ONE OF PETRARCH’S Litterae de rebus familiaribus contains the following assessment of Cicero:
. . . though nearly everything pleases me in Cicero—a man whom I cherish beyond all my other friends—and though I expressed admiration for his golden eloquence and divine intellect, I could not praise the fickleness of his character and his inconstancy, which I had detected in many instances.1
In this short passage are illustrated many of the features of a theory of authorship usually associated with the Renaissance. Cicero is at once someone to be respected and a ‘familiar’ or friend2. Yet, this reverence and assumed acquaintance do not entail uncritical admiration: Petrarch is acutely aware of the sins and shortcomings of his auctor.
The precedent for Petrarch’s radical approach to authorship was provided, paradoxically enough, by rediscovered authoritative texts, namely, Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Quintus and Brutus, which Petrarch himself had recovered in 13453. On reading these ‘quarrelsome letters’, Petrarch tells us, he was ‘soothed and ruffled at the same time’: the style was delightful, but the facility with which Cicero shifted from commending illustrious men to condemning them was offensive.
I could not restrain myself, and, indignation prompting me, I wrote to him as a friend of my own years and time, regardless of the ages which separated us. Indeed, I wrote with a familiarity acquired through an intimate knowledge of the works of his genius, and I pointed out to him what it was that offended me in his writings.4
Disregarding the distancing and aggrandising power of time, a ‘modern’ has claimed a close proximity of relationship, a high degree of familiarity, with an ‘ancient’, on the basis of their common literary, intellectual and moral concerns. The style of Cicero’s letters provided Petrarch with a new literary form; their content provided him with the new information necessary for the placing of Cicero’s life and literature in a genuine historical perspective.
Cicero, for Petrarch, was a model of eloquence and a brilliant thinker, a monotheistic philosopher who ‘never wrote one word that would conflict with the principles of Christ’5. Nevertheless, he had failed often to practise what he preached, turning a deaf ear to his own doctrines. Both these sides of the author’s character are described in the two ‘familiar letters’ which Petrarch addressed to him: the first censures Cicero’s life; the second praises his genius6. Cicero’s inconstancy is gravely censured, yet Petrarch writes out of ‘sincere love’ and empathises with his author: ‘I feel that I know you as intimately as if I had always lived with you’7.
I grieve at your lot, my friend; I am ashamed of your many, great shortcomings, and take compassion on them.8
Some aspects of his author’s life arouse Petrarch’s compassion, although he can rejoice freely in the mental abilities and powers of expression which Cicero possessed in such abundance.
You indeed, O Cicero (speaking with your leave), did live as a man, speak as an orator, and write as a philosopher. It was your life that I found fault with, not your intellectual powers, nor yet your command of language. Indeed, I admire the former, and am amazed at the latter. And, moreover, in your life I feel the lack of nothing except the element of constancy, and a desire for peace that was to have been expected of a philosopher.9
The philosophical wisdom of this auctor may be respected, his eloquence may be admired and imitated, and his moral shortcomings may be censured.
But not everyone was prepared to accept this point of view. When debating with an opponent who refused to believe ill of Cicero, Petrarch had regaled him with the two letters to Cicero, but to no avail10. The ‘venerable gentleman’ persisted in admiring everything indiscriminately about Cicero, ‘lest he might seem to cast even the slightest aspersions on so praiseworthy an author’: his only defence was the ‘mere splendour of Cicero’s name’. ‘Authority had driven out reason’, was Petrarch’s tart conclusion.
This last statement could well serve as a motto for earlier ‘lives’ of Cicero. Views similar to those held by Petrarch’s ‘venerable gentleman’ lie behind the eulogistic accounts found in works like the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais, the Compendiloquium de vitis illustrium philosophorum of John of Wales, and the Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum of Walter Burley (c. 1275–c. 1345). These accounts shall be paraphrased briefly, since they at once recapitulate the attitudes to authorship which have been described in the above chapters, and illustrate the fixed assumptions that Petrarch was up against.
Vincent of Beauvais’s contribution consists of a mere cathena or ‘chain’ of auctoritates derived from Cicero’s works, linked together in a sententious sequence11. On the face of it, Burley’s compilation looks more promising: the prologue declares his intention of bringing together in one volume the sparse information about their lives which the philosophers and poets recorded in their works12. Moreover, he has included many of their ‘notable responses and elegant sayings’, so that the reader might be consoled and morally informed. However, all Burley tells us about the life of Cicero is that he was the most noble among the Roman consuls: he illuminated the time of Julius Caesar, when he was by far the greatest and most studious philosopher13. Having repudiated his wife, Cicero was offered a prince’s sister in marriage, whereupon he said that he could not serve both a wife and philosophy together. This trivial anecdote is followed by a list of Cicero’s writings and a collection of sententiae excerpted from them. Burley, like Vincent of Beauvais before him, seems to have felt that Cicero’s true character was revealed by his most sententious statements. The account provided by John of Wales is similarly eulogistic, but at least he could offer two moralistic exempla featuring Cicero, one from Seneca and one from Aulus Gellius14. This depiction of Cicero is wholly in keeping with the principle, outlined in the prologue to the Compendiloquium, that certain gentiles lived a life so good that they put Christians—who ought to know better and do better—to shame. John cites Isaiah xxiii.4, ‘Be thou ashamed, O Zidon, for the sea has spoken’, then proceeds to paraphrase St Gregory’s interpretation of this text, as found at the beginning of the Moralia in Job (see p. 37). ‘Zidon’ signifies the stable New Law under which Christians live, while the ‘sea’ signifies the life of the gentiles. Well may Zidon be ashamed, for the life of virtuous pagans reproves life under the present regime, and the deeds of secular men confound the deeds of the religious. For these reasons, John explains, he thought fit to collect the notable sayings of the philosophers and the imitable examples of virtuous men, in order to stimulate the young and put would-be philosophers to shame, to repress arrogance and encourage humility.
These compilers were interested in Cicero mainly as an authority in moral philosophy and rhetoric. By contrast, Petrarch’s interest comprised both the achievements and the limitations of his favourite author, the ‘ancient’ whom he presumed to address—in the most familiar of tones—as his friend. Clearly, there are outstanding differences between the respective theories of authorship held by Petrarch and, for example, Thomas Aquinas15. Yet some of Petrarch’s attitudes can, as it were, be regarded as imaginative extensions of ideas which had emerged in scholastic literary theory. When coming to terms with the ‘literal sense’ of sacred Scripture, late medieval exegetes had been obliged to adopt fresh positions concerning the achievements and limitations of Biblical authors (see pp. 103–12). Authors like David and Solomon had on occasion been divinely inspired, but they had sinned as well; yet respect for their authority had come to be regarded as perfectly compatible with recognition of the shortcomings of their humanity. David was esteemed to be the greatest of the prophets: he was also a pattern of penitence, a man whom every sinner was urged to identify with and emulate. In approaching Cicero, Virgil and Seneca with a similar reverence, awareness of faults and sense of common humanity, Petrarch attained a new view of the pagan author.
In the writings of Petrarch, one can see the barriers coming down between various kinds of author, whether between pagan and Christian or ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. Many of the Litterae de rebus familiaribus record the activities and misfortunes of Petrarch and his ‘modern’ friends among contemporary Italians; for this, he claimed the precedent of Cicero’s letters. Petrarch’s letters to Cicero were the first in a series of letters to his ‘ancient’ friends among the classical authors.
In Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, a ‘modern author’ is treated with a degree of familiarity similar to that with which Petrarch had treated Cicero. Boccaccio had learnt from Petrarch that one could find fault with an author’s life without calling in question his intellectual powers or command of language. The great poet’s scholarship and genius are praised while his faults are censured, although it is quite clear that, in Boccaccio’s view, Dante was more sinned against than sinning. Boccaccio demonstrates his awareness of Dante’s pride, tactfully remarking that the great poet ‘did not deem himself worth less than in truth he was’16. When Dante’s involvement in petty political squabbles is described, one is reminded of Petrarch’s criticisms of the way in which Cicero had demeaned himself in ‘wrangles and frays’ which could bring no relief to the state but only harm upon himself. Boccaccio is ‘ashamed’ to record his author’s fierce partisanship: ‘any feeble woman or child, in speaking of parties and condemning the Ghibellines, could move him to such rage that he would have been led to throw stones if the speaker had not become silent’17. Reverence for a great writer cannot blind us to his faults.
I am ashamed to sully the reputation of so great a man by the mention of any fault in him, but my purpose to some extent requires it, for if I am silent about the things less worthy of praise, I shall destroy much faith in the laudable qualities already mentioned. I ask, therefore, the pardon of Dante, who perchance, while I am writing this, looks down at me with scornful eye from some high region of heaven.
One of Dante’s main faults, Boccaccio continues, was his licentiousness. Although this vice may be natural, common and even, in a certain sense, necessary, it cannot be decently excused. But what mortal shall be the just judge to condemn it? ‘Not I’, answers Boccaccio. Women have great power over men, as is illustrated by what Jupiter did for the sake of Europa, Hercules for Iole and Paris for Helen. But these are matters of poetry, which men of little judgment would dismiss as lies. Therefore, Boccaccio turns to more authoritative exempla, beginning with Adam and Eve and proceeding to the love-affairs of David and Solomon:
David, notwithstanding the fact that he had many wives, no sooner caught sight of Bathsheba than for her sake he forgot God, his own kingdom, himself, and his honour, becoming first an adulterer and then a homicide. What may we think he would have done, had she laid any commands upon him? And did not Solomon, to whose wisdom none ever attained save the Son of God, forsake Him who had made him wise, and kneel to adore Balaam in order to please a woman?18
Dante may not be excused but, at least, he is not alone among authors. Boccaccio has placed him in good company, by bracketing him with authors of sacred Scripture. Similarly, the Dante-commentators could claim that their ‘modern author’ shared literary roles and forms with Scriptural authors19. If, at the end of the Middle Ages, auctores became more like men, men became more like auctores.
Equally striking is the way in which, in the writings of Petrarch and Boccaccio, the barriers have come down between pagan and Christian authors. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas had firmly distinguished between secular poetry and sacred poetry. It was one thing for Scriptural auctores to communicate truths in the literal sense by various kinds of figurative language: it was quite another for the pagan poets to communicate their half-truths and lies by apparently similar means (see pp. 139–40). When expounding Aristotle’s remark in the Metaphysica about the ‘theologising poets’ who were the first philosophers, Aquinas averred that the philosopher is, in a sense, a lover of myths or fabulae20. But this opinion was not germane to Aquinas. By contrast, Petrarch and Boccaccio seized upon it eagerly: in it, they found a justification for their comparisons of secular poets with sacred poets in terms of style and, indeed, in terms of subject.
In a ‘familiar letter’ to his brother Gherardo, Petrarch invoked Aristotle in support of his contention that poetry is very far from being opposed to theology: indeed, ‘one may almost say that theology actually is poetry, poetry concerning God’.
To call Christ now a lion, now a lamb, now a worm, what pray is that if not poetical? And you will find thousands of such things in the Scriptures, so very many that I cannot attempt to enumerate them. What indeed are the parables of our Saviour, in the Gospels, but words whose sound is foreign to their sense, or allegories (to use the technical term)? But allegory is the very warp and woof of all poetry. . . . Why, even the Old Testament fathers made use of poetry, both heroic song and other kinds. Moses, for example, and Job, and David, and Solomon, and Jeremiah. Even the psalms, which you are always singing, day and night, are in metre, in the Hebrew; so that I should be guilty of no inaccuracy or impropriety if I ventured to style their author the Christian’s poet.21
In Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, Aristotle’s statement is cited in support of the claim that ‘theology is simply the poetry of God’22. When their subject is the same, Boccaccio explains, theology and poetry can be considered as almost one and the same thing. When their subject is not the same, theology and poetry at least agree in their method of treatment (forma dell’operare):
Holy Scripture—which we call theology—sometimes under the form of history, again in the meaning of a vision, now in the signification of a lament, and in many other ways, designs to reveal to us the high mystery of the incarnation of the divine Word, . . . so that, being thus taught, we may attain to that glory which He by his death and resurrection opened to us. . . . In like manner do poets in their works—which we term poetry—sometimes under fictions of various gods, again by the transformation of men into imaginary forms, and at times by gentle persuasion, reveal to us the causes of things, the effects of virtues and vices, what we ought to flee and what we ought to follow; in order that we may attain by virtuous action the end that they, although they did not rightly know the true God, believed to be our supreme salvation.23
Apparently, the end (fine) of poetry is not incompatible with the superior end of theology, although it is, of necessity, limited by the pagans’ ignorance of Christ and their subsequent failure to understand the nature of our supreme salvation.
Similar views are expressed in Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, written between 1350 and 1374 under Petrarch’s influence. Here it is argued that the ‘mode of composing’ (modus componendi) was the same for pagan and Old Testament poets24. Analysing the device of employing figurative forms and epithets to describe mystical and heavenly things, Boccaccio comments that this procedure is found in Scripture as well as in pagan poetry25. When he contrasts the poet’s appropriate mode (modus poeticus) with the philosopher’s characteristic mode of syllogistic argument26, one is reminded of the theologians’ stock distinction between the basically affective mode of sacred Scripture and the basically ratiocinative mode of human science (see pp. 119 et seq.)
It would seem that, by the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio, both ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’, and pagans and Christians, could freely be compared in terms of styles and structures, of authorial roles and degrees of authority, and of shortcomings and sins. The auctores are now ‘familiar authors’—‘familiar’ to the reader and, as it were, to each other. We have come a long way from Albert and Aquinas.