the
lyric Muse."[13]
Let me own also that I dread very much the rocks ahead if life should
be prolonged, and so would provide beforehand for this double wish of
mine to blend with my work for the Muses some simpler occupation in
household affairs. But this I do with such indifference that it is
plain enough I only descend to such necessities because I am so obliged.
_Augustine._ I see clearly how these pretexts texts which serve as an
excuse for your folly have penetrated deeply into your very spirit. How
is it, then, you have not engraved equally deeply in your heart the
words of the satirist--
"Why keep such hoarded gold to vex the mind?
Why should such madness still delude mankind?
To scrape through life on water and dry bread
That you may have a fortune when you're dead?"[14]
Undoubtedly it is more because you think that it is a fine thing to
die in a winding-sheet of purple, and rest in a marble tomb, and leave
to your heirs the business of disputing over a great succession, than
that you yourself care for the money which wins such advantages. It is
a futile trouble, believe me, and quite devoid of good sense. If you
will steadily observe human nature, you will discover that in a general
way it is content with very little, and, in your case particularly,
there is hardly a man who needs less for his satisfaction, unless you
had been blinded by prejudices. Doubtless the poet was thinking of the
average run of men, or possibly his own actual self, when he said--
"My sorry fare is dogwood fruit; I pluck
Wild herbs and roots that in the fields do grow,
And a few berries."[15]
But, unlike him, you will acknowledge yourself that such a mode of life
is far from sorry, and that in fact nothing would be pleasanter if you
were to consult only your own taste and not the customs of a deluded
world. Why, then, continue to torment yourself? If you order your life
as your nature dictates, you were rich long ago, but you never will
be able to be rich if you follow the standard of the world; you will
always think something wanting, and in 'rushing after it you will find
yourself swept away by your passion.
Do you remember with what delight you used to wander in the depth of
the country? Sometimes, laying yourself down on a bed of turf, you
would listen to the water of a brook murmuring over the stones; at
another time, seated on some open hill, you would let your eye wander
freely over the plain stretched at your feet; at others, again, you
enjoyed a sweet slumber beneath the shady trees of some valley in the
noontide heat, and revelled in the delicious silence. Never idle, in
your soul you would ponder over some high meditation, with only the
Muses for your friends--you were never less alone than when in their
company, and then, like the old man in Virgil who reckoned himself
"As rich askings, when, at the close of day,
Home to his cot he took his happy way,
And on his table spread his simple fare,
Fresh from the meadow without cost or care,"[16]
you would come at sunset back to your humble roof; and, contented with
your good things, did you not find yourself the richest and happiest
of mortal men?
_Petrarch._ Ah, well-a-day! I recall it all now, and the remembrance of
that time makes me sigh with regret.
_S. Augustine._ Why--why do you speak of sighing? And who, pray, is
the author of your woes? It is, indeed, your own spirit and none other
which too long has not dared to follow the true law of its nature,
and has thought itself a prisoner only because it would not break its
chain. Even now it is dragging you along like a runaway horse, and
unless you tighten the rein it will rush you to destruction. Ever since
you grew tired of your leafy trees, of your simple way of life, and
society of country people, egged on by cupidity, you have plunged once
more into the midst of the tumultuous life of cities. I read in your
face and speech what a happy and peaceful life you lived; for what
miseries have you not endured since then? Too rebellious against the
teachings of experience, you still hesitate!
It is without a doubt the bonds of your own sins that keep you back,
and God allows that, as you passed your childhood under a harsh muster,
so, though you once became free, you have again fallen into bondage,
and there will end your miserable old age. Verily, I was at your side
once, when, quite young, unstained by avarice or ambition, you gave
promise of becoming a great man; now, alas, having quite changed your
character, the nearer you get to the end of your journey the more you
trouble yourself about provisions for the way. What remains then but
that you will be found, when the day comes for you to die--and it may
be even now at hand, and certainly cannot be any great way off--you
will be found, I say, still hungering after gold, poring half-dead over
the calendar?
For those anxious cares, which increase day after day, must by
necessity at last have grown to a huge figure and a prodigious amount.
_Petrarch_. Well, after all, if I foresee the poverty of old age, and
gather some provision against that time of weariness, what is there so
much to find fault with?
_S. Augustine._ Ah! ludicrous anxiety and tragic neglect, to worry and
trouble yourself about a time at which you may never arrive and in
which you assuredly will not have long to stay, and yet to be quite
oblivious of that end at which you cannot help arriving, and of which
there is no remedy when you once have reached it. But such is your
execrable habit--to care for what's temporal, and be careless for all
that's eternal. As for this delusion of providing a shield against old
age, no doubt what put it into your head was the verse in Virgil which
speaks of
"The ant who dreads a destitute old age."[17]
And so you have made an ant your mentor and you are as excusable as the
satiric poet who wrote--
"Some people, like the ant, fear hunger and cold,"[18]
but if you are going to put no limit to the following of ants, you will
discover that there is nothing more melancholy and nothing more absurd
than to ward off poverty one day by loading yourself with it all your
days.
_Petrarch._ What will you say next! Do you counsel me to court Poverty?
I have no longing for it, but I will bear it with courage if Fortune,
who delights to overturn human affairs, reduces me to it.
_S. Augustine._ My opinion is that in every condition man should aim at
the golden mean. I would not then restrict you to the rules of those
who say, "All that is needed for man's life is bread and water; with
these none is poor; whosoever desires no more than these will rival
in felicity the Father of the Gods."[19] No, I do not tie man's life
down to dry bread and water; such maxims are as extreme as they are
troublesome and odious to listen to. Also, in regard to your infirmity,
what I enjoin is not to over-indulge natural appetite, but to control
it. What you already have would be sufficient for your wants if you had
known how to be sufficient to yourself. But as it is you are yourself
the cause of your own poverty. To heap up riches is to heap up cares
and anxieties. This truth has been proved so continually that there
is no need to bring more arguments. What a strange delusion, what a
melancholy blindness of the soul of man, whose nature is so noble,
whose birth is from above, that it will neglect all that is lofty and
debase itself to care for the metals of the earth. Every time you have
been drawn by these hooks of cupidity you come down from your high
meditations to these grovelling thoughts, and do you not feel each time
as if hurled from heaven to earth, from the bosom of the stars to a
bottomless pit of blackness?
_Petrarch_. Yes; in truth, I feel it, and one knows not how to express
what I have suffered in my fall.
_S. Augustine_. Why, then, are you not afraid of a danger you have so
often experienced? And when you were raised up to the higher life, why
did you not attach yourself to it more firmly?
_Petrarch_. I make all the efforts I can to do so; but inasmuch as the
various exigencies of our human lot shake and unsettle me, I am torn
away in spite of myself. It is not without reason, I imagine, that
the poets of antiquity dedicated the double peaks of Parnassus to two
different divinities. They desired to beg from Apollo, whom they called
the god of Genius, the interior resources of the mind, and from Bacchus
a plentiful supply of external goods, way of regarding it is suggested
to me not only by the teaching of experience, but by the frequent
testimony of wise men whom I need not quote to you. Moreover, although
the plurality of deities may be ridiculous, this opinion of the
Poets is not devoid of common sense. And in referring a like twofold
supplication to the one God from whom all good comes down, I do not
think I can be called unreasonable, unless indeed you hold otherwise.
_S. Augustine_. I deny not you are right in your view, but the poor
way you divide your time stirs my indignation. You had already devoted
your whole life to honourable work; if anything compelled you to spend
any of your time on other occupations, you regarded it as lost. But I
now you only concede to what is Good and Beautiful the moments you can
spare from avarice.
Any man in the world would desire to reach old age on such terms as
that; but what limit or check would be to such a state of mind? Choose
for yourself some defined goal, and when you have attained it, then
stay there and breathe awhile. Doubtless you know that the saying I am
about to quote is from lips of man, but has all the force of a divine
oracle--
"The miser's voice for ever cries, Give, give;
Then curb your lusts if you would wisely live."[20]
_Petrarch._ Neither to want nor to abound, neither to command others or
obey them--there you have my heart's wish.
_S. Augustine_. Then you must drop your humanity and become God, if you
would want nothing. Can you be ignorant that of all the creatures Man
is the one that has most wants?
_Petrarch_. Many a time have I heard that said, but I would still like
to hear it afresh from your lips and lodge it in my remembrance.
_S. Augustine._ Behold him naked and unformed, born in wailings and
tears, comforted with a few drops of milk, trembling and crawling,
needing the hand of another, fed and clothed from the beasts of the
field, his body feeble, his spirit restless, subject to all kinds of
sickness, the prey of passions innumerable, devoid of reason, joyful
to-day, to-morrow sorrowful, in both full of agitation, incapable of
mastering himself, unable to restrain his appetite, ignorant of what
things are useful to him and in what proportion, knowing not how to
control himself in meat or drink, forced with great labour to gain
the food that other creatures find ready at their need, made dull
with sleep, swollen with food, stupefied with drink, emaciated with
watching, famished with hunger, parched with thirst, at once greedy
and timid, disgusted with what he has, longing after what he has lost,
discontented alike with past, present and future, full of pride in his
misery, and aware of his frailty, baser than the vilest worms, his life
is short, his days uncertain, his fate inevitable, since Death in a
thousand forms is waiting for him at last.
_Petrarch._ You have so piled up his miseries and beggary that I feel
it were good if I had never been born.
_S. Augustine._ Yet, in the midst of such wretchedness and such deep
destitution of good in man's estate, you go on dreaming of riches and
power such as neither emperors nor kings have ever fully enjoyed.
_Petrarch_. Kindly tell me who ever made use of those words? Who spoke
either of riches or of power?
_S. Augustine._ You imply both, for what greater riches can there be
than to lack nothing? What greater power than to be independent of
every one else in the world? Certainly those kings and masters of the
earth whom you think so rich have wanted a multitude of things. The
generals of great armies depend on those whom they seem to command,
and, kept in check by their armed legions, they find the very soldiers
who render them invincible also render them in turn helpless. Give up,
therefore, your dreams of the impossible, and be content to accept the
lot of humanity; learn to live in want and in abundance, to command
and to obey, without desiring, with those ideas of yours, to shake off
the yoke of fortune that presses even on kings. You will only be free
from this yoke when, caring not a straw for human passions, you bend
your neck wholly to the rule of Virtue. Then you will be free, wanting
nothing, then. you will be independent; in a word, then you will be a
king, truly powerful and perfectly happy.
_Petrarch_. Now I do indeed repent for all that is past, and I desire
nothing. But I am still in bondage to one evil habit and am conscious
always of a certain need at the bottom of my heart.
_S. Augustine._ Well, to come back to our subject, there is the very
thing which keeps you back from the contemplation of death. It is that
which makes you harassed with earthly anxieties; you do not lift up
your heart at all to higher things. If you will take my counsel you
will utterly cast away these anxieties, which are as so many dead
weights upon the spirit, and you will find that it is not so hard after
all to order your life by your nature, and let that rule and govern you
more than the foolish opinions of the crowd.
_Petrarch_. I will do so very willingly, but may I ask you to finish
what you were beginning to say about ambition, which I have long
desired to hear?
_S. Augustine_. Why ask me to do what you can quite well do for
yourself? Examine your own heart; you will see that among its other
faults it is not ambition which holds the least place there.
_Petrarch._ It has profited me nothing then to have fled from towns
whenever I could, to have thought scorn of the world and public
affairs, to have gone into the recesses of the woods and silence of the
fields, to have proved my aversion from empty honours, if still I am to
be accused of ambition.
_S. Augustine._ You renounce many things well,--all you mortal men; but
not so much; because you despise them as because you despair of getting
them. Hope and desire inflame each other by the mutual stings of those
passions, so that when the one grows cold the other dies away, and when
one gets warm the other boils over.
_Petrarch._ Why, then, should I not hope? Was I quite destitute of any
accomplishment?
_S. Augustine._ I am not now speaking of your accomplishments, but
certainly you had not those by help of which, especially in the present
day, men mount to high places; I mean the art of ingratiating yourself
in the palaces of the great, the trick of flattery, deceit, promising,
lying, pretending, dissembling, and putting up with all kinds of
slights and indignities. Devoid of these accomplishments and others of
the kind, and seeing clearly that you could not overcome nature, you
turned your steps elsewhere. And you acted wisely and with prudence,
for, as Cicero expresses it, "to contend against the gods as did the
giants, what is it but to make war with nature itself."[21]
_Petrarch_. Farewell such honours as these, if they have to be sought
by such means!
_S. Augustine._ Your words are golden, but you have not convinced me
of your innocence, for you do not assert your indifference to honours
so much as to the vexations their pursuit involves, like the man who
pretended he did not want to see Rome because he really would not
endure the trouble of the journey thither. Observe, you have not yet
desisted from the pursuit of honour, as you seem to believe and as you
try to persuade me. But leave off trying to hide behind your finger, as
the saying goes; all your thoughts, all your actions are plain before
my eyes: and when you boast of having fled from cities and become
enamoured of the woods, I see no real excuse, but only a shifting of
your culpability.
We travel many ways to the same end, and, believe me, though you have
left the road worn by feet of the crowd, you still direct your feet by
a side-path towards this same ambition that you say you have thought
scorn of; it is repose, solitude, a total disregard of human affairs,
yes, and your own activities also, which just at present take you along
that chosen path, but the end and object is glory.
_Petrarch_. You drive me into a corner whence I think, however,
I could manage to escape; but, as the time is short and we must
discriminate between many things, let us proceed, if you have no
objection.
_S. Augustine_. Follow me, then, as I go forward. We will say nothing
of gourmandising, for which you have no more inclination than a
harmless pleasure in an occasional meeting with a few friends at the
hospitable board. But I have no fear for you on this score, for when
the country has regained its denizen, now snatched away to the towns,
these temptations will disappear in a moment; and I have noticed,
and have pleasure in acknowledging, that when you are alone you live
in such a simple way as to surpass your friends and neighbours in
frugality and temperance. I leave on one side anger also, though you
often get carried away by it more than is reasonable, yet at the same
time, thanks to your sweet natural temperament, you commonly control
the motions of your spirit, and recall the advice of Horace--
"Anger's a kind of madness, though not long;
Master the passion, since it's very strong;
And, if you rule it not, it will rule you,
So put the curb on quickly."[22]
_Petrarch._ That saying of the poet, and other words of philosophy
like it, have helped me a little, I own; but what has helped me above
all is the thought of the shortness of life. What insensate folly
to spend in hating and hurting our fellow-men the few days we pass
among them! Soon enough the last day of all will arrive, which will
quite extinguish this flame in human breasts and put an end to all
our hatred, and if we have desired for any of them nothing worse than
death, our evil wish will soon be fulfilled. Why, then, seek to take
one's life or that of others? Why let pass unused the better part of
a time so short? When the days are hardly long enough for honest joys
of this life, and for meditating on that which is to come, no matter
what economy of time we practise, what good is there in robbing any of
them of their right and needful use, and turning them to instruments
of sorrow and death for ourselves and others? This reflection has
helped me, when I found myself under any temptation to anger, not to
fall utterly under its dominion, or if I fell has helped me quickly to
recover; but hitherto I have not been able quite to arm myself at all
points from some little gusts of irritation.
_S. Augustine._ As I am not afraid that this wind of anger will cause
you to make shipwreck of yourself or others, I agree willingly that
without paying attention to the promises of the Stoics, who set out to
extirpate root and branch all the maladies of the soul, you content
yourself with the milder treatment of the Peripatetics. Leaving, then,
on one side for the moment these particular failings, I hasten to treat
of others more dangerous than these and against which you will need to
be on guard with more care.
_Petrarch_. Gracious Heaven, what is yet to come that is more dangerous
still?
_S. Augustine._ Well, has the sin of lust never touched you with its
flames?
_Petrarch_. Yes, indeed, at times so fiercely us to make me mourn
sorely that I was not born without feelings. I would sooner have been a
senseless stone than be tormented by so many stings of the flesh.
_S. Augustine_. Ah, there is that which turns you most aside from the
thought of things divine. For what does the doctrine of the heavenly
Plato show but that the soul must separate itself far from the passion
of the flesh and tread down its imaginings before it can rise pure and
free to the contemplation of the mystery of the Divine; for otherwise
the thought of its mortality will make it cling to those seducing
charms. You know what I mean, and you have learned this truth in
Plato's writings, to the study of which you said not long ago you had
given yourself up with ardour.
_Petrarch_. Yes, I own I had given myself to studying him with great
hopefulness and desire, but the novelty of a strange language and the
sudden departure of my teacher cut short my purpose.[23] For the rest
this doctrine of which you speak is very well known to me from your own
writings and those of the Platonists.
_S. Augustine._ It matters little from whom you learned the truth,
though it is a fact that the authority of a great master will often
have a profound influence.