GALANTHUS NIVALIS OF THE RENAISSANCE SPRING

[The name of the title’s flower is podsnezhnik in Russian, and snowdrop in English. The metaphor ought to be self-evident: Petrarca was the first flower of the Renaissance Spring.]

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Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) cannot be called a philosopher in the ordinary sense. The great poet is an exceptional philosopher in his philosophical outlook, which opens the first page of the Renaissance (known as Proto-Renaissance), while closing the book on the previous medieval era, which none other than Petrarca was the first one to call the Dark Ages. It is for his general philosophical outlook that he demands an entry in this section, and gets it, with no opposition whatsoever.

His writings are mainly superb poetry (his mastery of the sonnet form has been noted in every reference to his life and legacy) and letters, many purposefully fictional, such as the letters to Cicero and Virgil. There are other genres there, too, such as his prototype of a vade mecum, Itinerarium, known as Petrarch’s guide to the Holy Land in the modern bibliography of his works. He wrote some of his poetry in Italian, but most of his writings were in Latin, for which he exhibited a special affinity. But this presumable regression of his, as compared with Dante, who had been writing in Italian, was not a return to Church Latin, which would have been a regression indeed, but a forward-looking return to the Latin classics of Sacred Antiquity, constituting the heart and soul of the Renaissance.

Now returning to Petrarca’s philosophical outlook, he is credited as the leading figure of the first generation of the humanists, and, as I said before, the “father of the renaissance.” (The first stage of the Renaissance is called proto-Renaissance where he shares recognition with Dante and Boccaccio.) His predominant interest is in ethics, and in the possibility of reconciling Christian philosophy of asceticism and denial of this world with the classical culture of the ancient world and its secular and humanistic interests. Needless to say, he is rooting for the humanistic culture, while remaining a sincere and devout Catholic, and sees no contradiction between the classics and Christianity. In his masterpiece De Secreto Conflictu Curarum Mearum, written as a manifestly imaginary dialogue between himself and St. Augustine, he argues that being interested in secular matters of this world is not all that incompatible with man’s love of God. Man’s creativity, and his intellectual prowess are gifts of God, and these gifts must not be neglected and dismissed. On the contrary, there is a great moral benefit in the study of ancient history and classical literature. His defense of the genius of antiquity against the neglect it had suffered throughout the “Dark Ages” is very strongly worded:

“Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.”

Petrarca’s poetic, literary, and humanistic-philosophical genius brought him great fame and admiration of his contemporaries already, but his obsessive preoccupation with Virgil in particular (Cicero and Seneca, whom he greatly admired and quoted at every opportunity, were deemed far more acceptable to the Catholic Church, as I had a chance to note earlier in this section) eventually got him in serious trouble with Pope Innocent VI, but, fortunately, without truly severe consequences.

There is much more to be said about Petrarca, but being necessarily selective, I shall end this entry with one more quotation from him, which highlights his quiet humility and deeply philosophical disposition:

“Though I have always diligently sought for the truth, yet I fear that the recesses in which it is hidden, or my own preoccupations, or a certain dullness of mind may have sometimes stood in my way, so that often in my search for the thing I may have been bewildered by false lights. Therefore I have treated these matters not in the spirit of one who lays down the law, but as a student and an investigator. For to define is the province of the wise and I am neither wise nor neighbor to the wise but in Cicero’s words, a man fertile in conjectures.”

I wish I could also have an entry on Petrarca’s friend and fellow humanist Giovanni Boccaccio (and maybe one day I will), but my next entry is devoted to Petrarca’s successor in the Renaissance business, humanist, historian and statesman Leonardo Bruni (Aretino).