Chapter 4

[33]Horace,Epist.,i. 18, 106-8.

[34]Lucian, 343.

[35]He refers to the fact that his father was banished from Florence, and he himself was born in exile at Arezzo.

[36]Avignon.

[37]Horace,Epist., ii. 2, 76.

[38]Epist.,ii. 2, 77 (Conington).

[39]Petrarch'sEpist.,ii. 2, 77.

[40]Seneca'sLetters,lvi.

[41]Tusculan Orations,cxi.

[42]Æneid,i. 58.

[43]Ibid.,vi. 730.

[44]Ibid.,i. 52-57.

[45]Æneidi. 57.

[46]Tusculan Orations, iv. 38.

[47]Æneid,viii. 334.

[48]Pro Marcello,ii.

[49]Catilina, viii.

[50]Eclogue, vii. 75.

S. Augustine. Supposing that hitherto you have found some good from my words, I beg and implore you in what I have still to say to lend me a ready ear, and to put aside altogether the spirit of dispute and contradiction.

Petrarch.You may be sure I will so do, for I feel that, owing to your good counsels, I have been set free from a large part of my distress, and am therefore the better disposed to listen to what you may still have to say.

S. Augustine.I have not at all as yet touched upon the deep-seated wounds which are within, and I rather dread the task when I remember what debate and murmuring were caused by even the lightest allusion to them. But, on the other hand, I am not without hope that when you have rallied your strength, your spirit will more firmly bear without flinching a severer handling of the trouble.

Petrarch.Have no fear on that score. By this time I am used to hearing the name of my maladies and to bearing the touch of the surgeon's hand.

S. Augustine. Well, you are still held in bondage, on your right hand and on your left, by two strong chains which will not suffer you to turn your thoughts to meditate on life or on death. I have always dreaded these might bring you to destruction; and I am not yet at all reassured, and I shall only be so when I have seen you break and cast away your bonds and come forth perfectly free. And this I think possible but difficult enough to achieve, and that until it is accomplished I shall only be moving in a futile round. They say that to break a diamond one must use the blood of a goat, and in the same way to soften the hardness of these kinds of passions, this blood is of strange efficacy. No sooner has it touched even the hardest heart but it breaks and penetrates it. But I will tell you what my fear is. In this matter I must have your own full assent as we proceed, and I am haunted by the fear you will not be able, or perhaps I should say will prove unwilling, to give it. I greatly dread lest the glittering brilliance of your chains may dazzle your eyes and hinder you, and make you like the miser bound in prison with fetters of gold, who wished greatly to be set free but was not willing to break his chains.

Now such are the conditions of your own bondage that you can only gain your freedom by breaking your chains.

Petrarch. Alas, alas, I am more wretched than I thought. Do you mean to tell me my soul is still bound by two chains of which I am unconscious?

S. Augustine. All the same they are plain enough to see; but, dazzled by their beauty, you think they are not fetters but treasures; and, to keep to the same figure, you are like some one who, with hands and feet fast bound in shackles of gold, should look at them with delight and not see at all that they are shackles. Yes, you yourself with blinded eyes keep looking at your bonds; but, oh strange delusion! you are charmed with the very chains that are dragging you to your death, and, what is most sad of all, you glory in them!

Petrarch.What may these chains be of which you speak?

S. Augustine.Love and glory.

Petrarch.Great Heavens! what is this I hear? You call these things chains? And you would break them from me, if I would let you?

S. Augustine.Yes, I mean to try, but I doubt if I shall succeed. All the other things that held you back were less strong and also less pleasant to you, so you helped me to break them. These, on the contrary, are pleasant though they injure, and they deceive you by a false show of beauty; so they will demand greater efforts, for you will make resistance as if I were wishing to rob you of some great good. Nevertheless I mean to try.

Petrarch.Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting darkness the clearest faculties of my soul?

S. Augustine.Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a course is right?

Petrarch.I have by no means forgotten that axiom, but it has nothing to do with the subject, for why in the world should I not think that the course which I indicated is right? No, I never have thought and I never shall think any truth more indisputable than that these two passions, which you cast at me as a reproach, are the very noblest of all.

Augustine.Let us take them separately for the present, while I endeavour to find the remedies, so that I may not blunt the edge of my weapon by striking first at one and then the other indiscriminately. Tell me then, since we have first mentioned love, do you or do you not hold it to be the height of all madness?

Petrarch.To tell you the whole truth as I conceive it, I judge that love may be either described as the vilest passion or the noblest action of the soul.

S. Augustine.Do you mind giving me some example to confirm the view you have put forward?

Petrarch.If my passion is for some low woman of ill fame, my love is the height of folly. But if, fascinated by one who is the image of virtue, I devote myself to love and honour her, what have you to say to that? Do you put no difference between things so entirely opposed? Do you wish to banish all remains of honour from the case? To tell you my real feeling, just as I regard the first kind of love as a heavy and ill-starred burden on the soul, so of the second I think there is hardly any greater blessing to it; if it so happen that you hold an opposite view, let each one follow his own feeling, for, as you are well aware, truth is a large field and every man should have freedom to judge for himself.

S. Augustine. In matters directly contradictory opinions also may be diverse. But truth itself is one and always the same.

Petrarch. I admit that is so. But what makes us go wrong is that we bind ourselves obstinately to old opinions, and will not easily part from them.

S. Augustine.Heaven grant you may think as wisely on the whole matter of love as you do on this point.

Petrarch. To speak briefly, I think I am so certainly right that those who think the opposite I believe to be quite out of their senses.

S. Augustine. I should certainly maintain that to take for truth some ancient falsehood, and to take as falsehood some newly-discovered truth, as though all authority for truth were a matter of time, is the very climax of madness.

Petrarch.You are wasting your labour. Whoever asserts that view of love I shall never believe him. And I will rest on Cicero's saying, "If I err here I err willingly, and I shall never consent to part with this error as long as I live."[1]

S. Augustine.When Cicero uses those words he is speaking of the immortality of the soul, and referring to it as the noblest of conceptions, and declaring his own belief in it to be so firm that he would not endure to listen to any one who maintained the contrary. You, however, to urge the ignoblest and most false of all opinions, make use of those same terms. Unquestionably, even if the soul were mortal, it would be better to think it immortal. For error though it were, yet would it inspire the love of virtue, and that is a thing to be desired for its own sake alone, even if all hope of future reward were taken away from us; and as to which the desire for it will certainly become weaker, as men come to think the soul a mortal thing; and, on the other hand, the promise of a life to come, even if it were to turn out a delusion, is none the less a powerful incentive to the soul, human nature being what it is.

But you see what will be the consequences of that error in which you stand; it will precipitate your soul into all manner of folly, when shame, and fear, even reason, that now acts as some check on passion, and the knowledge of truth itself shall all have disappeared.

Petrarch.I have already told you you were wasting your time. My own remembrance tells mo that I have never loved anything to be ashamed of, and, on the contrary, have ever loved what is most noble.

S. Augustine.Even noble things may be loved in a shameful way; it is beyond doubt.

Petrarch.Neither in the object of love nor in the manner of loving am I guilty. So you may as well give up tormenting me.

S. Augustine.Well, well! Do you wish, like those with fever on the brain, to die laughing and joking? Or will you rather take some remedy for your mind so pitiable and so far from its true health?

Petrarch.I will not refuse a remedy if you will prove to me that I am ill, but, when a man is quite well, to begin taking remedies is often fatal.

S. Augustine.As soon as you have reached the stage of convalescence you will perceive quickly enough, as men generally do, that you have been seriously ill.

Petrarch.After all, I cannot but show deference to one who often in the past, and especially in these last two days, has given me proof how good were his counsels. So please go on.

S. Augustine.In the first place I ask you to forgive me if, compelled by the subject, I have to deal severely with what has been so delightful to you. For I cannot but foresee that the truth will sound bitterly in your ears.

Petrarch. Just one word before you begin. Do you thoroughly know the matter you are to touch upon?

S. Augustine.I have gone into it all carefully beforehand. It is about a mortal woman, in admiring and celebrating whom you have, alas! spent a large part of your life. That a mind like yours should have felt such an insensate passion and for so long a time does greatly astonish me.

Petrarch. Spare your reproaches, I pray. Thais and Livia were both mortal women; but you should be aware that she of whom you have set out to speak is a mind that has no care for things of earth, and burns only with the love of what is heavenly. In whose face, unless truth is an empty word, a certain divine loveliness shines out; whose character is the image and picture of perfect honour; whose voice and the living expression of whose eyes has nothing mortal in it; whose very form and motion is not as that of others. Consider this again and again, I entreat you, and I trust you may have understanding in what words to speak.

S. Augustine.Ah! out of all reason have you grown! Have you then for sixteen long years been feeding: with false joys this flame of your heart? Of a truth not longer did Italy once suffer the assaults of her most famous enemy, the great Hannibal; nor did she then endure more frequent onsets of her would-be lover, nor was consumed with more furious fires. You to-day carry within you as hot a flame of passion, you endure as fierce stings. Yet was there found one who forced him to retreat and, though late, to take his leave! But who shall expel this invader from your soul if you yourself forbid him to depart; if you of your own will invite him to stay long with you; if you, unhappy as you are, delight in your own calamity? Far other will be your thoughts when the fatal day shall come that will close for ever those eyes that are now so pleasing to you to look upon; when you shall see that face and those pale limbs changed by death; then you will be filled with shame to have so knit your mortal affections to a perishing body such as this, and what now you so obstinately maintain you will then blush to remember.

Petrarch. Heaven forbid any such misery. I shall not see your threats fulfilled.

S. Augustine. They will inevitably come to pass.

Petrarch. I know it. But the stars in their courses will not so fight against me as to prevent the order of Nature by hastening her death like that. First came I into this world and I shall be first to depart.

S. Augustine.I think you will not have forgotten that time when you feared the contrary event, and made a song of your beloved as if she were presently to die, a song full of moving sorrow.

Petrarch.Certainly I remember very well, but the thought that filled me then with grief, and the memory of which makes me shiver, was a jealous indignation at the bare possibility of my outliving her who is the best part of my life and whose presence makes all its sweetness. For that is the motive of that song; I remember it well, and how I was overcome with tears. Its spirit is still with me, if with you perchance are the words.

S. Augustine.I was not complaining how many tears the fear of her death made you shed, nor of how much grief you felt. I was only concerned that you should realise how this fear of yours in the past may certainly return; and more easily, in that every day is a step nearer to death, and that that fair form, worn by sicknesses and the bearing of many children, has already lost much of its first strength.

Petrarch.I also am borne down with cares and am worn with age, and in that onward path towards death I have outrun her whom I love.

S. Augustine.What folly it is to calculate the order of death by that of birth! For what are those sad lamentations of the old but because of the early deaths of their young children? What is it that yonder aged nurse is grieving over but that she sees the loss of her little nursling—

"Whom some dark dayHas stripped of his sweet life; and cruel fateSnatched from his mother's breast and covered himIn a too early grave."[2]

In your own case the small number of years by which you have preceded her gives you a very uncertain hope that you will be gone before the fire of your passion shall be extinguished; and yet you indulge the fiction that this order of Nature is unchangeable.

Petrarch. Not exactly unchangeable, but I pray without ceasing that it may not be changed, and whenever I think of death I remember Ovid's line—

"Late may her time arrive, and after mine."[3]

S. Augustine.I can listen to these trifles no more; but since you now admit that she may possibly die before you, I ask what should you say if she really were dead?

Petrarch. What should I say but that such a calamity would be the climax of all my miseries? Yet I should try and comfort myself with what was past. But may the winds bear away the words from our lips and the hurricane scatter such an omen to the ends of the earth!

S. Augustine.Ah, blindfold one! you see not yet what foolishness it is so to subject your soul to things of earth, that kindle in it the flames of desire, that have no power to give it rest, that cannot endure; and, while promising to charm you with their sweetness, torment you with perpetual agitations.

Petrarch. If you have any more effectual remedy, I beg you will point it out. You will never frighten me with talk like this; for I am not, as you suppose, infatuated with any creature that is mortal. You might have known that I have loved her physical charm loss than her soul, that what has captivated me has been a life above that of ordinary lives, the witnessing of which has shown me how the blessed live above.

Therefore, since you inquire of me (and the mere question is a torture to listen to) what I should do supposing she were to leave me and be the first to die—well, I should try and console myself in sorrow with Lælius, the wisest of the Romans. With him I should say, "It is her goodness that I loved and that is not dead;" and I would say to myself those other words that he pronounced after the death of him for whom he had conceived an affection surpassing all common affection.[4]

S. Augustine.You retire to Error's inaccessible fastness, and it will not be easy to dislodge you. But as I notice you are inclined to listen much more patiently to the truth about yourself and her, sing the praises of your darling lady as much as you will, and I will gainsay nothing. Were she a queen, a saint—

"A very goddess, or to Apollo's selfOwn sister, or a mother of the nymphs,"[5]

yet all her excellence will in nowise excuse your error.

Petrarch. Let us see what fresh quarrel you seek with me?

S. Augustine.It is unquestionably true that oftentimes the loveliest things are loved in a shameful way.

Petrarch.I have already met that insinuation on a previous occasion. If any one could see the image of the love that reigns in my heart, he would recognise that there is no difference between it and that face that I have praised indeed much, but less by far than it deserves to be praised. I call to witness the spirit of Truth in whose presence we are speaking when I assert that in my love there has never been anything dishonourable, never anything of the flesh, never anything that any man could blame unless it were its mere intensity. And if you add that even so it never passed the line of right, I think a fairer thing could never be conceived.

S. Augustine.I might reply to you with a word of Cicero and tell you, "You are talking of putting boundary lines in vice itself."[6]

Petrarch. Not in vice, but in love.

S. Augustine. But in that very passage he was speaking of love. Do you remember where it occurs?

Petrarch.Do I remember indeed? Of course I have read it in theTusculans. But he was speaking of men's common love; mine is one by itself.

S. Augustine.Other people, I fancy, might say the same of theirs; for true it is that in all the passions, and most of all in this, every man interprets his own case favourably, and there is point in the verse though from a common poet—

"To every man his lady,Then one to me assign;To every man his love affairs,And so let me have mine!"[7]

Petrarch.Would you like, if you have time, to hear me tell you a few of those many charms of hers that would strike you with astonishment and admiration?

S. Augustine.Do you think I am ignorant of all

"Those pleasant dreams that lovers use to weave"?

Every schoolboy knows the line, but I confess I am ashamed to hear such silliness from the lips of one whose words and thoughts should seek a higher range.

Petrarch.One thing I will not keep silence on,—call it silliness, call it gratitude, as you please,—namely, that to her I owe whatever I am, and I should never have attained such little renown and glory as I have unless she by the power of this love had quickened into life the feeble germ of virtue that Nature had sown in my heart. It was she who turned my youthful soul away from all that was base, who drew me as it were by a grappling chain, and forced me to look upwards. Why should you not believe it? It is a sure truth that by love we grow like what we love. Now there is no backbiter alive, let his tongue be as sharp as it may, that has ventured to touch her good name, or dared to say he had seen a single fault, I will not say in her conduct, but even in any one of her gestures or words. Moreover, those whisperers who leave no one's reputation untouched if they can help it, have been obliged in her, case to utter only reverence and respect.

It is no wonder, then, if such a glory as hers should have fostered in my heart the longing for more conspicuous glory, and should have sweetened those hard toils which I had to endure if I would attain that which I desired. What were all the wishes of my youth but solely to please her who above all others had pleased me? And you are not ignorant that to gain my end I scorned delights a thousand times, I gave myself before my time to labour and to cares without number; and now you bid me forget or diminish somewhat of my love for her who first taught me how to escape the vulgar crowd, who guided all my steps, spurred on my lagging mind, and wakened into life my drowsy spirit.

S. Augustine.Poor man! you would have done better to be silent than to speak, although even if you had been silent I should have discerned what you are within. But such stout words as these stir my indignation and anger.

Petrarch.I wonder why?

S. Augustine.To have a false opinion shows ignorance, but to keep on boldly proclaiming it shows pride as well as ignorance.

Petrarch. Suppose you try and prove that what I think and say is false.

S. Augustine.It is all false; and, first, what you say as to owing all you are to her. If you mean that she has made you what you are, there you certainly lie; but if you were to say that it is she. who has prevented you being any more than you are, you would speak the truth. O what long contention would you have been spared if by the charm of her beauty she had not held you back. What you are you owe to the bounty of Nature; what you might have been she has quite cut off, or rather let me say you yourself have cut it off, for she indeed is innocent. That beauty which seemed so charming and so sweet, through the burning flame of your desire, through the continual rain of your tears, has done away all that harvest that should have grown from the seeds of virtue in your soul. It is a false boast of yours that she has held you back from base things; from some perhaps she may, but only to plunge you into evils worse still. For if one leads you from some miry path to bring you to a precipice, or in lancing some small abscess cuts your throat, he deserves not the name of deliverer but assassin. Likewise she whom you hold up as your guide, though she drew you away from some base courses, has none the less overwhelmed you in a deep gulf of splendid ruin. As for her having taught you to look upwards and separate yourself from the vulgar crowd, what else is it than to say by sitting at her feet you became so infatuated with the charm of her above as to studiously neglect everything else?

And in the common intercourse of human life what can be more injurious than that? when you say she has involved you in toils without number, there indeed you speak truth. But what great gain is there in that? When there are such varied labours that a man is perforce obliged to engage in, what madness is it of one's own accord to go after fresh ones! As for your boasting that it is she who has made you thirst for glory, I pity your delusion, for I will prove to you that of all the burdens of your soul there is none more fatal than this. But the time for this is not yet come.

Petrarch. I believe the readiest of warriors first threatens and then strikes. I seem, however, to find threat and wound together. And already I begin to stagger.

S. Augustine. How much more will you stagger when I deliver my sharpest thrust of all? Forsooth that woman to whom you profess you owe everything, she, even she, has been your ruin.

Petrarch.Good Heavens! How do you think you will persuade me of that?

S. Augustine.She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the creature more than the Creator: and that one path alone leads, sooner than any other, to death.

Petrarch.I pray you make no rash judgment. The love which I feel for her has most certainly led me to love God.

S. Augustine.But it has inverted the true order.

Petrarch.How so?

S. Augustine.Because 'every creature' should be dear to us because of our love for the Creator. But in your case, on the contrary, held captive by the charm of the creature, you have not loved the Creator as you ought. You have admired the Divine Artificer as though in all His works He had made nothing fairer than the object of your love, although in truth the beauty of the body should be reckoned last of all.

Petrarch.I call Truth to witness as she stands here between us, and I take my conscience to witness also, as I said before, that the body. of my lady has been less dear to me than her soul. The proof of it is here, that the further she has advanced in age (which for the beauty of the body is a fatal thunderstroke) the more firm has been my admiration; for albeit the flower of her youth has withered visibly with time, the beauty of her soul has grown with the years, and as it was the beginning of my love for her, even so has it been its sustainer. Otherwise if it had been her bodily form which attracted me, it was, ere this, time to make a change.

S. Augustine.Are you mocking me? Do you mean to assert that if the same soul had been lodged in a body ill-formed and poor to look upon, you would have taken equal delight therein?

Petrarch.I dare not say that. For the soul itself cannot be discerned, and the image of a body like that would have given no indication of such a soul. But were it possible for the soul to be visible to my gaze, I should most certainly have loved its beauty even though its dwelling-place were poor.

S. Augustine.You are relying on mere words; for if you are only able to love that which is visible to your gaze, then what you love is the bodily form. However, I deny not that her soul and her character have helped to feed your flame, for (as I will show you before long) her name alone has both little and much kindled your mad passion; for, as in all the affections of the soul, it happens most of all in this one that oftentimes a very little spark will light a great fire.

Petrarch.I see where you would drive me. You want to make me say with Ovid—

"I love at once her body and her soul."[8]

S. Augustine.Yes, and you ought to confess this also, that neither in one or the other case has your love been temperate or what it should be.

Petrarch.You will have to put me to the torture ere I will make any such confession.

S. Augustine.And you will allow that this love has also cast you into great miseries.

Petrarch.Though you place me on the block itself, I will not acknowledge any such thing.

S. Augustine.If you do not ignore my questions and conclusions, you will soon make both those confessions. Tell me, then, can you recall the years when you were a little child, or have the crowding cares of your present life blotted all that time out?

Petrarch.My childhood and youth are as vividly before my eyes as if they were yesterday.

S. Augustine.Do you remember, then, how in those times you had the fear of God, how you thought about Death, what love you had for Religion, how dear goodness and virtue were to you?

Petrarch.Yes, I remember it all, and I am sorry when I see that as my years increased these virtues grew less and less in me.

S. Augustine.For my part I have ever been afraid lest the wind of Spring should cut that early blossom off, which, if only it might be left whole and unhurt, would have produced a wondrous fruitage.

Petrarch.Pray do not wander from the subject; for what has this to do with the question we were discussing?

S. Augustine.I will tell you. Recall each step in your life, since your remembrance is so complete and fresh; recall all the course of your life, and recollect at what period this great change you speak of began.

Petrarch.I have run over in my mind all the course and number of my years.

S. Augustine.And what do you find?

Petrarch.I see that the doctrine in the treatise of Pythagoras, of which I have heard tell and have read, is by no means void of truth. For when travelling the right road, still temperate and modest, I had reached the parting of the ways and had been bidden to turn to the right hand, whether from carelessness or perversity I know not, behold I turned to the left; and what I had read in my boyhood was of no profit to me—

"Here the ways part: the right will thee conductTo the walled palace of the mighty KingAnd to Elysium, but the left will leadWhere sin is punished and the malefactorGoes to his dreaded doom."[9]

Although I had read of all this before, yet I understood it not until I found it by experience. Afterwards I went wrong, in this foul and crooked pathway, and often in mind went back with tears and sorrow, yet could not keep the right way; and it was when I left that way, yes, that was certainly the time when all this confusion in my life began.

S. Augustine. And in what period of your age did this take place?

Petrarch.About the middle of my growing youth. But if you give me a minute or two, I think I can recall the exact year when it took place.

S. Augustine. I do not ask for the precise date, but tell me about when was it that you saw the form and feature of this woman for the first time?

Petrarch.Never assuredly shall I forget that day.

S. Augustine.Well now, put two and two together; compare the two dates.

Petrarch.I must confess in truth they coincide. I first saw her and I turned from my right course at one and the same time.

S. Augustine.That is all I wanted. You became infatuated. The unwonted dazzle blinded your eyes, so I believe. For they say the first effect of love is blindness. So one reads in the poet most conversant with Nature—

"At the first sight was that Sidonian dameBlinded,"

and then he adds presently—

"With love was Dido burning."[10]

And though, as you well know, the story is but on ancient fable, yet did the Poet in making it follow the order of Nature.

And when you had been struck blind by this meeting, if you chose the left-hand path it was because to you it seemed more broad and easy; for that to the right is steep and narrow, and of its hardship you were afraid. But that woman so renowned, whom you imagine as your most safe guide, wherefore did not she direct you upward, hesitating and trembling as you were? Why did she not take you by the hand as one does the blind, and set you in the way where you should walk?

Petrarch. She certainly did so, as far as it was in her power. What but this was in her heart when, unmoved by my entreaties, unyielding to my caress, she safeguarded her woman's honour, and in spite of her youth and mine, in spite of a thousand circumstances that would have bent a heart of adamant, she stood her ground, resolute and unsubdued? Yes, this womanly soul taught me what should be the honour and duty of a man; and to preserve her chastity she did, as Seneca expresses it—

"What was to me at once an example and a reproach."[11]

And at last, when she saw the reins of my chariot were broken and that I was rushing to the abyss, she chose rather to part from me than follow where I went.

S. Augustine. Base desires, then, sometimes you felt, though not long since you denied it? But it is the common folly of lovers, let me say of mad folk. One may say of them all alike—

"I would not, yet I would; I would, yet would not."[12]

You know not, any of you, what you want or what you want not.

Petrarch. Without seeing, I fell into the snare. But if in past days my feelings were other than they are now, love and youth were the cause. Now I know what I wish and what I desire, and I have at last made firm my staggering soul. She for her part has ever been firm in her mind and always the same. The more I understand this woman's constancy, the more I admire it; and if sometimes I regretted her resolution, now I rejoice in it and give her thanks.

S. Augustine.It is not easy to believe a man who has once taken you in. You may have changed the outside fashion of your life, but have not yet persuaded me that your soul is also changed.

If your flame is calmed and softened somewhat, yet it is not for certain quite put out. But you who set such price on her you love, do you not see how deeply by absolving her you condemn yourself? You delight in seeing in her the model of purity, and you avow yourself to be without any feeling and a criminal; and you protest that she is the most happy of women, while her love has made you the most unhappy of men. If you remember, it is just what I said at the beginning.

Petrarch.Yes, I remember. I cannot deny that what you say is true, and I see whither you are gradually leading me.

S. Augustine.To see it better still, lend me all your attention. Nothing so much leads a man to forget or despise God as the love of things temporal, and most of all this passion that we call love; and to which, by the greatest of all desecrations, we even gave the name of God, without doubt only that we may throw a heavenly veil over our human follies and make a pretext of divine inspiration when we want to commit an enormous transgression. In the case of the other passions, the sight of the object, the hope of enjoying it, and the ardour of the will take us captive. Love also demands all that, but in addition it asks also a reciprocal passion, without which it will be forced to die away. So, whereas in the other cases one loves singly and alone, in this case we must give love for love, and thus man's heart is stung and stung again. Therefore, Cicero was right when he wrote that "Of all the passions of the soul, assuredly the most violent is love,"[13]and he must have been very certain of his ground when he added that "assuredly"—he who in four books shows he was aware how Plato's Academy doubted everything.[14]

Petrarch. I have often noticed that reference, and wondered that of the passions he should call this the most violent of all.

S. Augustine.Your surprise would have vanished if you had not lost your powers of memory. But I must recall you by a short admonition to a recollection of its many evils. Think what you were when that plague seized upon your soul; how suddenly you fell to bemoaning, and came to such a pitch of wretchedness that you felt a morbid pleasure in feeding on tears and sighs. Passing sleepless nights, and murmuring ever the name of your beloved, scorning everything, hating life, desiring death, with a melancholy love for being alone, avoiding all your fellow-men, one might well apply to you, for they exactly fit your case, the lines in which Homer describes Bellerophon—

"There in the pleasant fields he wandered sad,Eating his heart, far from the ways of men."[15]

What meant that pale face and wasted figure? that flower of your age withering before its time, those heavy eyes, ever bathed in tears, your mind in a state of agitation, your broken rest and troubled moans, even when you were asleep? Why was your voice weak and altered through your sorrow of heart, and the very sound of your words, indistinct and broken, with whatever other token can be imagined, of a heart distressed and in disorder? Do you call these the signs of one in good health? Was it not this lady with whom for you every day, whether feast or fast, began and ended? Was it not at her coming the sun shone forth, and when she left you, night returned? Every change of her countenance brought a change in your heart; and if she were sad, you forthwith were filled with sadness. In a word, your life became wholly dependent upon hers. You know that I say but what is true and what is in every one's mouth.

And what could be more senseless than that, not content with the presence of her living face, the cause of all your woes, you must needs obtain a painted picture by an artist[16]of high repute, that you might carry it everywhere with you, to have an everlasting spring of tears, fearing, I suppose, lest otherwise their fountain might dry up? Of all such things you were only too vigilant, and you neglected everything else. But to come to that which is the very crowning instance of your folly, and of which I gave you warning a little while ago, who could sufficiently utter his indignation and amazement at this sign of a distempered mind, that, infatuated as much by the beauty of her name as of her person, you have with perfectly incredible silliness paid honour to anything that has the remotest connection with that name itself? Had you any liking for the laurel of empire or of poetry, it was forsooth because the name they bore was hers; and from this time onwards there is hardly a verse from your pen but in it you have made mention of the laurel, as if indeed you were a denizen of Peneus' stream,[17]or some priest on Cirrha's[18]Mount.

And finally, discovering that the laurel of empire was beyond your reach, you have, with as little self-restraint as you showed in the case of your beloved herself, now coveted the laurel of Poetry of which the merit of your works seemed to give more promise.

Although to gain your reward you were borne up on the wings of genius, yet will you shudder to remember with what trouble you attained it. I clearly divine what excuse you will make, and I see your thought the moment you open your lips. You will allege that you were devoted to these studies some time before you became a lover at all, and that desire for the glory of the poet's crown had kindled your heart from childhood. I neither deny it or forget it; but the fact of the usage being obsolete for centuries, and this being an epoch very unfavourable for studies like yours, the dangers also of long voyages, which would have brought you to the threshold of prison and of death itself, not to mention other obstacles of fortune no less violent than those—all these difficulties, I say, would perhaps have broken your resolve entirely, if the remembrance of a name so sweet, always entwining itself with your inmost soul, had not banished every other care, and drawn you over sea, over land, across mountains of difficulty, to Rome and to Naples, where at length you attained what you had longed for with such ardour. If all this seems to you the token of but a moderate passion, then at least shall be quite certain you are the victim of the moderate delusion.

I purposely leave out what Cicero was not ashamed to imitate from Terence when he wrote, "Wrongs, suspicions, fierce quarrels, jealousies, war, and then again peace—behold the miseries of love." Do you not recognise at once in his words the madness and, above all, the madness of jealousy which, as one knows too well, is the ruling power in love as love is the ruling passion among all others? Perhaps you may reply: "I admit it is so, but reason will be there to temper such excess." Terence himself had anticipated your answer when he added—

"Such fickle things to settle by sane ruleIs to be sanely insane."[19]

The phrase, the truth of which you will scarcely question, puts an end, unless I am mistaken, to all those subterfuges of yours.

Such, then, are the miseries of love, the particulars of which it is needless to mention to those who have proved them, and which would not be believed by those who never tried. But the worst of them all, to come back to our subject, is that it engenders a forgetfulness of God and of man's real state. For how should the soul thus crushed beneath these weights ever arise to that one and only most pure fountain of true Good? And since it is so, you may lay aside your wonder that Cicero should tell us no passion of man's soul seemed to him more violent than love.

Petrarch. I must own myself beaten; for it appears all you have said is taken from the very heart of the book of experience. And as you have quoted from the play of Terence, let me please myself by bringing from there also this sad complaint—

"O deed of shame! now am I foil of woe.Weary I burn with love; with open eyes,Brain clear, I am undone; and what to doI know not."[20]

I would also call to mind this counsel from the same poet's words—

"Think, while there's time, again and yet again."[21]

S. Augustine.And I likewise from the lips of Terence will give you my reply—

"What in itself contains no rule or reason,By rule or reason you can never hold."[22]

Petrarch.What is to be done, then? Am I to despair?

S. Augustine.That is the last thing in the world to do. However, let me briefly tell you the remedy I propose. You know that on this subject there are not only special treatises compiled by philosophers of eminence, but that some of the most famous poets have written on it whole books.

It would be almost an insult to point out which they are, above all, to you who are a past-master in the whole field, or to offer any advice as to reading them; but perhaps I might say a word without offence to suggest in what way their study might be applied for your own welfare.

First, then, notice what is said by Cicero—

"Some think that an old love can best be driven out bya new, as one nail is by another."[23]

And Ovid agrees, giving this general rule—

"Old love affairs must always yield to new."[24]

And without a doubt it is the truth, for the mind thus divided and parcelled out between different objects feels itself moved with less force towards each one. So the river Ganges, they tell us, was divided up by the Persian king into countless channels, and this river, that was so deep and formidable, was cut up into a thousand inconsiderable streamlets. And so an army, broken up and scattered, becomes vulnerable by the enemy; so Fire dispersed dies down; in a word, every power in the world, if concentrated, increases, but by dispersion is reduced. On the other hand, I think this is not to be overlooked, that there may be great danger when you lay aside a passion and, if one may say so, a passion of the nobler kind; you may, if you are not watchful, fall into dissipation of another sort, run after women and become a loose libertine. In my judgment, then, if one must die for certain, there is some consolation in dying of a nobler rather than a less noble wound. So if you ask my advice, it is this: Take your courage in both hands. Fly, if you possibly can; and I would even say, go from one prison to another; perchance you might escape by the way or else find a milder discipline to be under. Only beware, when your neck is freed from one such yoke as this, that you place it not under the weight of a crowd of more base and vile oppressions.

S. Petrarch.While the doctor is finishing his advice, will he allow the patient, in the throes of his malady, to interrupt him for a minute?

Augustine.Of course. Why not? Many a doctor, guided by the symptoms of his patient thus declared, has been able to find the very remedy he needed.

Petrarch.Then what I want to say is just this: For me to love another is impossible. My mind has grown only to love her; my eyes to look only for her; excepting her, all to them is nothing, or is mere darkness. And so if your remedy is that in order to be healed of this love I should love another, your condition is an impossible one. In that case all is over, and I am lost.

S. Augustine.Your senses are dulled, your appetite is lost; since then you can take no internal remedy, one must have recourse to other treatment and see what can be done by change of scene. Can you bring your mind to think of flight or exile and going right away from the places that you know?

Petrarch. Though I feel that her attraction draws me to her with hooks of steel, nevertheless if I have to go, I can.

S. Augustine. If you can, you will be safe. What else can I say, then, but this advice of Virgil's, changing only two little words—

"Ah! flee this land beloved, and leave behindshore to thee so dear."[25]

For how can you continue in safety in these scenes where there are so many memories of your wounds, where things present and the memory of things past cling always to you? So that I say, as Cicero also advises, "Seek change of scene; take care to do as one does who is recovering from some illness."[26]

Petrarch. Think of what you are prescribing. For how often and often, longing to get well, and familiar with advice like this, have I tried this remedy of flight; and though I have feigned various other reasons for it, yet the end and aim of all my peregrinations and all my retirement to the country was this one thing—to become free! For that I have wandered far away to the West, to the North, to the very confines of the ocean. Far and wide have I roamed. You see what good it has done me. And so Virgil's simile has many a time come home to my heart,—

"E'en as the stricken deer, that unawareRooming afar in pleasant groves of Crete,The hunter pierces with his weapon keen.And she unknowing o'er Mount Dicte's sideFlees wounded, and the fatal arrow cleavesTo her poor side."[27]

I am even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound with me.

S. Augustine.Yourself have given me the answer for which you look.

Petrarch.How so?

S. Augustine. Why, do you not see that if a man bears his wound with him, change of scone is but an aggravation of his pain and not a means of healing it? One might say your case is just that of the young man who complained to Socrates that he had been a tour and it had done him no good whatever. "You went touring with yourself,"[28]said the Sage.

You must first break off the old load of your passions; you must make your soul ready.Thenyou must fly. For it is proved to demonstration, not only in things physical but in moral also, that unless the patient is well disposed, the doctor's help is in vain. Otherwise were you to go to the far-off Indies, you will find that Horace only spoke truth when he said—

"Who cross the ocean making peace their goal,Change but their sky and cannot change their soul."

Or thus—

"We come to this; when o'er the world we range,'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change."[29]

Petrarch. I must say I cannot follow you. You give me a prescription to cure and heal my soul and tell me I must first heal it and then flee. Now, my difficulty is I do not know how to heal it. If it is cured, what more do I need? But if, again, it is not cured, what good will change of scene bring me? The help you offer me is useless. Tell me briefly what are the remedies I must use?

S. Augustine.I did not say that you must cure and heal your soul. What I said was you must make it ready. As for the rest, either you will be cured, and the change of scene will then establish your health on a firm footing; or you will not yet be cured, but only made ready, and then the change of scene will have the same ultimate result. But, if your soul is neither cured nor made ready, this change and frequent moving from place to place will only stir up its grief. I will still advise you to take a leaf out of Horace's book—

"For if the cure of mental ills is dueTo sense and wisdom, not a fine sea view,"[30]

—what he says is true. You will set out full of the hope and the wish to return, carrying along with you all that has ensnared your soul. In whatever place you are, to whatever side you turn, you will behold the face, you will hear the voice of her whom you have left. By that sad enchantment that belongs to lovers, you will have power to see her though you are absent, and to hear her though she is far away; and do you imagine that love is to be extinguished by subterfuges like this? Believe me, it will rather burn more fiercely. Those who call themselves masters in the art of love enjoin among their other maxims short absences one from another on the part of lovers, for fear they should become tired of seeing each other face to face or from their importunity. Therefore I advise, I recommend, I enjoin upon you that you learn to wholly sever your soul from that which weighs it down and go away without hope of return. You will discover then, but not before, what absence is able to do for the soul's healing. If fate had placed your lot in some unhealthy plague-stricken region where you were liable to constant illness, should you not flee from it never to return? And so I counsel you to do now, unless, as I much fear, men care more for their body than their soul.

Petrarch. That is their affair. But undoubtedly if I found myself ill on account of the unhealthiness of the place I was in, I should choose for my recovery some place with a healthier climate, and I should act in the same way, and with stronger reasons still, in case of maladies of the soul. Yet, as far as I can see, the cure of these is a more difficult matter.

S. Augustine. The united testimony of the greatest philosophers proves the falsity of that assertion. It is evident that all the maladies of the soul can be healed if only the patient puts no obstacle in the way, although many diseases of the body are incurable by any known means. For the rest, and not to go too far from our subject, I stick to my judgment. You must, as I said, make your soul ready, and teach it to renounce the object of its love, never once to turn back, never to see that which it was wont to look for. This is the only sure road for a lover; and if you wish to preserve your soul from ruin, this is what you must do.

Petrarch.That you may see how perfectly I have learned all you have said, let me recapitulate that to go for change of scene is useless, unless the soul is first made ready; such journeys will cure it when made ready, and will establish it when once cured. Is not that the conclusion of your threefold precept?

S. Augustine.Yes, it is precisely that, and you sum up very well what I have unfolded.

Petrarch.I could have divined your two first truths by myself, without you pointing them out; but as for the third, that the soul, when it is cured and established in health, still needs absence, I do not understand it, unless it is the fear of a relapse that is the motive of what you say.

S. Augustine.But you surely do not suppose that to be a slight point even in bodily health? And how much more grave a matter ought one to think it in regard to the soul, where a relapse is so much more rapid and dangerous. So I would say, let us refer once more to what seems one of the soundest remarks of Seneca, where in a letter he writes, "If any man wishes to have done with love he must avoid all recollection of the beloved form," and adds as his reason, "For nothing is so easily rekindled to life again as love."[31]O how true a saying is that, and from what profound experience of life is he speaking! But it is needless to call any other witness of this than your own knowledge will supply.

Petrarch.Yes, I agree he speaks truth, but if you notice he is speaking not of one who already has done with love, but of one who wishes to have done with it.

S. Augustine. He speaks of any man who is in danger. Any kind of blow is more dangerous if there is some wound before unhealed, or some disease not yet cured; and even afterwards it is not safe. And since we remember most, instances that have come home to us in our own experience, let me ask how often have you who speak to me not found yourself, as you went about these well-known spots, by their mere look, though no person met you, reminded of your former vanities; standing speechless, full of sighs, as you pace this town that has been, I will not say the cause, but at any rate the scene of all your evils; though before you came back to it you thought you were cured, and would have been to a very great extent if only you had remained away? And then with difficulty restraining your tears, half-wounded to death, you have fled, and cried to your own heart, "Here in these places I see at every turn the ambush of my ancient foe. The signs of death are ever about me!" So, then, were you healed already, if you would take counsel of me, I should say, "Do not stay long in this place. It is not wise for the prisoner who has broken his chains to go wandering round the prison gates, ever ready to take him in again, before which the jailer is ever on guard, laying his traps with special care to recapture those whose escape he regrets.

"The downward path to hell is ever smooth,Its dismal gate is open night and day."[32]

If precautions like these are needful for men in health, how much more are they in the case of those who have not yet shaken off their sickness. It is of the latter that Seneca was thinking when he wrote that maxim. He was giving counsel to those who were most in danger, for it was no use to speak of those whom the flame had already devoured and who were past all care for their safety. He addressed himself to those in another stage, who still felt the heat but tried to come forth of the flame. Many a sick man on the way to recovery has been thrown back by a draught of water which before his illness would have done him no harm; and often has one wearied out, with a long day's work, been knocked down by some trifling shake which when he was in his full strength would not have moved him at all.

It needs but a trifle sometimes, when the soul is emerging from its miseries, to plunge it quite back once more into the abyss. To see the purple on the shoulders of another will rouse again all our sleeping ambition; the sight of a little pile of money sets up our thirst for gold; one look at some fair lady will stir again our desire; the light glance of an eye will awaken sleeping love.

It is no wonder plagues like these take possession of your minds, when you see the madness of the world; and when once they have found their way back to the soul, they come with fatal ease. And since it is so, it is not enough merely to leave a plague-stricken spot, but you, O man, must keep on in your flight for life, till you have escaped everything that might drag the soul back to its old passions; for fear lest, when you return from the pit with Orpheus and look back, you lose your Eurydice once more.

Such is the sum of my counsel.

Petrarch. I accept it heartily and with thankfulness, for I feel that the remedy is suited to my wound. My intention is to fly, but I know not yet where lies the direction I should choose.

S. Augustine.A thousand ways are open to you to make choice of on every side; a thousand ports are ready to receive you. I know that, more than to other lands, your heart turns to Italy, and that a love of your native soil is inborn in you; and you are right, for—

"Not Media's forests rich, nor Ganges' stream,Though fair it be, nor Hermus rolling gold,May vie with Italy; Bactria and Ind,And all Pachaia with its odours rareShall not be mentioned."[33]

I think you have yourself not long ago, in a letter to one of your friends,[34]treated this theme of the famous Poet at fuller length in a Latin poem. Italy then would be my choice for you; because the ways of its people, its climate, the sea washing its shores, the Apennine range coming between them, all promise that a sojourn there would be better suited to extirpate your troubles than going anywhere else in the world. I would not, however, wish to confine you only to one corner of the land. Go under good auspices wherever inclination may lead; go without fear and with a free mind; take no backward glances, forget the past and step forward to the future. See how long you have been a stranger to your own country and your own self. It is time to return, for—

"O now 'tis evening, and the nightIs chiefly friend to thieves."[35]

I warn you in words of your own.

One further counsel I must urge which I had nearly forgotten. You must avoid solitude, until you are quite sure that you have not a trace of your old ailment left. You told me that a country life had done you no good. There is nothing surprising in that. What remedy were you likely to find in a place all lonely and remote? Let me confess that often when you were retreating thither all by yourself, sighing, and turning longing eyes back to the town, I have laughed heartily and said to myself: "What a blindfold fool love has made of this unhappy wight! and led him to quite forget the verse that every schoolboy knows, about flying from his trouble and finding his death."

Petrarch. I am afraid you are right, but what are the lines to which you allude?

S. Augustine.Ovid, of course.

"Lover! whoe'er you be, dwell not alone;In solitude you're sure to be undone.You're safer in a crowd; the word is true,Lone woods are not the place for such as you."[36]

Petrarch. Yes, I remember them perfectly, and knew them almost by heart from my childhood.

S. Augustine.Much good has it done you to know so many things yet not know how to suit them to your need. When you not only know all the testimony of the ancients, but have yourself proved the evils of solitude, it astonishes me that you should commit such a blunder as to seek it. You have, in fact, often complained that there was no good in being alone. You have expressed it in a thousand places, and especially in the fine poem you composed on your own misfortune. The sweet accents of it charmed me while you were writing.[37]

It surprised me to hear a song so harmonious arise from a soul so full of agitation, and come from the lips of a man so far out of his senses and I asked myself what power of love can stay the offended Muses from abandoning so dire a nest of troubles, and, scared by such aberration of mind in their host, forsaking utterly their wonted dwelling? I thought of words of Plato, "Let no man wholly sane knock at Poe try'd door," and then of Aristotle, who followed him and said, "All great genius has a touch of madness in it,"[38]but I remembered that in these sayings of theirs they were thinking of a frenzy far indeed removed from yours. However, we will return to this subject at some other time.

Petrarch. I must fain own what you say is the truth; but I never thought to have made verses so harmonious as to be worth your praise and commendation. They will be all the dearer to me now that I know it.

If you have other remedy to offer me, I beg you withhold it not from him who is in need.

S. Augustine. To unfold all one knows is the act of a braggart more than of a wise friend. And remember that men did not invent all the sundry kinds of remedies, internal and external, for diverse kinds of sickness, on purpose that each and every one should be tried on every occasion; but that, as Seneca remarks to Lucilius, "Nothing is so contrary to the work of healing as a frequent change of remedy; and no wound will ever be healed perfectly, to which first one and then another medicine is continually applied. The true way is only to try the new when the old remedy has failed."[39]

So, then, although the remedies for this kind of ailment are many and varied, I will content myself with only pointing out a few, and I will choose those which in my judgment will best suit your need. For indeed, I have no wish merely to show you what is new, but only to tell you, of all those which are known, what remedies, so far as I can judge, are most likely in your case to be efficacious.

Back to Index Next